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A situation involves strategic interaction if the best course of action of one agent depends on what others are going to do and vice-versa. These situations include, for example, the competition among firms in an oligopolistic market, the struggle between candidates in an election campaign, the wage bargaining between a worker and an employer, and the rivalry between states locked in an arms race. Although originally developed and applied ...more
Today's websites are increasingly dynamic. Pages are no longer static HTML files but instead generated by scripts and database calls. User interfaces are more seamless, with technologies like Ajax replacing traditional page reloads. This course teaches students how to build dynamic websites with Ajax and with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP), one of today's most popular frameworks. Students learn how to set up domain names with DNS, ho...more
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)Professor Wai Chee Dimock traces Faulkner's appropriation of the epic genre through two conventions: the blurring of boundaries between humans and non-humans and the resurrection of the dead. She first reads Faulkner's minor character Tull and his relation to both mules and buzzards to draw out the "nature of manhood in poor whites." From Tull, she shifts focus to Jewel and suggests that his kinshi...more
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)Professor Wai Chee Dimock positions her reading of Tender Is the Night alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald's career as a Hollywood screenwriter. She shows how the novel borrows narrative techniques from film, particularly flashback, "switchability" on a macro and micro scale, and montage. Invoking the theories of Sergei Eisenstein, she reads scenes of wartime death and individual murder to show how love ...more
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)Professor Dimock introduces the class to the works of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, the premiere writers of American modernism. She orients their novels along three "scales" of interpretation: global geopolitics, experimental narration, and sensory detail. Invoking the writings of critic Paul Fussell, she argues that all three writers are united by a preoccupati...more
There are three main types of convective storms: airmass thunderstorms, severe thunderstorms and hurricanes. These storms are all driven by the release of latent heat into the atmosphere during condensation of water vapor. Severe thunderstorms include both squall line thunderstorms and tornados. They acquire energy from water vapor in the atmosphere over land and therefore typically require warm air temperatures and high humidity. Hurrican...more
In this final lecture on The Human Stain, Professor Hungerford argues that desire is the engine of narrative, for Roth, both at the structural level and in the very grammar of his sentences. Sex and writing are alike in their attempt to cross the boundaries between persons. Passing does not only occur racially, but is also likened to the process whereby a writer, like Roth or his proxy Nathan Zuckerman, comes to inhabit the subjectivities ...more
This lecture begins by applying the united-atom "plum-pudding" view of molecular orbitals, introduced in the previous lecture, to more complex molecules. It then introduces the more utilitarian concept of localized pairwise bonding between atoms. Formulating an atom-pair molecular orbital as the sum of atomic orbitals creates an electron difference density through the cross product that enters upon squaring a sum. This "overlap" term is th...more
In this second lecture on On The Road, Professor Hungerford addresses some of the obstacles and failures to the novel's high ambitions for achieving American community through an immediacy of communication. Sal Paradise's desire to cross racial boundaries, for example, seems ultimately more exploitative than expansive; Dean's exuberant language of "Yes!" and "Wow!" devolves into meaningless gibberish. And yet the novel's mystical vision of...more
Rodrigo Jordan, Founder of Vertical, describes a challenge in making the first crossing of the Ellsworth Mountains in Antarctica, highlighting the role in optimism in allowing the team to shift their paradigm and successfully cross an ice valley. Jordan then argues that the entrepreneurs he admires have a similar, paradigm shifting optimism: despite the challenges and disappointments that his colleagues inevitably face, these entrepreneurs...more
This lecture reviews selected topics previously covered in lectures 1 through 5. This includes: scaling arguments, dot products, cross products, one-dimensional kinematics, trajectories, and uniform circular motion. Professor Lewin concludes by presenting a brain teaser to the audience. Sliding his fingers underneath a yardstick, towards the center, something strange happens: the fingers seem to make turns moving, they alternating slidi...more
Just twenty percent of the members in any group or social system own eighty percent of the assets, indicative that scale indicates a growing concentration of power. The top 2,000 companies employ and influences a million people in the modern world, says author David Rothkopf. With cross-ownership and networking in all circles - business, military, religion, and the Internet among them - a few succeed, but the majority of participants withi...more
