Online courses directory (19947)

This course gives an overview of engineering management and covers topics such as financial principles, management of innovation, technology strategy, and best management practices. The focus of the course is the development of individual skills and team work. This is carried out through an exposure to management tools.

This course examines fundamental issues in the philosophy of law, including the nature and content of law, its relation to morality, theories of legal interpretation, and the obligation to obey the law, as well as philosophical issues and problems associated with punishment and responsibility, liberty, and legal ethics.

18.104 is an undergraduate level seminar for mathematics majors. Students present and discuss subject matter taken from current journals or books. Instruction and practice in written and oral communication is provided. The topics vary from year to year. The topic for this term is Applications to Number Theory.

This course is a student-presented seminar in combinatorics, graph theory, and discrete mathematics in general. Instruction and practice in written and oral communication is emphasized, with participants reading and presenting papers from recent mathematics literature and writing a final paper in a related topic.

This semester long subject (11.521) is divided into two halves. The first half focuses on learning spatial database management techniques and methods and the second half focuses on using these skills to address a 'real world,' client-oriented planning problem. The first half of the semester may be taken separately using the class number 11.523 and the second half may be taken separately as 11.524.

In order to help shape and utilize the information infrastructure that will support the management and development of our metropolitan areas, planners need a basic understanding of the tools and technology for querying, analyzing, and sharing complex databases and maps. Managing online access to large and constantly-changing spatial datasets can be a powerful aid to planning and can facilitate inter-agency cooperation and collaboration in an increasingly decentralized world. But it requires the use of knowledge representation methods, client-server technologies and access control issues that are quite different from what are needed to model and visualize standalone datasets on a personal computer. Hence, planners should acquire basic skills in database management, digital spatial data analysis, and networking.

The 11.523 portion of the semester addresses these issues while retaining a focus on planning (rather than on computer science). This is an intensive, hands-on class that stresses learning by doing. Exercises and examples involving real-world data, maps, and images are used to develop skills with database query languages and the design development and use of structured databases. Class work utilizes web tools, GIS, and database software with lab exercises primarily on the new high-performance PC computing cluster. Specifically, we will access an Oracle 8i database using SQL (structured query language) and use ArcView for GIS. Each week there are two sixty to ninety-minute classes plus another 90+ minute hands-on lab in electronic classrooms. Class lectures will focus on concepts and case discussion, the scheduled lab time focuses on computer mechanics and skill building. Specific topics during 11.523 include:

• finding, understanding and structuring digital spatial data that are available on the Internet using various browsing, visualization, and data management tools;
• considerable work with relational database technologies and the Structured Query Language (SQL) to design, construct, query, and update urban planning databases;
• some experience with so-called 'client/server' and 'enterprise GIS' technologies for facilitating distributed access to complex spatial data and urban planning applications;
• advanced GIS topics such as 3D visualizations and geospatial web services.

The 11.524 portion of the semester will treat the classroom like a professional planning office, working as a team to produce a two deliverables for their client, Lawrence Community Works, Inc. (LCW), a community development corporation located in the City of Lawrence, Massachusetts. LCW and DUSP recently agreed to work together for the next five years to design and implement a multi-tier web-based planning system that promotes democratic involvement and informs community development projects. Your involvement this semester is critical, because the implementation plan that you craft this semester will serve as the road map for both organizations for years to come and the simple web-based planning tool that you design will engage stakeholders by giving them a better sense of how technologies can aid decision-making processes. To assist you with the more technical aspects of the project, we hired Robert Cheetham, President of Azavea, Inc. (http://www.azavea.com/ ), to provide exactly 100 hours of consultancy services. Through their project work, students will enhance important professional skills by:

• formulating an implementation plan for a real client;
• designing a simple web-based tool for understanding problems;
• engaging constituents and stakeholders in a real setting;
• integrating theory and practice by evaluating the role of technology in community development;
• learning to communicate effectively within a group and with a professional consultant;
• working with such tools as the WWW, Access, ArcView, ArcIMS, SDE, etc.

This is an introductory course in algebraic combinatorics. No prior knowledge of combinatorics is expected, but assumes a familiarity with linear algebra and finite groups. Topics were chosen to show the beauty and power of techniques in algebraic combinatorics. Rigorous mathematical proofs are expected.

This course analyzes combinatorial problems and methods for their solution. Topics include: enumeration, generating functions, recurrence relations, construction of bijections, introduction to graph theory, network algorithms, and extremal combinatorics.

This undergraduate level Algebra I course covers groups, vector spaces, linear transformations, symmetry groups, bilinear forms, and linear groups.

This undergraduate level course follows Algebra I. Topics include group representations, rings, ideals, fields, polynomial rings, modules, factorization, integers in quadratic number fields, field extensions, and Galois theory.

