Explore Applied Quantitative Reasoning (AQR) WAYS Courses

Transportation accounts for nearly one-third of American energy use and greenhouse gas emissions and three-quarters of American oil consumption. It has crucial impacts on climate change, air pollution, resource depletion, and national security. Students wishing to address these issues reconsider how we move, finding sustainable transportation solutions. An introduction to the issue, covering the past and present of transportation and its impacts; examining alternative fuel proposals; and digging deeper into the most promising option: battery electric vehicles. Energy requirements of air, ground, and maritime transportation; design of electric motors, power control systems, drive trains, and batteries; and technologies for generating renewable energy. Two opportunities for hands-on experiences with electric cars. Prerequisites: Introduction to calculus and Physics AP or elementary mechanics.

This multidisciplinary course combines different approaches to how GIS and spatial tools can be applied in social science research. We take a collaborative, project oriented approach to bring together technical expertise and substantive applications from several social science disciplines. The course aims to integrate tools, methods, and current debates in social science research and will enable students to engage in critical spatial research and a multidisciplinary dialogue around geographic space.

Complex biological behaviors through the integration of computational modeling and molecular biology. Topics: reconstructing biological networks from high-throughput data and knowledge bases. Network properties. Computational modeling of network behaviors at the small and large scale. Using model predictions to guide an experimental program. Robustness, noise, and cellular variation. Prerequisites: CME 102; BIO 41, BIO 42; or consent of instructor.

Preference to sophomores. For students interested in science, engineering, politics, and the law. Learn from past disasters to avoid future ones. How disasters can be tracked to failures in the design process. The roles of engineers, artisans, politicians, lawyers, and scientists in the design of products. Failure as rooted in oversight in adhering to the design process. Student teams analyze real disasters and design new products presumably free from the potential for disastrous outcomes.

Analysis and description of labor markets. Determination of employment, unemployment, hours of work, wages. Welfare programs and work effort. Wage differentials by schooling, experience, gender, and race. Income inequality, changes in inequality, and differences in inequality. Employment contracts, labor unions, and bargaining. International comparisons. Prerequisites: ECON 51, ECON 102B.

Introduction to seismology including: elasticity and the wave equation, P, S, and surface waves, dispersion, ray theory, reflection and transmission of seismic waves, seismic imaging, large-scale Earth structure, earthquake location, earthquake statistics and forecasting, magnitude scales, seismic source theory.

Active faulting and erosion in the Bay Area, and its effects upon landscapes. Earth science concepts and skills through investigation of the valley, mountain, and coastal areas around Stanford. Faulting associated with the San Andreas Fault, coastal processes along the San Mateo coast, uplift of the mountains by plate tectonic processes, and landsliding in urban and mountainous areas. Field excursions; student projects.

(HumBio students must enroll in HumBio 154A.)This course teaches operations research and modeling techniques to improve public health programs and disease control systems. Students will engage in in-depth interdisciplinary study of disease detection and control strategies from a "systems science" perspective, which involves the use of common mathematical modeling and operations research techniques such as optimization, queuing theory, Markov and Kermack-McKendrick models, and microsimulation. Lectures and problem sets will focus on applying these techniques to classical public health dilemmas such as how to optimize screening programs, reduce waiting times for healthcare services, solve resource allocation problems, and compare macro-scale disease control strategies that cannot be easily evaluated through randomized trials. Readings will complement the lectures and problem sets by offering critical perspectives from the public health history, sociology, and epidemiology. In-depth case studies from non-governmental organizations, departments of public health, and international agencies will drive the course. Open to upper-division undergraduate students.

Guns, Drugs, Abortion, Capital Punishment, Policing and Prisons, and Other Uncontroversial Topics in the Empirical Evaluation of Law and Policy Do guns make us safer? Can mass shootings be stopped? What is the true cost of the war on drugs and is legalization the answer? Why does the US have the most prisoners in the world and what are the social ramifications? Did the legalization of abortion reduce crime in the 1990s? Did capital punishment? Is the criminal justice system racially biased? These are some of the questions we will address by reading major empirical studies evaluating the impact of law and policy in the arena of criminal justice. This course has been modified from my law school course so that it is accessible to those with little or no statistical or economic background but who are willing to grapple with the intuitions behind such studies, which will be a main focus of the course readings. The seminar should appeal to anyone interested in understanding core issues in criminal justice policy, the challenges in answering empirical questions with data, and the intuition behind the statistical techniques that define the credibility revolution in empirical evaluation. The goal is to help students be more aware that many beliefs and policy positions are based on factual premises for which the empirical support is weak or nonexistent, or even directly contradictory, and how better to empirically ascertain truths about the world and align them with our policy preferences. Successful completion of the course will enable students to more effectively understand and critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the empirical studies that constantly appear in the media and policy discourse, to comprehend the challenges in establishing true causal relationships in the fields of law, policy, and medicine, and to better understand how ideologues and motivated researchers contribute to the vast array of conflicting studies in these domains.

