Online courses directory (2511)

This course is a first course in algebraic topology. The emphasis is on homology and cohomology theory, including cup products, Kunneth formulas, intersection pairings, and the Lefschetz fixed point theorem.

This class introduces students to the rudiments of Western music through oral, aural, and written practice utilizing rhythm, melody, intervals, scales, chords, and musical notation. The approach is based upon the inclusive Kodály philosophy of music education. Individual skills are addressed through a variety of means, emphasizing singing and keyboard practice in the required piano labs.

For the first time in history, the global demand for freshwater is overtaking its supply in many parts of the world. The U.N. predicts that by 2025, more than half of the countries in the world will be experiencing water stress or outright shortages. Lack of water can cause disease, food shortages, starvation, migrations, political conflict, and even lead to war. Models of cooperation, both historic and contemporary, show the way forward. The first half of the course details the multiple facets of the water crisis. Topics include water systems, water transfers, dams, pollution, climate change, scarcity, water conflict/cooperation, food security, and agriculture. The second half of the course describes innovative solutions: Adaptive technologies and adaptation through policy, planning, management, economic tools, and finally, human behaviors required to preserve this precious and imperiled resource. Several field trips to water/wastewater/biosolids reuse and water-energy sites will help us to better comprehend both local and international challenges and solutions.

MIT students bring rich cultural backgrounds to their college experience. This course explores the splits, costs, confusions, insights, and opportunities of living in two traditions, perhaps without feeling completely at home in either. Course readings include accounts of growing up Asian-American, Hispanic, Native American, and South-East Asian-American, and of mixed race. The texts include selections from Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Kesaya E. Noda's "Growing Up Asian in America," Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek, Gary Soto's "Like Mexicans," Sherman Alexie's The Toughest Indian in the World, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, the movies Smoke Signals and Mississippi Masala, Danzy Senna's Caucasia, and others. We will also use students' writings as ways to investigate our multiple identities, exploring the constraints and contributions of cultural and ethnic traditions. Students need not carry two passports in order to enroll; an interest in reading and writing about being shaped by multiple influences suffices.

In this class, concepts of building technology and experimental methods are studied, in class and in lab assignments. Projects vary yearly and have included design and testing of strategies for daylighting, passive heating and cooling, and improved indoor air quality via natural ventilation. Experimental methods focus on measurement and analysis of thermally driven and wind-driven airflows, lighting intensity and glare, and heat flow and thermal storage. Experiments are conducted at model and full scale and are often motivated by ongoing field work in developing countries.

This course develops and applies scaling laws and the methods of continuum mechanics to biomechanical phenomena over a range of length scales. Topics include: structure of tissues and the molecular basis for macroscopic properties; chemical and electrical effects on mechanical behavior; cell mechanics, motility and adhesion; biomembranes; biomolecular mechanics and molecular motors. Experimental methods for probing structures at the tissue, cellular, and molecular levels will also be investigated.

This course was originally co-developed by Professors Alan Grodzinsky, Roger Kamm, and L. Mahadevan.

This course provides an overview of macroeconomic issues: the determination of output, employment, unemployment, interest rates, and inflation. Monetary and fiscal policies are discussed. Important policy debates such as, the sub-prime crisis, social security, the public debt, and international economic issues are critically explored. The course introduces basic models of macroeconomics and illustrates principles with the experience of the U.S. and foreign economies.

This course is a graduate introduction to natural language processing - the study of human language from a computational perspective. It covers syntactic, semantic and discourse processing models, emphasizing machine learning or corpus-based methods and algorithms. It also covers applications of these methods and models in syntactic parsing, information extraction, statistical machine translation, dialogue systems, and summarization. The subject qualifies as an Artificial Intelligence and Applications concentration subject.

We will explore the mathematical strategies behind popular games, toys, and puzzles. Topics covered will combine basic fundamentals of game theory, probability, group theory, and elementary programming concepts. Each week will consist of a lecture and discussion followed by game play to implement the concepts learned in class.

This course examines the dynamic interrelations among physical and behavioral traits of humans, environment, and culture to provide an integrated framework for studying human biological evolution and modern diversity. Topics include issues in morphological evolution and adaptation; fossil and cultural evidence for human evolution from earliest times through the Pleistocene; evolution of tool use and social behavior; modern human variation and concepts of race. The class also studies stone artifacts and fossil specimens.

