Voice and Alexander Technique II deepens and expands the work we did in Voice and Alexander Technique I. This continuing course presupposes that you have continued our work in your daily practice and in your other classes and have begun to develop clarity around the inner structure of the body which is your physical and vocal support. Our work this term will help you develop a solid vocal technique, a body that is strong, open and free, and a mind which is clear and focused.
NONFICTION LECTURE
The purpose of this course is to familiarize SIPA students with the protocols and devices used in the function of the internet while focusing on the flaws and vulnerabilities. This course will approach each session in the following manner: discussion of the topic to include what the topic is and how it is used, vulnerabilities and specifically, and example, and will follow up with a video or other demonstration of a common hacker technique or tool to illustrate the problem so the students can better understand the impact. This course is intended to complement Basics of Cybersecurity with a tighter focus on specific vulnerabilities and how these can be exploited by hackers, criminals, spies, or militaries. This course is intended to be an introduction to cybersecurity and is thus suitable for complete newcomers to the area. It is a big field, with a lot to cover; however this should get students familiar with all of the basics. The class is divided into seven topics; the first five iteratively build on each other. Session six will look to future technologies. Session seven will challenge students to understand the authorities encountered and the friction between the authorities and agencies in responding to a cyber incident. Many cyber jobs are opening up with companies that need international affairs analysts who, while not cybersecurity experts, understand the topic well enough to write policy recommendations or intelligence briefs. Even if you don’t intend your career to focus on cyber issues, having some exposure will deepen your understanding of the dynamics of many other international and public policy issues.
This course will examine cybersecurity and threats in cyberspace as a business risk: that is, the potential and consequent magnitude of loss or liability arising from conducting business connected to the Internet. Many organizations have traditionally viewed cybersecurity as a technology problem, “owned” by the Information Technology department. However, doing business connected to the Internet can create non-technical problems: legal, regulatory, financial, logistical, brand or reputational, even health or public safety problems. Increasingly, organizations are treating cybersecurity and cyber threats in a broader manner, viewing cyber as a risk to be managed, and owned ultimately by the most senior ranks of corporate governance. An example might be a bank managing cyber operational risk similarly to managing credit and market risk. However, organizations continue to face challenges as they try to translate, measure, manage, and report a risk that is highly technical, and still somewhat foreign to most risk managers. The objective of this course will be to introduce you to basic concepts of cybersecurity and threats in cyberspace, and enable you to apply them to tools, techniques, and processes for business risk management. It assumes no technical knowledge of cybersecurity, nor a deep understanding of risk management. Students will learn about the basic principles of cybersecurity, the main actors in the business and regulatory spheres, and approaches to business risk management: how to understand, describe, measure, and report risk in a cybersecurity context. Students will also understand different models and approaches used by leading institutions in various industries, including the financial services sector, critical infrastructure providers, high-technology companies, and governments.
In this course, students will analyze the following tools and their role in social innovation and policy change: artificial intelligence and machine learning, chatbots, social networks, online petitions, direct digital pressure, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, e-participation, multi-agent systems, and digitally-driven phone-banking and blast-messaging. The focus will be via study of case-studies and stories of best practices, mainly from the Global South. The analysis of tools and case studies will be complemented by brief lectures from practitioners, followed by a dialogue between the instructor and the students on the current academic debate around these issues. The course will consist of seven sessions, divided into three overarching themes: Social Innovation as a replacement of government: how to adapt service provision to the digital age; Social Innovation as a collaboration with government: how to enhance civic participation through new methodologies and technologies; Social Innovation as a counter-power to government: how to use coordinated action to stop abuse of power. The purpose of the course is to help future policy makers, entrepreneurs, civic leaders, and designers understand how public policy can learn from new and effective examples of social innovation. In the process, students will be exposed to transdisciplinary concepts touching on the subjects of political science, sociology of science and technology, political philosophy, philosophy of information and technology. Theory will be balanced with practice and students will be provided a methodology for strategic thinking that combines a mix of design thinking, product development and start-up planning and iteration techniques.
POETRY LECTURE
This class examines why some countries are poor and others rich, why some govern themselves well and others govern themselves poorly, and why some are peaceful while others have collapsed into conflict or civil war. Hence, this course tries to give you a survey of some of the big questions we ask when we study state building and the political economy of development.
