Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 and STAT UN1201 Standard economic theory seeks to explain human behavior (especially in economic settings, such as markets) in terms of rational choice, which means that the choices that are made can be predicted on the basis of what would best serve some coherent objective, under an objectively correct understanding of the predictable consequences of alternative actions. Observed behavior often seems difficult to reconcile with a strong form of this theory, even if incentives clearly have some influence on behavior; and the course will discuss empirical evidence (both from laboratory experiments and observations in the field) for some well-established anomalies. But beyond simply cataloguing anomalies for the standard theory, the course will consider the extent to which departures from a strong version of rational choice theory can be understood as reflecting cognitive processes that are also evident in other domains such as sensory perception; examples from visual perception will receive particular attention. And in addition to describing what is known about how the underlying mechanisms work (something that is understood in more detail in sensory contexts than in the case of value-based decision making), the course will consider the extent to which such mechanisms --- while suboptimal from a normative standpoint that treats perfect knowledge of one's situation as costless and automatic --- might actually represent efficient uses of the limited information and bounded information-processing resources available to actual people (or other organisms). Thus the course will consider both ways in which the realism of economic analysis may be improved by taking into account cognitive processes, and ways in which understanding of cognitive processes might be advanced by considering the economic problem of efficient use of limited (cognitive) resources.
This course explores key frameworks and issue areas within international political economy. It examines the history and key characteristics of (economic) globalization, the theories of international cooperation, as well as the nature and role of international organizations (such as the World Trade Organization) in fostering trade and international economic cooperation. Furthermore, the course discusses the pros and cons of globalization and its implications on domestic policies of nation-states, with a particular focus on the tensions globalization creates and the lines of cleavages between winners and losers from globalization. Finally, the course reflects on the future of globalization and international trade and the challenges faced by national and supranational policy makers.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS GU4865.
Design and programming of System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms. Topics include: overview of technology and economic trends, methodologies and supporting CAD tools for system-level design, models of computation, the SystemC language, transaction-level modeling, software simulation and virtual platforms, hardware-software partitioning, high-level synthesis, system programming and device drivers, on-chip communication, memory organization, power management and optimization, integration of programmable processor cores and specialized accelerators. Case studies of modern SoC platforms for various classes of applications.
This course explores the origins, performance, reception, adaptation, and translation of
The Thousand and One Nights
, one of the most beloved and inluential story collections in world literature. An authorless collage built up over centuries, it is an “ocean” of narratives that has much to teach us about how stories work, whether they must come to an end, and our apparently bottomless desire to hear them. In addition to reading the tales themselves and studying their themes and devices, we will delve into the very real history of this curious work and its eccentric interpreters, translators, and readers. Finally, we will consider how the Nights puts pressure on ideas of authorship and originality and enlarges our notion of what a book is – and might be.
The United States has a long complex relationship with the international human rights system. Although its founding was grounded in fundamental norms of inalienable rights, equality and freedom, U.S. history is characterized by divisive and sometimes violent disagreements about who counts as human, what is fundamental to the human condition, and which/how rights should be protected. How has this history contributed to our contemporary struggles? Through engaging with issues related to racial justice, criminal justice, reproductive justice, disability justice, gender justice, and indigenous people’s rights, students are asked to consider how certain rights are sites of contestation within the U.S. political system and within U.S. society.
This course offers a multidisciplinary survey of urgent contemporary human rights issues in the United States and seeks to advance students’ skills to examine human rights research and analysis through intersectional approaches. Part of the inquiry of this course is ensuring that students understand existing tensions among several key concepts (1) human rights as a body of international human rights law and institutions; (2) human rights movements using human rights discourse to further their aspirations; (3) constitutional rights in the U.S. as interpreted by U.S. courts that may or may not allude to/be contained in international law; and (4) political rhetoric that use the language of “rights” for political ends.
Coursework will ground current human rights debates in their social, legal, and political contexts. It will outline the different actors in the human rights landscape, focusing on mobilization strategies of human rights movements and the policy reforms that they seek to advance human rights agendas. Students will engage with legal cases and legislation in the United States. By the end of this course, you should expect to be able to:
Understand critical human rights issues in the United States, and apply international and domestic human rights principles and practice to these contemporary human rights debates;
Understand the role of social movements in shaping narratives around human rights;
Analyze (through case studies) the real-life application and effects of human rights policies, as well as how they contribute to the promotion, progressive enforcement, and internalization of international human rights.
