Peqod :: Classes - Columbia University Catalog of Classes

We live in a Digital world. Information is being collected at unprecedented rates, and new tools and techniques make it possible for policy practitioners to process this influx of data and distill its meaning and lessons for policy developments. Computer science is an incredibly powerful mechanism to navigate and assess a variety of systems and their data. Policy decision science is being transformed by augmenting traditional policy analysis with modern computing. Using computer processing methods, open data and survey analysis no longer need to be massively time consuming efforts, rather this information can be refined and processed for analysis by writing a relatively small amount of code.
Computer science is not only a tool, but a framework for thinking. It involves the abstraction of concepts which enables practitioners to break down complex problems into their core components. This is particularly useful for policy students, because policy topics tend to be multi-dimensional and difficult to distill.
Finally, computer science is ubiquitous in professional settings and having a command of this subject will provide the capability to communicate information to both technical and non-technical audiences.
This introductory course will explore computing concepts and coding in the context of solving policy problems. Such problems might include troubleshooting sources of environmental pollution, evaluating the effectiveness of public housing policy or determining the impact that local financial markets have on international healthcare or education. Using policy scenarios as examples, students will be exposed to topics including: requirements gathering, data collection, data cleansing, writing pseudocode and code, using Python packages to help solve policy problems, presenting technical solutions and the constraints of computing. The hands-on nature of the class will help students to develop a strong, transferable skill-set that could be applied to both current coursework and future employment. Between the computer science and policy context lectures, students will see how computer science will become a fundamental component of their policy analysis education.

Department: International and Public Affairs
F 2:10 p.m.-3 p.m.
F 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
3 points

Details

INAF U6006

EXPANDED ARCHITECTURES

Between 1928 and 1929 Le Corbusier traveled for the first time to Spain and Latin America. Despite the scarcity of his built works, he was already an undisputed emblem of modern architecture. His extraordinarily influential ideas had been avidly incorporated and reproduced by many authors with the desire to be identified as “Modern.” Not only architects but also painters and writers saw in the Swiss icon the incarnation of the Avant-Garde. The mutual contact between le Corbusier and the South was, nevertheless, far from a harmonic dialogue between different models of modernity across the Atlantic. Instead, prospects became dynamic misencounters with both sides systematically failing to fulfill each other’s expectations.
The establishment in Europe had accused Le Corbusier of an excess of modernity and had just rejected his ambitious project for the Society of Nations. Conversely, influential German Avant-Garde architects were criticizing him for bourgeois and reactionary tendencies. Le Corbusier travels to the South not only in search of new markets for his work, but also for new sources of legitimacy. There, he still was, or at least he thought he was, undisputedly “Modern.”
Quite often, in Spain and Latin America, his lectures were not sponsored by architectural institutions but rather by groups with wider artistic and pedagogic interests. It was thus that, after his first contacts in Paris with Latin American figures such as Tarsila do Amaral or Vicente Hidobro, Le Corbusier got in contact with the artists and intellectuals around Victoria Ocampo’s
Amigos del Arte
in Argentina, the environment of the
Residencia de estudiantes
in Spain including names such as Dalí, Lorca, Moreno Villa, or the Anthropophagic Movement in Brazil.
This course traces those intermedial and geographic transits of Le Corbusier’s ideas and images as a privileged field to questions transatlantic circulations of the Avant-Garde but also as a space of “expanded architecture” in which spatial ideas were transferred from urbanism, architecture, and design to literature and visual arts.

Department: Spanish and Portuguese
W 2:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Instructor: Alberto Medina
Info
4 points

Details

SPAN GR6006