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PROFESSOR: So besides our physical expectation that a virus such as SARS-CoV-2, coronavirus, could be transmitted through respiratory droplets, especially aerosol droplets through the airborne route of transmission, there is substantial evidence-- both epidemiological evidence and some physical evidence-- to support this hypothesis. So first, let's go through some of the epidemiological evidence. This is a very small fraction of what is available to date. So one of the first incidents that gave a sense there might be airborne transmission was a religious event that took place at the Tiantong Temple in Ningbo China, where there were hundreds of people in attendance. But in particular, there were two buses that brought worshippers in one-hour bus rides to this location. And on one of the buses was what was known to be the first infected person with COVID-19, entering this region after having had contact with others from Wuhan China, the initial source of the outbreak. A...

Today, let's start our little look at history. We've actually been here before is sort of the theme I want to develop, because I want us to put us back as if you are entering the labor force around 1930. You've just come off what we call the roaring '20s. And while you should feel better because the economy was going so well in the 1920s and profits were up and the stock market was at record levels, you probably don't feel very optimistic. Because despite all this good news, family income was falling in the 1920s as it is today. Most of the income went to the top 10%, just as it is today in our society. And then of course 1929 comes along, and we get the Great Stock Market Crash, and everything starts to fall to pieces. At that point, over the next several years, if you were entering the labor force or an existing, more mature worker, you were expected to lose between 8% to 20% percent of your income. If you got unemployed, over 25% of the labor force,...

ANJALI SASTRY: Part of our challenge as teachers is to help make sure that we're embedding into their approach enough rigor, that we're looking at the data and the evidence and that it's being linked to the content we're teaching here. SARAH HANSEN: Today in the podcast, we're looking at a new kind of independent study. ANJALI SASTRY: Teaching this way is incredibly rewarding and also really scary. You'll often be invited into domains where you don't have the expertise, and it's quite hard to predict how a given session or conversation will go. SARAH HANSEN: Welcome to Chalk Radio, a podcast about inspired teaching at MIT. I'm your host, Sarah Hansen, from MIT OpenCourseWare. In this episode, we'll be talking about action learning and an exciting evolution of the independent study. The MIT Sloan School of Management has a tradition of involving MBA Fellows in collaborations with partners from around the globe. For years, these proje...

Our discussion about the future of the workforce would not be complete without an exploration of what impact the current innovations in technology will have, specifically, artificial intelligence. Over the past three years, there have been significant innovations in big data, database architecture, and artificial intelligence, that are enabling new business models and products. In simplest terms, the innovations in artificial intelligence are equipping algorithms to make smarter decisions about tasks and problems that have, so far, been thought only to be reserved for humans. The accompanying innovations, and cheapening of hardware, that enables artificial intelligence algorithms to read and process incredibly large data sets, has motivated more entrepreneurs, and technologists, to innovate with artificial intelligence. Many think that the implications for the workplace will hurt workers. Similar to how the Industrial Revolution displaced many workers through the creation...

[APPLAUSE] MODERATOR: today our keynote speaker is Tom Friedman. I have a story Tom doesn't know. I first heard him speak at a graduation ceremony. I think it was his daughter and my son were classmates. And it was the graduation ceremony at Yale. And I recall him giving the graduation speech. And it was truly a tour de force of both deep insight and personal commentary about their futures. It occurred to me then, my universal answer to the question when you're in a meeting and you are planning an event, well, who should we get to come speak? It made it real simple. I just kept saying. Thomas Friedman. And I continued to do that for several years in a row. And guess what? We finally got it to work. So it's my honor to introduce Tom Friedman, who actually needs very little in the way of introduction. But, being polite, I will give you some of the highlights of what's an extraordinary career. He is one of the keenest observers and commentators on the issues ...

CASEY RODRIGUEZ: We'll continue our discussion of the Riemann integral. So let me just recall a few bits of notation from last time and then also, the main result that we proved at the end of last class. So we had partitions, which are just finite sets. So here, a is less than b, and we're looking at an interval ab. Partitions, they're just finite sets of ab. And then we also had tags, which were finite sets as well with c one between x0 and x1, which is less than or equal to xi 2, which is less than or equal to x2 and so on. And we call these tag partitions. And we also had the norm of a partition. This is the max of-- so we think of partitions as being-- as breaking up the interval ab up into smaller subintervals, x0 up to x1. I got to get a different piece of chalk. This one is going psychedelic on me. And then the xi ones are just points chosen in these smaller subintervals. The norm of a partition is the length of the largest subinterval. And then we had ...