What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Lectures#
Tuesday 14:05 to 15:55, every teaching week, in Theatre 1. Break 14:55–15:05; the core material ends around 15:40. Remaining time is contingency or optional discussion of the deck’s closing question. Each lecture writes down one part of the protocol, cites where its claims come from, and ends with lines you can check yourself against. The lab that Thursday tests it. Dates, rooms and the rules the room runs on are on the timetable; each term a lecture introduces is collected in the glossary.
Introduction + The Opening Handshake
Here is “how are you?”, and here is its specification, written down in one lecture after a lifetime of nobody writing it down.
Week 1, 23 February 2027
The Undocumented Majority + Field Notes Without Pathology
Why the people who run the protocol can’t describe it, whose failure a mismatch is, and how to write down what you saw without diagnosing anyone.
Week 2, 2 March 2027
Payload and Envelope
Indirect speech, hints and implicature: a protocol that breaks its own published maxims on purpose, and calls it politeness.
Week 3, 9 March 2027
Latency and Turn-Taking
The gap before a reply is measured in milliseconds, and listeners have learned what long ones usually mean. An undocumented timeout, documented.
Week 4, 16 March 2027
Error Handling and Repair
A twelve-language study found a listener signalling trouble about once every 1.4 minutes. The protocol has a subroutine for it, and a separate one for offence.
Week 5, 23 March 2027
Masking: Cost Accounting
Masking works, and it has a price. Here is the ledger: what each masked subroutine buys, what it costs, and how much say you had in running it.
Week 6, 30 March 2027
Emergency: Overload, Shutdown, Recovery
What happens when week 6’s budget is overspent for too long, and a runbook written now, while you can write one, for the day you can’t.
Week 7, 6 April 2027
Institutional Protocols
Emails to tutors, office hours, extensions and group work. The university specifies everything except how to ask for help, so this week does.
Week 8, 27 April 2027
Escalation Rates
How closeness actually paces: hours, disclosure, and a rate limit nobody publishes, until now.
Week 9, 4 May 2027
Disclosure
Whether to tell people, when, which people, and at what cost. Five audiences, needs without labels, and the timing trap.
Week 10, 11 May 2027
Interoperation, Not Conversion
Evidence on communication across implementations, what the studies leave open, and a bilateral protocol to try with your partner.
Week 11, 18 May 2027
Advanced Topics and Further Study
Romance, persuasion and power, logged as open issues rather than taught, with where the documentation starts. And the course’s own errata, because a specification without them is lying.
Week 12, 25 May 2027