As reduced sea ice conditions bring increased shipping and development opportunities to the Arctic, Alaska Native Village Corporations are at the table with resource developers, representing the interests of their people and land.
Tribal communities in southeastern Alaska are partnering with federal and state agencies to investigate increasing harmful algal bloomsevents that pose human health risks to subsistence harvesters.
The course is intended for people who would like a deeper understanding of the American housing finance system. The focus will be on providing necessary background knowledge rather than on evaluating specific policy proposals. Near the end of the course, participants will be encouraged to bring up policy issues and to discuss them in light of the information presented.
We will explore the changing political choices and ethical dilemmas of American scientists from the atomic scientists of World War II to biologists in the present wrestling with the questions raised by cloning and other biotechnologies. As well as asking how we would behave if confronted with the same choices, we will try to understand the choices scientists have made by seeing them in their historical and political contexts. Some of the topics covered include: the original development of nuclear weapons and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the effects of the Cold War on American science; the space shuttle disasters; debates on the use of nuclear power, wind power, and biofuels; abuse of human subjects in psychological and other experiments; deliberations on genetically modified food, the human genome project, human cloning, embryonic stem cell research; and the ethics of archaeological science in light of controversies over museum collections.
"The Art of the Probable" addresses the history of scientific ideas, in particular the emergence and development of mathematical probability. But it is neither meant to be a history of the exact sciences per se nor an annex to, say, the Course 6 curriculum in probability and statistics. Rather, our objective is to focus on the formal, thematic, and rhetorical features that imaginative literature shares with texts in the history of probability. These shared issues include (but are not limited to): the attempt to quantify or otherwise explain the presence of chance, risk, and contingency in everyday life; the deduction of causes for phenomena that are knowable only in their effects; and, above all, the question of what it means to think and act rationally in an uncertain world.
Our course therefore aims to broaden students' appreciation for and understanding of how literature interacts with – both reflecting upon and contributing to – the scientific understanding of the world. We are just as centrally committed to encouraging students to regard imaginative literature as a unique contribution to knowledge in its own right, and to see literary works of art as objects that demand and richly repay close critical analysis. It is our hope that the course will serve students well if they elect to pursue further work in Literature or other discipline in SHASS, and also enrich or complement their understanding of probability and statistics in other scientific and engineering subjects they elect to take.
This course does not seek to provide answers to ethical questions. Instead, the course hopes to teach students two things. First, how do you recognize ethical or moral problems in science and medicine? When something does not feel right (whether cloning, or failing to clone) — what exactly is the nature of the discomfort? What kind of tensions and conflicts exist within biomedicine? Second, how can you think productively about ethical and moral problems? What processes create them? Why do people disagree about them? How can an understanding of philosophy or history help resolve them? By the end of the course students will hopefully have sophisticated and nuanced ideas about problems in bioethics, even if they do not have comfortable answers.
While many people have heard of Bitcoin, far fewer understand it. In short, Bitcoin is a digital currency that allows transactions independent of the banking system. Lately, many people are buying Bitcoin purely as a financial investment, hoping it will appreciate. So which is it—currency or financial asset? Read more about it in the March 2018 issue of Page One Economics.
Student teams design their own booms (bridges) and engage in a friendly competition with other teams to test their designs. Each team strives to design a boom that is light, can hold a certain amount of weight, and is affordable to build. Teams are also assessed on how close their design estimations are to the final weight and cost of their boom "construction." This activity teaches students how to simplify the math behind the risk and estimation process that takes place at every engineering firm prior to the bidding phase when an engineering firm calculates how much money it will take to build the project and then "bids" against other competitors.
This is a course for those who are interested in the challenge posed by massive and persistent world poverty, and are hopeful that economists might have something useful to say about this challenge. The questions we will take up include: Is extreme poverty a thing of the past? What is economic life like when living under a dollar per day? Why do some countries grow fast and others fall further behind? Does growth help the poor? Are famines unavoidable? How can we end child labor—or should we? How do we make schools work for poor citizens? How do we deal with the disease burden? Is micro finance invaluable or overrated? Without property rights, is life destined to be "nasty, brutish and short"? Has globalization been good to the poor? Should we leave economic development to the market? Should we leave economic development to non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? Does foreign aid help or hinder? Where is the best place to intervene?
MITx Online Version
This course is part of the Micromaster’s Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy through MITx Online. The course is entirely free to audit, though learners have the option to pay a fee, which is based on the learner's ability to pay, to take the proctored exam, and earn a course certificate. To access the course, create an MITx Online account and enroll in the course 14.73x The Challenges of Global Poverty.