China’s transformation under its last imperial rulers, with special emphasis on economic, legal, political, and cultural change.
Prerequisites: introductory chemistry and earth science coursework. Prerequisites: Introductory Chemistry and Earth Science coursework. Given in alternate years. This class will be an introduction to the field of stable isotope geochemistry and its application to understanding current and past environmental processes. The utility of stable isotopes as tracers will be examined with respect to the disciplines of hydrology, oceanography,paleoclimatology, paleoceanography, landscape evolution, carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle dynamics. We will focus on the stable isotopes of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen in water, ice, carbonates and organic compounds and why they fractionate in the environment. The theoretical background for isotope fractionation will be discussed in class. Radiocarbon as a tracer and dating tool will also be reviewed. In addition, the mechanics of how mass spectrometers analyze different isotope ratios will be explored in class and during experiments in the laboratory. Additional key parts of the class will be a review of paper or laboratory report and student-lead reviews of published papers on relevant topics.
Covers image formation, methods of analysis, and representation of digital images. Measures of qualitative performance in the context of clinical imaging. Algorithms fundamental to the construction of medical images via methods of computed tomography, magnetic resonance, and ultrasound. Algorithms and methods for the enhancement and quantification of specific features of clinical importance in each of these modalities.
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
Research training course. Recommended in preparation for laboratory related research.
Required for, and can be taken only by, all applied mathematics majors in the junior year. Introductory seminars on problems and techniques in applied mathematics. Typical topics are nonlinear dynamics, scientific computation, economics, operation research, etc.
Required for, and can be taken only by, all applied physics majors and minors in the junior year. Discussion of specific and self-contained problems in areas such as applied electrodynamics, physics of solids, and plasma physics. Topics change yearly.
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Topics chosen in consultation between members of the staff and students.
Basic microbiological principles; microbial metabolism; identification and interactions of microbial populations responsible for the biotransformation of pollutants; mathematical modeling of microbially mediated processes; biotechnology and engineering applications using microbial systems for pollution control.
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Topics chosen in consultation between members of the staff and students.
Required for all applied mathematics majors in the senior year. Term paper required. Examples of problem areas are nonlinear dynamics, asymptotics, approximation theory, numerical methods, etc. Approximately three problem areas are studied per term.
Required for, and can be taken only by, all applied physics majors in the senior year. Discussion of specific and self-contained problems in areas such as applied electrodynamics, physics of solids, and plasma physics. Formal presentation of a term paper required. Topics change yearly.
For more than forty years, second language acquisition (SLA) has been emerging as an independent field of inquiry with its own research agenda and theoretical paradigms. The study of SLA is inherently interdisciplinary, as it draws on scholarship from the fields of linguistics, psychology, education, and sociology. This course explores how Chinese is acquired by non-native speakers. Students will learn about general phenomena and patterns during the process of acquiring a new language. They will become familiar with important core concepts, theoretical frameworks, and research practices of the field of SLA, with Chinese as the linguistic focus.
Advanced Turkish I is designed to use authentic Turkish materials around projects that are chosen by the student in a research seminar format where students conduct their own research and share it in class in a friendly atmosphere. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 and ECON UN3412 Selected topics in microeconomics.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 and ECON UN3412 Selected topics in microeconomics.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 and ECON UN3412 Selected topics in microeconomics.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 and ECON UN3412 Selected topics in microeconomics.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 and ECON UN3412 Selected topics in microeconomics.
The development of computational tools, such as artificial intelligence, has transformed daily life and many areas of research. For instance, the development of large language models such as ChatGPT, have changed the way people write and think. These computational tools also hold great potential for advancing psychological research. However, they are still unfamiliar to many students and psychologists.
In this class, you will learn about how to apply computational tools to facilitate practical problem solving in the real world and research at different stages, including before, during, and after data collection. Specifically, through a combination of lectures (which focus on the mathematical basics and developments of these computational methods), in-class engagements (which focus on translational application of the computational methods to solving new practical problems), and coding workshops (which focus on practical coding skills that implement the computational methods), I will introduce you to methods for handling complex stimuli, validating data quality, and modeling big data. Workshops will be administered via Colab using Python, so please be sure to bring a laptop to every class.
