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Social and ethical responsibilities of computing (serc), 17.806 quantitative research methods iv: advanced topics.

> Related Topics: Inequality, Justice, & Human Rights , Social and Environmental Impacts

Author: In Song Kim

Lecture Module: “Analyzing the Impact of Police Stopping in Political Behavior”

Keywords: policing, stop-question-and-frisk, racial minorities, political behavior

Module Goals: This problem set explores how/whether policing against citizens and against racial minorities affects political behavior by leveraging a variety of data sources available online, including micro-level administrative data on policing.                    

17.806 Problem Set 1 Questions (PDF)

17.806 Problem Set 1 (ZIP)  This file contains 1 .log file, 2 .png files, and 1 .tex file.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Open Learning at MIT

By Katherine Ouellette (Article originally published on Medium ) 

Image: 360 Production, iStock

Are you looking to expand your knowledge or develop new skills? MIT Open Learning offers free educational resources available to anyone across the globe. In this guide, we introduce you to the world of open learning at MIT so that you can get started on your learning journey — whether you’re a beginner looking to explore a new topic or an enthusiast hoping to delve deeper into specific subjects.

What is open learning? 

Open learning refers to the concept of making educational resources freely available to learners across the globe, embracing principles of accessibility, inclusivity, and lifelong learning. MIT has been a pioneer in open learning, championing the dissemination of knowledge beyond the traditional classroom.

What is MIT Open Learning?

MIT Open Learning is home to open education platforms, such as MIT OpenCourseWare and MITx , and programs like Day of AI . The mission of Open Learning is to transform teaching and learning at MIT and around the globe through the innovative use of digital technologies.

“What we’re trying to do is take the knowledge we create here and think about how we then use it to meet challenges in the world,” Eric Grimson, MIT’s interim Vice President for Open Learning and Chancellor for Academic Advancement at MIT, said in an interview . “We want to take what we know about a field, what we know about how to teach, what we know about the science of learning and get it out there so that it improves things around the world.”

What’s in the catalog?

MIT OpenCourseWare and MITx offer thousands of online courses taught by the Institute’s faculty spanning the MIT undergraduate and graduate curricula — from machine learning and philosophy to chemistry and gender studies. Here are a some ways you can get started on your learning journey:

• Introductory undergraduate courses
• Best undergraduate and graduate courses according to QS World University Rankings
• Top ranked graduate courses according to U.S. News and World Report
• Most popular online courses of all time
• Unexpected undergraduate courses

What is MIT OpenCourseWare?

Launched over 20 years ago, MIT OpenCourseWare offers free, online, open educational resources from more than 2,500 courses. Anyone can learn from notable MIT faculty who are Nobel Prize winners, National Academy of Sciences members, and more. With OpenCourseWare’s Mirror Site program , more than 440 hard drives containing free copies of content have been distributed to worldwide educational organizations with limited or costly Internet access. And because it’s Creative Commons licensed, anyone can download, remix, and carry these materials with them, wherever they go.

What is MITx ?

MITx has developed more than 250 free online courses . MITx applies the MIT motto “mens et manus” or “mind and hand” to create hands-on learning experiences. The courses are free to audit. Learners can also get an optional certificate for a small fee.

Certain MITx courses are part of the MITx MicroMasters Programs , where credential earners can advance in their professional careers or apply for accelerated master’s degree programs at MIT and other pathway schools. Individual MicroMasters courses range from $200 to $1,000, and the cost for the entire credential ranges from $850 to $5,000.

What is Day of AI?

Day of AI offers a full school day’s worth of curriculum and activities for elementary, middle school, and high school students. The program is completely free and accessible to students and teachers of all backgrounds and abilities. MIT RAISE designed the materials so that no prior technology or coding experience is needed.

What can I do with these courses and programs?

Millions of learners have leveraged MIT Open Learning’s free resources in their education and their careers.

• High schooler Dustin Liang used the calculus learned through MITx to better understand his cancer treatment.
• After learning computer programming from MITx and MIT OpenCourseWare, another teenager was inspired to teach other kids how to code at his local library.
• Chansa Kabwe used MIT OpenCourseWare to follow MIT’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science curriculum — and became a machine learning engineer.
• Students in Turkey created their own PhD-level research curriculum with MIT OpenCourseWare to coincide with their medical school studies.
• Middle and high school students in Massachusetts who learned  from the Day of AI curricula were able to discuss the human rights and data policy implications of AI.

Learn more about MIT Open Learning and its open education platforms and programs.

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Mit opencourseware, what is love celebrate valentine’s day with a collection of free mit courses, celebrate women’s history month with free online courses from mit, leave a reply cancel reply.

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What will you learn with MIT OpenCourseWare?

Watch these hidden gems from real mit courses.