This course addresses the challenges of defining a relationship between exposure to environmental chemicals and human disease. Course topics include epidemiological approaches to understanding disease causation; biostatistical methods; evaluation of human exposure to chemicals, and their internal distribution, metabolism, reactions with cellular components, and biological effects; and qualitative and quantitative health risk assessment methods used in the U.S. as bases for regulatory decision-making. Throughout the term, students consider case studies of local and national interest.
This course addresses the challenges of defining a relationship between exposure to environmental chemicals and human disease. Course topics include epidemiological approaches to understanding disease causation; biostatistical methods; evaluation of human exposure to chemicals, and their internal distribution, metabolism, reactions with cellular components, and biological effects; and qualitative and quantitative health risk assessment methods used in the U.S. as bases for regulatory decision-making. Throughout the term, students consider case studies of local and national interest.
This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:
"Penile circumcision dramatically reduces the risk of contracting HIV-1. This protection likely has multiple physical and biological mechanisms, and understanding these mechanisms could lead to non-surgical interventions to reduce HIV-1 transmission. Thus, researchers examined the microbiota and immune milieu before and after elective circumcision in two key areas. The coronal sulcus (CS), which is exposed to the air by foreskin removal and the urethra, which is thought to be the primary site of penile HIV-1 infection in circumcised men. The CS showed a dramatic decrease in pro-inflammatory anaerobic bacteria after circumcision, as well as significantly reduced inflammatory cytokines and chemokines. Circumcision also altered the urethral microbiota. However — in contrast to the CS — there were few changes to the urethral immune profile..."
The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.
Students are read a series of two options and are asked to decide which options are more dangerous. They then learn about risk and how to prevent or reduce risk by taking precautions. Next they listen to a story about risk, where Clifford, the big red dog, helps reduce the risk of danger by taking precautions. After the story, the students complete a story sequencing activity based on Clifford’s actions. Finally, they recognize that Clifford does not exist in the real world and talk about people in their families and communities that help protect them from risk.
We are concurrently experiencing two global crises - the climate crisis and COVID-19. What are connections between the two? Why are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities disproportionately affected by both? This asynchronous Canvas course explores these questions and more. The course includes recordings from two guest speakers. Dr. Isabel Carrera Zamanillo from Stanford University presents on climate justice connections. Dr. Carrie Tzou, Professor and Director of the Goodlad Institute for Educational Renewal at UW Bothell, shares strategies and instructional resources for teaching about COVID-19.
Introduction to Personal Health covers four topics:
Health and disease, influence of family and community
Culture, beliefs, attitudes, and stigmatized illnesses
Leading causes of death, risk factors, and prevention
Three levels of health promotion/disease prevention
This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:
"River deltas across the globe are sinking – a problem for the half-billion people currently living on them. These landforms, created as sediment washes downstream towards a river’s mouth, are highly susceptible to environmental change. Human activity such as population growth and industrialization are dramatically accelerating this sinking, leading to increased flood risk and the loss of coastal wetlands. To keep deltas intact, a better understanding of the stresses they face is key. Many research groups have studied threats to deltas at the single-delta level; the scope and variety of these threats at the global level, however, isn’t clear. But researchers in New York have developed a method to classify the effects of human activity on deltas worldwide. The team used cluster analysis -- a way of sorting different variables into groups based on their similarity -- to spot patterns in datasets collected at 48 deltas..."
The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.
In recent years, the redistribution of risk has created conditions for natural and technological disasters to become more widespread, more difficult to manage, and more discriminatory in their effects. Policy and planning decision-makers frequently focus on the impact that human settlement patterns, land use decisions, and risky technologies can have on vulnerable populations. However, to ensure safety and promote equity, they also must be familiar with the social and political dynamics that are present at each stage of the disaster management cycle. Therefore, this course will provide students with:
An understanding of the breadth of factors that give rise to disaster vulnerability; and
A foundation for assessing and managing the social and political processes associated with disaster policy and planning.
Students are given a portfolio of investments, and they assess the relative risk associated with the products in their portfolios. They later determine which savings and investment instruments might be most suitable for clients of different ages and economic status.
In this virtual professional development opportunity designed for teachers, EarthGen explores two global crises taking place concurrently - the climate crisis and COVID-19. What are the connections between the two? Why are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities disproportionately affected by both? Educators receive foundational information around climate justice, analyze the variables associated with vulnerability, exposure, and risk, and explore educational resources to bring this content into their classrooms.Contact EarthGen at info@earthgenwa.org for more information.
This course introduces the theory and the practice of engineering ethics using a multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural approach. Theory includes ethics and philosophy of engineering. Historical cases are taken primarily from the scholarly literatures on engineering ethics, and hypothetical cases are written by students. Each student will write a story by selecting an ancestor or mythic hero as a substitute for a character in a historical case. Students will compare these cases and recommend action.