Prerequisites: introductory college-level biology and chemistry. An overview of the biology and ecology of the oceans with a focus on the interaction between marine organisms and the physics and chemistry of the oceans.
Prerequisites:
Recommended preparation: a solid background in mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
Topics:
Physical properties of seawater, hydrography (water masses and their distribution), dispersal (advection and diffusion), ocean dynamics (Navier Stokes equation), processes (eddies, waves, tides), large-scale circulation (wind-driven gyres, overturning circulation).
This course examines themes and changes in the (self-)representation of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people in cinema from the early sound period to the present. It pays attention to both the formal qualities of film and filmmakers’ use of cinematic strategies (mise-en-scene, editing, etc.) designed to elicit certain responses in viewers and to the distinctive possibilities and constraints of the classical Hollywood studio system, independent film, avant-garde cinema, and world cinema; the impact of various regimes of formal and informal censorship; the role of queer men and women as screenwriters, directors, actors, and designers; and the competing visions of gay, progay, and antigay filmmakers. Along with considering the formal properties of film and the historical forces that shaped it, the course explores what cultural analysts can learn from film. How can we treat film as evidence in historical analysis? We will consider the films we see as evidence that may shed new light on historical problems and periodization, and will also use the films to engage with recent queer theoretical work on queer subjectivity, affect, and culture.
Prerequisites: advanced calculus and general physics, or the instructors permission. Methods and underpinnings of seismology including seismogram analysis, elastic wave propogation theory, earthquake source characterization, instrumentation, inversion of seismic data to infer Earth structure.
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Please e-mail the instructor at bc14@columbia.edu. This course will examine the tension between two contradictory trends in world politics. On the one hand, we have emerged from a century that has seen some of the most brutal practices ever perpetrated by states against their populations in the form of genocide, systematic torture, mass murder and ethnic cleansing. Many of these abuses occurred after the Holocaust, even though the mantra never again was viewed by many as a pledge never to allow a repeat of these practices. Events in the new century suggest that these trends will not end anytime soon. At the same time, since the middle of the twentieth century, for the first time in human history there has been a growing global consensus that all individuals are entitled to at least some level of protection from abuse by their governments. This concept of human rights has been institutionalized through international law, diplomacy, international discourse, transnational activism, and the foreign policies of many states. Over the past two decades, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and international tribunals have gone further than any institutions in human history to try to stem state abuses. This seminar will try to make sense of these contradictions.
The rapid democratization of technology has led to a new wave of immersive storytelling that spills off screens into the real world and back again. These works defy traditional constraints as they shift away from a one-to-many to a many-to-many paradigm, transforming those formerly known as the audience from passive viewers into storytellers in their own right. New opportunities and limitations offered by emergent technologies are augmenting the grammar of storytelling, as creators wrestle with an ever-shifting digital landscape. New Media Art pulls back the curtain on transmedial works of fiction, non-fiction, and emergent forms that defy definition. Throughout the semester well explore projects that utilize Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and the Internet of Things, alongside a heavy-hitting selection of new media thinkers, theorists, and critics. The course will be co-taught as a dialogue between artistic practice and new media theory. Lance Weiler, a new media artist and founder of Columbia’s Digital Storytelling Lab, selected the media artworks; Rob King, a film and media historian, selected the scholarly readings. It is in the interaction between these two perspectives that the course will explore the parameters of emerging frontiers in media art and the challenges these pose for existing critical vocabularies.
This 4000-level seminar explores the Ottoman Empire with emphasis on the long nineteenth century, while also tracing how the century that followed remained profoundly marked by the afterlives of its institutions, ideas, and the disruptions it set in motion. After an overview Ottoman history and historiography, and an exploration of recent digital humanities trends in Ottoman Studies, the course proceeds in three sections: 1) imperial reconfiguration and crisis, 2) revolution, war, and genocide, and 3) afterlives of empire. Case studies spotlight the empire’s ethno-religious communities, including Arabs, Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, and Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the Russian Empire. Anchored in
The I.B. Tauris Handbook of the Late Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy
, the course aims to equip students with the conceptual and historiographical tools needed to critically analyze the Ottoman past and its enduring legacies across the modern Middle East.
