Online courses directory (2511)

This course explores the nature of love through works of philosophy, literature, film, poetry, and individual experience. It investigates the distinction among eros, philia, and agape. Students discuss ideas of love as a feeling, an action, a species of 'knowing someone,' or a way to give or take. Authors studied include Plato, Kant, Buber, D. H. Lawrence, Rumi, and Aristotle.

This course is part of the Concourse program at MIT.

This course provides an introduction to the theory and phenomenology of nonlinear dynamics and chaos in dissipative systems. The content is structured to be of general interest to undergraduates in science and engineering.

The objective of this course is to develop an understanding of principles of marine isotope geochemistry, its systematics, and its application to the study of the behavior and history of the oceans within the earth system. The emphasis is on developing the underlying concepts and theory as well as proficiency in working with practical isotope systems. The course is divided into four sections: nuclear systematics, Earth formation and evolution, stable isotopes, and applications to the ocean system.

This course covers the process of identifying and quantifying market opportunities, then conceptualizing, planning, and starting a new, technology-based enterprise. Students develop detailed business plans for a startup. It is intended for students who want to start their own business, further develop an existing business, be a member of a management team in a new enterprise, or better understand the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial process.
 

This course is an advanced subject in fluid and continuum mechanics. The course content includes kinematics, macroscopic balances for linear and angular momentum, stress tensors, creeping flows and the lubrication approximation, the boundary layer approximation, linear stability theory, and some simple turbulent flows.

Project Laboratory in Mathematics is a course designed to give students a sense of what it's like to do mathematical research. In teams, students explore puzzling and complex mathematical situations, search for regularities, and attempt to explain them mathematically. Students share their results through professional-style papers and presentations.

This course site was created specifically for educators interested in offering students a taste of mathematical research. This site features extensive description and commentary from the instructors about why the course was created and how it operates.

This class is a multidisciplinary introduction to pharmacology, neurotransmitters, drug mechanisms, and brain diseases from addiction to schizophrenia.

From Abilify® to Zyrtec®, the world is full of fascinating drugs. If you are poisoned by sarin nerve gas, you may be able to save your life by huffing some BZ nerve gas. This class will explain that chemical curiosity, along with a host of other interesting tidbits of pharmacology. The structure of the class interleaves basic concepts with specific examples and entertaining tangents, so it is not loaded with boring abstract theory. In the first class you will learn what a neurotransmitter is, and you will immediately apply that knowledge when we discuss the mechanism of caffeine. The class is highly multidisciplinary, including topics such as patent law, medical ethics, history, and the physics of crack pipes.

Hacking and trolling; mass murders and bullying. What do these have in common? One theory holds that these are all "deviant" social behaviors, occurring both online and off, which have purportedly been brought about or exacerbated by our new media environment. Such aberrant behaviors seemingly give us ample reason to fear digital and social media. But is technology to blame? We will grapple with this question as we investigate how our understanding of new technologies and media is socially shaped and, in turn, how new media might influence our social behavior.

We will begin by studying how similar panics about "old" media (books, film, television and even the written word itself) set historical precedents for these current fears. Along the way we will establish and explore issues embedded in debates about new media, including questions of class, gender, youth, sex, and violence. Such topics will be placed in cross-cultural perspective, allowing us to compare the nature of panics over contemporary events and issues—e.g. the Columbine school shootings, cyber-bullying, Japanese otaku, and the Chinese "Human Flesh Search Engine"—occurring within both the United States and East Asia. Students will read essays, keep media journals and watch films pertaining to weekly topics.

This course introduces students to the modeling, quantification, and analysis of uncertainty.  The tools of probability theory, and of the related field of statistical inference, are the keys for being able to analyze and make sense of data. These tools underlie important advances in many fields, from the basic sciences to engineering and management.

