15.514 is an intensive introduction to the preparation and interpretation of financial information for investors (external users) and managers (internal users) and to the use of financial instruments to support system and project creation. The course adopts a decision-maker perspective on accounting and finance with the goal of helping students develop a framework for understanding financial, managerial, and tax reports. 15.514 is restricted to System Design and Management students.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgement is hereby given to Professor G. Peter Wilson for his authorship of the following content in this course:

The Five Challenges (see Syllabus and Lecture 1)
“What Do Intel and Accountants Have in Common?” (see Lecture 1)
A Conceptual Framework for Financial Accounting (see Lecture 1)

This course focuses on the tools and programs available to economic development practitioners to address capital needs for businesses and economic development projects. It provides an overview of private capital markets and financing sources to understand capital market imperfections that constrain economic development, business accounting, financial statement analysis, federal economic development programs, and public finance tools. The course covers policies and program models, including revolving loan funds, guarantee programs, venture capital funds, bank holding companies, community development loan funds and credit unions, micro-enterprise funds, and the Community Reinvestment Act. The objective of this course is to provide students with a comprehensive overview of economic development finance practice in the United States, and to develop a knowledge base and skills to either be a development finance practitioner, or apply economic development finance approaches to other fields of planning and community development.

This course introduces finite element methods for the analysis of solid, structural, fluid, field, and heat transfer problems. Steady-state, transient, and dynamic conditions are considered. Finite element methods and solution procedures for linear and nonlinear analyses are presented using largely physical arguments. The homework and a term project (for graduate students) involve use of the general purpose finite element analysis program ADINA. Applications include finite element analyses, modeling of problems, and interpretation of numerical results.

This course presents finite element theory and methods for general linear and nonlinear analyses. Reliable and effective finite element procedures are discussed with their applications to the solution of general problems in solid, structural, and fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer, and fluid-structure interactions. The governing continuum mechanics equations, conservation laws, virtual work, and variational principles are used to establish effective finite element discretizations and the stability, accuracy, and convergence are discussed. The homework and the student-selected term project using the general-purpose finite element analysis program ADINA are important parts of the course.

Finite element analysis is now widely used for solving complex static and dynamic problems encountered in engineering and the sciences. In these two video courses, Professor K. J. Bathe, a researcher of world renown in the field of finite element analysis, teaches the basic principles used for effective finite element analysis, describes the general assumptions, and discusses the implementation of finite element procedures for linear and nonlinear analyses.
These videos were produced in 1982 and 1986 by the MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study.

This class provides students with an introduction to principal concepts and methods of fluid mechanics. Topics covered in the course include pressure, hydrostatics, and buoyancy; open systems and control volume analysis; mass conservation and momentum conservation for moving fluids; viscous fluid flows, flow through pipes; dimensional analysis; boundary layers, and lift and drag on objects. Students will work to formulate the models necessary to study, analyze, and design fluid systems through the application of these concepts, and to develop the problem-solving skills essential to good engineering practice of fluid mechanics in practical applications.

This class introduces fluid dynamics to first year graduate students. The aim is to help students acquire an understanding of some of the basic concepts of fluid dynamics that will be needed as a foundation for advanced courses in atmospheric science, physical oceanography, ocean engineering, etc. The emphasis will be on fluid fundamentals, but with an atmosphere/ocean twist.

This course explores connections between what we eat and who we are through cross-cultural study of how personal and collective identities, social relations, and economic inequalities are formed and maintained via practices of food production, preparation, and consumption. Discussions are organized around critical discussion of what makes “good” food good (tasty, healthy, authentic, ethical, etc.), and draw on anthropological studies as well as recent writing and films on the politics of food and agriculture. A primary goal of the course is to provide students with conceptual tools to understand and evaluate food systems at local and global levels. Instruction and practice in written and oral communication is provided.

In this class, food serves as both the subject and the object of historical analysis. As a subject, food has been transformed over the last 100 years, largely as a result of ever more elaborate scientific and technological innovations. From a need to preserve surplus foods for leaner times grew an elaborate array of techniques – drying, freezing, canning, salting, etc – that changed not only what people ate, but how far they could/had to travel, the space in which they lived, their relations with neighbors and relatives, and most of all, their place in the economic order of things. The role of capitalism in supporting and extending food preservation and development was fundamental. As an object, food offers us a way into cultural, political, economic, and techno-scientific history. Long ignored by historians of science and technology, food offers a rich source for exploring, e.g., the creation and maintenance of mass-production techniques, industrial farming initiatives, the politics of consumption, vertical integration of business firms, globalization, changing race and gender identities, labor movements, and so forth. How is food different in these contexts, from other sorts of industrial goods? What does the trip from farm to table tell us about American culture and history?

This course will explore food in modern American history as a story of industrialization and globalization. Lectures, readings, and discussions will emphasize the historical dimensions of—and debates about—slave plantations and factory farm labor; industrial processing and technologies of food preservation; the political economy and ecology of global commodity chains; the vagaries of nutritional science; food restrictions and reform movements; food surpluses and famines; cooking traditions and innovations; the emergence of restaurants, supermarkets, fast food, and slow food. The core concern of the course will be to understand the increasingly pervasive influence of the American model of food production and consumption patterns.

