Courses tagged with "Information control" (95)

This course is the continuation of 21F105. It is designed to further help students develop sophisticated conversational, reading and writing skills by combining traditional textbook material with their own explorations of Chinese speaking societies, using the human, literary, and electronic resources available at MIT and in the Boston area. Some special features of Chinese society, its culture, its customs and habits, its history, and the psychology of its people are introduced. The class consists of reading, discussion, composition, network exploration, and conversational practice. The course is conducted in Mandarin.

In this course students are exposed to history and culture of German-speaking countries through audio, video, and Web materials. It focuses on the expansion of basic communication skills and further development of linguistic competency, and includes the review and completion of basic grammar, building of vocabulary, and practice in writing short essays. Students will also read short literary texts.

This class investigates theory and practice of digital or new media poetry with emphasis on workshop review of digital poetry created by students. Each week students examine published examples of digital poetry in a variety of forms including but not limited to soundscapes, hypertext poetry, animation, code poems, interactive games, location-based poems using handheld devices, digital video and wikis.

This class is divided into a series of sections or "modules", each of which concentrates on a particular large technology-related topic in a cultural context. The class will start with a four-week module on Samurai Swords and Blacksmithing, followed by smaller units on Chinese Cooking, the Invention of Clocks, and Andean Weaving, and end with a four-week module on Automobiles and Engines. In addition, there will be a series of hands-on projects that tie theory and practice together. The class discussions range across anthropology, history, and individual development, emphasizing recurring themes, such as the interaction between technology and culture and the relation between "skill" knowledge and "craft" knowledge.

Culture Tech evolved from a more extensive, two-semester course which formed the centerpiece of the Integrated Studies Program at MIT.  For 13 years, ISP was an alternative first-year program combining humanities, physics, learning-by-doing, and weekly luncheons.  Culture Tech represents the core principles of ISP distilled into a 6-unit seminar. Although many collections of topics have been used over the years, the modules presented here are a representative sequence. 

This course examines computers anthropologically, as artifacts revealing the social orders and cultural practices that create them. Students read classic texts in computer science along with cultural analyses of computing history and contemporary configurations. It explores the history of automata, automation and capitalist manufacturing; cybernetics and WWII operations research; artificial intelligence and gendered subjectivity; robots, cyborgs, and artificial life; creation and commoditization of the personal computer; the growth of the Internet as a military, academic, and commercial project; hackers and gamers; technobodies and virtual sociality. Emphasis is placed on how ideas about gender and other social differences shape labor practices, models of cognition, hacking culture, and social media.

Humans are social animals; social demands, both cooperative and competitive, structure our development, our brain and our mind. This course covers social development, social behaviour, social cognition and social neuroscience, in both human and non-human social animals. Topics include altruism, empathy, communication, theory of mind, aggression, power, groups, mating, and morality. Methods include evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology and anthropology.

When John Locke declared (in the 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding) that knowledge was derived solely from experience, he raised the possibility that human understanding and identity were not the products of God's will or of immutable laws of nature so much as of one's personal history and background. If on the one hand Locke's theory led some to pronounce that individuals could determine the course of their own lives, however, the idea that we are the products of our experience just as readily supported the conviction that we are nothing more than machines acting out lives whose destinies we do not control. This course will track the formulation of that problem, and a variety of responses to it, in the literature of the "long eighteenth century." Readings will range widely across genre, from lyric poetry and the novel to diary entries, philosophical prose, and political essays, including texts by Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mary Astell, David Hume, Laurence Sterne, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Hays, and Mary Shelley. Topics to be discussed include the construction of gender identities; the individual in society; imagination and the poet's work. There will be two essays, one 5-6 pages and one 8-10 pages in length, and required presentations.

This course is an introduction to the history, theory, practice, and implications of rhetoric, the art and craft of persuasion. This course specifically focuses on the ways that scientists use various methods of persuasion in the construction of scientific knowledge.