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a free and open publication of MIT courses across every MIT department and degree program. You can watch over 7,000 lectures straight from the MIT classroom on OCW’s YouTube channel . To celebrate 4 million subscribers on YouTube — the most subscribers for any .edu provider — here are a few of our favorite videos that we consider “hidden gems.” For more recommendations, check out the Community tab on OCW’s channel.

Lecture: Do aesthetics matter in video games? Instructors: Philip Tan, Rik Eberhardt View the complete course: CMS.611J: Creating Video Games

Lecture: Vibrations and Waves Introduction Instructor: Yen-Jie Lee View the complete course: MIT 8.03SC Physics III: Vibrations and Waves

Interested in how this residential MIT physics course was adapted for online learners? Read about the process from one of our MITx Digital Learning Lab fellows who helped design the course.

Lecture: Puzzle 1: You Will All Conform Instructor: Srini Devadas View the complete course: MIT 6.S095 Programming for the Puzzled

Lecture: F-22 Flight Controls Instructor: Randy Gordon View the complete course: MIT 16.687 Private Pilot Ground School

Lecture: When Your Breath Smells Like Nail Polish Remover Instructor: John Essigmann View the complete course: MIT 5.07SC Biological Chemistry

What will you learn with MIT OpenCourseWare? was originally published in MIT Open Learning on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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By: MIT Open Learning on October 27th, 2021 12 Minute Read

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10 Resources for Learning Data Science Online from MIT Open Learning

It's no surprise that data science savvy professionals are in high demand in today's job market. With a 650% increase in data science jobs since 2012 , now is the time to familiarize yourself with data science and other key topics in computer science.

Learning data science online doesn't have to be expensive or intimidating. MIT Open Learning offers a number of online data science resources that range in cost and time commitment, including courses and programs from OpenCourseWare, MITx Refugee Action Hub (ReACT), and MIT xPRO. To better understand the benefits of these different resources, scroll to the comparison chart at the end of this post.

Whether you need to brush up on basics, take a deep dive, or gain a credential that can be used to further your academic or professional goals, MIT Open Learning has an online data science course for you! 

Get started by exploring the online data science learning resources below:

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Extracting hydrogen from rocks

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It’s commonly thought that the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen, exists mainly alongside other elements — with oxygen in water, for example, and with carbon in methane. But naturally occurring underground pockets of pure hydrogen are punching holes in that notion — and generating attention as a potentially unlimited source of carbon-free power.   One interested party is the U.S. Department of Energy, which last month awarded $20 million in research grants to 18 teams from laboratories, universities, and private companies to develop technologies that can lead to cheap, clean fuel from the subsurface.   Geologic hydrogen, as it’s known, is produced when water reacts with iron-rich rocks, causing the iron to oxidize. One of the grant recipients, MIT Assistant Professor Iwnetim Abate’s research group, will use its $1.3 million grant to determine the ideal conditions for producing hydrogen underground — considering factors such as catalysts to initiate the chemical reaction, temperature, pressure, and pH levels. The goal is to improve efficiency for large-scale production, meeting global energy needs at a competitive cost.   The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are potentially billions of tons of geologic hydrogen buried in the Earth’s crust. Accumulations have been discovered worldwide, and a slew of startups are searching for extractable deposits. Abate is looking to jump-start the natural hydrogen production process, implementing “proactive” approaches that involve stimulating production and harvesting the gas.                                                                                                                           “We aim to optimize the reaction parameters to make the reaction faster and produce hydrogen in an economically feasible manner,” says Abate, the Chipman Development Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). Abate’s research centers on designing materials and technologies for the renewable energy transition, including next-generation batteries and novel chemical methods for energy storage. 

