Numerical solution of differential equations, in particular partial differential equations arising in various fields of application. Presentation emphasizes finite difference approaches to present theory on stability, accuracy, and convergence with minimal coverage of alternate approaches (left for other courses). Method coverage includes explicit and implicit time-stepping methods, direct and iterative solvers for boundary-value problems.
Major technologies to capture carbon dioxide via new or retrofitted power plant designs, during industrial processes, and from ambient air. In addition to basic science and engineering challenges of each technology, full spectrum of economic, environmental, regulatory, and political/policy aspects, and their implication for regional and global carbon management strategies of the future. Combination of lectures, class debates and breakout groups, student presentations, and independent final projects.
This course examines the historical and theoretical issues concerning the representation of African Americans in film and media. The course will provide a historical overview while focusing on key themes, concepts, and texts.
Prerequisites: CHNS W3301: Classical Chinese I; completion of three years of modern Chinese at least, or four years of Japanese or Korean. Please see department. Prerequisites: CHNS W3301: Classical Chinese I; completion of three years of modern Chinese at least, or four years of Japanese or Korean.
Advanced classical thermodynamics. Availability, irreversibility, generalized behavior, equations of state for nonideal gases, mixtures and solutions, phase and chemical behavior, combustion. Thermodynamic properties of ideal gases. Applications to automotive and aircraft engines, refrigeration and air conditioning, and biological systems.
Prerequisites: BIOL W4300 or the instructors permission. A weekly seminar and discussion course focusing on the most recent development in biotechnology. Professionals of the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and related industries will be invited to present and lead discussions.
Introduction to various CO2 utilization and conversion technologies that can reduce the overall carbon footprint of commodity chemicals and materials. Fundamentals of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, reaction kinetics, catalysis and reactor design will be discussed using technological examples such as enhanced oil recovery, shale fracking, photo and electrochemical conversion of CO2 to chemical and fuels, and formation of solid carbonates and their various uses. Life cycle analyses of potential products and utilization schemes will also be discussed, as well as the use of renewable energy for CO2 conversion.
Introduction to various CO2 utilization and conversion technologies that can reduce the overall carbon footprint of commodity chemicals and materials. Fundamentals of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, reaction kinetics, catalysis and reactor design will be discussed using technological examples such as enhanced oil recovery, shale fracking, photo and electrochemical conversion of CO2 to chemical and fuels, and formation of solid carbonates and their various uses. Life cycle analyses of potential products and utilization schemes will also be discussed, as well as the use of renewable energy for CO2 conversion.
Principles of propulsion. Thermodynamic cycles of air breathing propulsion systems including ramjet, scramjet, turbojet, and turbofan engine and rocket propulsion system concepts. Turbine engine and rocket performance characteristics. Component and cycle analysis of jet engines and turbomachinery. Advanced propulsion systems. Columbia Engineering interdisciplinary course.
Non Course Prerequisites: Elementary probability theory (IEOR E3658 or above) and stochastic process (on the level of the first part of IEOR E4106 or STAT G4264) are required. Knowledge on analysis (MATH GU4601 or above) and differential equations (APMA E4200 or above) are required. Knowledge on numerical methods (APMA E4300 and above) and programming skills are required. Provides elementary introduction to fundamental ideas in stochastic analysis for applied mathematics. Core material includes: (i) review of probability theory (including limit theorems), and introduction to discrete Markov chains and Monte Carlo methods; (ii) elementary theory of stochastic process, Ito's stochastic calculus and stochastic differential equations; (iii) introductions to probabilistic representation of elliptic partial differential equations (the Fokker-Planck equation theory); (iv) stochastic approximation algorithms; and (v) asymptotic analysis of SDEs.
Principles of flight, incompressible flows, compressible regimes. Inviscid compressible aerodynamics in nozzles (wind tunnels, jet engines), around wings (aircraft, space shuttle) and around blunt bodies (rockets, reentry vehicles). Physics of normal shock waves, oblique shock waves, and explosion waves.
In recent decades, the study of the so-called “Buddho-Daoism” has become a burgeoning field that breaks down the traditional boundary lines drawn between the two Chinese religious traditions. In this course we will read secondary scholarship in English that probes the complex relationships between Buddhism and Daoism in the past two millennia. Students are required not only to be aware of the tensions and complementarity between them, but to be alert to the nature of claims to either religious purity or mixing and the ways those claims were put forward under specific religio-historical circumstances. The course is organized thematically rather than chronologically. We will address topics on terminology, doctrine, cosmology, eschatology, soteriology, exorcism, scriptural productions, ritual performance, miracle tales and visual representations that arose in the interactions of the two religions, with particular attention paid to critiquing terms such as “influence,” “encounter,” “dialogue,” “hybridity,” “syncretism,” and “repertoire.” The course is designed for both advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of East Asian religion, literature, history, art history, sociology and anthropology. One course on Buddhism or Chinese religious traditions is recommended, but not required, as background.
