Seminar for mathematics majors. Students present and discuss the subject matter, taken from current journals or books. Topics vary from year to year. Topic for Fall 2002: Quantum calculus. Instruction and practice in oral communication provided.

Required for all Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences majors in the Environmental Science track, this course is an introduction to current research in the field. Stresses integration of central scientific concepts in environmental policy making and the chemistry, biology, and geology environmental science tracks. Revisits selected core themes for students who have already acquired a basic understanding of environmental science concepts. The topic for this term is geoengineering.

This advanced course in anthropology engages closely with discussions and debates about ethnographic research, ethics, and representation.

Seminar for mathematics majors. Students present and discuss the subject matter, taken from current journals or books and write up exercises. Topic for spring 2003: Elementary topological properties of differentiable manifolds. Topics covered include Sard's theorem, the Thom transversality theorem, vector fields and the Poincare-Hopf theorem, and cohomolgy via differential forms. Prerequisites subject to negotiation with the instructor. Instruction and practice in oral communication provided. In this course, students take turns in giving lectures. For the most part, the lectures are based on Robert Osserman's classic book A Survey of Minimal Surfaces, Dover Phoenix Editions. New York: Dover Publications, May 1, 2002. ISBN: 0486495140.

The main objective of this cross disciplinary course is to understand the historical development and the current status of ideas and models, to present and question the constraints from the different research fields, and to investigate if and how the different views on mantle flow can be reconciled with the currently available data.

Examines different types of historical writing: political, social, cultural, demographic, biographical, and comparative. Includes discussion of historical films, fiction, memoirs, and conventional history. Particular attention given to works which have broken new ground in terms of their methodology and approach. Required writing includes brief weekly response papers and a substantial research paper (including proposal, first draft, and final draft), in conjunction with a formal oral presentation. Weekly discussion of readings include periodic student-led discussion and/or presentations. Open to all students, but required of history majors and minors in junior year. This course is designed to acquaint students with a variety of approaches to the past used by historians writing in the twentieth century. The books we read have all made significant contributions to their respective sub-fields and have been selected to give as wide a coverage in both field and methodology as possible in one semester's worth of reading. We examine how historians conceive of their object of study, how they use primary sources as a basis for their accounts, how they structure the narrative and analytic discussion of their topic, and what are the advantages and drawbacks of their various approaches.

Topics vary from year to year. Typical examples from past years: manufacturing strategy, technology supply chains. This seminar will explore the purposes and development of Technology Roadmaps for systematically mapping out possible development paths for various technological domains and the industries that build on them. Data of importance for such roadmaps include rates of innovation, key bottlenecks, physical limitations, improvement trendlines, corporate intent, and value chain and industry evolutionary paths. The course will build on ongoing work on the MIT Communications Technology Roadmap project, but will explore other domains selected from Nanotechnology, Bio-informatics, Geno/Proteino/Celleomics, Neurotechnology, Imaging and Diagnostics, etc. Thesis and Special Project opportunities will be offered.

This course is a seminar in topology. The main mathematical goal is to learn about the fundamental group, homology and cohomology. The main non-mathematical goal is to obtain experience giving math talks.

Innovation in expression -- as realized in media, tangible objects, and performance, and more -- generates new questions and new potentials for human engagement. When and how does expression engage us deeply? While "deep engagement" seems fundamental to the human psyche, it is hard to define, difficult to reliably design for, and hard to critically measure or assess. Are there principles we can articulate? Are there evaluation metrics we can use to insure quality of experience? Many personal stories confirm the hypothesis that once we experience deep engagement, it is a state we long for, remember, and want to repeat. We need to better understand these principles and innovate methods that can insure higher-quality products (artifacts, experiences, environments, performances, etc.) that appeal to a broad audience and that have lasting value over the long term.

This seminar applies a systems perspective to understand health care delivery today, its stakeholders and problems as well as opportunities. Students are introduced to the 'systems perspective' that has been used successfully in other industries, and will address the introduction of new processes, technologies and strategies to improve overall health outcomes. Students are assigned to teams to work on a semester_long group project, in collaboration with staff of a nearby Boston hospital.

This course provides an introduction to important philosophical questions about the mind, specifically those that are intimately connected with contemporary psychology and neuroscience. Are our concepts innate, or are they acquired by experience? (And what does it even mean to call a concept 'innate'?) Are 'mental images' pictures in the head? Is color in the mind or in the world? Is the mind nothing more than the brain? Can there be a science of consciousness? The course will include guest lectures by Professors.

Explores photography as a disciplined way of seeing, investigating landscapes, and expressing ideas. Readings, observations, and photographs form the basis of discussions on landscape, light, detail, place, poetics, and ways of seeing, among other issues. A rudimentary understanding of photography and access to a camera required.

This course is a broad introduction to a host of sensor technologies, illustrated by applications drawn from human-computer interfaces and ubiquitous computing. After extensively reviewing electronics for sensor signal conditioning, the lectures cover the principles and operation of a variety of sensor architectures and modalities, including pressure, strain, displacement, proximity, thermal, electric and magnetic field, optical, acoustic, RF, inertial, and bioelectric. Simple sensor processing algorithms and wired and wireless network standards are also discussed. Students are required to complete written assignments, a set of laboratories, and a final project.

