Courses tagged with "Nutrition" (797)

This course will introduce students to the field of computer science and the fundamentals of computer programming.  It has been specifically designed for students with no prior programming experience, and does not require a background in Computer Science.  This course will touch upon a variety of fundamental topics within the field of Computer Science and will use Java, a high-level, portable, and well-constructed computer programming language developed by Sun Microsystems, to demonstrate those principles.  We will begin with an overview of the topics we will cover this semester and a brief history of software development.  We will then learn about Object-Oriented programming, the paradigm in which Java was constructed, before discussing Java, its fundamentals, relational operators, control statements, and Java I/0.  The course will conclude with an introduction to algorithmic design.  By the end of the course, you should have a strong understanding of the fundamentals of Computer Science and the Java p…

This course will introduce you to the field of international political economy.  International political economy combines two very important aspects of international relations: politics and economics.  The goal of this course is to make you aware of the ways in which economics and politics influence each other when it comes to creating policy.  It explores the interrelated nature of both economics (via its emphasis on markets) and politics (via its emphasis on power).  This course is thus both an economics and a politics course.  However, please note that though we will review some economics concepts, this course is not an econometrics course and does not require a background in economic methods. Economic policy can be an important instrument of statecraft and diplomacy between countries.  For example, countries often use trade relationships, promises of aid, loans, and investments to build goodwill.  On the other hand, countries can also use economic policy to punish or express disapproval towards o…

"(Latin) America is ungovernable; all who have served the revolution have plowed the sea!"  Simon Bolivar, liberator of much of South America, spoke these famous words on his deathbed in 1830 while reflecting on what he deemed the failure of democracy to take root in Latin America in the early part of the 19th century.  Looking through the historical struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean over the last century and a half, these words continue to hold some truth.  The story of Latin America is one of inequality, complexity, failures, and unrealized possibilities.  Latin America and the Caribbean have entered into the 21st century with a legacy of persistent poverty, authoritarianism, corruption, and inequality. This course will introduce you to the politics of Latin America and the Caribbean and examine the causes and effects of the region’s development.  In many ways, Latin American/Caribbean politics defies any sort of coherent logic attempting to bring it together, a fact that is much reflect…

In the first unit, we will learn the mechanics of editing and compiling a simple program written in C++.  We will begin with a discussion of the essential elements of C++ programming: variables, loops, expressions, functions, and string class.  Next, we will cover the basics of object-oriented programming: classes, inheritance, templates, exceptions, and file manipulation.  We will then review function and class templates and the classes that perform output and input of characters to/from files.  This course will also cover the topics of namespaces, exception handling, and preprocessor directives.  In the last part of the course, we will learn some slightly more sophisticated programming techniques that deal with data structures such as linked lists and binary trees. This course contains a number of sample programs and review exercises.  Through these exercises, students should better learn how to write functions, use the string class, and write elementary data structures such as linked lists and bina…

Management refers to the organization and coordination of work to produce a desired result. A manager is a person who practices management by working with and through people in order to accomplish his or her organization’s goals. When you think of the term manager, you may be imagining your supervisor as he or she hires and terminates employees and makes major decisions above your authority. However, although you may not view yourself in this way, you yourself may also be a manager. In fact, many of us practice management skills in the workplace every day. You may have a team of employees that you manage, or lead a project that requires management strategy, or demonstrate leadership qualities among your peers. These are all scenarios that require you to apply the principles of management. In this course, you will learn to recognize the characteristics of proper management by identifying what successful managers do and how they do it. Understanding how managers work is just as beneficial for the subordinate…

The Business Administration major is designed to prepare you for a leadership role in today’s highly competitive, global business environment.  This elective course will allow you to incorporate risk management principles into your individual management style.  Risk management refers to the process of identifying, assessing, and prioritizing risks.  This course will teach you how to accurately assess the consequences of uncertain events; the ultimate goal for risk managers is to reduce and control the likelihood of such occurrences.  Personal attitudes toward risk vary widely (for example, attitudes can range from risk-averse to risk-seeking).  You are advised to approach this course from the perspective of a business manager (i.e., as a decision maker). Unforeseen circumstances can occur in various contexts, including natural disaster, collapses in financial markets, and accidents.  As a business manager, you will need to use risk management tools to minimize and control the probability and impact…

This course is designed to introduce you to the study of Calculus.  You will learn concrete applications of how calculus is used and, more importantly, why it works.  Calculus is not a new discipline; it has been around since the days of Archimedes.  However, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, two 17th-century European mathematicians concurrently working on the same intellectual discovery hundreds of miles apart, were responsible for developing the field as we know it today.  This brings us to our first question, what is today's Calculus?  In its simplest terms, calculus is the study of functions, rates of change, and continuity.  While you may have cultivated a basic understanding of functions in previous math courses, in this course you will come to a more advanced understanding of their complexity, learning to take a closer look at their behaviors and nuances. In this course, we will address three major topics: limits, derivatives, and integrals, as well as study their respective foundations and a…