The basic thesis of the course is that all viruses adopt a common strategy. The strategy is simple: 1. Viral genomes are contained in metastable particles. 2. Genomes encode gene products that promote an infectious cycle (mechanisms for genomes to enter cells, replicate, and exit in particles). 3. Infection patterns range from benign to lethal; infections can overcome or co-exist with host defenses. Despite the apparent simplicity, the tactics evolved by particular virus families to survive and prosper are remarkable. This rich set of solutions to common problems in host/parasite interactions provides significant insight and powerful research tools. Virology has enabled a more detailed understanding of the structure and function of molecules, cells and organisms and has provided fundamental understanding of disease and virus evolution. The course will emphasize the common reactions that must be completed by all viruses for successful reproduction within a host cell and survival and spread within a host population. The molecular basis of alternative reproductive cycles, the interactions of viruses with host organisms, and how these lead to disease are presented with examples drawn from a set of representative animal and human viruses, although selected bacterial viruses will be discussed.
Applications of continuum mechanics to the understanding of various biological tissues properties. The structure, function, and mechanical properties of various tissues in biolgical systems, such as blood vessels, muscle, skin, brain tissue, bone, tendon, cartilage, ligaments, etc. are examined. The establishment of basic governing mechanical principles and constitutive relations for each tissue. Experimental determination of various tissue properties. Medical and clinical implications of tissue mechanical behavior.
This course engages the genre of life writing in Tibetan Buddhist culture, addressing the permeable and fluid nature of this important sphere of Tibetan literature. Through Tibetan biographies, hagiographies, and autobiographies, the class will consider questions about how life-writing overlaps with religious doctrine, philosophy, and history. For comparative purposes, we will read life writing from Western (and Japanese or Chinese) authors, for instance accounts of the lives of Christian saints, raising questions about the cultural relativity of what makes up a life's story.
This course deals with a fundamental question of sustainability management: how to change organizations and more complex systems, such as communities, industries, and markets, by integrating sustainability concerns in the way that they operate. The course poses this question to a dozen leading sustainability practitioners, who answer it by discussing management strategies that they use in their own work. Through these guest lectures, extensive class discussion, readings, and writing assignments, students identify and simulate applying practical ways for transforming how organizations and complex systems work. The practitioners, who work in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors and in a wide variety of organizations, make presentations in the first hour of the course. Students then have time to ask questions and speak informally with the guest practitioners, and will participate in an instructor-led class discussion, geared toward identifying management strategies, better understanding their application, and considering their effectiveness. By the end of the course, the students gain an understanding of management tools and strategies that they, themselves, would use to integrate sustainability in organizations. The course complements the M.S. in Sustainability Management program’s required course, Sustainability Management (SUMA K4100). In that course, students study management and organization theory. In the Practicum, students learn directly from leading practitioners, who confront sustainability management issues daily.
The seminar will focus on trends that have emerged over the past three decades in Jewish American women's writing in the fields of memoirs, fiction and Jewish history: the representation and exploration through fictive narratives of women's experiences in American Jewish orthodox communities; reinterpretation of Jewish history through gender analysis; the recording of migration and exile by Jewish women immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Morocco, Iran, and Egypt; and gender transformations. Texts will be analyzed in terms of genre structures, narrative strategies, the role of gender in shaping content and Jewish identity, and the political, cultural and social contexts in which the works were created. The course aims for students to discuss and critically engage with texts in order to develop the skills of analytical and abstract thinking, as well as the ability to express that critical thinking in writing. Prerequisites:
Both
one introductory WGSS course
and
Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory,
or
Permission of the Instructor.
The goal of this course is to explore how chemical methods and concepts have impacted our ability to understand and manipulate protein structure and function. We will navigate this subject through a combination of lectures and structured discussions on research articles from the literature. The course is divided into three segments: (1) In the first part, we will review the rudiments of protein structure and function, then delve into various aspects of enzyme chemistry and polypeptide biosynthesis. (2) In the second part of the course, we will cover synthetic methods to produce and chemically modify peptides and proteins. (3) In the final part, we will discuss chemical approaches to control protein function and monitor protein activity, focusing on methods that use small molecules and mass spectrometry proteomics.
Principles of electronic circuits used in the generation, transmission, and reception of signal waveforms, as used in analog and digital communication systems. Nonlinearity and distortion; power amplifiers; tuned amplifiers; oscillators; multipliers and mixers; modulators and demodulators; phase-locked loops. An extensive design project is an integral part of the course.
Introduction to analysis and design of heating, ventilating and air-conditioning systems. Heating and cooling loads. Humidity control. Solar gain and passive solar design. Global energy implications. Green buildings. Building-integrated photovoltaics. Roof-mounted gardens and greenhouses. Financial assessment tools and case studies. Open to Mechanical Engineering graduate students only.
Hindu poetry of radical religious participation—bhakti—in translation: poets of different regions, genders, and theological leanings. Knowledge of the original languages is not expected. Music, art, and performance play a role.