In a 2015 interview with David Simon (creator of
The Wire
) President Barak Obama offered that
The Wire
is, "one of the greatest -- not just television shows, but pieces of American art in the last couple of decades."
The Wire
combines hyperrealism with the reinvention of fundamental American themes (from picaresque individualisms, to coming to terms with the illusory “American dream”, to a fundamental loss of faith in American institutions), and engages in a scathing expose of the shared dysfunction among the bureaucracies (police, courts, public schools etc.) that manage a troubled American inner city. On a more macro level
The Wire
humanizes (and therefore vastly problematizes) assumptions about the individual Americans’ who inhabit America’s most dangerous urban environments from gang members to police officers to teachers and even ordinary citizens.
The Wire
, of course, did not single-handedly reshape American television. Scholars like Martin Shuster refer to this period of television history as “new television.” That is, the product of new imaginations that felt television had exhausted its normative points of reference, subject matter and narrative technique. Many of the shows from this period sought to reinvent television for interaction with an evolving zeitgeist shaped by shared dissolution with 21st century American life: “I’d been thinking: it’s good to be in a thing from the ground floor, I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling I might be in at the end. That the best is over,” Tony Soprano confides to Dr. Malfi in S1.E1 of the Sopranos. Series that fall within this rubric include (in chronological order):
The Sopranos
;
The Wire
;
Deadwood
;
Madmen
; and
Breaking Bad.
We need to consider carefully that these shows emerged during a particular moment on American history. This was a period shaped by an increasingly relativist conceptualizations of truth (and, at times, outright fraud) and a resultant loss of faith in American institutions. Resistance movements (MeeToo, and Black Lives Mater) began to shape. No wonder that so many of the series under discussion take place amid American cultures defined by a liminal faith in law and order, within the contexts of vague moral authorities and hold American institutions with a shared, deep, suspicion.
These show
The term 'gendercide' highlights a range of distinct and specific forms of violence executed against human beings based on their own gender self-identification as well as patriarchal assumptions about their gender. In this course, we will examine research discerning, movements challenging, and the adjudication, and/or lack thereof, of Gender Based Violence (GBV) in several major categories traversing spatial, temporal, and ideological contexts, including: reproductive rights and health; trafficking and migration; and disaster and pandemics. It is critical to: interrogate the ideologies that drive and sustain GBV; examine in detail the harm it presents to human beings; explore what can be done to protect the security of those experiencing GBV; and to think about measures of prevention to guard additional human beings from experiencing it. The heart of the course will involve an intersectional analysis of specific case studies; highlighting the GBV associated with each case; examining the impact of GBV on human rights; and how GBV has been addressed in society. The close study of each case will assist students in illuminating intricacies, complexities, and challenges to human security in specific contexts.
This interdisciplinary course grapples with nation-states and cities at its margins, exploring the exclusions, oppositions, silences and, in particular, the 'Others' or 'in-betweens' of the nation-state as an organizing tool. ‘Illegal migrants’, ‘refugees’, ‘asylum seekers’, ‘exiles’, ‘nomads’, ‘aliens’, and other ‘Others’: these are all in-between figures, exceptions to a political order defined by membership in the city, borders, sovereignty and nation-states. In their very existence, they represent a challenge to this political order, as social and political theorists have long recognized. This seminar explores the dynamics, contradictions and politics surrounding nation-states and their Others with particular attention to the responses to them on the part of ostensibly liberal-democratic states. We examine the relationship between citizenship, statelessness, refugee-hood and migration as exceptions to a political order defined by membership in the city, borders, sovereignty and nation-states. Students will engage with film, fiction, visual animations and displacement maps to examine key theoretical and critical interventions by scholars who examine nation-states and cities at their margins. To this end, participants will examine key theoretical interventions by Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben alongside scholars who have grappled with, contested, and developed their ideas, such as Étienne Balibar, Didier Bigo, Jacques Rancière, and Seyla Benhabib. With these texts, the participants will attempt to explore non-national or post-national alternatives to the nation-state and citizenship as a tool for planning and organization of people and space.
Taken together, this course provides an alternative to conventional scholarship on this subject. It engages with and provides an alternative to the mainstream literature to take for granted the inclusive and integrative character of nation-states and its respective memberships in the form of refugees, citizens and migrants.