This course covers topics such as sums of independent random variables, central limit phenomena, infinitely divisible laws, Levy processes, Brownian motion, conditioning, and martingales.

This class introduces students to the interdisciplinary nature of 21st-century engineering projects with three threads of learning: a technical toolkit, a social science toolkit, and a methodology for problem-based learning. Students encounter the social, political, economic, and technological challenges of engineering practice by participating in real engineering projects with faculty and industry; this semester's major project focuses on the engineering and economics of solar cells. Student teams will create prototypes and mixed media reports with exercises in project planning, analysis, design, optimization, demonstration, reporting and team building.

This course addresses the architecting of air transportation systems. The focus is on the conceptual phase of product definition, including technical, economic, market, environmental, regulatory, legal, manufacturing, and societal factors. It centers on a realistic system case study and includes a number of lectures from industry and government. Past examples include: the Very Large Transport Aircraft, a Supersonic Business Jet, and a Next Generation Cargo System. The course identifies the critical system level issues and analyzes them in depth via student team projects and individual assignments. The overall goal of the semester is to produce a business plan and a system specifications document that can be used to assess candidate systems.

Do you want to think about ways to help solve New Orleans' problems? CityScope is a project-based introduction to the contemporary city. "Problem solving in complex (urban) environments" is different than "solving complex problems." As a member of a team, you will learn to assess scenarios for the purpose of formulating social, economic and design strategies to provide humane and sustainable solutions. A visit to New Orleans is planned for spring break 2007.

This workshop explores the potential of media technology and the Internet to enhance communication and transform city design and community development in inner-city neighborhoods. The class introduces a variety of methods for describing or representing a place and its residents, for simulating actions and changes, for presenting visions of the future, and for engaging multiple actors in the process of envisioning change and guiding action. Students will engage two neighborhoods: the Mill Creek neighborhood of West Philadelphia, PA, and the Brightwood/Northend neighborhood of Springfield, MA. Students will meet real people working on real projects, put theory into practice, and reflect on insights gained in the process. Our hope is that student work will contribute to new initiatives in both communities.

The class Web site can be found here: Media Technology and City Design and Development. It is sponsored by the West Philadelphia Landscape Project and the Center for Reflective Community Practice.

In this course students create digital visual images and analyze designs from historical and theoretical perspectives with an emphasis on art and design, examining visual experience in broad terms, and from the perspectives of both creators and viewers. The course addresses key topics such as: image making as a cognitive and perceptual practice, the production of visual significance and meaning, and the role of technology in creating and understanding digitally produced images. Students will be given design problems growing out of their reading and present solutions using technologies such as the Adobe Creative Suite and/or similar applications.

This course explores the properties of non-linear, multi-linear, and interactive forms of narratives as they have evolved from print to digital media. Works covered in this course range from the Talmud, classics of non-linear novels, experimental literature, early sound and film experiments to recent multi-linear and interactive films and games. The study of the structural properties of narratives that experiment with digression, multiple points of view, disruptions of time, space, and of storyline is complemented by theoretical texts about authorship/readership, plot/story, properties of digital media and hypertext. Questions that will be addressed in this course include: How can we define 'non-linearity/multi-linearity', 'interactivity', 'narrative'. To what extend are these aspects determined by the text, the reader, the digital format? What kinds of narratives are especially suited for a nonlinear/ interactive format? Are there stories that can only be told in a digital format? What can we learn from early non-digital examples of non-linear and interactive story telling?

This subject is aimed at students with little or no programming experience. It aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation can play in solving problems. It also aims to help students, regardless of their major, to feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals. The class will use the Python™ programming language.

This course introduces the theory of error-correcting codes to computer scientists. This theory, dating back to the works of Shannon and Hamming from the late 40's, overflows with theorems, techniques, and notions of interest to theoretical computer scientists. The course will focus on results of asymptotic and algorithmic significance. Principal topics include:

1. Construction and existence results for error-correcting codes.
2. Limitations on the combinatorial performance of error-correcting codes.
3. Decoding algorithms.
4. Applications in computer science.