No future, there’s no future, no future for you…or me…What happens after the end of the future? If England’s dreaming in 1977 looked like a dead-end, how do we dream of futures in a moment so much closer to the reality of worlds’ end? In this class, we will read a range of ambiguous utopias and dystopias (to use a term from Ursula LeGuin) and explore various models of temporality, a range of fantasies of apocalypse and a few visions of futurity. While some critics, like Frederick Jameson, propose that utopia is a “meditation on the impossible,” others like José Muñoz insist that “we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” Utopian and dystopian fictions tend to lead us back to the present and force confrontations with the horrors of war, the ravages of capitalist exploitation, the violence of social hierarchies and the ruinous peril of environmental decline. In the films and novels and essays we engage here, we will not be looking for answers to questions about what to do and nor should we expect to find maps to better futures. We will no doubt be confronted with dead ends, blasted landscapes and empty gestures. But we will also find elegant aesthetic expressions of ruination, inspirational confrontations with obliteration, brilliant visions of endings, breaches, bureaucratic domination, human limitation and necro-political chaos. We will search in the narratives of uprisings, zombification, cloning, nuclear disaster, refusal, solidarity, for opportunities to reimagine world, ends, futures, time, place, person, possibility, art, desire, bodies, life and death.
Despite the fact that a fifth of the world’s Muslim population lives in Southeast Asia, the region is often considered peripheral to or insignificant for the study of Islam more broadly. In this course, we will not only learn about Islamic thought and practice in the history and present of this important part of the Islamic world; we will also reflect on issues that, while grounded in the Southeast Asian context, illustrate a variety of key Islamic Studies issues. The first half of the course will provide a historical overview over the development of Islam in Southeast Asia while the second half will focus on contemporary issues. The Malay-Indonesian world, home to 90% of Southeast Asia’s Muslims, will be our primary focus. Our approach will be interdisciplinary, incorporating anthropological, historical, and media studies approaches. Students in this class are expected to have some prior knowledge of Islam.
The course focuses on human identity, beginning with the individual and progressing to communal and global viewpoints using a framework of perspectives from biology, genetics, medicine, psychiatry, religion and the law.
The idea of utopia, from its earliest pre-modern examples, involves the question of proper governance, the ideal relations between a state and its peoples, and the responsibilities owed between individuals. In all of its forms, Utopias create borders and insist on degrees of isolation. In this class, we explore the pressures that plagues and other catastrophes place on the ideals of utopia, especially in terms of how social relations are imagined. We will study the relationship between utopia and dystopia; how science fiction and reality converge; and how we might harmonize individual and collective interests. The problem of isolation and utopia pierces the very heart of the novel as a genre. Literary pleasure, both within and outside of the text, involving both the work of the reader and writer, is often figured in terms of isolation. The rise of the novel as a genre tracks with the rise of peaceful, solitary time. But against this pleasure in isolation, we can see the frustrations and loneliness highlighted by the contested contemporary public health interventions of social distancing and lockdown. In thinking about utopia, we will examine the role that isolation plays in its production. In a review of a novel by Margaret Atwood, Frederic Jameson suggested that, “the post catastrophe situation in reality constitutes the preparation for the emergence of Utopia itself.” This antagonism will drive our study of isolation, individuation and collective futures. The first half of the class will focus on classical depictions of utopia, dystopia and catastrophe while the second half will look at contemporary imaginings. We will read novels by Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, and Ling Ma among others, alongside classic social contract theory, political philosophy and public health history to explore the intersections of biopolitics and the imagination. Throughout we will seek to imagine the possibility of emerging more together out of catastrophe.
What is scripture? How is cannon created? How do particular communities find meaning in varying works of literature? In this seminar, we will explore a number of influential American texts not simply in order to understand how they address questions of the holy and divine presence but also for how they provide creative ways of considering questions that have dogged Americans for centuries. In so doing, we will place literary works in conversation with contemporary theological trends and present-day scholarship on these connections. The course’s main thematic focus will be on government and collective rights; racial difference and questions of theodicy; children’s literature and disciplinary formation; the American libertarian streak; how best to care for the self; and humanity’s connection to nature. Students will examine a variety of texts – from the Declaration of Independence to Carl Sagan and Moby Dick – to better understand what matters to Americans and what do the literary artifacts we leave behind say about our current civilizational moment. This course will have succeeded in its goals if by its end your operative definition of religion has been significantly jumbled, challenged, and complicated. While many of our historical actors will use the term in different ways, this course is invested not in identifying what is or is not properly “religious,” but rather in examining how ideas operate in the world for the people to whom they’re important. To a certain extent, we must take seriously the claims made by religious actors of God acting in their lives. But in terms of analysis, religion for us will be a fluid concept, one that evades simple definition, and that is always “real” in terms of its effects on belief, action, and identity.
