This module will provide you with an introduction to the fundamental properties of floating bodies, covering those areas conventionally treated by hydrostatic methods and will provide students with an early insight into a range of tasks involved in the design, construction, management and operation of marine vehicles and an awareness of an engineer's responsibility to society. Students should be aware that this module requires good grades at A level Mathematics and Physics or equivalent qualifications.
This module examines key features of cell design and of materials used in batteries. It links this to a range of techniques that are commonly used to study cell architecture and structure, composition and surface chemistry of battery materials. Emphasis is placed on the operando use of these techniques and on reading of the associated literature.
The development of energy storage technologies plays a critical role in the transition to an environmentally sustainable society and improving people's quality of living. Energy storage technologies are necessary in a variety of very important applications such as the storage of energy from renewable energy resources, electrification of transport, portable devices, etc. In this module you will learn about the main applications of battery technologies and their specific requirements, as well as the strategies that are currently under development to make better batteries, and the decisive factors that guide the choice of different battery chemistries for different applications.
To gain an in-depth theoretical and practical understanding of Bayesian inference and active learning, and their applications.
A week-long field course held in Bolonia on the Andalucian coast of Southern Spain, within the Estrecho natural park. The field course will take place during the Easter holidays, when there is a large diversity of flora and fauna to survey. As a residential field course, you will be able to immerse yourself in research, undertaking a research project of your own design, to test a novel ecological hypothesis. You will then collect, analyse and interpret your data, producing a written report and a conference-style presentation. Throughout the module you will keep a field notebook to record your project’s development, data collection and interpretation. Teaching sessions will be accompanied by practical work which involves animal observation, with alternatives in place if required to meet minimum learning outcomes.
This module examines the essential role of behaviour change in Clinical Exercise Physiology, focusing on promoting and sustaining physical activity and exercise in individuals with various health conditions. You will explore the psychological, social, and biological factors influencing exercise behaviour, including the effects of chronic illness and socio-cultural context. You will develop client-centred counselling skills underpinned by the principles of motivational interviewing and critically evaluate evidence-based models of behaviour changes. Utilising University of Southampton academic expertise in simulation, you will develop person-centred communication skills, learning to co-produce personalised, sustainable intervention plans that foster long-term health improvements in clinical populations. This module aligns with CEP-UK standards, preparing students for effective, compassionate clinical practice.
Behavioural ecology considers the evolutionary pressures that shape behaviour. This module will explore animal behaviours from evolutionary biology and population ecological perspectives. Each week, lectures will consider a different behavioural ecology topic, to be discussed in more detail in accompanying weekly seminars. Throughout the module, students will keep an individual notebook/log/journal, sharing their notes and reflections with other students during seminars as part of group discussions to expand their personal learning network. Each student will write a research proposal for a behavioural ecology research project of their own devising, requiring them to consider the relevant background information, appropriate methodology and to budget the costs of their proposed project.
This module gives an overview of the concepts, models, and findings in behavioural economics. Behavioural economics is a field of economics that imports relevant insights from neighbouring disciplines, like psychology and anthropology, to inform economic theory and policy. Many of these insights have been generated through lab and field experiments about the drivers of economic behaviour, and they have revealed systematic patterns of individual and group behaviour. These systematic patterns are relevant for economic behaviour in several domains (e.g. consumption, savings, risk behaviour), and this module studies them in depth. It also exposes students to modifications of economic theory that capture these patterns, and to various behavioural phenomena such as self-control problems and cognitive bias, both in theory and in practice. It equips students with the theoretical toolset to analyse and understand economic choices in the presence of behavioural biases, as well as the analytical tools to make normative and policy analysis in the presence of behavioural phenomena. The module also emphasises the consequences of departures from classical microeconomic theory for prediction of economic choices and market outcomes and policy implications.
Mainstream finance assumes that people are rational and is mainly concerned with how they should behave when making financial decisions. In this module, instead, we focus on how individuals make financial decisions in practice, and we use insights from psychology and behavioural economics to explain why they systematically deviate from normative financial theory and make predictable errors. The cognitive, emotional, and social biases that influence people’s decisions bear important implications for individual investors, financial managers, and the dynamics of financial markets. The module builds on results from a wide spectrum of disciplines outside of finance (such as psychology, medicine, and sociology) and includes practical examples, simple in-class experiments, and discussions of academic studies.
Behavioural finance (BF) is an unorthodox area of finance that assumes financial markets are fundamentally inefficient. Advocates of BF believe that investor behaviour and decision making are driven by aspects of personal and market psychology. This module will involve an introduction to BF followed by a detailed analysis of the main issues.
The module aims to develop the themes introduced in the Introduction to Psychology Module in semester 1. The module integrates the approaches and findings of biological psychology in an attempt to understand the biological factors that explain why people behave as they do. The module will examine how innate biological mechanisms control our desires. For example how is hunger and satiation controlled within the body. We then apply those principles to understand how the system might break down and might lead to conditions such as Obesity The module is one of the pre-requisites for PSYC2025 and PSYC3048.
This module aims to develop your capabilities of addressing behavioural issues in an operational context. It goes beyond the typical focus on single decisions taken by an individual to decision making—possibly involving some strategic considerations—in what is called operations. Operations is an area of the management field focused on designing and controlling the processes involved with the production of goods or services. The study of operations can refer to the field of operational research or operations management. Known paradigms for the former include Multiple-Criteria Decision-Making and System Dynamics and for the latter Operations Management. In both cases, the module focuses on decisions under genuine uncertainty that cannot be meaningfully reduced to probability (risk). We cover novel and transparent tools that do not rely on probability, such as simple heuristics and simulations of system dynamics, and contrast them to traditional tools of optimisation in operational research and operations management.
This course will provide an overview of behavioural physiology, which is a growing, interdisciplinary research area that stems from the idea that animal physiology and behaviour are inextricably linked and mutually enriching fields of study. This field focuses on identifying the causal physiological mechanisms responsible for observed behavioural patterns in animal species, and distinguish which mechanisms are common across animal groups and which are unique adaptations to specific taxa. Animals also face a barrage of natural and anthropogenic pressures driven by environmental factors throughout their lifetime, which can modulate the connection between physiology and behavior.
The core of this module is a fieldtrip to Berlin. This fieldtrip is used to address questions about the production of urban space in twentieth-century Western Europe. Topics include: modern urbanism and architecture; political ideologies and monuments; memory and memorials; global capital and public space; the performance of urban space; and the reading/writing of urban space