Analytical techniques such as linear and integer programming, Monte Carlo simulation, forecasting, decision analysis, and Markov chains in the environment of the spreadsheet. Probability management. Materials include spreadsheet add-ins for implementing these and other techniques. Emphasis is on building intuition through interactive modeling, and extending the applicability of this type of analysis through integration with existing business data structures.

(Formerly POLISCI 1) Approaches to the study of conflict and cooperation in world affairs. Applications to war, terrorism, trade policy, the environment, and world poverty. Debates about the ethics of war and the global distribution of wealth.

This multidisciplinary course combines different approaches to how GIS and spatial tools can be applied in social science research. We take a collaborative, project oriented approach to bring together technical expertise and substantive applications from several social science disciplines. The course aims to integrate tools, methods, and current debates in social science research and will enable students to engage in critical spatial research and a multidisciplinary dialogue around geographic space.

Imagine collecting a bit of your saliva and sending it in to one of the personalized genomics company: for very little money you will get back information about hundreds of thousands of variable sites in your genome. Records of exposure to a variety of chemicals in the areas you have lived are only a few clicks away on the web; as are thousands of studies and informal reports on the effects of different diets, to which you can compare your own. What does this all mean for you? Never before in history humans have recorded so much information about themselves and the world that surrounds them. Nor has this data been so readily available to the lay person. Expression as "data deluge'' are used to describe such wealth as well as the loss of proper bearings that it often generates. How to summarize all this information in a useful way? How to boil down millions of numbers to just a meaningful few? How to convey the gist of the story in a picture without misleading oversimplifications? To answer these questions we need to consider the use of the data, appreciate the diversity that they represent, and understand how people instinctively interpret numbers and pictures. During each week, we will consider a different data set to be summarized with a different goal. We will review analysis of similar problems carried out in the past and explore if and how the same tools can be useful today. We will pay attention to contemporary media (newspapers, blogs, etc.) to identify settings similar to the ones we are examining and critique the displays and summaries there documented. Taking an experimental approach, we will evaluate the effectiveness of different data summaries in conveying the desired information by testing them on subsets of the enrolled students.

How do scientists actually go about answering practical questions? How does science function as a way of understanding our world, and importantly how does it differ from other approaches? As its point of departure, this course will examine and critique selected episodes of the television series, MythBusters (Discovery Channel), which tests the validity of many popular beliefs in a variety of imaginative ways, including myths, rumors, traditions, and stories. We will take the opportunity to delve more deeply into the applicability of the scientific method in understanding a vast range of real-world problems, and into the practical acquisition of fact-based knowledge, which together form the cornerstone of all science. The intellectual framework of this course will be based, first and foremost, on skeptical inquiry, combined with the other key ingredients of good science, which include: framing the question well, careful experimental design, meticulous observation and measurement, quantitative analysis and modeling, the evaluation of statistical significance, recovery from failure, disseminating findings, and the continuous cycle of hypothesis and testing. Note: This course is taught at an introductory level, but it pays serious attention to the quantitative treatment of experimental data and associated tests of statistical significance. All students taking the course will be expected to learn, and to work a series of problems in, basic probability and statistics. There is also a hands-on, "dorm lab" component that involves some fabrication and a significant amount of individual testing and measurement. The final course project will involve developing and writing a scientific grant proposal to test a myth. We hope to inculcate in our students "a taste for questioning, a sense of observation, intellectual rigor, practice with reasoning, modesty in the face of facts, the ability to distinguish between true and false, and an attachment to logical and precise language. " (Yves Quéré, 2010 Science 330:605).

How has our approach to cancer been affected by clinical observations, scientific discoveries, social norms, politics, and economic interests? Approximately one in three Americans will develop invasive cancer during their lifetime; one in five Americans will die as a result of this disease. This course will expose you to multiple ways of approaching the cancer problem, including laboratory research, clinical trials, population studies, public health interventions, and health care economics. We will start with the 18th century discovery of the relationship between coal tar and cancer, and trace the role of scientific research in revealing the genetic basis of cancer. We will then discuss the development of new treatments for cancer as well as measures to screen for and prevent cancer, including the ongoing debate over tobacco control. Using cancer as a case study, you will learn important aspects of the scientific method including experimental design, data analysis, and the difference between correlation and causation. You will learn how science can be used and misused with regard to the public good. You will also learn about ways in which social, political, and economic forces shape our knowledge about and response to disease.