Computation in political science

I was talking to Mike B the other day, wondering how to best proselytize social scientists to the wonders of computational methods. We ended up brainstorming a list of topics for an Introductory Computation 501 class for grad students.

Here's what I remember from the list. What should we add?

• Basic architecture of computers and the Internet
• Enough python to understand pseudocode (if, else, for, while...)
• Big O notation
• Regular expressions, probably in tandem with HTML
• Spiders and crawlers
• NLP text classification (probably Naive Bayes, latent semantic analysis, and SVM)
• Database architecture (keys, tables, queries, etc...)