historical study
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Young people with mammoth commercial success have bred a new kind of philanthropic entrepreneur, says Google.org's Executive Director Larry Brilliant. And Brilliant also explains his optimism in smallpox, using it as a case study on a managed disease that once killed half a billion people worldwide. Through global unity and a concentrated effort, akin to what Google.org strives to accomplish in other areas, the virus was eradicated; thanks...more
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This is the first of two lectures on social psychology, the study of how we think about ourselves, other people, and social groups. Students will hear about the famous "six degrees of separation" phenomenon and how it illuminates important individual differences in social connectedness. This lecture also reviews a number of important biases that greatly influence how we think of ourselves as well as other people.
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Demonstrating her lesson using a case study of a medical device company, KPCB partner Beth Seidenberg offers an illustrative example of what angel and first-round financing might look like for the upstart enterprise. Her advice includes tips on seeking seed money, and why a small company shouldn't go out for financing too soon. Incrementally building dollars around real milestones is critical for real investment and corporate success.
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Professor Blight lectures on southern slavery. He makes a case for viewing the U.S. South as one of the five true "slave societies" in world history. He discusses the internal slave trade that moved thousands of slaves from the eastern seaboard to the cotton states of the Southwest between 1820 and 1860. Professor Blight then sketches the contents of the pro-slavery argument, including its biblical, historical, economic, cynical, and utopi...more
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The global AIDS pandemic furnishes a case study for many of the themes addressed throughout the course. While in the developed West the disease largely afflicts concentrated high-risk groups such as intravenous drug users and the sexually promiscuous, in Southern Africa it is much more a generalized disease of poverty. In countries such as Botswana and Swaziland, the economic and social consequences of the disease have created a vicious ci...more
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An intensive introduction to African American political thought that focuses on major ideological trends and political philosophies as they have been applied and interpreted by African Americans. Elements of the class include debates and conflicts in black political thought, historical contest of African American social movements, and discussions of the relationship between black political thought and major trends in Western thought. M...more
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This course offers a holistic view of the aircraft as a system, covering: basic systems engineering; cost and weight estimation; basic aircraft performance; safety and reliability; lifecycle topics; aircraft subsystems; risk analysis and management; and system realization. Small student teams retrospectively analyze an existing aircraft covering: key design drivers and decisions; aircraft attributes and subsystems; and operational experien...more
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Professor Snowden describes the historical detective work that went into the research and writing of Naples in the Time of Cholera, his study of the 1884 and 1911 epidemics of Asiatic cholera that struck Italy. The latter epidemic is of particular interest, because the official historiography of the disease has long confined its outbreaks in Western Europe to the nineteenth century. Through his investigation, Snowden discovered that there ...more
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Astrobiology is a new meta-discipline which combines astronomy, biology, chemistry, philosophy, and physics in an effort to study the current state of life in the universe. In the Stanford Astrobiology Course, lectures follow a, more or less, linear path from the Big Bang all the way to the development of complex life and, finally, space exploration. The course explains how evolutionary principles have operated at the macro, and micro, ...more
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Professor Diamond builds on previously introduced material about the cardiac system and introduces angiology, the study of the blood vessels. To begin, she draws a diagram of the composition of the circulatory system, showing how the arteries, arterioles, capillaries differ from veins and veinules. She also explains what blood vessels are made of and their specific functions. She then details elastic arteries (those more limited in number...more
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The course facilitates a close reading of Don Quixote in the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain. Students are also expected to read four of Cervantes' Exemplary Stories, Cervantes' Don Quixote: A Casebook, and J.H. Elliott's Imperial Spain. Cervantes' work will be discussed in relation to paintings by Velázquez. The question of why Don Quixote is read today will be addressed throughout the course. Students are...more
