University of Edinburgh

This course introduces students to key themes and debates in early modern history (c. 1500-1800), using selected case studies from Britain, Europe and the wider world. Particular attention is paid to the usefulness (or otherwise) of the concept of "early modernity," and the extent to which it can be applied to the world beyond Europe.

The course shows how social research can shed light on topical social and political debates. Students are given opportunities to reflect critically on the ways in which evidence is used in debate about public policy. This course illustrates how social research can shed light on topical social and political debates. The specific aims are to understand how academic enquiry can be used to understand public political debates and public policy to understand how evidence informs debates, and how it is sometimes distorted and misused in these debates; to understand how social and political theory can be brought to bear on understanding topical debates; and to develop the skills of engaging in topical debates in a rational and evidence-based way while also taking account of the important role of ideology and emotion. 

The course enables students to understand and use multilevel models mainly in the context of social science, but examples are also given from medicine and some aspects of biological science. The focus is on multilevel models for quantitative, binary, and multinomial outcomes, with further sessions on models for ordinal and count outcomes. The importance of multilevel modelling for longitudinal data is explained. Analysis is conducted using the Noteable service and the R Stan statistical modelling package, which is free to all users.

This course focuses on comic writing for the English stage during one of its most exuberantly creative periods. Beginning with the romantic comedy of Shakespeare and concluding with some of the most daringly sceptical drama of the Restoration period, the course explores the varieties of comic theatre developed over the 17th century, including festive comedy, the carnivalesque, fable, city comedy, and different modes of satire. In doing so, it examines the comic engagement with a range of moral, social and political debates and conflicts, both of the early modern period and in our own time. It also reads the plays in the light of theories of the purposes and workings of comedy, as well as in the context of the very different social and staging conditions obtaining at either end of the century.

The course addresses contemporary issues facing business, through the lenses of different disciplines (ways of thinking). Disciplines may include popular culture, literature, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, politics, history, religion and statistics. Students leave the course with an understanding of how to think creatively about business and how to think critically about propositions within it.

Reinforcement learning (RL) refers to a collection of machine learning techniques which solve sequential decision making problems using a process of trial-and-error. It is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and provides one of the most powerful approaches to solving decision problems. This course covers foundational models and algorithms used in RL, as well as advanced topics such as scalable function approximation using neural network representations and concurrent interactive learning of multiple RL agents.

Humans are a vital component of secure and private systems, they are also one of the most expensive components and the most challenging to reason about. In this course, students learn about how to create systems that are usable while still fulfilling their primary security or privacy mission. Students also learn about research topics such as designing user studies to critically evaluate interfaces and reading academic papers to create an academically-informed view of the topic.

The main theme of the course is the interplay between Number Theory and rings. Students need to be familiar with the basics of prime numbers, unique factorization of integers and modular arithmetic. This is an advanced course with Fundamentals of Pure Mathematics as a prerequisite. 

This course promotes an understanding of core concepts in microbial growth and form, with an emphasis on diversity of function. It explores microbes, their major properties, and how they influence processes, such as global warming, acid rain, and nutrient cycling in the world. It examines how microbes interact with plants to influence crop production and spoilage, or affect the safety of the food we eat. The course also explores how microbes are exploited in the biotechnology industry, as well as how we might make new products in the future, using cutting edge technology, such as synthetic biology.

The course looks at developing models that are motivated by empirical evidence of individual behavior rather than assumptions about rationality. Students look at leading academic papers in the area to assess the empirical evidence (field and experimental) and the implications for standard assumptions on rationality and to look at how the theory has been developed in the light of this evidence. Topics covered include decision making under certainty, decision making under uncertainty including prospect theory, experimental economics and/or neuroeconomics, intertemporal choice, self-control, behavioral game theory, case studies on saving and obesity, and the economics of happiness.