Courses tagged with "Information environments" (1105)

This course focuses on China's transition from plan to market. What has the trajectory of institutional change in China been, and how has growth been achieved? Is that growth sustainable? Subject examines specific aspects of reform (enterprise, fiscal, financial, social welfare), and the systemic consequences of interaction between various reform measures. Additional topics include the interaction between political and economic change, the transformation of state-society relations, and the generalizability of China's reform experience. Graduate students are expected to explore the subject in greater depth.

This course examines theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding the process of late development. Topics include the role of the state in alleviating or exacerbating poverty, the politics of industrial policy and planning and the relationship between institutional change and growth. How over the past century have some of the world's poorest nations achieved wealth? How have others remained mired in poverty? What are the social consequences for alternative strategies of development?

This is a graduate seminar for students who already have some familiarity with issues in political economy and/or European politics. The objective is to examine the ways in which changes in the international economy and the regimes that regulate it interact with domestic politics, policy-making, and the institutional structures of the political economy in industrialized democracies.

This class explores the politics of economic reform in Latin America. Topics addressed include: Dependency, Development, and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism; The Political Consequences of Market-Oriented Reform in Venezuela; The Mexican Peso Crisis; Transitions from Authoritarian Rule in the Southern Cone; Civil-Military Relations; Limits of Democratization; Parties and Elections in Latin America; Religion, Political Mobilization, and Civil Society; and Revolution.

Examines role of European states in postwar period of rapid economic growth and current crisis. Includes analysis of different state traditions ("etatist," liberal, authoritarian); government's role in decline of some economies and rise of others; why and where Keynesianism, indicative planning, and state enterprises were introduced; alternative conceptions of contemporary economic problems (new international division of labor? too few producers? oil shock?); and of policies to deal with them (industrial policy? monetarism? protectionism?).

This course explores the foundations and content of norms of justice that apply beyond the borders of a single state. We examine issues of political justice, economic justice, and human rights. Topics include the case for skepticism about global justice; the idea of global democracy; intellectual property rights; the nature of distributive justice at the global level; pluralism and human rights; and rights to control borders. It meets jointly with Harvard's Philosophy 271, and is taught by Professors Joshua Cohen, Thomas Scanlon, and Amartya Sen. Readings are from Kant, Habermas, Rawls, Sen, Beitz, Nussbaum, Stiglitz, Ignatieff, Walzer, among others.

This subject is designed for upper level undergraduates and graduate students as an introduction to politics and the policy process in modern Japan. The semester is divided into two parts. After a two-week general introduction to Japan and to the dominant approaches to the study of Japanese history, politics and society, we will begin exploring five aspects of Japanese politics: party politics, electoral politics, interest group politics, bureaucratic politics, and policy, which will be broken up into seven additional sections. We will try to understand the ways in which the actors and institutions identified in the first part of the semester affect the policy process across a variety of issues areas.

This graduate reading seminar explores the role of religious groups, institutions, and ideas in politics using social science theories. It is open to advanced undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.

This course provides an introduction to the language and culture of the Portuguese-speaking world, with special attention to Brazilian Portuguese. This course focuses are on basic oral expression, listening comprehension, and elementary reading and writing. Students develop their vocabulary and understanding of grammatical concepts through active communication. This is a coordinated language lab program and is designed for students with no knowledge of Portuguese. Class is conducted entirely in Portuguese.

This course is a continuation of 21G.801. It focuses on expanding communication skills and further development of linguistic competency using a variety of authentic sources, such as the Internet, audio, video, and printed materials, to help develop cultural awareness and linguistic proficiency. This course is conducted entirely in Portuguese.

This course provides understanding of the theory and processes of negotiation as practiced in a variety of settings. It is designed for relevance to the broad spectrum of bargaining problems faced by the manager and professional. With an emphasis on simulations, exercises, role playing and cases, students are given an opportunity to develop negotiation skills experientially and to understand negotiation in useful analytical frameworks.

This course is designed to provide you with a competitive advantage in negotiation. You will learn and practice the technical skills and analytic frameworks that are necessary to negotiate successfully with peers from other top business schools, and you will learn methods for developing the powerful social capital you will need to rise in the executive ranks of any organization.

In this course, you will learn to successfully face the challenge of negotiating materially rewarding deals while also building your social capital. You will work with training materials on leadership and relationship building that have been used with over 200 principals and partners in international professional service firms (40% were non-US nationals), and a social capital assessment tool used by these executives to receive feedback from senior partners and over 2000 clients. In addition, you will have the opportunity to participate in a lunchtime workshop on "Leadership and Emotional Intelligence" led by an executive coach, Charles Wolfe of Charles J Wolfe Associates.