In 1935, WEB Dubois wrote about abolition democracy: an idea based not only on breaking down unjust systems, but on building up new, antiracist social structures. Scholar activists like Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore and Mariame Kaba have long contended that the abolition of slavery was but one first step in ongoing abolitionist practices dismantling racialized systems of policing, surveillance and incarceration. The possibilities of prison and police abolition have recently come into the mainstream national consciousness during the 2020 resurgence of nationwide Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests. As we collectively imagine what nonpunitive and supportive community reinvestment in employment, education, childcare, mental health, and housing might look like, medicine must be a part of these conversations. Indeed, if racist violence is a public health emergency, and we are trying to bring forth a “public health approach to public safety” – what are medicine’s responsibilities to these social and institutional reinventions? Medicine has a long and fraught history of racial violence. It was, after all, medicine and pseudoscientific inquiry that helped establish what we know as the racial categorizations of today: ways of separating human beings based on things like skin color and hair texture that were used (and often continue to be used) to justify the enslavement, exclusion, or genocide of one group of people by another. Additionally, the history of the professionalization of U.S. medicine, through the formation of medical schools and professional organizations as well as and the certification of trained physicians, is a history of exclusion, with a solidification of the identity of “physician” around upper middle class white masculinity. Indeed, the 1910 Flexner Report, whose aim was to make consistent training across the country’s medical schools, was explicit in its racism. From practices of eugenic sterilization, to histories of experimentation upon bodies of color, medicine is unfortunately built upon racist, sexist and able-ist practices. This course is built on the premise that a socially just practice of medicine is a bioethical imperative. Such a practice cannot be achieved, however, without examining medicine’s histories of racism, as well as learning from and building upon histories of anti-racist health practice. The first half of the semester will be dedicated to learning about histories of medical racism: from eugenics and racist experimentation to public h
Sufism or
tassawuf
has misleadingly been described as the mystical side of Islam, implying that it is somehow detached from the material world. Throughout the history of Islam, Sufi ideas, practices, and institutions have borne a complex, intimate, and sometimes fraught relationship with other aspects of Islamic tradition and practice, a relationship that has also been profoundly impacted by Orientalist scholarship in the colonial period and by global reformist currents in the postcolonial period. This seminar for advanced undergraduates and graduate students is an interdisciplinary investigation of how Sufism has been affected by the historical, sociocultural, political, and everyday environments in which is it experienced and practiced, with a particular focus on South Asia. Eclectic in approach, we will begin by considering how Sufism has been construed and even constructed by scholars, considering how modern notions of the self, religion, and the political have shaped scholarly understandings of what Sufism is. Focusing on bodily practices and well known individual Sufis who lived in South Asia during different historical periods, we will use them as a vehicle for understanding Sufi experience within the context of the evolving Sufi orders within specific local spaces. We will consider why Sufism has become such a target of controversy and ambivalence among Muslims in the modern world and trace some of the changing controversies and tensions that Sufis have struggled with over time, focusing on their understandings of self, society and reality.
Genocide has indelibly marked the last century. Survivors of these crimes have sought justice and reparations, while also struggling to keep alive the memory of all that was lost. Words and images are employed in this struggle. The literary, performing, and visual arts play key roles in resisting the destruction of memory. Genocide is a crime whose aim is not just the annihilation of biological individuals but of social groups and their cultural heritage. Words (in the form of poetry, memoir, drama, fiction) and images (in the form of photography, film, painting) are used to combat the forgetting, the denial, and the distorting of genocidal crimes. This course will explore the ways these forms of memory resilience work in the case of the Armenian Genocide. While often under-appreciated, Armenians began a process of reflection upon and resistance against their cultural loss in the decades after 1915. Yet it took another generation for artists and writers to foreground this resistance in their creative output. In parallel to the Jewish response to the Holocaust, the 1960’s and 70’s saw the awakening of a greater Armenian public response to the genocide. Along with memorialization and demands for justice, a heightened critical reflection on the meaning of loss took place. Historical studies of the genocide multiplied adding to our understanding of the nature and causes of the violence. Alongside such scholarship the broader discipline of memory studies has immeasurable added to our understanding of 1915. The literature and critical study of the Holocaust and other genocides will help us understand the Armenian resilience of memory. The art and literature we explore will be supplemented by dialogue (in-person or virtually) with writers and artists whose works of resistance continue to be created today.
Prerequisites: (CHEN E4230) or instructors permission. Complex reactive systems. Catalysis. Heterogeneous systems, with an emphasis on coupled chemical kinetics and transport phenomena. Reactions at interfaces (surfaces, aerosols, bubbles). Reactions in solution.
Prerequisites: (CHEN E4230) or instructors permission. Complex reactive systems. Catalysis. Heterogeneous systems, with an emphasis on coupled chemical kinetics and transport phenomena. Reactions at interfaces (surfaces, aerosols, bubbles). Reactions in solution.
Prerequisites: BCRS UN2102 Further develops skills in speaking, reading, and writing, using essays, short stories, films, and fragments of larger works. Reinforces basic grammar and introduces more complete structures.
Covering a period from the 7th century to the present, this class draws on Japanese literature, folklore, painting, performance, and anime, to explore the world of the supernatural, particularly the role of ghosts, gods, demons, animals, and nature. Students are introduced to various strands of popular religion, including Buddhist cosmologies and native beliefs about nature and human life, with special attention to the relationship between the living and the dead, and explore the role of human intermediaries. The course looks at these texts and media in relationship to the local community, gender, social and occupational status, environment (both natural and urban), and historical period, exploring issues of social identity and power.
This course explores human adaptation from a biological, ecological and evolutionary perspective. From our earliest hominin ancestors in Africa to our own species' subsequent dispersal throughout the world, our lineage has encountered innumerable environmental pressures. Using morphological, physiological and behavioral/cultural evidence, we will examine the responses to these pressures that helped shape our unique lineage and allowed it to adapt to a diverse array of environments.
