Open course ware

PROFESSOR: So let's build on this concept of diffusion of virions in droplets to understand how we would expect a size dependent infectivity of virions in different sized droplets. So an important concept in epidemiology that we will come to later is the infectivity, which is the probability that if a virion is transferred that it actually causes an infection in the host. That can be further broken down into a product of two probabilities. The first is that if the virus has escaped from the droplet, it actually causes an infection. And that's perhaps something which is roughly constant. It has to do with the physiology of the host. But then there is the escape of the virion from the droplet. And as we've already discussed, that's a strongly size dependent quantity. And from very large droplets, it's very difficult in a mucus droplet, especially, for the virion to diffuse out in a reasonable amount of time. And in fact, virions are typically found to ha...

PROFESSOR: Good morning. Come on down. All right. So last time, we talked about the first couple of steps of the central dogma. The central dogma is this name given to the statement DNA goes to DNA by replication. DNA goes to RNA by the process of transcription. We call it transcription because it's such a direct copying of letter to letter. RNA goes to protein by a process of translation, because translation is the kind of word we would use between two different languages. And there are two different languages-- the languages of nucleotides and the language of amino acids. For what it's worth, it's name, the central dogma, goes back to Francis Crick, who called this the central dogma. He did it in a kind of a light-hearted way, although others since then have criticized it, saying, oh, this is dogmatic. Actually, Crick said not that DNA goes to RNA goes to the protein. He says that all information flows from nucleic acids to proteins and not back again. Becau...

Sarah Hansen: Today on the podcast, we're highlighting the power of open educational resources or OER. Elizabeth Siler: I love using OER. One thing I love about teaching OER is that I get to teach what I want to teach. What I think my students need to know, in the way they need to learn it. Instead of just defaulting to what the textbooks say. Sarah Hansen: In this episode, I invited two instructors in to talk about open educational resources. One of them teaches negotiation and management here at MIT and shares her course materials in MIT OpenCourseWare. The other recently adapted those materials for use in her own course at another university. An organizational ombudsperson at MIT for 42 years, adjunct professor Mary Rowe was among the very first instructors to put her course materials on OpenCourseWare almost 20 years ago. That course is titled 15.667, Negotiation and Conflict Management. Associate professor Elizabeth Siler has used and adapted the materials from t...

PROFESSOR: I've put on the blackboard here the things we were doing last time. We began our study of stationary states that are not normalizable. These are scattering states. Momentum eigenstates were not normalizable, but now we have more interesting states that represent the solutions of the Schrodinger equation, that are stationary states with some energy e. Because they are not normalizable, but we cannot directly interpret any of these solutions as the behavior of a particle. I kind of tell you a story, OK. So this is-- a particle is coming, colliding, doing something. These are not normalizable states. So part of what we're going to be trying to do today is connect to the picture of wave packets and see how this is used to really calculate what would happen if you send in a particle of potential. Nevertheless, we wrote a solution that has roughly that interpretation, at least morally speaking. We think of a wave that is coming from the left, that's ae to...

SARAH HANSEN: Today on Chalk Radio, living poetry. JOSHUA BENNETT: Yeah, poetry is for everybody, by design. Poetry is also so old. Poetry is first. And so, yeah, I want to tap into that, that ancient thing, that ancient music. SARAH HANSEN: I'm Sarah Hansen. My guest today is Dr. Joshua Bennett, MIT professor of literature and the distinguished chair of the humanities at MIT. He teaches courses on writing, poetry, and society, including the course called Reading Poetry, Social Poetics, which will soon be available on MIT OpenCourseWare. This was truly one of the most impactful conversations I've had since we started the podcast. Joshua has a way of weaving stories and poetry into all of his responses, painting vivid pictures that make the ideas that he shares in this episode so potent and tangible. In our conversation, he brought in his own poetry and even talked about the people he admires that have helped to shape his approach to writing, teaching, living, and ...