At first glance, the course may appear highly theoretical, but not to worry—we will move slowly through the texts and concepts together. The instructor will also ensure that we apply the ideas discussed in class to concrete and tangible case studies with examples given to enable easier access and collective learning.
This course surveys the relationship between sociology as a discipline and the body of thought, action and critique that coheres under the term queer theory. Many people understand these two projects to be constitutionally at odds. Sociology as a discipline concerns itself with the empirical study of, as Norbert Elias wrote, “the problem of human societies.” How we do this is distinct. Sociologists have a defined set of technical skills that make use of social categories and classifications. We organize individuals by behavior and identity, document diverse cultural milieus, and even attempt to quantify the demographic details of sexual identities, practices and communities. Queer theory, on the other hand, emerged as a field of academic thought in the early 1990’s, at the apex of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The urgency of the political moment demanded new analytical tools for thinking about gender, sexuality, medicine and bodies. Queer theorists took to task the restrictive categories of gender and sexual life that relegated gay men and lesbians to sociological studies of “deviant” people and practices, in favor of rich and pointed critiques of the organization of culture, institutions and politics that renders some people and practices deviant in the first place. Queer theorists document their suspicion of methods, of categories, and of knowledge practices themselves. Social science is often the target of such critiques.
So, is there actually a way to do something we might call queer sociology? Or is it, fundamentally, an oxymoron? As what we think of as data becomes “bigger” and ever more categorically precise, what use has sociology for queer theory? How can a body of thought that operates from an anti-categorical impulse inform empirical work that seeks, at least in some part, to identify and observe particular types of people and particular forms of social life? In this course, we will read a set of foundational texts in the queer theoretical tradition alongside sociology that makes use of queer phenomena, frameworks and world-making projects. Expect to cover topics like ephemera, ghosts, messy affect, political lesbianism, perversion and a variety of other things you don’t typically see on a sociology syllabus. Each week, we will survey a select set of orienting ideas from queer theory–the heterosexual matrix, heteronormativity, antidisciplinarity, and homonormativity–and examine the ways in which sociologists of sexuality aim
What is the state of anti-incarceral activism today? What visions of social transformation are available for tomorrow? Mass incarceration remains one of the most pressing human rights issues in the United States. This course explores what has been done, is being done, and can be done to rethink incarceration in the U.S. and to provoke change.
We will actively engage with prominent activists at Columbia who will visit some classes during the second half of the semester.
Incarcerated people in the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn (a maximum-security federal prison) and in Rikers Island (a mixed security New York State detention center) regularly claim to be tortured (and show apparent evidence of torture), and yet their claims are rarely thoroughly examined. There has never been real accountability. Compare the New York cases to those in Chicago. From 1972 to 1991, former Chicago police commander Jon Burge and white detectives under his command systematically tortured at least 117 Black people in police custody. In May 2015, 43 years after clear evidence of torture, Chicago became the first municipality in the U.S. to provide reparations to those harmed by racially-motivated law enforcement violence, passing legislation for survivors of the Burge police torture regime. What is the difference between those tortured in Chicago and those who (at least claim to) have been tortured in New York? Decades of community activism.
This course approaches Jewish Studies from theoretical and pedagogical standpoints. In addition to looking back at ancient, medieval and Early Modern approaches to the study of Jewish topics and examining the theoretical, historical and religious underpinnings of Jewish Studies as a modern discipline, we will also read theoretical writings from related disciplines. The course will balance these materials with pedagogical materials and exercises. Faculty from disciplines related to Jewish Studies will visit the seminar to offer perspectives on current approaches to the field, and the class will visit the Rare Book and Manuscript Library with Jewish Studies Librarian Michelle Chesner. This course is required for students in the Jewish Studies MA program. It is open to graduate students, and advanced undergraduates may register with permission from the instructor. Please note that faculty visits will be added to the syllabus as they are scheduled.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Selected topics in computer science. Content and prerequisites vary between sections and semesters. May be repeated for credit. Check “topics course” webpage on the department website for more information on each section.
Master's level independent project involving theoretical, computational, experimental, or engineering design work. May be repeated, subject to Master's Program guidelines. Students must submit both a project outline prior to registration and a final project write-up at the end of the semester.