During the last decade, the rapid development of US shale oil/gas and the rapid growth of renewables throughout the world, seem to have kept at bay the geopolitical power of major global energy producers such as Russia and Saudi Arabia. However, while Russia’s domestic policies took the heat of lower oil/gas prices, its international policies have only become more assertive. Over the last decade, Russia has had enough financial capital to engage in two wars—Ukraine and Syria—and to sponsor state-supported information warfare throughout Europe and the US. The question is, where did this money come from? A considerable portion of it did come from oil/gas proceeds as oil/gas exports continue to be at the service of the Kremlin administration in order to advance Russia’s global objectives. Revenues from those exports remain the major guarantor of Putin’s regime stability. Revenues from military exports are also beginning to a play larger role in Russia’s budget, but oil and gas exports continue to be a significant part of it. In addition, even though the geopolitics of oil and gas are shifting globally, Russia’s oil and gas exports are still a central tool for Russia’s geopolitical interests. Now at the time of pandemic and public strong sentiment towards green energy the world seems to be oversupplied with oil and gas. The international community is asking whether or not we really need fossil fuels. However, 80% of our energy needs still come from fossil fuels and Russian oil /gas production still play an important role in the world energy balance. In this course, we will focus on Russian resources as they affect the international community, and what role they play in the global energy mix and international relations.
This is a Law School course. For more detailed course information, please go to the Law School Curriculum Guide at: http://www.law.columbia.edu/courses/search
This course tracks the trajectories of politics in the Caucasus, focusing on the political development of the independent states of the South Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. While the focus is on contemporary political dynamics, the course considers the mechanisms through which the legacies of Imperial Russian expansion and Soviet structures interact with current mechanisms of interest articulation and power. Students in this course will examine the contours and mechanisms of the collapse of Soviet hegemony in the South Caucasus, spending some time examining the conflicts that accompanied this process and persist today. The course will address the country contexts both individually and comparatively, thereby encouraging students to delve deeply into the politics of each state, but then also enabling them to find continuities and contrasts across major thematic considerations.
This course exposes students to conceptual and practical skills needed to develop a reflective practice orientation to applied professional work in international peace building and conflict resolution. The class focuses on skills for designing, implementing, and evaluating conflict resolution interventions. During the semester, students co-design projects, creating specific objectives and activities in collaboration with a Project Supervisor in a pre-selected field-based partner institution. Students are encouraged to work in teams of 2-3 in the course. Students implement the project during the summer, taking into consideration changes on the ground, through internships under the guidance of their field-based Project Supervisors. Students return in the fall to deliver a report of their activities in the field reflecting on their experiences and presenting their findings to the SIPA community. The course supports students in developing critical practical skills and experiences in managing a conflict resolution project while exploring the professional field of applied conflict resolution. This course requires instructor permission in order to register. Please add yourself to the waitlist in SSOL and submit the proper documents in order to be considered.
This course examines how conflicting knowledges and belief-systems have been rendered occult, marginal, or repressed, and it refocuses attention on enchantment in modernity and modern disciplines as a means of their recovery. Among the questions we will explore are the following: From what place, and by what means, is the world enchanted? Is enchantment a compensation for what Freud called “the lost appeal of life on this earth”? Or is it ultimately a privileging of the irrational in a world dominated by reason? What is the place of science in enchantment? Does the decline of religion precipitate the re-enchantment of the world via art? And finally and most importantly, can we understand intellectual formations by revisiting the processes of enchantment and disenchantment? Readings will include conceptual works by Max Weber, Theodor Adorno, Marcel Gauchet, Jane Bennett, Michael Saler, Alex Owen, Bruno Latour, and Jason Josephson-Storm, among others; and literary works by Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, George du Maurier, H. G. Wells, Helena P. Blavatsky, H. P. Lovecraft, and Philip Dick. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Gauri Viswanathan (gv6@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "seminar application." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available.
The course covers a range of current topics in evolutionary and quantitative genetics, with two main aims: 1) to expose students to important, open questions in the field and 2) to help them learn how to read research papers carefully and critically. This year we will focus on the genetic basis of adaptation. Adaptation is the dynamic evolutionary process by which an organism’s fitness increases in a particular environment via changes in the frequencies of alleles contributing to heritable phenotypic trait variation. Recent evidence from human genetics, and past evidence in quantitative genetics in a variety of organisms, indicate the heritable variation in many traits is highly polygenic, suggesting that when selection pressures change, adaptation should be highly polygenic as well. At the same time, there appear to be many examples in which adaptation occured by large effect changes in few genes. We will review the theory and evidence, with the goal of understanding when we should expect adaptation to proceed by these different modes.