The course is devoted to reading and discussing of Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece
Master i Margarita
. Classes are conducted entirely in Russian
Exploring philosophies of history from the ancient Greeks to the present.
Prerequisites: three years of Russian. This is a language course designed to meet the needs of those foreign learners of Russian as well as heritage speakers who want to further develop their reading, listening, speaking, and writing skills and be introduced to the history of Russia.
Developments in architectural history during the modern period. Emphasis on moments of significant change in architecture (theoretical, economic, technological, and institutional). Themes include positive versus arbitrary beauty, enlightenment urban planning, historicism, structural rationalism, the housing reform movement, iron and glass technology, changes generated by developments external or internal to architecture itself and transformations in Western architecture.
Russian filmmaker Andre Tarkovsky said that “the artist has no right to an idea in which he is not socially committed.” Argentine filmmaker Fernando Solanas and Spanish-born Octavio Getino postulated an alternative cinema that would spur spectators to political action. In this course we will ask the question: How do authoritarian governments influence the arts, and how do artists respond? We will study how socially committed filmmakers have subverted and redefined cinema aesthetics to challenge authoritarianism and repression. In addition, we will look at how some filmmakers respond to institutional oppression, such as poverty and corruption, even within so-called “free” societies. The focus is on contemporary filmmakers but will also include earlier classics of world cinema to provide historical perspective. The course will discuss these topics, among others: What is authoritarianism, what is totalitarianism, and what are the tools of repression within authoritarian/totalitarian societies? What is Third Cinema, and how does it represent and challenge authoritarianism? How does film navigate the opposition of censorship, propaganda and truth? How do filmmakers respond to repressive laws concerning gender and sexual orientation? How do they deal with violence and trauma? How are memories of repressive regimes reflected in the psyche of modern cinema? And finally, what do we learn about authority, artistic vision, and about ourselves when we watch these films?
This course approaches the Chinese knight-errant, often seen in the Kungfu films (most recently Mulan 2020), both as a historical fact and a literary imagination. It provides students with a broad overview of Chinese literature until the twentieth century, to familiarize students with the most prominent literary genres of each time period, from official history to classical poetry, from classical tale to vernacular fiction, from drama to film. Through reading/viewing the knight-errant literature, we will discuss issues including translation and comparative studies, "history" writing and forming, literary genre and media, gender boundary and transgression, national and trans-national.
Through a wide range of readings and classroom discussions, this course will introduce students to the crucial role that the unique African-American appropriation of the Judeo-Christian prophetic biblical tradition has played -- and continues to play -- in the lives of black people in America.
“Los cuatro puntos cardinales son tres: el norte y el sur,” the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro
wrote with sharp humor in Altazor o el viaje en paracaídas (Altazor or the Voyage in a
Parachute): “The four cardinal points are three: North and South.” The North/South division is
not the only marker of spatial, geopolitical, economic, or ideological inequalities; several other
divides compete with it as the axis around which our global order is structured: West/the rest,
center/periphery, urban/rural, public/private, land/sea, common/enclosed, developed/developing,
colonial/postcolonial, without forgetting the old ideological divisions of First, Second, Third, and
Fourth Worlds. In response to such spatial divides, this course will explore a range of critical
attempts in art, literature, the social sciences and the theoretical humanities to map out the
unequal organization of the current world order. Studying concepts of so-called “primitive” or
“originary” accumulation, land appropriation, dispossession, uneven development, real
abstraction, and neo-extractivism with a particular focus on Latin America, we will circle back to
the question of how to imagine a cartography that might be critical of the current hegemonies
without increasing the worldwide zones of invisibility and inequality that sustain them.
This course is one of a series on the history of the modern self that includes courses on Montaigne, Pascal, and Tocqueville as well. This semester we focus on Rousseau, and in particular
Emile,
his treatise on education and psychology. We also examine hisautobiographical work, the
Confessions,
and consider how Rousseau’s theory of the self shapes and is shaped by his understanding of himself.
An introduction to mathematical concepts used in theoretical neuroscience aimed to give a minimal requisite background for NBHV G4360, Introduction to Theoretical Neuroscience. The target audience is students with minimal mathematical background who are interested in rapidly acquiring the vocabulary and basic mathematical skills for studying theoretical neuroscience, or who wish to gain a deeper exposure to mathematical concepts than offered by NBHV G4360. Topics include single- and multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, dynamical systems, and probability. Examples and applications are drawn primarily from theoretical and computational neuroscience.
Prerequisites: LING UN3101 An investigation of the sounds of human language, from the perspective of phonetics (articulation and acoustics, including computer-aided acoustic analysis) and phonology (the distribution and function of sounds in individual languages).
This course will examine practical issues, opportunities, tactics and strategies to advocate for economic and social rights. The course will incorporate central debates about economic and social rights, such as how to identify violators and define state responsibility, whether these rights can be litigated, and how to make implementable recommendations for change, measure implementation and measure impact. The course will also look more in depth at the standards and fulfillment challenges on several of the key rights including health, housing, education, and labor. Throughout the course, you will focus on one economic and social rights topic of your choice. Through the lens of your chosen topic, you will review how organizations and social movements have engaged to affect change on similar issues, and use that research to explore many of the practical skills of advocacy and campaigning: framing recommendations and calls to action; drafting policy briefs; crafting media pitches and social media content; and designing and evaluating an overall advocacy strategy.