Course Format

This course has been designed for independent study. It provides everything you will need to understand the concepts covered in the course. The materials include:

• Lecture Videos by MIT Professor John Tsitsiklis
• Lecture Slides and Readings
• Recitation Problems and Solutions
• Recitation Help Videos by MIT Teaching Assistants
• Tutorial Problems and Solutions
• Tutorial Help Videos by MIT Teaching Assistants
• Problem Sets with Solutions
• Exams with Solutions

This course explores the reciprocal relationships among design, science, and technology by covering a wide range of topics including industrial design, architecture, visualization and perception, design computation, material ecology, and environmental design and sustainability. Students will examine how transformations in science and technology have influenced design thinking and vice versa, as well as develop methodologies for design research and collaborate on design solutions to interdisciplinary problems.

This course explores photography as a disciplined way of seeing or investigating urban landscapes, and expressing ideas. Readings, observations, and photographs form the basis of discussions on light, detail, place, poetics, narrative, and how photography can inform design and planning.

The current version of the class website for the course can be found here: Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry.

This seminar looks at key issues in the historical development and current state of modern American criminal justice, with an emphasis on its relationship to citizenship, nationhood, and race/ethnicity. We begin with a range of perspectives on the rise of what is often called "mass incarceration": how did our current system of criminal punishment take shape, and what role did race play in that process? Part Two takes up a series of case studies, including racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty, enforcement of the drug laws, and the regulation of police investigations. The third and final part of the seminar looks at national security policing: the development of a constitutional law governing the intersection of ethnicity, religion, and counter-terrorism, and the impact of counter-terrorism policy on domestic police practices.

This course provides an introduction to the field of comparative politics. Readings include both classic and recent materials. Discussions include research design and research methods, in addition to topics such as political culture, social cleavages, the state, and democratic institutions. The emphasis on each issue depends in part on the interests of the students.

Rainbows and unicorns make the world happy. Why not you?

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"Sports, not religion, is the opiate of the people." So says David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker and a former sportswriter. Many of our heroes are sports heroes, and for many of us, sports were an important part of our childhood years. Sports are big business, even on college campuses, and they are the subject of many classic movies. In this introductory writing class we consider the role of sports in our own lives and explore the cultural meanings of sports in America. Sports have produced a large body of excellent descriptive and analytic writing; we'll read writers as diverse as Hank Aaron, John Updike, David Foster Wallace, and Malcolm Gladwell on the joys and conundrums of baseball, boxing, football, tennis, and running.

The primary work of the class is improving students' communication skills. We'll write and revise 3 essays, including an investigative essay, and we'll also give one short oral report. Revision is an important part of the class; all essays will be revised at least once.

Students in this course will examine short stories and short novels published in France during the past 20 years, with emphasis on texts related to the dominant social and cultural trends. Themes include the legacy of France's colonial experience, the re-examination of its wartime past, memory and the Holocaust, the specter of AIDS, changing gender relationships, new families, the quest for personal identity, and immigration narratives. This course is taught in French.

This graduate-level course is a computationally focused introduction to elliptic curves, with applications to number theory and cryptography.

This course explores the relationship between political institutions and economic development, covering key theoretical issues as well as recent empirical evidence. Topics include corruption, democracy, dictatorship, and war. Discusses not just what we know on these topics, but how we know it, covering how to craft a good empirical study or field experiment and how to discriminate between reliable and unreliable evidence.

This class covers the analysis and modeling of stochastic processes. Topics include measure theoretic probability, martingales, filtration, and stopping theorems, elements of large deviations theory, Brownian motion and reflected Brownian motion, stochastic integration and Ito calculus and functional limit theorems. In addition, the class will go over some applications to finance theory, insurance, queueing and inventory models.

This course examines systematically, and comparatively, great and middle power military interventions, and candidate military interventions, into civil wars from the 1990s to the present. These civil wars did not easily fit into the traditional category of vital interest. These interventions may therefore tell us something about broad trends in international politics including the nature of unipolarity, the erosion of sovereignty, the security implications of globalization, and the nature of modern western military power.