Online courses directory (2511)

The seminar is designed to provide advanced graduate students with a thorough understanding of selected regional economic theories and techniques and with experience in using alternative socioeconomic impact assessment models and related regional techniques on microcomputers. Discussions will be held on particular theoretical modeling and economic issues; linkages among theories, accounts, and policies; relationships between national and regional economic structures; and methods of adjusting and estimating regional input-output accounts and tables. Examples from the Boston area and other U.S. cities/regions will be used to illustrate points throughout the seminar. We will also examine how such models are used in other countries. New material on analyzing regional development issues will be covered.

This course offers an introduction to Women's and Gender Studies, an interdisciplinary academic field that asks critical questions about the meaning of gender in society. The primary goal of this course is to familiarize students with key issues, questions and debates in Women's and Gender Studies scholarship, both historical and contemporary. Gender scholarship critically analyzes themes of gendered performance and power in a range of social spheres, such as law, culture, work, medicine and the family.

Does race still matter, as Cornel West proclaimed in his 1994 book of that title, or do we now live, as others maintain, in a post-racial society? The very notion of what constitutes race remains a complex and evolving question in cultural terms. In this course we will engage this question head-on, reading and writing about issues involving the construction of race and racial identity as reflected from a number of vantage points and via a rich array of voices and genres. Readings will include literary works by such writers as Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz, and Sherman Alexie, as well as perspectives on film and popular culture from figures such as Malcolm Gladwell and Touré.

The history, policy, and politics of urban transportation are discussed in this class. Also covered are the role of the federal government, the "highway revolt" and public transit in the auto era, using analytic tools for transportation planning and policy analysis. The class then explores the contribution of transportation to air pollution and climate change, land use and transportation interactions, together with issues with bicycles, pedestrians, and traffic calming. Examples used in the class are taken mainly from the Boston metropolitan area.

The Beijing Urban Design Studio is a joint program between the MIT and Tsinghua University Schools of Architecture and Planning. The goal of the studio is to foster international cooperation through the undertaking of a joint urban design and planning initiative in the city of Beijing involving important, often controversial, sites and projects. Since 1995, almost 250 MIT and Tsinghua University students and faculty have participated in this annual studio, making it one of the most successful and enduring international academic programs between China and the US. It has received the Irwin Sizer Award from MIT for outstanding innovation in education. The studio takes place over five weeks in June and July including several weeks in residence at Tsinghua University and two brief study tours to locations and projects that inform the work. It will include 18-20 MIT and 10-15 Tsinghua Architecture and Planning students. The Beijing City Planning Institute, responsible for strategic planning in the city, participates in the studio as the client.

Humans are social animals; social demands, both cooperative and competitive, structure our development, our brain and our mind. This course covers social development, social behaviour, social cognition and social neuroscience, in both human and non-human social animals. Topics include altruism, empathy, communication, theory of mind, aggression, power, groups, mating, and morality. Methods include evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology and anthropology.

This course covers techniques of creating narratives that take advantage of the flexibility of form offered by the computer. The course studies the structural properties of book-based narratives that experiment with digression, multiple points of view, disruptions of time and of storyline. The class analyzes the structure and evaluates the literary qualities of computer-based narratives including hypertexts, adventure games, and classic artificial intelligence programs like Eliza. With this base, students use authoring systems to model a variety of narrative techniques and to create their own fictions. Knowledge of programming is helpful but not necessary.

This course considers a wide range of issues related to the contemporary and historical use of technology, the development of new technologies, and the cultural representation of technology, including the role women have played in the development of technology and the effect of technological change on the roles of women and ideas of gender. It discusses the social implications of technology and its understanding and deployment in different cultural contexts. It investigates the relationships between technology and identity categories, such as gender, race, class, and sexuality, and examines how technology offers possibilities for new social relations and how to evaluate them.

This course will provide students with an analytic framework to understand the roles that gender, race, and class play in defining and determining access to leadership and power in the U.S., especially in the context of the workplace. We will explore women and men in leadership positions within the corporate, political and non-profit sectors, with attention to the roles of women of color and immigrant women within this context. We will also look at specific policies such as affirmative action, parental leave, child-care policy, and working-time policies and the role they play–or could play–in achieving parity. We will further investigate ways in which these policies address gender, racial, and class inequities, and think critically about mechanisms for change. The course will be highly interactive, and will combine texts, theater, videos and visual arts.

This course examines the modern definition of freedom, and the obligations that people accept in honoring it. It investigates how these obligations are captured in the principles of our political associations. This course also studies how the centrality of freedom plays out in the political thought of such authors as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke and Montesquieu, as well as debating which notions of freedom inspire and sustain the American experiment by careful reading of the documents and arguments of the founding of the United States.

