Courses tagged with "Information environments" (108)

This course discusses the evolution and role of urban public transportation modes, systems and services, focusing on bus and rail. Technological characteristics are described, along with their impacts on capacity, service quality, and cost. Current practice and new methods for data collection and analysis, performance monitoring, route and network design, frequency determination, and vehicle and crew scheduling are covered. The course also discusses effects of pricing policy and service quality on ridership, methods for estimating costs associated with proposed service changes, organizational models for delivering public transportation service including finance and operations, and select transit management topics including labor relations, fare policy and technology, marketing and operations management.

This class presents a detailed study of soil properties with emphasis on interpretation of field and laboratory test data and their use in soft-ground construction engineering. Topics to be covered include: consolidation and secondary compression; basic strength principles; stress-strain strength behavior of clays, emphasizing effects of sample disturbance, anisotropy, and strain rate; strength and compression of granular soils; and engineering properties of compacted soils. Some knowledge of field and laboratory testing is assumed for all students.

This course provides an overview of key concepts in strategic management in the construction, real estate, and architecture industries. Topics include supply chain analysis, market segmentation, vertical integration, competitive advantage, and industry transformation. This course is of interest to students seeking more understanding of the business dynamics of real estate and construction; seeking to provide value in firms which they may join; or seeking to build a foundation for their own entrepreneurial pursuits.

This course uses computer-based methods for the analysis of large-scale structural systems. Topics covered include: modeling strategies for complex structures; application to tall buildings, cable-stayed bridges, and tension structures; introduction to the theory of active structural control; design of classical feedback control systems for civil structures; and simulation studies using customized computer software.

The course is designed to provide a better understanding of the built environment, globalization, the current financial crisis and the impact of these factors on the rapidly changing and evolving international architecture, engineering, construction fields.

We will, hopefully, obtain a better understanding of how these forces of globalization and the current financial crisis are having an impact on the built environment and how they will affect firms and your future career opportunities. We will also identify, review and discuss best practices and lessons that can be learned from recent events.

We will explore the "international built environment" in detail, examining how it functions and asking what are the managerial, entrepreneurial and professional opportunities, challenges and risks in it, especially growing crossover and multi-disciplinary opportunities; and we will seek to understand what makes this "built environment" so different from other sectors.

This course discusses management methods of relevance to public transportation systems. Topics include strategic planning management, labor relations, maintenance planning and administration, financing, marketing and fare policy, and management information and decision support systems. The course shows how these general management tasks are dealt with in the transit industry and presents alternative strategies. It also identifies alternative arrangements for service provision, including different ways of involving the private sector in public transportation.

Design, operation, and management of traffic flows over complex transportation networks are the foci of this course. It covers two major topics: traffic flow modeling and traffic flow operations. Sub-topics include deterministic and probabilistic models, elements of queuing theory, and traffic assignment. Concepts are illustrated through various applications and case studies. This is a half-term subject offered during the second half of the semester.

Through a combination of lectures, cases, and class discussions this subject examines the economic and political conflict between transportation and the environment. It investigates the role of government regulation, green business and transportation policy as facilitators of economic development and environmental sustainability. It analyzes a variety of international policy problems including government-business relations; the role of interest groups, non-governmental organizations, and the public and media in the regulation of the automobile; sustainable development; global warming; the politics of risk and siting of transport facilities; environmental justice; equity; and transportation and public health in the urban metropolis. It provides students with an opportunity to apply transportation and planning methods to developing policy alternatives in the context of environmental politics.

This class surveys the current concepts, theories, and issues in strategic management of transportation organizations. It provides transportation logistics and engineering systems students with an overview of the operating context, leadership challenges, strategies, and management tools that are used in today's public and private transportation organizations. The following concepts, tools, and issues are presented in both public and private sector cases: alternative models of decision-making, strategic planning (e.g., use of SWOT analysis and scenario development), stakeholder valuation and analysis, government-based regulation and cooperation within the transportation enterprise, disaster communications, systems safety, change management, and the impact of globalization.

Approaching transportation as a complex, large-scale, integrated, open system (CLIOS), this course strives to be an interdisciplinary systems subject in the "open" sense. It introduces qualitative modeling ideas and various techniques and philosophies of modeling complex transportation enterprises. It also introduces conceptual frameworks for qualitative analysis, such as frameworks for regional strategic planning, institutional change analysis, and new technology development and deployment. And it covers transportation as a large-scale, integrated system that interacts directly with the social, political, and economic aspects of contemporary society. Fundamental elements and issues shaping traveler and freight transportation systems are covered, along with underlying principles governing transportation planning, investment, operations, and maintenance.

The main objective of this course is to give broad insight into the different facets of transportation systems, while providing a solid introduction to transportation demand and cost analyses. As part of the core in the Master of Science in Transportation program, the course will not focus on a specific transportation mode but will use the various modes to apply the theoretical and analytical concepts presented in the lectures and readings.