This subject is on regional energy-environmental modeling rather than on general energy-environmental policies, but the models should have some policy relevance. We will start with some discussion of green accounting issues; then, we will cover a variety of theoretical and empirical topics related to spatial energy demand and supply, energy forecasts, national and regional energy prices, and environmental implications of regional energy consumption and production. Where feasible, the topics will have a spatial dimension. This is a new seminar, so we expect students to contribute material to the set of readings and topics covered during the semester.

This landscape and environmental planning workshop investigates and propose a framework for the enhancement, development and preservation of the natural and cultural landscape of the Cardener River Corridor in Catalunya, Spain. The workshop is carried out in conjunction with the Polytechnic University of Catalunya, and the Barcelona Provincial Council (Diputació de Barcelona).

The course examines the causes and effects of rapid urbanization in developing countries. Using case studies from the world's four major developing regions, including (among others) Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Managua, Singapore, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Kabul, Beirut, Cairo, Kinshasa, Cape Town and Johannesburg, it explores the economic and political dynamics that grease the wheels of contemporary patterns of growth. In addition to examining both local and transnational forces that drive contemporary urbanization, the course focuses on key issues that emerge in rapidly growing cities of the developing world, ranging from growing income inequality and socio-economic exclusion, environmental challenges, and rising violence. Class sessions are discussion-based and focus on a critical analysis of the arguments presented in the readings.

Microeconomics will ground you in - surprise - basic microeconomics-how markets function, how to think about allocating scarce resources among competing uses, what profit maximizing behavior means in industries with different numbers of competitors, how technology and trade reshapes the opportunities people face, and so on. We will apply economic ideas to understand current economic problems, including the housing bubble, the current unemployment situation (particularly for high school gradutes), how Google makes its money and why healthcare costs are rising so fast.

The studio will focus on the district of Gaoming, located in the northwest of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) - the fastest growing and most productive region of China. The District has recently completed a planning effort in which several design institutes and a Hong Kong planning firm prepared ideas for a new central area near the river. The class will complement these efforts by focusing on planning and design options on the waterfront of the proposed new district and ways of integrating water/hydrological factors into all aspects and land uses of a modern city (residential, commercial, industrial) - including watershed and natural ecosystem protection, economic and recreational activities, transportation, and tourism.

This course is an elementary introduction to number theory with no algebraic prerequisites. Topics covered include primes, congruences, quadratic reciprocity, diophantine equations, irrational numbers, continued fractions, and partitions. 

This course introduces topology, covering topics fundamental to modern analysis and geometry. It also deals with subjects like topological spaces and continuous functions, connectedness, compactness, separation axioms, and selected further topics such as function spaces, metrization theorems, embedding theorems and the fundamental group.

This course is a seminar in topology. The main mathematical goal is to learn about the fundamental group, homology and cohomology. The main non-mathematical goal is to obtain experience giving math talks.

For the last century, precepts of scientific management and administrative rationality have concentrated power in the hands of technical specialists, which in recent decades has contributed to widespread disenfranchisement and discontent among stakeholders in natural resources cases. In this seminar we examine the limitations of scientific management as a model both for governance and for gathering and using information, and describe alternative methods for informing and organizing decision-making processes. We feature cases involving large carnivores in the West (mountain lions and grizzly bears), Northeast coastal fisheries, and adaptive management of the Colorado River. There will be nightly readings and a short written assignment.

The course is an introduction to the approach of Reflective Practice developed by Donald Schön. It is an approach that enables professionals to understand how they use their knowledge in practical situations and how they can combine practice and learning in a more effective way. Through greater awareness of how they deploy their knowledge in practical situations, professionals can increase their capacities of learning in a more timely way. Understanding how they frame situations and ideas helps professionals to achieve greater flexibility and increase their capacity of conceptual innovation.

The objective of the course is to introduce students to the approach and methods of reflective practice by raising their awareness about their own cognitive resources and how they use them in their practice. The course will introduce theories of learning, knowledge generation, framing and reframing, theories of action, reflection-in-practice, and conceptual innovation, and provide students with opportunities to experiment with these theories in real life through practical exercises in which they reflect on real situations that they have faced in their past professional experience. Through these practical exercises, students will have the opportunity to reflect on their thinking capacities in the context of their practice.

This intensive and brief 4-day seminar, taught during MIT's Independent Activities Period in January, uses a case set in Hartford, Vermont to introduce economic development planning skills to students in the Master in City Planning (MCP) Degree Program. It introduces analytical tools that are used to assess local economic development conditions, issues, and opportunities as part of formulating economic development plans. The course is designed to provide MCP students with skills needed for applied economic development planning work in other courses, particularly Economic Development Planning (11.438) and Revitalizing Urban Main Streets (11.439).