This course is designed to provide you with a simple and straightforward introduction to econometrics.  Econometrics is an application of statistical procedures to the testing of hypotheses about economic relationships and to the estimation of parameters.  Regression analysis is the primary procedure commonly used by researchers and managers whether their employments are within the goods or the resources market and/or within the agriculture, the manufacturing, the services, or the information sectors of an economy. Completion of this course in econometrics will help you progress from a student of economics to a practitioner of economics.  By completing this course, you will gain an overview of econometrics, develop your ability to think like an economist, hone your skills building and testing models of consumer and producer behavior, and synthesize the results you find through analyses of data pertaining to market-based economic systems.  In essence, professional economists conduct studies that combine…

Differential equations are, in addition to a topic of study in mathematics, the main language in which the laws and phenomena of science are expressed.  In its most basic sense, a differential equation is an expression that describes how a system changes from one moment of time to another, or from one point in space to another.  When working with differential equations, the ultimate goal is to move from a microscopic view of relevant physics to a macroscopic view of the behavior of a system as a whole. Let’s look at a simple differential equation.  From previous math and physics courses, we know that a car that is constantly accelerating in the x-direction, for example, obeys the equation d2x/dt2 = a, where a is the applied acceleration.  This equation has two derivations with respect to time, so it is a second-order differential equation; because it has derivations with respect to only one variable (in this example, time), it is known as an  ordinary differential equation, or an ODE. Let’s say t…

Differential equations are, in addition to a topic of study in mathematics, the main language in which the laws and phenomena of science are expressed.  In basic terms, a differential equation is an expression that describes how a system changes from one moment of time to another, or from one point in space to another.  When working with differential equations, the ultimate goal is to move from a microscopic view of relevant physics to a macroscopic view of the behavior of a system as a whole. Let’s look at a simple differential equation.  Based on previous math and physics courses, you know that a car that is constantly accelerating in the x-direction obeys the equation d2x/dt2 = a, where a is the applied acceleration.  This equation has two derivations with respect to time, so it is a second-order differential equation; because it has derivations with respect to only one variable (in this example, time), it is known as an  ordinary differential equation, or an ODE. Let’s say that we want to sol…

This course provides a brief review of introductory algebra topics. Topics to be covered include integer operations, order of operations, perimeter and area, fractions and decimals, scientific notation, ratios and rates, conversions, percents, algebraic expressions, linear equations, the Pythagorean theorem, and graphing.

This course is an introduction to complex analysis, or the theory of the analytic functions of a complex variable.  Put differently, complex analysis is the theory of the differentiation and integration of functions that depend on one complex variable.  Such functions, beautiful on their own, are immediately useful in Physics, Engineering, and Signal Processing.  Because of the algebraic properties of the complex numbers and the inherently geometric flavor of complex analysis, this course will feel quite different from Real Analysis, although many of the same concepts, such as open sets, metrics, and limits will reappear.  Simply put, you will be working with lines and sets and very specific functions on the complex planedrawing pictures of them and teasing out all of their idiosyncrasies.  You will again find yourself calculating line integrals, just as in multivariable calculus.  However, the techniques you learn in this course will help you get past many of the seeming dead-ends you ran up against in…

There are many different ways that you can go about solving engineering problems.  One of the most important methods is energy analysis.  Energy is a physical property that allows work of any kind to be done; without it, there would be no motion, no heat, and no life.  You wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning, but it wouldn’t matter, because there would be no sun.  Without energy, our world would not exist as it does. Thermodynamics is the study of energy and its transfers though work.  It is the link between heat and mechanical exertion.  Once you have a solid grasp on thermodynamic concepts, you should be able to understand why certain mechanisms (such as engines and boilers) work the way they do, determine how much work they can put out, and know how to optimize these power systems.   A thorough understanding of thermodynamics is crucial to any career that focuses on HVAC systems, car engines, or renewable energy technology. This course will focus on the fundamentals of thermod…

In common conversation, we often use the phrase “contemporary art” to refer to current artistic productionthe art being produced today.  However, in the art history field, the phrase denotes a specific period of art and artistic practice starting in the 1960s and continuing today.  It is characterized by a break from the modernist artistic canon and a desire to move away from the dominant Western cultural model, looking for inspiration in everyday and popular culture.  More specifically, many contemporary artworks reject traditional modernistic artistic media (such as painting or sculpture) in favor of a more collaborative, ephemeral, and multimedia approach that further blurs the boundaries between high and mass culture.  In its subject matter, this art also tends to reflect a shift away from purely aesthetic issues to more socially oriented concerns.  Finally, it is important to note that contemporary art should not be seen as a progression of different artistic styles but as series of different cu…

