Spring 2010 Large-Format Courses

Professor Randolph Bias
Knowing: Acquiring and Sharing Information in the Information Age
This class will address how we “know” anything—how we gain new knowledge, how we share it with others, and how we discern good information from bad. The course will address the modern field of information studies and will integrate with it a module on experimental design and statistics.

Professor Jonathan Brown
Imperialism or International Cooperation: US Relations with Latin America
This course surveys the history of the United States trade, investments, and diplomacy in Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to the Neo-liberal Reforms of the 1990s. The central question of the course will revolve around whether, on balance, the United States has contributed positively to the development of democracy and economic growth in Latin America.

Professor Sheldon Ekland-Olson
Life and Death Decisions
The course explores decisions related to our ability to control the life and death process, including issues of creation and termination, eugenics, in vitro fertilization, abortion, suicide, euthanasia, doctor-assisted suicide, capital punishment, and war.

Professors Bruce Hunt and Linda Henderson
Science and Art: Then and Now
This course is organized around alternating presentations of History of Science and History of Art content, with the goal of introducing students to both science and art as well as to their historical interconnections, with attitudes toward nature as the unifying theme.

Professor Bruce Porter
The Computer in the Modern World
This course offers an introduction to how the computer has revolutionized the world in which we live, while addressing such issues as privacy and security.

Professor Sahotra Sarkar
The Rise of Modern Science
This course is a survey of the historical development of modern science from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The emphasis will be on how the advances of science have transformed our most basic ideas, about space, time, and causality, about life and what it means to be human.

Professor John Scalo
Extraterrestrial Life
We discuss possibilities for Earth-like worlds, the living state, complex organisms, and human-like intelligence in our Galaxy. We want to know whether our world, and the life it supports, is a fluke, or whether our Galaxy could be teeming with planets inhabited by complex organisms, and how science can even address such questions.

Professor Christine Schmidt
Biotechnology and World Health
This course provides an overview of global health concerns and how technological advances can improve human health. We will compare and contrast health concerns and technology advances for different parts of the world, including developed and developing countries.

Professor Lawrence Speck
Creative Problem Solving
This course will focus on the common thread of problem solving that runs through fields as divergent as software design, filmmaking, entrepreneurship, engineering design, architecture, political strategy, experimental science, and other fields.

Professors Michael Webber, Dave Allen and Thomas Edgar
Energy, Environment, and Society
Students will examine how science, technology, economics and social policy are interrelated and affect the three main pillars for sustainability: economy, social equity and environment.