This course will focus on quantum mechanics, paying attention to both the underlying mathematical structures as well as their physical motivations and consequences. It is meant to be accessible to students with no previous formal training in quantum theory. The role of symmetry, groups and representations will be stressed.
Prerequisites: VIAR R2420, or VIAR R2430. (Formerly R3415) Designed for students who have already taken one semester of a printmaking course and are interested in continuing on an upper level. Students are encouraged to work in all areas, separate or combined, using their own vocabulary and imagery to create a body of work by the end of the semester. If the class is full, please visit http://arts.columbia.edu/undergraduate-visual-arts-program.
This seminar course takes concerns around rapidly diminishing language diversity as the starting point for an interdisciplinary, trans-regional, and trans-lingual investigation of the role of digital communication technologies in these global shifts. Digital technologies appear to be contributing to language extinction, with a potential for 50-90% loss of language diversity this century. While an increasing number of languages are digitally supported, this process is largely market-driven, excluding smaller or poorer language communities. This course investigates the role of digital design and governance in including or excluding languages from the digital sphere. Digital exclusion and language shift affect minority language communities in ways that cut to the core of their identities, relationships, and epistemologies. Furthermore, it is estimated that there are 800+ endangered languages represented in the NY area, a higher concentration than any other city in the world. As such, this course gives students the opportunity to understand global language justice through the work of leading scholars and practitioners (guest speakers to be announced at beginning of semester), as well to understand it on a personal and practical level through hands-on activities such as interviews with minority language speakers and assessments of digital supports for minority languages. Students will leave this course with new skills in qualitative and quantitative research methods, media production skills, and a rich understanding of how the social sciences, humanities, and big data contribute an interdisciplinary and multi-faceted perspective on the loss of language diversity. Furthermore, students will be challenged to identify and develop evidence-based strategies to advance global language justice in the digital sphere.
(Lecture). This course examines the works of the major English poets of the period 1830-1900. We will pay special attention to Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, and their great poetic innovation, the dramatic monologue. We will also be concentrating on poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, A. E. Housman, and Thomas Hardy.
Generation of random numbers from given distributions; variance reduction; statistical output analysis; introduction to simulation languages; application to financial, telecommunications, computer, and production systems. Graduate students must register for 3 points. Undergraduate students must register for 4 points. Note: Students who have taken IEOR E4703 Monte Carlo simulation may not register for this course for credit. Recitation section required.
Required for undergraduate students majoring in IE and OR. Job shop scheduling: parallel machines, machines in series; arbitrary job shops. Algorithms, complexity, and worst-case analysis. Effects of randomness: machine breakdowns, random processing time. Term project.
This course is a topical (not comprehensive) survey of musical-poetic manifestations from Latin America, the Caribbean and their diasporas
that emerged during the 1960s and the 1970s.
The course revisits this time period by exploring the contributions of myriad countries among which Puerto Rico, Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, Québec, Haiti, Chile, Argentina, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Martinique/Guadeloupe, and the United States (with a strong emphasis on New York). It analyzes objects and experiences engaged in contesting colonialism, settler colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, racism, capitalism and Eurocentrism highlighting as well the limits (and limitations) of these radical discourses. Using a decolonial/postcolonial lens and an ethnomusicological approach, the course pays careful attention to the politics of these musics, their historical context and aesthetics, and the social imaginary of those who made them possible.
This course is a topical (not comprehensive) survey of musical-poetic manifestations from Latin America, the Caribbean and their diasporas
that emerged during the 1960s and the 1970s.
The course revisits this time period by exploring the contributions of myriad countries among which Puerto Rico, Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, Québec, Haiti, Chile, Argentina, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Martinique/Guadeloupe, and the United States (with a strong emphasis on New York). It analyzes objects and experiences engaged in contesting colonialism, settler colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, racism, capitalism and Eurocentrism highlighting as well the limits (and limitations) of these radical discourses. Using a decolonial/postcolonial lens and an ethnomusicological approach, the course pays careful attention to the politics of these musics, their historical context and aesthetics, and the social imaginary of those who made them possible.
Fourier analysis. Physics of diagnostic ultrasound and principles of ultrasound imaging instrumentation. Propagation of plane waves in lossless medium; ultrasound propagation through biological tissues; single-element and array transducer design; pulse-echo and Doppler ultrasound instrumentation, performance evaluation of ultrasound imaging systems using tissue-mimicking phantoms, ultrasound tissue characterization; ultrasound nonlinearity and bubble activity; harmonic imaging; acoustic output of ultrasound systems; biological effects of ultrasound.
This course is set-up in a form of a practicum where major activists concerned with Brazilian political, social and economic development will be asked to address a policy problem and discuss their proposals for effective changes. Other speakers will analyze the government's policies but will also discuss major new reports or studies, and bring to our attention key issues that are not yet on the policy agenda.
