United Kingdom - Scotland

This course introduces the politics and power dynamics of policy making and implementation. Students examine how selected social problems (e.g. teenage pregnancy and welfare reform) are constructed and why some are high on the policy making agenda whilst others are not. This course challenges taken-for-granted assumptions about policy responses to selected social problems via an examination of politics and power; explores the ways in which social problems are socially constructed in political discourse, public debate and policy presentation; locates the lived experiences of social problems within the context of global and local inequalities; and differentiates between policy design, implementation, and lived experience.

The course is a study of imperative stored program control architecture and application in an embedded environment. An initial series of exercises teaching principles and techniques is followed by two application project phases. The students use C programming language as an example only to program an embedded processor built on a high performance Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform. There is no need for prior knowledge of the C language as students are provided with pre-built modules and guidelines for integration.

This course provides an introduction to philosophical issues in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. These include questions such as: What is the relation between the mind and the material world? Is the mind a part of the scientific, law-governed material world? If so, can I really act freely? If the mind is part of the material world, how could a material thing be conscious? What, fundamentally, are material things and their properties? What is it for one event to cause another? What is time, and what is change? How can physical objects persist through change? Can a person persist through time and change and still be the same person?