This course is designed to introduce you to the rigorous examination of the real number system and the foundations of calculus of functions of a single real variable. Analysis lies at the heart of the trinity of higher mathematics algebra, analysis, and topology because it is where the other two fields meet. In calculus, you learned to find limits, and you used these limits to give a rigorous justification for ideas of rate of change and areas under curves. Many of the results that you learned or derived were intuitive in many cases you could draw a picture of the situation and immediately “see” whether or not the result was true. This intuition, however, can sometimes be misleading. In the first place, your ability to find limits of real-valued functions on the real line was based on certain properties of the underlying field on which undergraduate calculus is founded: the real numbers. Things may have become slightly more complicated when you began to work in other spaces. For instance, you may r…

This course will introduce you to the field of computer science and the fundamentals of computer programming. Introduction to Computer Science I is specifically designed for students with no prior programming experience, and taking this course does not require a background in Computer Science. This course will touch upon a variety of fundamental topics within the field of Computer Science and will use Java, a high-level, portable, and well-constructed computer programming language developed by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), to demonstrate those principles. We will begin with an overview of the course topics as well as a brief history of software development. We will cover basic object-oriented programming terminology and concepts such as objects, classes, inheritance, and polymorphism, as well as the fundamentals of Java, its primitive data types, relational operators, control statements, exception handling, and file input /output. By the end of the course, you should have a strong understanding of the fundam…

This course serves as an introduction to the Buddhist artistic traditions of South, Southeast, and East Asia, as well as the Himalayas.  It is organized into four units based on the development of Buddhist schools and artistic traditions in Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, and China, Korea, and Japan.  The first unit surveys the core tenets of Buddhism, Buddhist iconography, and early Buddhist art and architecture in India.  The second unit reviews the development of Buddhist art and architecture in Southeast Asia, focusing on the patronage of Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism by rulers in the modern countries of Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand.  Unit three examines the particular form of Vajrayana Buddhism and its artistic traditions that developed in the Himalayas.  The final unit traces the spread of Mahayana Buddhist art and architecture into China and later into Korea and Japan via the Silk Roads.  All four units highlight the interaction between Buddhist doctrine, art, and architecture; Bud…

Human physiology is the study of the body’s processes, also known as functions. You already have experience with this subject, because you are a human and perform numerous functions each day to maintain your body’s balance or homeostasis. For example, gas exchange in your lungs provides the body’s cells with adequate oxygen supply needed to survive and carry out metabolic processes. Digestion of food components in your mouth, stomach, and small intestines breaks larger substances into molecules that can be absorbed in the small intestines and used for energy. White blood cells attack foreign bodies, such as bacteria and cells containing viruses to keep you free from infection. As you might expect, an understanding of physiology is paramount if you wish to pursue studies in health care, development, or even behavior. A doctor needs to understand how to relate a urine sample to kidney function. A nurse needs to know the importance of electrocardiogram results and heart activity. A medical laboratory sci…

This course will introduce you to the history of East Asia from the early Yellow River civilizations to the Qing Dynasty in the late eighteenth century.  You will learn about the major political, economic, and social changes that took place in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam during this period.  The course will be structured chronologically.  Each unit will include representative primary-source documents that illustrate important overarching political, economic, and social themes, such as the development of a coherent Chinese identity, Chinese imperial aspirations in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, the expansion of Western influence and trade networks, the Mongol invasions, and the role of Confucianism and Buddhism in East Asian culture.  By the end of the course, you will understand how East Asia transformed from fragmented and warring societies into consolidated imperial states that sought to separate themselves from Western religion and commerce.  The course will present a variety of resources that will d…

This course is the first in a series of four courses under the Job Search “umbrella” that include Job Search Skills, Resume Writing, Interview Skills, and Professional Etiquette.  The Job Search Skills course is intended to give you a solid beginning to this exciting time of self-exploration with finding a job.  Whether you are seeking your first job, wish to take the next step in your existing career, or desire to begin a new career, you will obtain the necessary information about yourself to turn this desire into a successful job search.  If, for example, you think of yourself as a product that you are trying to market to potential employers, you will realize that you can only be successful if you know the product thoroughly and how this product can meet the needs of the consumer (the employer).  This course will guide you to information on how to target jobs and/or careers that are desirable and realistic for you and that fill a need for employers in today’s challenging job market.