Online courses directory (2511)

Modal logic is the logic of necessity and possibility, and by extension of analogously paired notions like validity and consistency, obligation and permission, the known and the not-ruled-out. This a first course in the area. A solid background in first-order logic is essential. Topics to be covered include (some or all of) the main systems of propositional modal logic, Kripkean "possible world" semantics, strict implication, contingent identity, intensional objects, counterpart theory, the logic of actuality, and deontic and / or epistemic logic. The emphasis will be more on technical methods and results than philosophical applications.

Planning Economics will apply microeconomic theory to issues that markets don't always handle well and so are not usually covered in a standard microeconomics course. Issues for this year include global warming, how you value a national park, the economics and politics of New York City development, how cities form and why people are willing to pay more to live in, say, the Boston Metro area, than they would pay to live in rural North Dakota, and how to evaluate costs and benefits that occur at different points in time.

This course covers the general principles of separation by equilibrium and rate processes. Topics include staged cascades and applications to distillation, absorption, adsorption, and membrane processes. Phase equilibria and the role of diffusion are also covered.

This course, which spans a third of a semester, provides students with experience using techniques employed in synthetic organic chemistry. It also introduces them to the exciting research area of catalytic chiral catalysis.

This class is part of the new laboratory curriculum in the MIT Department of Chemistry. Undergraduate Research-Inspired Experimental Chemistry Alternatives (URIECA) introduces students to cutting edge research topics in a modular format.

This course will serve as an introduction to the interdisciplinary academic study of videogames, examining their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. By playing, analyzing, and reading and writing about videogames, we will examine debates surrounding how they function within socially situated contexts in order to better understand games' influence on and reflections of society. Readings will include contemporary videogame theory and the completion of a contemporary commercial videogame chosen in consultation with the instructor.

This course covers the fundamental methods used for exploring the information content of observations related to kinematical and dynamical models.

This course integrates psychological insights into economic models of behavior. It discusses the limitations of standard economic models and surveys the ways in which psychological experiments have been used to learn about preferences, cognition, and behavior. Topics include: trust, vengeance, fairness, impatience, impulsivity, bounded rationality, learning, reinforcement, classical conditioning, loss-aversion, over-confidence, self-serving biases, cognitive dissonance, altruism, subjective well-being, and hedonic adaptation. Economic concepts such as equilibrium, rational choice, utility maximization, Bayesian beliefs, game theory, and behavior under uncertainty are discussed in light of these phenomena.

This subject studies the changing structure of American politics, economics, and society from the end of the Civil War to the present. We will consider secondary historical accounts and primary documents to examine some of the key issues in the development of modern America: industrialization and urbanization; U.S. emergence as a global power; ideas about rights and equality; and the changing structures of gender, class, and race. This subject also examines the multiple answers that Americans gave to the question of what it means to be an American in the modern age. As a communications intensive subject, students will be expected to engage intensively with the material through frequent oral and written exercises.

Analysis I (18.100) in its various versions covers fundamentals of mathematical analysis: continuity, differentiability, some form of the Riemann integral, sequences and series of numbers and functions, uniform convergence with applications to interchange of limit operations, some point-set topology, including some work in Euclidean n-space.

MIT students may choose to take one of three versions of 18.100: Option A (18.100A) chooses less abstract definitions and proofs, and gives applications where possible. Option B (18.100B) is more demanding and for students with more mathematical maturity; it places more emphasis from the beginning on point-set topology and n-space, whereas Option A is concerned primarily with analysis on the real line, saving for the last weeks work in 2-space (the plane) and its point-set topology. Option C (18.100C) is a 15-unit variant of Option B, with further instruction and practice in written and oral communication.

This course is for the singer and/or pianist interested in collaborative study of solo vocal performance. This term we will focus upon the works of Women Composers. Students will gather biographical data and explore art songs, operatic arias, choral masterpieces, and arrangements employing sacred and secular texts. Additionally, students will conduct inquiry into works indicative of their own heritage.

This course is a practicum-style seminar in anthropological methods of ethnographic fieldwork and writing. Depending on student experience in ethnographic reading and practice, the course is a mix of reading anthropological and science studies ethnographies; and formulating and pursuing ethnographic work in local labs, companies, or other sites.

The economic growth of developing countries requires the acquisition of technological capabilities. In countries at the world technological frontier, such capabilities refer to cutting edge skills to innovate entirely new products. In developing countries, the requisite technological capabilities are broader, and include production engineering, project execution and incremental innovation to make borrowed technology work. Theories of technology acquisition are examined. The empirical evidence is taken from two sets of developing countries; the most advanced (Taiwan, Korea, India, China and Brazil) and the least advanced (Africa and Middle Eastern countries).

This course is organized around algorithmic issues that arise in machine learning. Modern machine learning systems are often built on top of algorithms that do not have provable guarantees, and it is the subject of debate when and why they work. In this class, we focus on designing algorithms whose performance we can rigorously analyze for fundamental machine learning problems.

"Designing a dream city is easy. Rebuilding a living one takes imagination."    -Jane Jacobs

This course examines the challenges that cities will face and strategies they can use to prepare for the impacts of climate change. Particular attention will be paid to the presence of global disparities, the needs of vulnerable populations and resource constrained locales, and the ways in which local government and community-based activities can achieve equitable levels of climate-readiness.

This course is an investigation of affective priming and creation of rigorously counterbalanced, fully computerized testing paradigm. Includes background readings, study design, counterbalancing, study execution, data analysis, presentation of poster, and final paper.

This course examines the science of natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and hurricanes and explores the relationships between the science of and policy toward such hazards. It presents the causes and effects of these phenomena, discusses their predictability, and examines how this knowledge influences policy making. This course includes intensive practice in the writing and presentation of scientific research and summaries for policy makers.

LEGO® robotics uses LEGO®s as a fun tool to explore robotics, mechanical systems, electronics, and programming. This seminar is primarily a lab experience which provides students with resources to design, build, and program functional robots constructed from LEGO®s and a few other parts such as motors and sensors.

This course, along with 21F.108/158 offered in the spring, form the elementary level of the streamlined sequence, which is for students who have some basic conversational skills gained, typically, from growing up in a Chinese speaking environment, but lack a corresponding level of literacy. The focus of the course is on learning standard everyday usage, on reading in both traditional and simplified characters, and on writing.

This course focuses on phonological phenomena that are sensitive to morphological structure, including base-reduplicant identity, cyclicity, level ordering, derived environment effects, opaque rule interactions, and morpheme structure constraints. In the recent OT literature, it has been claimed that all of these phenomena can be analyzed with a single theoretical device: correspondence constraints, which regulate the similarity of lexically related forms (such as input and output, base and derivative, base and reduplicant).

This class explores the creation (and creativity) of the modern scientific and cultural world through study of western Europe in the 17th century, the age of Descartes and Newton, Shakespeare, Milton and Ford. It compares period thinking to present-day debates about the scientific method, art, religion, and society. This team-taught, interdisciplinary subject draws on a wide range of literary, dramatic, historical, and scientific texts and images, and involves theatrical experimentation as well as reading, writing, researching and conversing.

The primary theme of the class is to explore how England in the mid-seventeenth century became "a world turned upside down" by the new ideas and upheavals in religion, politics, and philosophy, ideas that would shape our modern world. Paying special attention to the "theatricality" of the new models and perspectives afforded by scientific experimentation, the class will read plays by Shakespeare, Tate, Brecht, Ford, Churchill, and Kushner, as well as primary and secondary texts from a wide range of disciplines. Students will also compose and perform in scenes based on that material.