Online courses directory (2511)

This course provides an analytic framework for understanding the roles that gender and race play in defining the work worlds of women and men in our society, including ways in which gender intersects with race and class. The course examines specific workplace-related policies through a gender/race lens, including welfare policy, comparable worth, affirmative action, parental leave policy, child care policy and working time policies. Students are required to investigate ways in which these policies address gender and racial inequities, and think critically about mechanisms for change.

This course covers abstractions and implementation techniques for the design of distributed systems. Topics include: server design, network programming, naming, storage systems, security, and fault tolerance. The assigned readings for the course are from current literature. This course is worth 6 Engineering Design Points.

8.321 is the first semester of a two-semester subject on quantum theory, stressing principles. Topics covered include: Hilbert spaces, observables, uncertainty relations, eigenvalue problems and methods for solution thereof, time-evolution in the Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and interaction pictures, connections between classical and quantum mechanics, path integrals, quantum mechanics in EM fields, angular momentum, time-independent perturbation theory, density operators, and quantum measurement.

General introduction to systems engineering using both the classical V-model and the new Meta approach. Topics include stakeholder analysis, requirements definition, system architecture and concept generation, trade-space exploration and concept selection, design definition and optimization, system integration and interface management, system safety, verification and validation, and commissioning and operations. Discusses the trade-offs between performance, lifecycle cost and system operability. Readings based on systems engineering standards and papers. Students apply the concepts of systems engineering to a cyber-electro-mechanical system, which is subsequently entered into a design competition.

Students will prepare a PDR (Preliminary Design Review)-level design intended for the Cansat Competition.This year's class will be taught in the form of a Small-Private-Online-Course (SPOC) and offered simultaneously to students at MIT under number 16.842 and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as ENG-421.

This half-semester course introduces and surveys the major public capital market real estate vehicles, REITs and MBS (with primary emphasis on CMBS). Some background is also included in basic modern portfolio theory and equilibrium asset pricing. This course is primarily designed to provide MSRED students with a basic introduction to the public capital market sources of financial capital for real estate, and how those markets value such capital investments.

This short course provides an introduction to reactor dynamics including subcritical multiplication, critical operation in absence of thermal feedback effects and effects of Xenon, fuel and moderator temperature, etc. Topics include the derivation of point kinetics and dynamic period equations; techniques for reactor control including signal validation, supervisory algorithms, model-based trajectory tracking, and rule-based control; and an overview of light-water reactor startup. Lectures and demonstrations employ computer simulation and the use of the MIT Research Reactor.

This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

This course introduces the students to dynamics of large-scale circulations in oceans and atmospheres. Basic concepts include mass and momentum conservation, hydrostatic and geostrophic balance, and pressure and other vertical coordinates. It covers the topics of fundamental conservation and balance principles for large-scale flow, generation and dissipation of quasi-balanced eddies, as well as equilibrated quasi-balanced systems. Examples of oceanic and atmospheric quasi-balanced flows, computational models, and rotating tank experiments can be found in the accompaniment laboratory course 12.804, Large-scale Flow Dynamics Lab.

This course considers reggae, or Jamaican popular music more generally—in its various forms (ska, rocksteady, roots, dancehall)—as constituted by international movements and exchanges and as a product that circulates globally in complex ways. By reading across the reggae literature, as well as considering reggae texts themselves (songs, films, videos, and images), students will scrutinize the different interpretations of reggae's significance and the implications of different interpretations of the story of Jamaica and its music. Beginning with a consideration of how Jamaica's popular music industry emerged out of transnational exchanges, the course will proceed to focus on reggae's circulation outside of Jamaica via diasporic networks and commercial mediascapes. Among other sites, we will consider reggae's resonance and impact elsewhere in the Anglo Caribbean (e.g., Trinidad, Barbados), the United Kingdom (including British reggae styles but also such progeny as jungle, grime, and dubstep), the United States (both as reggae per se and in hip-hop), Panama and Puerto Rico and other Latin American locales (e.g., Brazil), Japan and Australia, as well as West, South, and East Africa (Côte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Uganda).

During this course, we will be exploring basic questions of architecture through several short design exercises. Working with many different media, students will discover the interrelationship of architecture and its related disciplines, such as structures, sustainability, architectural history and the visual arts. Each problem will focus on one of these disciplines and one exploration and presentation technique.

This class is divided into a series of sections or "modules", each of which concentrates on a particular large technology-related topic in a cultural context. The class will start with a four-week module on Samurai Swords and Blacksmithing, followed by smaller units on Chinese Cooking, the Invention of Clocks, and Andean Weaving, and end with a four-week module on Automobiles and Engines. In addition, there will be a series of hands-on projects that tie theory and practice together. The class discussions range across anthropology, history, and individual development, emphasizing recurring themes, such as the interaction between technology and culture and the relation between "skill" knowledge and "craft" knowledge.

Culture Tech evolved from a more extensive, two-semester course which formed the centerpiece of the Integrated Studies Program at MIT.  For 13 years, ISP was an alternative first-year program combining humanities, physics, learning-by-doing, and weekly luncheons.  Culture Tech represents the core principles of ISP distilled into a 6-unit seminar. Although many collections of topics have been used over the years, the modules presented here are a representative sequence. 

This course is a survey of principal concepts and methods of fluid dynamics. Topics include mass conservation, momentum, and energy equations for continua; Navier-Stokes equation for viscous flows; similarity and dimensional analysis; lubrication theory; boundary layers and separation; circulation and vorticity theorems; potential flow; introduction to turbulence; lift and drag; surface tension and surface tension driven flows.

6.863 is a laboratory-oriented course on the theory and practice of building computer systems for human language processing, with an emphasis on the linguistic, cognitive, and engineering foundations for understanding their design.

This course is a laboratory accompaniment to 12.803, Quasi-balanced Circulations in Oceans and Atmospheres. The subject includes analysis of observations of oceanic and atmospheric quasi-balanced flows, computational models, and rotating tank experiments. Student projects illustrate the basic principles of potential vorticity conservation and inversion, Rossby wave propagation, baroclinic instability, and the behavior of isolated vortices.

This seminar addresses the inherent challenges of translating poetry from different languages, cultures, and eras. Students do some translation of their own, though accommodations are made if a student lacks even a basic knowledge of any foreign language.

This course covers French politics, culture, and society from Louis XIV to Napoleon Bonaparte. Attention is given to the growth of the central state, the beginnings of a modern consumer society, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, including its origins, and the rise and fall of Napoleon.