This course is designed to present major theoretical systems of psychotherapy, with a special emphasis on how clients in therapy change and how to conceptualize clients' presenting concerns from theoretical points of view. Issues related to application of theory in practice, especially those related to individual/cultural diversity will be addressed and emphasized.
This course investigates the functioning of the labor market using economic models and micro-economic data. It will analyze both the behavior of agents in the labor market – workers and firms – and institutions and polices that underpin such behavior. Topics include human capital, skills and education, the importance of firm wage policies, income inequality, minimum wages, immigration, collective bargaining and unions, comparative labor market institutions, and role of labor market policies. Students will conduct the hands-on analysis of real-world labor market data. The course will over econometric methods used by economists in estimating causal effects, including the use of natural experiments and instrumental variables.
Prerequisites: permission of the departmental adviser to Graduate Studies.
The goal of this course is to provide an overview of the economics of international development. The key objective is to give students a framework to think about the processes that drive economic development, as well as policies that might promote it.
This course explores the creative visualization and sonification of data. Humans produce enormous amounts of data representing complex phenomena (including but not limited to our own activities), but we there is a deficit in our ability to perceive and understand the patterns in the data. The auditory and visual perceptual systems are optimized for a wide range of spatial and temporal patterns that we process simultaneously to understand our immediate surroundings. How can we use these capabilities to better understand processes that are beyond the range of our direct perception, but we can measure indirectly with a vast range of sensors? This course addresses ways of generating both sonic and visual animations of the same data, from which we will construct videos. Questions of how to design and tune these representations to bring out patterns in the data, based on the nature of human perception and also aesthetic choices, will be discussed throughout. How might these questions of pattern perception vary (or not) for scientific and artistic intents? Students will select datasets they are interested in early in the course, and will develop and build these projects over the semester. While the course is taught using Python and RTcmix, and prior experience in Python is encouraged, students may use other sonic/visual coding environments such as Unity, Max/MSP, or Pure Data for their projects. Hardware for VR/AR and spatialized sound will be available for class use at the Computer Music Center.
This course explores the central themes in K-12 and higher education from an economic perspective. Topics in K-12 education include the effects of class-size, peer effects, teachers, accountability, charter schools, and vouchers. Topics in higher education include the decision to invest in human capital, estimating returns to college, and the market for college education. The course will cover research and policy issues from both domestic and international contexts.
This mini seminar is an introduction to psychoanalytic theories of group emotional adaptations and their representations as applied to the study of social, cultural and historical phenomena. The role of group emotional responses and adaptational processes will be described. The phenomenon of symbolic alterations of reality will be discussed. The inclusion of group emotional adaptations will make for a more comprehensive ethnology and historiography.
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This class explores advanced topics relating to the production of music by computer. Although programming experience is not a prerequisite, various programming techniques are enlisted to investigate interface design, algorithmic composition, computer analysis and processing of digital audio, and the use of computer music in contexts such as VR/AR applications. Check with the instructor for the particular focus of the class in an upcoming semester. Note: this class is not necessarily a continuation of Sound: Advanced Topics I/GR6610. Some familiarity with computer music hardware/software is expected. Permission of instructor is required to enroll.
This seminar is intended as a general introduction to a series of conversations that have been taking place across the humanities with regard to the role of inanimate objects in the construction of human subjectivities and social behavior. By calling into question methodological and theoretical dispositions rooted in deeply entrenched dichotomies between subject and object, spirit and matter, social and natural, animal and human, text and artifact, scholars in such diverse fields as philosophy, anthropology, economics, art history, and literary theory have been highlighting the manifold ways in which humans live with and through the fabricated and natural objects that shape our world, our identities and our social behavior. This course is also designed to aid students preparing for the Religion Department Zones exam in media.
An introduction to combinatorial optimization, network flows and discrete algorithms. Shortest path problems, maximum flow problems. Matching problems, bipartite and cardinality nonbipartite. Introduction to discrete algorithms and complexity theory: NP-completeness and approximation algorithms.