This course focuses on traditional nature writing and the environmentalist essay. Students will keep a Web log as a journal. Writings are drawn from the tradition of nature writing and from contemporary forms of the environmentalist essay.

This course examines interpersonal and group dynamics, considers how the thoughts, feelings, and actions of individuals are influenced by (and influence) the beliefs, values, and practices of large and small groups. Learning occurs through a combination of lectures, demonstrations and in-class activities complemented by participation in small study groups and completion of homework assignments.

A survey of how America has become the world's largest consumer of energy. Explores American history from the perspective of energy and its relationship to politics, diplomacy, the economy, science and technology, labor, culture, and the environment. Topics include muscle and water power in early America, coal and the Industrial Revolution, electrification, energy consumption in the home, oil and U.S. foreign policy, automobiles and suburbanization, nuclear power, OPEC and the 70's energy crisis, global warming, and possible paths for the future.

This subject surveys main currents of European cultural and intellectual history in the modern period. Such a foundation course is central to the humanities in Europe. The curriculum introduces a set of ideas and arguments that have played a formative role in European cultural history, and acquaints them with some exemplars of critical thought. Among the topics to be considered: the critique of religion, the promise of independence, the advance of capitalism, the temptations of Marxism, the origins of totalitarianism, and the dialects of enlightenment. In addition to texts, we will also discuss pieces of art, incl. paintings and film.

This course uses scale models to design environments that orchestrate contrasting material properties and conventional constructional systems to create places that foster specific ways of inhabiting space. It also demonstrates how architecture differs from other forms of design. Intended for students to test aptitude for architectural design and to experience an unfamiliar mode of thought, it's conducted in a studio format, with lectures on architectural theory and history, and structured for students with no previous experience in design.

Required of Architecture majors.

Advances in cognitive science have resolved, clarified, and sometimes complicated some of the great questions of Western philosophy: what is the structure of the world and how do we come to know it; does everyone represent the world the same way; what is the best way for us to act in the world. Specific topics include color, objects, number, categories, similarity, inductive inference, space, time, causality, reasoning, decision-making, morality and consciousness. Readings and discussion include a brief philosophical history of each topic and focus on advances in cognitive and developmental psychology, computation, neuroscience, and related fields. At least one subject in cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, or artificial intelligence is required. An additional project is required for graduate credit.

This course explores stereotypes associated with Asian women in colonial, nationalist, state-authoritarian, and global/diasporic narratives about gender and power. Students will read ethnography, cultural studies, and history, and view films to examine the politics and circumstances that create and perpetuate the representation of Asian women as dragon ladies, lotus blossoms, despotic tyrants, desexualized servants, and docile subordinates. Students are introduced to the debates about Orientalism, gender, and power.

This course focuses on the Great Depression and World War II and how they led to a major reordering of American politics and society. We will examine how ordinary people experienced these crises and how those experiences changed their outlook on politics and the world around them.

The Great Depression and World War II permanently changed American politics and society. Topics include: the Great Crash, the New Deal, Roosevelt, the home front, the Normandy Invasion, and the atomic bomb. Explores those events through film, novels, newspapers, and other historical documents.

This course examines the American experience at home and abroad from Pearl Harbor to the end of the Cold War. Topics include: America's role as global superpower, foreign and domestic anticommunism, social movements of left and right, suburbanization, and popular culture.

This class has been reorganized to focus primarily on the War in Iraq. As in previous years, the class still examines war in cross-cultural perspective, asking whether war is intrinsic to human nature, what causes war, how particular cultural experiences of war differ, and how war has affected American culture.

This subject explores the legal history of the United States as a gendered system. It examines how women have shaped the meanings of American citizenship through pursuit of political rights such as suffrage, jury duty, and military service, how those political struggles have varied for across race, religion, and class, as well as how the legal system has shaped gender relations for both women and men through regulation of such issues as marriage, divorce, work, reproduction, and the family. The course readings will draw from primary and secondary materials in American history, as well as some court cases. However, the focus of the class is on the broader relationship between law and society, and no technical legal knowledge is required or assumed.