Through investigating cross-cultural case studies, this course introduces students to the anthropological study of the social institutions and symbolic meanings of family, gender, and sexuality. We will explores the myriad forms that families and households take and considers their social, emotional, and economic dynamics.

Inspired by the work of the architect Antoni Gaudi, this research workshop will explore three-dimensional problems in the static equilibrium of structural systems. Through an interdisciplinary collaboration between computer science and architecture, we will develop design tools for determining the form of three-dimensional structural systems under a variety of loads. The goal of the workshop is to develop real-time design and analysis tools which will be useful to architects and engineers in the form-finding of efficient three-dimensional structural systems.

How and why do we participate in public life? How do we get drawn into community and political affairs? In this course we examine the associations and networks that connect us to one another and structure our social and political interactions. Readings are drawn from a growing body of research suggesting that the social networks, community norms, and associational activities represented by the concepts of civil society and social capital can have important effects on the functioning of democracy, stability and change in political regimes, the capacity of states to carry out their objectives, and international politics.

This course examines some leading examples of major genres of storytelling in the Western tradition, among them epic (Homer’s Odyssey), romance (from the Arthurian tradition), and novel (Cervantes’s Don Quixote). We will be asking why people tell (and have always told) stories, how they tell them, why they might tell them the way they do, and what difference it makes how they tell them. We’ll combine an investigation of the changing formal properties of narratives with consideration of the historical, cultural, and technological factors that have influenced how tales got told. In keeping with its CI-H and HASS-D label, this course will involve substantial attention to students’ writing and speaking abilities.

This class will investigate the ways in which the formal aspects of Western storytelling in various media have shaped both fantasies and perceptions, making certain understandings of experience possible through the selection, arrangement, and processing of narrative material. Surveying the field chronologically across the major narrative genres and sub-genres from Homeric epic through the novel and across media to include live performance, film, and video games, we will be examining the ways in which new ideologies and psychological insights become available through the development of various narrative techniques and new technologies. Emphasis will be placed on the generic conventions of story-telling as well as on literary and cultural issues, the role of media and modes of transmission, the artistic significance of the chosen texts and their identity as anthropological artifacts whose conventions and assumptions are rooted in particular times, places, and technologies. Authors will include: Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Christian evangelists, Marie de France, Cervantes, La Clos, Poe, Lang, Cocteau, Disney-Pixar, and Maxis-Electronic Arts, with theoretical readings in Propp, Bakhtin, Girard, Freud, and Marx.

This practicum focuses on applying the principles of sustainability to improve the quality of life and activity along the Foshan downtown riverfront. The City has recently engaged in several planning efforts that, with the help of consultants and experts, will help to identify strategies to revitalize the City’s center and establish a new downtown. This practicum will compliment these efforts by focusing on planning and design options in and around the Pearl River, a now underutilized waterway that runs through the City’s new downtown.

This subject describes and illustrates computational approaches to solving problems in systems biology. A series of case-studies will be explored that demonstrate how an effective match between the statement of a biological problem and the selection of an appropriate algorithm or computational technique can lead to fundamental advances. The subject will cover several discrete and numerical algorithms used in simulation, feature extraction, and optimization for molecular, network, and systems models in biology.

Advances in cognitive science have resolved, clarified, and sometimes complicated some of the great questions of Western philosophy: what is the structure of the world and how do we come to know it; does everyone represent the world the same way; what is the best way for us to act in the world. Specific topics include color, objects, number, categories, similarity, inductive inference, space, time, causality, reasoning, decision-making, morality and consciousness. Readings and discussion include a brief philosophical history of each topic and focus on advances in cognitive and developmental psychology, computation, neuroscience, and related fields. At least one subject in cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, or artificial intelligence is required. An additional project is required for graduate credit.

This course is an introduction to computational biology emphasizing the fundamentals of nucleic acid and protein sequence and structural analysis; it also includes an introduction to the analysis of complex biological systems. Topics covered in the course include principles and methods used for sequence alignment, motif finding, structural modeling, structure prediction and network modeling, as well as currently emerging research areas.

This course explores the foundations of policy making in developing countries. The goal is to spell out various policy options and to quantify the trade-offs between them. We will study the different facets of human development: education, health, gender, the family, land relations, risk, informal and formal norms and institutions. This is an empirical class. For each topic, we will study several concrete examples chosen from around the world. While studying each of these topics, we will ask: What determines the decisions of poor households in developing countries? What constraints are they subject to? Is there a scope for policy (by government, international organizations, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs))? What policies have been tried out? Have they been successful?
MITx Online Version
This course is part of the Micromaster’s Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy through MITx Online. The course is entirely free to audit, though learners have the option to pay a fee, which is based on the learner’s ability to pay, to take the proctored exam, and earn a course certificate. To access the course, create an MITx Online account and enroll in the course 14.740x Foundations of Development Policy.