Online courses directory (2511)
This class explores the foundations of the environmental justice movement, current and emerging issues, and the application of environmental justice analysis to environmental policy and planning. It examines claims made by diverse groups along with the policy and civil society responses that address perceived inequity and injustice. While focused mainly on the United States, international issues and perspectives are also considered.
Through site-specific client-based work, this course will allow students to materially contribute to redevelopment decision-making regarding a former inner-city industrial site. The course will focus on generating and analyzing pragmatic redevelopment scenarios given the issues of brownfields and environmental contamination, community preferences, regulatory constraints and economic realities.
The course is designed along two parallel and mutually reinforcing educational tracks: Field learning and classroom reflection, with ample time built into the schedule for both. As the course will focus on an actual site, there will be a sizeable portion of student time spent on location and in the surrounding community.
This class provides a general introduction to the diverse roles of microorganisms in natural and artificial environments. It will cover topics including: cellular architecture, energetics, and growth; evolution and gene flow; population and community dynamics; water and soil microbiology; biogeochemical cycling; and microorganisms in biodeterioration and bioremediation.
This course explores the proper role of government in the regulation of the environment. It will help students develop the tools to estimate the costs and benefits of environmental regulations. These tools will be used to evaluate a series of current policy questions, including: Should air and water pollution regulations be tightened or loosened? What are the costs of climate change in the U.S. and abroad? Is there a "Race to the Bottom" in environmental regulation? What is "sustainable development"? How do environmental problems differ in developing countries? Are we running out of oil and other natural resources? Should we be more energy efficient? To gain real world experience, the course is scheduled to include a visit to the MIT cogeneration plant. We will also do an in-class simulation of an air pollution emissions market.
"Environmental Politics & Policy" explores the workings of environmental policymaking in the United States.
- What are the big issues facing environmental policy?
- How did we end up with the policies we have today?
- Why does it take a crisis to move environmental policy forward?
- Why do political factors - economic interests, social and political values, bureaucratic styles, ideologies, elections, etc. - always seem to overwhelm sound scientific and engineering judgment in determining policy outcomes?
Case studies ranging from cleaning up toxic waste pollution to endangered species protection probe the clashes between science and politics at local, state, and federal levels.
This class explores the interrelationship between humans and natural environments. It does so by focusing on conflict over access to and use of the environment as well as ideas about "nature" in various parts of the world.
This course introduces students to iterative decoding algorithms and the codes to which they are applied, including Turbo Codes, Low-Density Parity-Check Codes, and Serially-Concatenated Codes. The course will begin with an introduction to the fundamental problems of Coding Theory and their mathematical formulations. This will be followed by a study of Belief Propagation--the probabilistic heuristic which underlies iterative decoding algorithms. Belief Propagation will then be applied to the decoding of Turbo, LDPC, and Serially-Concatenated codes. The technical portion of the course will conclude with a study of tools for explaining and predicting the behavior of iterative decoding algorithms, including EXIT charts and Density Evolution.
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:
- Construction and existence results for error-correcting codes.
- Limitations on the combinatorial performance of error-correcting codes.
- Decoding algorithms.
- Applications in computer science.
