quantitative predictions
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This course explores the physical processes that control Earth's atmosphere, ocean, and climate. Quantitative methods for constructing mass and energy budgets. Topics include clouds, rain, severe storms, regional climate, the ozone layer, air pollution, ocean currents and productivity, the seasons, El Niño, the history of Earth's climate, global warming, energy, and water resources.
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This course provides a thorough introduction to the principles and methods of physics for students who have good preparation in physics and mathematics. Emphasis is placed on problem solving and quantitative reasoning. This course covers Newtonian mechanics, special relativity, gravitation, thermodynamics, and waves.
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This course uses the theory and application of atomistic computer simulations to model, understand, and predict the properties of real materials. Specific topics include: energy models from classical potentials to first-principles approaches; density functional theory and the total-energy pseudopotential method; errors and accuracy of quantitative predictions: thermodynamic ensembles, Monte Carlo sampling and molecular dynamics simulations...more
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Census data is often politically influenced and hence inaccurate. The birthrate in developing countries is nearly twice that in developed countries. Most humans live in less developed countries, so the world birthrate is near the higher number. The world birthrate is two and a half times the death rate; we are not close to population stabilization. Almost everywhere, the death rate has been drastically reduced; further changes will not mas...more
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A mortgage involves making a promise, backing it with collateral, and defining a way to dissolve the promise at prearranged terms in case you want to end it by prepaying. The option to prepay, the refinancing option, makes the mortgage much more complicated than a coupon bond, and therefore something that a hedge fund could make money trading. In this lecture we discuss how to build and calibrate a model to forecast prepayments in order to...more
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In order to understand the precise predictions of the Leverage Cycle theory, in this last class we explicitly solve two mathematical examples of leverage cycles. We show how supply and demand determine leverage as well as the interest rate, and how impatience and volatility play crucial roles in setting the interest rate and the leverage. Mathematically, the model helps us identify the three key elements of a crisis. First, scary bad news ...more
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We previously established that the reality of scarcity invalidates Marx's core idea of superabundance, and mortally wounds his theory. Certainly, his historical predictions about worker-led socialist revolutions around the world were off-mark. Today, Professor Shapiro presents more of the shortcomings of the Marxian tradition. These include Marx's failure to account for the ability of the state to buttress capitalism and stave off the cond...more
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Professor McBride uses this lecture to show that covalent bonding depends primarily on two factors: orbital overlap and energy-match. First he discusses how overlap depends on hybridization; then how bond strength depends on the number of shared electrons. In this way quantum mechanics shows that Coulomb's law answers Newton's query about what "makes the Particles of Bodies stick together by very strong Attractions." Energy mismatch betwee...more
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Epidemics, or high-impact infectious diseases, have had an historical impact equal to that of wars, revolutions and economic crises. This course looks at the various ways in which these diseases have affected societies in Europe and North America from 1600 to the present. Contrary to optimistic mid-twentieth-century predictions, epidemic diseases still pose a major threat to human well-being. Diseases will be considered not only in their b...more
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The most prominent chemist in the generation following Lavoisier was Berzelius in Sweden. Together with Gay-Lussac in Paris and Davy in London, he discovered new elements, and improved atomic weights and combustion analysis for organic compounds. Invention of electrolysis led not only to new elements but also to the theory of dualism, with elements being held together by electrostatic attraction. Wöhler's report on the synthesis of urea re...more
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Understanding conformational relationships makes it easy to draw idealized chair structures for cyclohexane and to visualize axial-equatorial interconversion. After quantitative consideration of the conformational energies of ethane, propane, and butane, cyclohexane is used to illustrate the utility of molecular mechanics as an alternative to quantum mechanics for estimating such energies. To give useful accuracy this empirical scheme requ...more
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Wirt makes some interesting predictions about the future of digital music, digital photos, and the trends of high speed networks and increasing storage capacity. He describes a world where almost everything has a built-in hard drive for storing information, but the challenge will be keeping it all in sync.
