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MIT Open Course Ware
An inspiring trip to Haiti and publishing educational materials that matter: read about it in the newest letter from executive director Cecilia d'Oliveira.
Khan Academy
Matrices, vectors, vector spaces, transformations. Covers all topics in a first year college linear algebra course. This is an advanced course normally taken by science or engineering majors after taking at least two semesters of calculus (although calculus really isn't a prereq) so don't confuse this with regular high school algebra.
Big Think
Since the beginning of recorded time, and probably since long before that, the human body has been highly politicized, particularly in the areas of sexuality and reproduction. With the emergence of biotechnology, genetic modification, and the further refinement of psychopharmacology, we can expect further political polarization around the ethical issues these new options will raise. For example: should we genetically enhance our offspring in accordance with our cultural values, thereby significantly shaping their future in unpredictable ways before they’re even born? In our time, many of the political battles over the body revolve around reproduction, and therefore the rights of women. Abortion and birth control, specifically, are epicenters of controversy in the United States, and the site of a fervent cultural clash between religious ideas about sex and reproduction and democratic ideals of personal liberty.Rainn Wilson: I think creative blocks come from people’s life journeys. If you don’t know who you are or what you’re about or what you believe in it’s really pretty impossible to be creative. So I think a lot of times when people have "creative blocks" and I know my share of friends do as well if they’re at just some stuck point. They’re not sure what to do with their lives or their writing or their photography or their filmmaking or whatever it is that they’re doing.
Rainn Wilson Interview
This course is an introduction to game theory and strategic thinking . Ideas such as dominance , backward induction , Nash equilibrium , evolutionary stability , commitment , credibility , asymmetric information , adverse selection , and signaling are discussed and applied to games played in class and to examples drawn from economics, politics, the movies, and elsewhere. favorites
Game Theory
Professor Bailyn returns to the subject of the expansion of the universe to offer explanations that do not require belief in the Big Bang theory. One alternative is a theory that, in the past, the entire universe was reduced to an "initial singularity," in which everything was much closer, and therefore denser and hotter. Since the universe is in constant flux, however, it follows that in the future things will drift apart. The Steady State explanation for the expansion of the universe is then explained.
Introduction to Astrophysics
Modern Theoretical Physics
The old Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics associated with Niels Bohr is giving way to a more profoud interpretation based on the idea of quantum entanglement. Entanglement not only replaces the obsolete notion of the collapse of wave function but it is also the basis for Bell's famous theorem, the new paradigm of quantum computing, and finally the widely discussed "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics of Everett. This course consists of parts I and III of a three part, year-long course series, but each course stands on its own and serves to look at some of the basics of quantum mechanics, entangement, Bell's theorem, elements of quantum computing, quantum teleportation, and similar material. favorites Lecture 1 of Leonard Susskind's course concentrating on Quantum Entanglements (Part 1, Fall 2006). Recorded September 25, 2006 at Stanford University.Financial Theory
In order for Social Security to work, people have to believe there's some possibility that the world will last forever, so that each old generation will have a young generation to support it. The overlapping generations model, invented by Allais and Samuelson but here augmented with land, represents such a situation. Financial equilibrium can again be reduced to general equilibrium. At first glance it would seem that the model requires a solution of an infinite number of supply equals demand equations, one for each time period. But by assuming stationarity, the whole analysis can be reduced to one equation. In this mathematical framework we reach an even more precise and subtle understanding of Social Security and the real rate of interest.