Food Prices: Cause for Concern
Rising food prices are having a significant effect on economies throughout the world. What are the long term trends, and why do they give cause for concern?
Unified Engineering I, II, III, and IV, Fall 2003
The basic objective of Unified is to give a solid understanding of the fundamental disciplines of aerospace engineering, as well as their interrelationships and applications. These disciplines are Materials and Structures (M); Computers and Programming (C); Fluid Mechanics (F); Thermodynamics and Propulsion (T); and Signals and Systems (S). In choosing to teach these subjects in a unified manner, we seek to explain the common intellectual threads in these disciplines, as well as their combined a
15.515 Financial Accounting (MIT)
Our goal is to help you develop a framework for understanding financial, managerial, and tax reports. The course goal is divided into five subordinate challenges that can help you organize the way you learn accounting:
The record keeping and reporting challenge
The computation challenge
The judgment challenge
The usage challenge
The search challenge
The course adopts a decision-maker perspective of accounting by emphasizing the relation between accounting data and the underlying economic event
15.535 Business Analysis Using Financial Statements (MIT)
The purpose of this class is to advance your understanding of how to use financial information to value and analyze firms. We will apply your economics/accounting/finance skills to problems from today's business news to help us understand what is contained in financial reports, why firms report certain information, and how to be a sophisticated user of this information.
21W.730-3 Expository Writing: Autobiography - Theory and Practice (MIT)
Focus: What can we believe when we read an autobiography? How do writers recall, select, shape, and present their lives to construct life stories? Readings that ground these questions include selections from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Linda Brent (pseudonym for Harriet Jacobs), "A Sketch of the Past" by Virginia Woolf, Notes of A Native Son by James Baldwin, "The Achievement of Desire" by Richard Rodriguez, The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, and "Our Secret" by Susan
6.857 Network and Computer Security (MIT)
6.857 is an upper-level undergraduate, first-year graduate course on network and computer security. It fits within the department's Computer Systems and Architecture Engineering concentration. Topics covered include (but are not limited to) the following:
Techniques for achieving security in multi-user computer systems and distributed computer systems;
Cryptography: secret-key, public-key, digital signatures;
Authentication and identification schemes;
Intrusion detection: viruses;
Forma
15.063 Communicating With Data (MIT)
Communicating With Data has a distinctive structure and content, combining fundamental quantitative techniques of using data to make informed management decisions with illustrations of how real decision makers, even highly trained professionals, fall prey to errors and biases in their understanding. We present the fundamental concepts underlying the quantitative techniques as a way of thinking, not just a way of calculating, in order to enhance decision-making skills. Rather than survey all
4.107 MArch Portfolio Seminar (MIT)
The aim of the Portfolio Seminar is to assist in developing a critical position in relationship to their design work. By engaging multiple forms of representation, written and visual, students will explore methods that facilitate describing and representing their design work. Through a critical assessment of their existing portfolios, students will first be challenged to articulate design theses and interests in their past projects. Different mediums of representation will then be studied in ord
6.171 Software Engineering for Web Applications (MIT)
6.171 is a course for students who already have some programming and software engineering experience. The goal is to give students some experience in dealing with those challenges that are unique to Internet applications, such as:
concurrency;
unpredictable load;
security risks;
opportunity for wide-area distributed computing;
creating a reliable and stateful user experience on top of unreliable connections and stateless protocols;
extreme requirements and absurd development sch
6.345 Automatic Speech Recognition (MIT)
6.345 introduces students to the rapidly developing field of automatic speech recognition. Its content is divided into three parts. Part I deals with background material in the acoustic theory of speech production, acoustic-phonetics, and signal representation. Part II describes algorithmic aspects of speech recognition systems including pattern classification, search algorithms, stochastic modelling, and language modelling techniques. Part III compares and contrasts the various approaches to sp
11.946 Planning in Transition Economies for Growth and Equity (MIT)
During the last fifteen years, nations across the globe embarked on a historic transformation away from centrally planned economies to market-oriented ones. However, in the common pursuit for economic growth, these transition countries implemented widely different reform strategies with mixed results. With over a decade of empirical evidence now available, this new course examines this phenomenon that has pushed the discourse in a number of disciplines, requiring us to reconsider fundamental iss
15.356 How to Develop "Breakthrough" Products and Services (MIT)
To prosper, firms must develop major product and service innovations. Often, though, they don't know how. Recent research into the innovation process has made it possible to develop "breakthroughs" systematically. 15.356 presents several practical concept development methods, such as the "Lead User Method," where manufacturers learn from innovative customers. Expert guest speakers present case studies that show the "art" required to implement a concept development method. 15.356 is a half-term s
11.949 City Visions: Past and Future (MIT)
This class is intended to introduce students to understandings of the city generated from both social science literature and the field of urban design. The first part of the course examines literature on the history and theory of the city. Among other factors, it pays special attention to the larger territorial settings in which cities emerged and developed (ranging from the global to the national to the regional context) and how these affected the nature, character, and functioning of citi
18.315 Combinatorial Theory: Hyperplane Arrangements (MIT)
This is a graduate-level course in combinatorial theory. The content varies year to year, according to the interests of the instructor and the students. The topic of this course is hyperplane arrangements, including background material from the theory of posets and matroids.
6.831 User Interface Design and Implementation (MIT)
6.831 introduces the principles of user interface development, focusing on three key areas:
Design: How to design good user interfaces, starting with human capabilities (including the human information processor model, perception, motor skills, color, attention, and errors) and using those capabilities to drive design techniques: task analysis, user-centered design, iterative design, usability guidelines, interaction styles, and graphic design principles.
Implementation: Techniques for buildi
14.02 Principles of Macroeconomics (MIT)
This course provides an overview of the following macroeconomic issues: the determination of output, employment, unemployment, interest rates, and inflation. Monetary and fiscal policies are discussed, as are public debt and international economic issues. This course also introduces basic models of macroeconomics and illustrates principles with the experience of the United States and other economies.
15.996 Cross-Cultural Leadership (MIT)
Cross Cultural Leadership is a collaborative research seminar that examines what constitutes "effective" leadership across cultures. It is collaborative because the students are expected to provide some of the content. The weekly readings target particular aspects of cultural differentiation. Working within those topics, students are asked to describe aspects of leadership in particular cultures based on their research and/or personal experiences. The goal of the course is to help prepare studen
2.71 Optics (MIT)
This course is an introduction to optical science with elementary engineering applications. Topics covered include geometrical optics: ray-tracing, aberrations, lens design, apertures and stops, radiometry and photometry; wave optics: basic electrodynamics, polarization, interference, wave-guiding, Fresnel and Faunhofer diffraction, image formation, resolution, and space-bandwidth product. Emphasis is on analytical and numerical tools used in optical design. Graduate students are required to com
17.914 International Politics in the New Century - via Simulation, Interactive Gaming, and 'Edutain
This workshop is designed to introduce students to different perspectives on politics and the state of the world through new visualization techniques and approaches to interactive political gaming (and selective 'edutainment'). Specifically, we shall explore applications of interactive tools (such as video and web-based games, blogs or simulations) to examine critical challenges in international politics of the 21C century focusing specifically on general insights and specific understa
5.302 Introduction to Experimental Chemistry (MIT)
5.302 is a 3-unit course intended to provide freshmen with a stimulating and enjoyable "hands-on" experience with chemical phenomena. The aim of this course is to provide freshmen with an opportunity to get "up close and personal" with the chemical phenomena introduced in 5.111, 5.112 and 3.091. Interesting and dramatic experiments have been selected to illustrate and reinforce the concepts and principles introduced in the chemistry core lecture courses. WARNING N