This course introduces sensory systems and multi-sensory fusion using the vestibular and spatial orientation systems as a model. Topics range from end organ dynamics to neural responses, to sensory integration, to behavior, and adaptation, with particular application to balance, posture and locomotion under normal gravity and space conditions. Depending upon the background and interests of the students, advanced term project topics might include motion sickness, astronaut adaptation, artificial gravity, lunar surface locomotion, vestibulo-cardiovascular responses, vestibular neural prostheses, or other topics of interest.

General principles of separation by equilibrium and rate processes. Staged cascades. Applications to distillation, absorption, adsorption, and membrane processes. Phase equilibria and role of diffusion. 10.32 will be offered for 6 units starting spring 2004.

This unit describes a general approach to guiding students to complete service-based engineering design projects, with specific examples provided in detail as associated activities. With your class, brainstorm ideas for engineering designs that benefit your community or a specific person in your community. Then, guided by the steps of the engineering design process, have students research to understand background science and math, meet their client to understand the problem, and create, test and improve prototype devices. Note that service-based projects often take more time to prepare, especially if you arrange for a real client. However, the authors notice that students of both genders and all ethnicities tend to respond with more enthusiasm and interest to altruistic projects.

Investigates relationships between the two media, including film adaptations as well as works linked by genre, topic, and style. Explores how artworks challenge and cross cultural, political, and aesthetic boundaries. Topic for Fall: Shakespeare, Film, and Media. Meets with CMS.840, but assignments differ. Filmed Shakespeare began in 1899, with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree performing the death scene from King John for the camera. Sarah Bernhardt, who had played Hamlet a number of times in her long career, filmed the duel scene for the Paris Exposition of 1900. In the era of silent film (1895-1929) several hundred Shakespeare films were made in England, France Germany and the United States, Even without the spoken word, Shakespeare was popular in the new medium. The first half-century of sound included many of the most highly regarded Shakespeare films, among them -- Laurence Olivier's Hamlet and Henry V, Orson Welles' Othello and Chimes at Midnight, Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, Polanski's Macbeth and Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. We are now in the midst of an extremely rich and varied period for Shakespeare on film which began with the release of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V in 1989 and includes such films as Richard Loncraine's Richard III, Julie Taymor's Titus, Zeffirelli and Almereyda's Hamlet films, Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and Shakespeare in Love. The phenomenon of filmed Shakespeare raises many questions for literary and media studies about adaptation, authorship, the status of "classic" texts and their variant forms, the role of Shakespeare in youth and popular culture, and the transition from manuscript, book and stage to the modern medium of film and its recent digitally inflected forms. Most of our work will involve individual and group analysis of the "film text" -- that is, of specific sequences in the films, aided by videotape, DVD, the Shakespeare Electronic Archive (http://shea.mit.edu), and some of the software tools for video annoatation developed by the MIT Shakespeare Project under the MIT-Microsoft iCampus Initiative. We will study the films as works of art in their own right, and try to understand the means -- literary, dramatic, performative, cinematic -- by which they engage audiences and create meaning. With Shakespeare film as example, we will discuss how stories cross time, culture and media, and reflect on the benefits as well as the limitations of such migration. The class will be conducted as a structured discussion, punctuated by student presentations and "mini-lectures" by the instructor. Students will introduce discussions, prepare clips and examples, and the major "written" work will take the form of presentations to the class and multimedia annotations as well as conventional short essays. The methodological bias of the class is close "reading" of both text and film. This is a class in which your insights will form a major part of the work and will be the basis of a large fraction of class discussion. You will need to read carefully, to watch and listen to the films carefully, and develop effective ways of conveying your ideas to the class.

Ship longitudinal strength and hull primary stresses. Ship structural design concepts. Effect of superstructures and dissimilar materials on primary strength. Transverse shear stresses in the hull girder. Torsional strength of ships.Design limit states including plate bending, column and panel buckling, panel ultimate strength, and plastic analysis. Matrix stiffness, grillage, and finite element analysis. Computer projects on the structural design of a midship module. This course is intended for first year graduate students and advanced undergraduates with an interest in design of ships or offshore structures. It requires a sufficient background in structural mechanics. Computer applications are utilized, with emphasis on the theory underlying the analysis. Hydrostatic loading, shear load and bending moment, and resulting primary hull primary stresses will be developed. Topics will include; ship structural design concepts, effect of superstructures and dissimilar materials on primary strength, transverse shear stresses in the hull girder, and torsional strength among others. Failure mechanisms and design limit states will be developed for plate bending, column and panel buckling, panel ultimate strength, and plastic analysis. Matrix stiffness, grillage, and finite element analysis will be introduced. Design of a ship structure will be analyzed by "hand" with desktop computer tools and a final design project using current applications for structural design of a section will be accomplished.

Subject provides a solid theoretical foundation for the analysis and processing of experimental data, and real-time experimental control methods. Includes spectral analysis, filter design, system identification, simulation in continuous and discrete-time domains. Emphasis on practical problems with laboratory exercises. Subject is designated as a d'Arbeloff Laboratory "gateway" subject.

This course covers the fundamentals of signal and system analysis, focusing on representations of discrete-time and continuous-time signals (singularity functions, complex exponentials and geometrics, Fourier representations, Laplace and Z transforms, sampling) and representations of linear, time-invariant systems (difference and differential equations, block diagrams, system functions, poles and zeros, convolution, impulse and step responses, frequency responses). Applications are drawn broadly from engineering and physics, including feedback and control, communications, and signal processing.