http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/33970 MIT's OpenCourseWare: a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41943 3.91J / 1.593J Mechanical Behavior of Plastics, Spring 2003 Roylance, David Relation among chemical composition, physical structure, and mechanical behavior of plastics or synthetic high polymers. Study of types of polymers; fundamentals of viscoelastic phenomena such as creep, stress relaxation, stress rupture, mechanical damping, impact; effects of chemical composition and structure on viscoelastic and strength properties; methods of mechanical property evaluation. Influences of plastics fabrication methods. Emphasis on recent research techniques and results. Individual laboratory projects investigating problems related to current research. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41942 24.119 Mind and Machines, Spring 2005 Byrne, Alexander Examination of problems in the intersection of artificial intelligence, psychology, and philosophy. Issues discussed: whether people are Turing Machines, whether computers can be conscious, limitations on what computers can do, computation and neurophysiology, the Turing test, the analog/digital distinction, the Chinese Room argument, the causal efficacy of content, the inverted spectrum, mental representation, procedural semantics, connectionism, the relation between simulation and explanation, and whether some aspects of mentality are more resistant to programming than others. From the course home page: Course Description This course is an introduction to many of the central issues in a branch of philosophy called philosophy of mind. Some of the questions we will discuss include the following. Can computers think? Is the mind an immaterial thing? Or is the mind the brain? Or does the mind stand to the brain as a computer program stands to the hardware? How can creatures like ourselves think thoughts that are "about" things? (For example, we can all think that Aristotle is a philosopher, and in that sense think "about" Aristotle, but what is the explanation of this quite remarkable ability?) Can I know whether your experiences and my experiences when we look at raspberries, fire trucks and stop lights are the same? Can consciousness be given a scientific explanation? http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41941 22.611J / 6.651J / 8.613J Introduction To Plasma Physics I, Fall 2002 Molvig, Kim Introduces plasma phenomena relevant to energy generation by controlled thermonuclear fusion and to astrophysics. Basic plasma properties and collective behavior. Coulomb collisions and transport processes. Motion of charged particles in magnetic fields; plasma confinement schemes. MHD models; simple equilibrium and stability analysis. Two-fluid hydrodynamic plasma models; wave propagation in a magnetic field. Introduces kinetic theory; Vlasov plasma model; electron plasma waves and Landau damping; ion-acoustic waves; streaming instabilities. A subject description tailored to fit the background and interests of the attending students distributed shortly before and at the beginning of the subject. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41937 24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory, Fall 2004 Von Fintel, Kai Formal theories of context-dependency, presupposition, implicature, context-change, focus and topic. Special emphasis on the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. Applications to the analysis of quantification, definiteness, presupposition projection, conditionals and modality, anaphora, questions and answers.