While not yet fully recognized as a literary or philosophical genre, science fiction, through the “dislocation” it operates, raises (or amplifies) questions that have long been the preserve of religion, metaphysics, or philosophy, and it has brought some of these questions into the realm of popular culture. Science fiction is often perceived as hostile to religion, yet it often blurs the boundaries between science and religion. Recent SF, unlike the traditional “space opera,” revolves around the relations between the human mind and Artificial Intelligence — a challenge that our fast-evolving technoscientific society is confronting with a new sense of urgency. This course examines overlapping issues and questions shared by religion and SF.
Required for undergraduate students majoring in IE. Statistical methods for quality control and improvement: graphical methods, introduction to experimental design and reliability engineering and the relationships between quality and productivity. Contemporary methods used by manufacturing and service organizations in product and process design, production and delivery of products and services.
Prerequisites: W3211, W3213, W3412. Corequisites: MATH V2010. This course focuses on the application of econometric methods to time series data; such data is common in the testing of macro and financial economics models. It will focus on the application of these methods to data problems in macro and finance.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 Introduction to the systematic treatment of game theory and its applications in economic analysis.
Transportation, primarily focused on the movement of people, and logistics, primarily focused on the movement of goods, are two of the most fundamental challenges to modern society. To address many problems in these areas, a wide array of mathematical models and analytics tools have been developed. This class will introduce many of the foundational tools used in transportation and logistics problems, relying on ideas from linear optimization, integer optimization, stochastic processes, statistics, and simulation. We will address problems such as optimizing the routes of cars and delivery trucks, positioning emergency vehicles, and controlling traffic behavior. Moreover, we will discuss modern issues such as bicycle sharing, on-demand car and delivery services, humanitarian logistics, and autonomous vehicles. Concepts will be reinforced with technical content as well as real-world data and examples.
Fundamental concepts of signal processing in linear systems and stochastic processes. Estimation, detection and filtering methods applied to biomedical signals. Harmonic analysis, auto-regressive model, Wiener and Matched filters, linear discriminants, and independent components. Methods are developed to answer concrete questions on specific data sets in modalities such as ECG, EEG, MEG, Ultrasound. Lectures accompanied by data analysis assignments using MATLAB.
The Simulation class has as its purpose to familiarize and inform the student participants with the real-life interests, objectives, constraints, working and strategies of the range of stakeholders concerned or engaged with a large natural resource development project (oil) in a developing and civil war torn country. It challenges the students, as members of pre-assigned teams with different goals and objectives, as well as values, to seek ways to reconcile, to the extent possible, through discussion and negotiation the different and even conflicting interests, goals and strategies of the multiple stakeholders. These stakeholders include the governing parties, opposition parties, local and international NGOs, local and international media and think tanks, as well as two oil companies, including one from an authoritarian country, competing for the oil development contract.
The objective of this course is to explore the relationship between sound, music and Islam and, in doing so, to focus on a philosophy of listening (sama‘) which is deeply embedded in the experiential. The course aims to analyze how sound and music directly or indirectly associated with Islam are produced, circulated, and listened to by a wide variety of audiences in local and transnational settings; to explore the ways in which multiple sonic dimensions of Islam have affected the public sphere in different historical moments and contexts (particular in relation to ideas about nationalism, secularism and modernity); and to examine the effect of these sonic dimensions on Muslim and non-Muslim listeners in a local and a transnational perspective.
The objective of this course will be to tease out Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s complex and often contradictory ideas on women and gender difference in nature and society, to examine his own gender construction in his autobiographical writings, and to determine how women writers from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries have responded to these aspects of his work. Readings of Rousseau’s works (in French) will include the
Discours sur l’inégalité
,
Émile,
the
Lettre à d’Alembert
and the
Confessions
. Other authors will include Louise d’Épinay, Isabelle de Charrière, Olympe de Gouges, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, Marie-Jeanne Roland de la Platière, George Sand and Monique Wittig, along with contemporary feminist criticism on Rousseau. The course will be taught in French with most readings in French, but papers may be written in English for non-majors or graduate students from other departments. This course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the French major and the 18th Century requirement for the MA or PhD in the French Department. By the end of the course students should be conversant in the major arguments, themes and motifs Rousseau develops with respect to women and gender difference in the state of nature and society. They should have gained a nuanced understanding of the ways gender and sexuality are constructed in the
Confessions
and in the autobiographical works of women authors inspired by it. They should be able to characterize the diverse ways that various women writers, from Rousseau’s time to the present, have responded to his depiction of women and gender. They should have gained the ability to speak with fluency in French about these complex issues, and to develop in their written work, in French or in English, coherent and original arguments about Rousseau, women and gender. Above all, students will be expected to develop their own point of view on a central paradox of Rousseau’s corpus: how is it that a writer often derided in his own time and our own as misogynist has had such an outsized influence on successive generations of women writers?
