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One of the central tasks of this course has been to unpack the ways in which work in today's economy has changed over time. Often, when we talk about this topic, one of the first things that comes to mind is the role of technology in transforming work. Over the past few years, we have seen an explosion in what's known as the on-demand economy. It's visible everywhere. We as consumers are able to have our food delivered, grab a ride home, or even have someone run their errands, all purchased and arranged in a matter of minutes from our smartphones. Our colleague John McCarthy talks in more detail about these new ways of organizing work in a different video lecture in this course. What we're going to talk about now is how these employment arrangements are connected to two issues-- one, how we think about workers' rights in the on-demand economy, and two, how technology can promote new forms of worker advocacy in settings where gigs, not full-time jobs fo...

STEPHEN CARPENTER: Part of what I do is work with people who are preparing to be K-12 art teachers. I actually work with artists. I've taught studio-based courses in ceramics, drawing. And I'm also working with grad students who are interested in engaging in research about and through and within art practices, visual cultural practices. So there's this range of folks with whom I'm working. So one of your-- I'm trying to negotiate a place to enter, Larry. And one of the things that you said was how explicit am I with, as we've been calling it, this hidden agenda, a hidden curriculum? LARRY SUSSKIND: Not as an agenda STEPHEN CARPENTER: No, but it's the same thing, right? In many cases, it's the same thing, right? Because you have an agenda that you're trying to cover, whether it's an official agenda, we can correlate that to the official curriculum. And I'm pulling this term, these curriculum pieces from the work of George Posner ...

An important part of your image making, mostly small devices, is what you use for backgrounds, or how to view backgrounds. You know, you can make some very interesting images even more interesting if you subtlety suggest a certain kind of background that works, that's relevant. Your selection can really change your image. Sometimes you have to be kind of careful 'cause the background can overtake what you want to say and we'll see that in a moment. So take for example this image that I made of an assemblage of pieces. And I took it on a surface against a white wall, which is what a lot of you do and, the issue for me is that even though you don't think that the view sees it, the viewer does see the horizon, where the two pieces of material meet. You might say, 'Well, what what's the big deal'? Well, you should start really getting into the habit of trying to edit out anything that is ambiguous or that is not giving the viewer a very clear view ...

The question of how far we can go when we enhance, or adjust, or touch up an image in science is a critical one. You are all familiar, I'm sure, with the stunningly beautiful Hubble images published all over the world. But most of the world is not familiar with the fact that the colors we're seeing were artificially created, decided and implemented by humans. You can read a conversation I had with some of these researchers in American Scientist, in the resource section, look for this thumbnail. I think you'll find the article interesting, about the decisions the researchers made about coloring the detail of nebula. So in essence, the coloring, or enhancement, was mostly done for the purpose of communicating structure, and I would say also for helping bring attention to these amazing images. Now remember, these pictures of the universe, are representations, that is re- presentations, they are photographs of that universe, they are not the universe. All the phot...

Some of you might want to present what happens over time with your photographs. Other than creating a video, it's usually quite compelling when watching a dynamic phenomena that's true. And if you think about it, all of science is ultimately dynamic, right? Things change over time. We generally assume one has to watch a moving image to see that change. So here, for example, you are seeing something called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. It's a complicated oscillating reaction that we're observing within a Petri dish. But it's not a video, in the sense that it wasn't taken with a video camera. You're seeing a series of still images that I made and I was privileged to make in professor Zhabotinsky's lab at Brandeis. I took the images 11 seconds apart over a period of five minutes. By the way, I made the images in film, which became slide formats, as you might remember-- or then again, maybe you don't! And you're seeing digital scan...

PROFESSOR: So let's think of a specific virus, the coronavirus, including the case of interest today, which is the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus. So this virus comes in the form of virion, which is the capsid containing RNA, which is then going to infect a cell. And the size of that virion is around 120 nanometer diameter, and it's nearly a perfect sphere. Now, the size here of 120 nanometers compared to bacteria is about 1,000 times smaller than [some] bacteria. So this actually has a very big implication in terms of how a virion can be spread from one organism to another. So the bacteria, if you recall, are the size of several microns. That's the scale of large droplets, which sediment -- or larger than that, they would begin to sediment out of the air. And we can think about transmission through coughing. Also, besides the fact that the virus is much smaller, it cannot swim. So bacteria have various means of locomotion -- cilia, flagella, et cetera, whereas ...

PROFESSOR: So the transfer of respiratory pathogens is primarily accomplished through droplets that are emitted by an infected person and then either breathed in or ending up on surfaces and touched and incorporated into the body in some other way by a susceptible person. So let's begin by talking about the formation of droplets during respiration. So these droplets can form in different parts of the respiratory tract. So the respiratory tract refers to the whole system of your breathing apparatus in your body. So that includes, of course, your lungs, which involves a network of passages going from the large bronchus down to the bronchioles and ultimately to the alveolar sacs where the air is exchanged or oxygen gets into the blood and carbon dioxide is picked up, and then you exhale. In the upper respiratory tract, we have of course the mouth and the nose and the larynx, the voice box where sounds are made. The nasopharynx is sort of the region behind the mouth and t...

DAVID THORBURN: One of the things I aim for in the course, is to try to show students, in ways as concrete and rich as I can, what the authority, or power, of movies in a cultural moment might be. And I try to give them some examples of that. In my first lecture, I sometimes read to them from a passage from James Agee's novel, A Death in the Family. In the very beginning of the novel he describes, beautifully, an excursion between a father and son, going to see a Chaplin comedy in 1915 in some southern city. And what he describes is what a social occasion it was, what a moment of bonding it was for father and son, what a cultural moment it was more broadly for the whole of the population that went into the theater to laugh uproariously at Charlie's shenanigans. "And then the screen was filled with a city, and with a sidewalk of a side street of a city, and a long line of palms. And there was Charlie. Everyone laughed the minute they saw him squattily walking,...

What is the purpose of the corporation? This is one of the most controversial and perhaps one of the most important questions that we need to address in this course and that you will need to address as the next generation workforce leaders. Why is this the case? Well, because American CEOs have answered this in two different ways. From the 1940s through the '70s and '80s and into the 1990s, there was a broad view of the corporation that has now narrowed down to focus on maximizing shareholder value in the short run. Here's a quote from the CEO of Sonesta Hotels, Roger Sonnabend. He says, "Social responsibility and expanding profitability are not at odds with one another. Quite the contrary. They are two faces of the same coin." That view was shared by a lot of CEOs of his era-- best illustrated perhaps by graduates of this important institution called the Harvard Business School. The class of 1949 is known for producing an enormous number of CEOs tha...

Over the course of six weeks in the summer of 2014, Market Basket employees, joined by their customers, protested against the firing of their beloved CEO. They risked their jobs, their livelihoods, and they brought the business to a halt. At a time when we see so much division between the CEOs who represent the top 1% and the workers, who represent by the bottom 99%, this level of support for a CEO got the attention of the entire country. Arthur Demoulas, he stands for valuing people. He always says we are in the people business first, grocery business second. And when the ownership changed, you started asking the questions, what's going to happen with our benefits? What's going to happen with our pay? And when you start taking away that factor of focusing on people, the entire business model starts to fall apart. The workers were fighting for a business model that works for everyone-- for them, for their customers, and for their shareholders. We saw a number of c...