Sparking innovation

Interest in geologic hydrogen is growing at a time when governments worldwide are seeking carbon-free energy alternatives to oil and gas. In December, French President Emmanuel Macron said his government would provide funding  to explore natural hydrogen. And in February, government and private sector witnesses  briefed U.S. lawmakers  on opportunities to extract hydrogen from the ground.   Today commercial hydrogen is manufactured at $2 a kilogram, mostly for fertilizer and chemical and steel production, but most methods involve burning fossil fuels, which release Earth-heating carbon. “ Green hydrogen ,” produced with renewable energy, is promising, but at $7 per kilogram, it’s expensive.   “If you get hydrogen at a dollar a kilo, it’s competitive with natural gas on an energy-price basis,” says Douglas Wicks, a program director at Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), the Department of Energy organization leading the geologic hydrogen grant program.   Recipients of the  ARPA-E grants  include Colorado School of Mines, Texas Tech University, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, plus private companies including Koloma, a hydrogen production startup that has received funding from Amazon and Bill Gates. The projects themselves are diverse, ranging from applying industrial oil and gas methods for hydrogen production and extraction to developing models to understand hydrogen formation in rocks. The purpose: to address questions in what Wicks calls a “total white space.”   “In geologic hydrogen, we don’t know how we can accelerate the production of it, because it’s a chemical reaction, nor do we really understand how to engineer the subsurface so that we can safely extract it,” Wicks says. “We’re trying to bring in the best skills of each of the different groups to work on this under the idea that the ensemble should be able to give us good answers in a fairly rapid timeframe.”   Geochemist Viacheslav Zgonnik, one of the foremost experts in the natural hydrogen field, agrees that the list of unknowns is long, as is the road to the first commercial projects. But he says efforts to stimulate hydrogen production — to harness the natural reaction between water and rock — present “tremendous potential.”   “The idea is to find ways we can accelerate that reaction and control it so we can produce hydrogen on demand in specific places,” says Zgonnik, CEO and founder of Natural Hydrogen Energy, a Denver-based startup that has mineral leases for exploratory drilling in the United States. “If we can achieve that goal, it means that we can potentially replace fossil fuels with stimulated hydrogen.”

“A full-circle moment”

For Abate, the connection to the project is personal. As a child in his hometown in Ethiopia, power outages were a usual occurrence — the lights would be out three, maybe four days a week. Flickering candles or pollutant-emitting kerosene lamps were often the only source of light for doing homework at night.   “And for the household, we had to use wood and charcoal for chores such as cooking,” says Abate. “That was my story all the way until the end of high school and before I came to the U.S. for college.”   In 1987, well-diggers drilling for water in Mali in Western Africa  uncovered a natural hydrogen deposit , causing an explosion. Decades later, Malian entrepreneur Aliou Diallo and his Canadian oil and gas company tapped the well and used an engine to burn hydrogen and power electricity in the nearby village.   Ditching oil and gas, Diallo launched Hydroma, the world’s first hydrogen exploration enterprise. The company is drilling wells near the original site that have yielded high concentrations of the gas.   “So, what used to be known as an energy-poor continent now is generating hope for the future of the world,” Abate says. “Learning about that was a full-circle moment for me. Of course, the problem is global; the solution is global. But then the connection with my personal journey, plus the solution coming from my home continent, makes me personally connected to the problem and to the solution.”

Experiments that scale

Abate and researchers in his lab are formulating a recipe for a fluid that will induce the chemical reaction that triggers hydrogen production in rocks. The main ingredient is water, and the team is testing “simple” materials for catalysts that will speed up the reaction and in turn increase the amount of hydrogen produced, says postdoc Yifan Gao.   “Some catalysts are very costly and hard to produce, requiring complex production or preparation,” Gao says. “A catalyst that’s inexpensive and abundant will allow us to enhance the production rate — that way, we produce it at an economically feasible rate, but also with an economically feasible yield.”   The iron-rich rocks in which the chemical reaction happens can be found across the United States and the world. To optimize the reaction across a diversity of geological compositions and environments, Abate and Gao are developing what they call a high-throughput system, consisting of artificial intelligence software and robotics, to test different catalyst mixtures and simulate what would happen when applied to rocks from various regions, with different external conditions like temperature and pressure.   “And from that we measure how much hydrogen we are producing for each possible combination,” Abate says. “Then the AI will learn from the experiments and suggest to us, ‘Based on what I’ve learned and based on the literature, I suggest you test this composition of catalyst material for this rock.’”   The team is writing a paper on its project and aims to publish its findings in the coming months.   The next milestones for the project, after developing the catalyst recipe, is designing a reactor that will serve two purposes. First, fitted with technologies such as Raman spectroscopy, it will allow researchers to identify and optimize the chemical conditions that lead to improved rates and yield of hydrogen production. The lab-scale device will also inform the design of a real-world reactor that can accelerate hydrogen production in the field.   “That would be a plant-scale reactor that would be implanted into the subsurface,” Abate says.   The cross-disciplinary project is also tapping the expertise of Yang Shao-Horn, of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and DMSE, for computational analysis of the catalyst, and Esteban Gazel, a Cornell University scientist who will lend his expertise in geology and geochemistry. He’ll focus on understanding the iron-rich ultramafic rock formations across the United States and the globe and how they react with water.   For Wicks at ARPA-E, the questions Abate and the other grant recipients are asking are just the first, critical steps in uncharted energy territory.   “If we can understand how to stimulate these rocks into generating hydrogen, safely getting it up, it really unleashes the potential energy source,” he says. Then the emerging industry will look to oil and gas for the drilling, piping, and gas extraction know-how. “As I like to say, this is enabling technology that we hope to, in a very short term, enable us to say, ‘Is there really something there?’”

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