Prerequisites: Course in European history or political science or relevant comparative politics courses. This is an upper-level course in European political development. It is designed for undergraduates who already have some exposure to European history and politics and graduate students. The course will analyze important theoretical works, and debates about, the evolution of European political systems and institutions since the Second World War and place the European experience in comparative perspective
Various forms of ethnic politics have characterized politics in many states throughout Eurasia since 1991, from nationalist separatism to violent conflict to political competition among ethnic minorities and majorities. This course is designed to encourage students to think deeply about the relationship between ethnicity and politics. We will consider several questions. First, why does ethnicity become politicized? We investigate this question by examining nationalist secessionism and ethnic conflict—phenomena that mushroomed at the end of the Cold War. We will focus on East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, devoting special attention to the cases of Yugoslavia, the USSR, Moldova, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Chechnya. However, we will also study cases in which the dog didn’t bark, i.e. places where nationalist mobilization and ethnic violence either did not occur, or emerged and then receded as in the ethnic republics of the Russian Federation (including the “Muslim” regions of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, etc.). In the second part of the course, we will analyze ethnic politics after independent statehood was achieved throughout the post-Soviet space. How do nationalist state-builders try to construct a nation and a state at the same time? Have they incorporated or discriminated against minorities living within “their” states? How have ethnic minorities responded? We will study Ukraine, the Baltics and Kazakhstan where ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking populations form large portions of the population, devoting particular attention to the crisis in Ukraine. We will also examine how the post-conflict regions of Bosnia and Kosovo have dealt with ethnic pluralism. These cases allow us to gain greater understanding of how multi-ethnic states use forms of federalism, consociationalism, and power-sharing as state-building strategies.
Populism is one of the political buzzwords of the early 21st century. It is central to current debates about politics, from radical right parties in Europe to left-wing presidents in Latin America to the Tea Party, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the United States. But populism is also one of the most contested concepts in the social sciences. In line with a growing body of literature, populism should be defined in ideational terms, i.e., as a worldview that considers society to be separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volont´e g´en´erale (general will) of the people. This course will provide an introduction to populism in theory and practice.
The first part of the course will discuss how scholars from different parts of the world studied populism since this phenomenon entered the political and social science agenda in the late 1960s. Is populism an ideology? A strategy? A style of politics? A certain type of discourse? Something else? And, crucially, who are “the people” in populism? Could we, possibly, re-conceptualize populism in a way that is at the same time minimal and with sufficient discriminatory power, politically relevant, analytically compelling, operationally feasible, and clearly pointing to an opposite pole?
Beyond defining populism, this course also examines the phenomenon in the entirety of its geographical variants. Populism is an omnipresent, multifaceted, and ideologically boundless phenomenon. What distinguishes its various manifestations in Europe, Latin America, the United States, and elsewhere across time (old vs. new populisms), region (western vs. eastern; but also Nordic, Baltic, and Southern European), regime type in which they develop (democracy vs. non-democracy), and ideological hue (right vs. left populisms)?
A second part of this course will look at actual populist strategies, how populist leaders gain their appeal, what social conditions increase the likelihood of a populist victory, how populists gain and maintain power. What are the determinants of voting motivation for populist parties? And how do they differ from mainstream parties? This course will also examine what happens once populists come into office, as has happened several times in both Europe and Latin America? Cases such as Hungary, Greece and Venezuela are studied in order to understand the way in which populism co
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Examines current topics in neurobiology and behavior.
From Bong Joon-ho’s runaway success Parasite, to manga adaptations of Kobayashi Takiji’s novel The Crab Cannery Ship, to the proliferation of Chinese migrant worker poetry, recent developments in the cultural landscape of East Asia have seen a renewed concern with the plight of workers and other sections of the oppressed under conditions of late capitalism. This course offers students the opportunity to situate these developments within an extended historical trajectory as the basis on which to think about the relation of radical histories to our present and possible future. It does so by integrating contemporary cultural texts with earlier cultural experiments that arose amidst the political turbulence of the 1930s across a range of locations in East Asia.
Introduction to methods in deep learning, with focus on applications to quantitative problems in biomedical imaging and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medicine. Network models: Deep feedforward networks, convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks. Deep autoencoders for denoising. Segmentation and classification of biological tissues and biomarkers of disease. Theory and methods lectures will be accompanied with examples from biomedical image including analysis of neurological images of the brain (MRI), CT images of the lung for cancer and COPD, cardiac ultrasound. Programming assignments will use tensorflow / Pytorch and Jupyter Notebook. Examinations and a final project will also be required.
All supervisors will be Columbia faculty who hold a PhD. Students are responsible for identifying their own supervisor and it is at the discretion of faculty whether they accept to supervise independent research. Projects must be focused on Hellenic Studies and can be approached from any disciplinary background. Students are expected to develop their own reading list in consultation with their supervisor. In addition to completing assigned readings, the student must also write a Hellenic studies paper of 20 pages. Projects other than a research paper will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Hellenic Studies is an interdisciplinary field that revolves around two main axes: space and time. Its teaching and research are focused on the study of post-classical Greece in various fields: Language, Literature, History, Politics, Anthropology, Art, Archaeology, and in various periods: Late Antique, Medieval, Byzantine, Modern Greek etc. Therefore, the range of topics that are acceptable as a Hellenic Studies seminar paper is broad. It is upon each supervisor to discuss the specific topic with the student. The work submitted for this independent study course must be different from the work a student submits in other courses, including the Hellenic Studies Senior Research Seminar.