Introduces transportation systems analysis, stressing demand and economic aspects. Covers the key principles governing transportation planning, investment, operations and maintenance. Introduces the microeconomic concepts central to transportation systems. Topics covered include economic theories of the firm, the consumer, and the market, demand models, discrete choice analysis, cost models and production functions, and pricing theory. Application to transportation systems include congestion pricing, technological change, resource allocation, market structure and regulation, revenue forecasting, public and private transportation finance, and project evaluation; covering urban passenger transportation, freight, aviation and intelligent transportation systems.

1.34 focuses on the geotechnical aspects of hazardous waste management, with specific emphasis on the design of land-based waste containment structures and hazardous waste remediation. Topics include: introduction to hazardous waste, definition of hazardous waste, regulatory requirements, waste characteristics, geo-chemistry, and contaminant transport; the design and operation of waste containment structures, landfills, impoundments, and mine-waste disposal; the characterization and remediation of contaminated sites, the superfund law, preliminary site assessment, site investigation techniques, and remediation technologies; and monitoring requirements.

This course is an overview of engineering approaches to protecting water quality with an emphasis on fundamental principals. Theory and conceptual design of systems for treating municipal wastewater and drinking water are discussed, as well as reactor theory, process kinetics, and models. Physical, chemical, and biological processes are presented, including sedimentation, filtration, biological treatment, disinfection, and sludge processing. Finally, there is discussion of engineered and natural processes for wastewater treatment.

The course material emphasizes mathematical models for predicting distribution and fate of effluents discharged into lakes, reservoirs, rivers, estuaries, and oceans. It also focuses on formulation and structure of models as well as analytical and simple numerical solution techniques. Also discussed are the role of element cycles, such as oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus, as water quality indicators; offshore outfalls and diffusion; salinity intrusion in estuaries; and thermal stratification, eutrophication, and sedimentation processes in lakes and reservoirs. This course is a core requirement for the Environmental MEng program.

This subject is concerned with quantitative methods for analyzing large-scale water resource problems. Topics covered include the design and management of facilities for river basin development, flood control, water supply, groundwater remediation, and other activities related to water resources. Simulation models and optimization methods are often used to support analyses of water resource problems. In this subject we will be constructing simulation models with the MATLAB® programming language and solving numerical optimization problems with the GAMS optimization package.

6.823 is a course in the department's "Computer Systems and Architecture" concentration. 6.823 is a study of the evolution of computer architecture and the factors influencing the design of hardware and software elements of computer systems. Topics may include: instruction set design; processor micro-architecture and pipelining; cache and virtual memory organizations; protection and sharing; I/O and interrupts; in-order and out-of-order superscalar architectures; VLIW machines; vector supercomputers; multithreaded architectures; symmetric multiprocessors; and parallel computers.

This class investigates the theory, method, and form of collage. It studies not only the historical precedents for collage and their physical attributes, but the psychology and process that plays a part in the making of them. The class was broken into three parts, changing scales and methods each time, to introduce and study the rigor by which decisions were made in relation to the collage. The class was less about the making of art than the study of the processes by which art is made.

This studio explores the notion of in-between by engaging several relationships; the relationship between intervention and perception, between representation and notation and between the fixed and the temporal. In the Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis Borges tells the perverse tale of the one to one scale map, where the desire for precision and power leads to the escalating production of larger and more accurate maps of the territory. For Jean Baudrillard, "The territory no longer precedes the map nor survives it. …it is the map that precedes the territory... and thus, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map." The map or the territory, left to ruin-shredding across the 'other', beautifully captures the tension between reality and representation. Mediating between collective desire and territorial surface, maps filter, create, frame, scale, orient, and project. A map has agency. It is not merely representational but operational, the experience and discursive potential of this process lies in the reciprocity between the representation and the real. It is in-between these specific sets of relationships that this studio positions itself.

This semester students are asked to transform the Hereshoff Museum in Bristol, Rhode Island, through processes of erasure and addition. Hereshoff Manufacturing was recognized as one of the premier builders of America's Cup racing boats between 1890's and 1930's. The studio, however, is about more than the program. It is about land, water, and wind and the search for expressing materially and tectonically the relationships between these principle conditions. That is, where the land is primarily about stasis (docking, anchoring and referencing our locus), water's fluidity holds the latent promise of movement and freedom. Movement is activated by wind, allowing for negotiating the relationship between water and land.

The theme that unites the Level II studios in the fall semester is a focus upon the 'making of architecture and built form' as a tectonic, technical and materially driven endeavor. It is a design investigation that is rooted in a larger culture of materiality and the associated phenomena, but a study of the language and production of built form as an integrated response to the conceptual proposition of the project. The studio will look to works of architecture where the material tectonic and its resultant technology or fabrication become instrumental to the realization of the ideas, in whatever form they may take. This becomes the 'art of technology' -- suggesting a level of innovation and creative manipulation as part of the design process to transform material into a composition of beauty and poetry as well as environmental control. In this regard the studio will look to the works and design processes of a number of architects including Shigeru Ban, Peter Zumthor, Herzog and deMeuron, Kazuyo Sejima, Richard Horden, Rick Joy and Glenn Murcutt among others.