Overall, this course is designed to enhance your ability to negotiate within the context of an ongoing relationship. As a manager, consultant, or professional service provider you will negotiate with your counterparts, team members, clients, and subordinates on an ongoing basis. Further, in today's less hierarchical organizations, you will be forced to negotiate with others to get your work done. Every time a project falls behind, critical new information is uncovered, or the competitive landscape of your industry changes, you will need to renegotiate tasks, plans, goals, or fees with your key stakeholders.

In sum, we will focus both on the analytic tools necessary to become a highly successful negotiator and on the relationship building skills necessary to negotiate deals that will enhance your social capital, your ability to lead others, and your book of loyal clients.

6.334 examines the application of electronics to energy conversion and control. Topics covered include: modeling, analysis, and control techniques; design of power circuits including inverters, rectifiers, and DC-DC converters; analysis and design of magnetic components and filters; and characteristics of power semiconductor devices. Numerous application examples will be presented such as motion control systems, power supplies, and radio-frequency power amplifiers. The course is worth 6 engineering design points.

Practical Leadership is an interactive seminar where students receive repeated coaching and real-time feedback on their own leadership capabilities from their peers and the instructor. The course is structured around a set of readings. However, the key component is each student's own self-assessment. These self-assessments are done by the students in the first week of the semester. The areas for improvement that the students identify are then targeted in the weekly role plays that are customized for each student in the class. The goal of the class is for each student to increase his or her own leadership abilities through an ongoing cycle of practice, feedback and reflection.

This is a course in how corporations make use of the insights and tools of risk management. Most courses on derivatives, futures and options, and financial engineering are taught from the viewpoint of investment bankers and traders in the securities. This course is taught from the point of view of the manufacturing corporation, the utility, the software firm—any potential end-user of derivatives, but not the dealer. Most related courses focus on the extensive taxonomy of instruments and the complex models developed to price them, and on ways to exploit mispricing. While this course will make use of some of these pricing models, the focus is on how corporations use the insights and models to improve their operations, to increase the value of their real assets, or to create the financial flexibility necessary to implement their core strategy.

This course introduces students to the techniques of participatory action research (PAR) and the practice of case study research. PAR processes are place or case-specific, place a premium on local ways of knowing, and gauge the success of research in terms of what partner-communities do with the knowledge that is co-produced. The objective of PAR is to generate the ideas, information, and understandings that ought to inform efforts to promote social change. By focusing on ways of co-producing knowledge using various forms of data collection and analysis, students will learn how the people and communities who are often university partners in applied social science research can use findings or results from PAR case studies to address the challenges they confront in their communities.

Learn more about Participatory Action Research at MIT.

This course is the third and final part of our graduate introduction to semantics. The other two classes are 24.970 Introduction to Semantics and 24.973 Advanced Semantics. The semester will be divided into somewhat independent units. One unit will be devoted to conversational implicatures (mainly scalar implicatures) and another to presupposition. In each unit, we will discuss basic concepts and technical tools and then devote some time to recent work which illustrates their application.

This course provides students with the opportunity to develop a map of contemporary architectural practice and discourse. The seminar examines six themes in terms of their recent history: city and global economy, urban plan and map of operations, program and performance, drawing and scripting, image and surface, and utopia and projection. Students will study buildings and read relevant texts in order to place recent architectural projects in disciplinary and cultural context.

Intensive coverage of precision engineering theory, heuristics, and applications pertaining to the design of systems ranging from consumer products to machine tools. Topics covered include: economics, project management, and design philosophy; principles of accuracy, repeatability, and resolution; error budgeting; sensors; sensor mounting; systems design; bearings; actuators and transmissions; system integration driven by functional requirements, and operating physics. Emphasis on developing creative designs, which are optimized by analytical techniques applied via spreadsheets. This is a projects course with lectures consisting of design teams presenting their work and the class helping to develop solutions; thereby everyone learning from everyone's projects.

Forecasting is the ultimate form of model validation. But even if a perfect model is in hand, imperfect forecasts are likely. This course will cover the factors that limit our ability to produce good forecasts, will show how the quality of forecasts can be gauged a priori (predicting our ability to predict!), and will cover the state of the art in operational atmosphere and ocean forecasting systems.