This course is part of the Concourse program at MIT.

This course provides an introduction to linear systems, transfer functions, and Laplace transforms. It covers stability and feedback, and provides basic design tools for specifications of transient response. It also briefly covers frequency-domain techniques.

 

This course offers an introduction to probability, statistical mechanics, and thermodynamics. Numerous examples are used to illustrate a wide variety of physical phenomena such as magnetism, polyatomic gases, thermal radiation, electrons in solids, and noise in electronic devices.

This course is an elective subject in MIT’s undergraduate Energy Studies Minor. This Institute-wide program complements the deep expertise obtained in any major with a broad understanding of the interlinked realms of science, technology, and social sciences as they relate to energy and associated environmental challenges.

This course explores recent historical and anthropological approaches to the study of medicine and biology. Topics might include interaction of disease and society; science, colonialism, and international health; impact of new technologies on medicine and the life sciences; neuroscience and psychiatry; race, biology and medicine. Specific emphasis varies from year to year.

This course is a historical exploration of the ways that people have interacted with their closest animal relatives, for example: hunting, domestication of livestock, exploitation of animal labor, scientific study of animals, display of exotic and performing animals, and pet-keeping. Themes include changing ideas about animal agency and intelligence, our moral obligations to animals, and the limits imposed on the use of animals. Students taking the graduate version complete additional assignments.

The class will cover quantitative techniques of Operations Research with emphasis on applications in transportation systems analysis (urban, air, ocean, highway, pick-up and delivery systems) and in the planning and design of logistically oriented urban service systems (e.g., fire and police departments, emergency medical services, emergency repair services). It presents a unified study of functions of random variables, geometrical probability, multi-server queueing theory, spatial location theory, network analysis and graph theory, and relevant methods of simulation. There will be discussion focused on the difficulty of implementation, among other topics.

16.885J offers a holistic view of the aircraft as a system, covering: basic systems engineering; cost and weight estimation; basic aircraft performance; safety and reliability; lifecycle topics; aircraft subsystems; risk analysis and management; and system realization. Small student teams retrospectively analyze an existing aircraft covering: key design drivers and decisions; aircraft attributes and subsystems; and operational experience. Oral and written versions of the case study are delivered. For the Fall 2005 term, the class focuses on a systems engineering analysis of the Space Shuttle. It offers study of both design and operations of the shuttle, with frequent lectures by outside experts. Students choose specific shuttle systems for detailed analysis and develop new subsystem designs using state of the art technology.

This course covers important concepts and techniques in designing and operating safety-critical systems. Topics include the nature of risk, formal accident and human error models, causes of accidents, fundamental concepts of system safety engineering, system and software hazard analysis, designing for safety, fault tolerance, safety issues in the design of human-machine interaction, verification of safety, creating a safety culture, and management of safety-critical projects. Includes a class project involving the high-level system design and analysis of a safety-critical system.

Interdisciplinary introduction to contemporary Latin America, drawing on films, literature, popular press accounts, and scholarly research. Topics include economic development, ethnic and racial identity, religion, revolution, democracy, transitional justice, and the rule of law. Examples draw on a range of countries in the region, especially Mexico, Chile, and Brazil. Includes a heavy oral participation component, with regular breakout groups, formal class presentations on pressing social issues (such as criminal justice and land tenure), and a structured class debate.

This course explores recent historical and anthropological approaches to the study of life, in both medicine and biology. After grounding our conversation in accounts of natural history and medicine that predate the rise of biology as a discipline, we explore modes of theorizing historical and contemporary bioscience. Drawing on the work of historian William Coleman, we examine the forms, functions, and transformations of biological and medical objects of study. Along the way we treat the history of heredity, molecular biology, race, medicine in the colonies and the metropole, and bioeconomic exchange. We read anthropological literature on old and new forms of biopower, at scales from the molecular to the organismic to the global. The course includes readings from the HASTS Common Exam List. The aim of this seminar is to train students to be participants in scholarly debates in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences about the nature of life, the body, and biomedicine.

Theories about cities and the form that settlements should take will be discussed. Attempts will be made at a distinction between descriptive and normative theory, by examining examples of various theories of city form over time. The class will concentrate on the origins of the modern city and theories about its emerging form, including the transformation of the nineteenth-century city and its organization. It analyzes current issues of city form in relation to city making, social structure, and physical design. Case studies of several cities will be presented as examples of the theories discussed in the class.