A writing practicum associated with 11.200 and 11.205 that focuses on helping students present their ideas in cogent, persuasive arguments and other analytical frameworks. Reading and writing assignments and other exercises stress the connections between clear thinking, critical reading, and effective writing.

This book is a broad introduction to Australian politics and public policy. This field of study is important for Australians to understand the exercise of political power, their history and the scope for change. It is also important for analysts outside Australia looking for comparative cases. Within this volume are diverse topics and perspectives, demonstrating that the study of Australian politics and policy is not ‘fixed’. Rather, it is a contested field of academic scholarship. Indeed, the volume’s editors do not all agree on the content of this introduction!

The defining challenge facing business leaders is to develop and drive performance into the future.
For commercial firms, this generally means building profits and growing the value of the business.
Although their focus may be on non-financial outcomes, public services, voluntary groups, and other
not-for-profit organizations share the same central challenge—continually improving their
performance. When the causes of performance through time are not understood, management has
difficulty making the right decisions about important issues. Worse, entire organizations are led into
ill-chosen strategies for their future.
To overcome these problems, leaders need the means to answer three basic questions:
1. Why is business performance following its current path?
2. Where are current policies, decisions, and strategy leading us?
3. How can future prospects be improved?
These questions are the starting point for this book.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Performance Through Time
Chapter 2: Resources: Vital Drivers of Performance
Chapter 3: Resources and Bathtub Behavior
Chapter 4: Handling Interdependence Between Resources
Chapter 5: Building and Managing the Strategic Architecture
Chapter 6: You Need Quality Resources as Well as Quantity
Chapter 7: Managing Rivalry for Customers and Other Resources
Chapter 8: Intangible Resources and Capabilities
Chapter 9: Going Forward

Uses a case approach to develop a framework for business analysis. Provides students with tools for business analysis, including strategic, accounting, financial, and prospective analysis. Concepts are then applied to a number of decision-making contexts, such as credit analysis, investor communications, merger analysis, financial policy decisions, and securities analysis. From the Course Description: Course Description The purpose of this class is to advance your understanding of how to use financial information to value and analyze firms. We will apply your economics/accounting/finance skills to problems from today's business news to help us understand what is contained in financial reports, why firms report certain information, and how to be a sophisticated user of this information.

This lecture course provides students with a comprehensive introduction to the international relations of the People's Republic of China. China's foreign relations during the Cold War as well as contemporary diplomatic, security and economic issues will be examined to identify and explain China's foreign policy goals and their implementation since 1949. Throughout, this course will investigate the sources of conflict and cooperation in China's behavior, assessing competing explanations for key events and policies. Readings will be drawn from political science, history, and international relations theory.

The Climate Toolkit is a resource manual designed to help the reader navigate the complex and perplexing issue of climate change by providing tools and strategies to explore the underlying science. As such it contains a collection of activities that make use of readily available on-line resources developed by research groups and public agencies. These include web-based climate models, climate data archives, interactive atlases, policy papers, and “solution” catalogs. Unlike a standard textbook, it is designed to help readers do their own climate research and devise their own perspective rather than providing them with a script to assimilate and repeat.

You are welcome to this Module in Contemporary Issues in Education, which is a part of your Professional Studies in education. To understand the content in this Module well, you need to grasp the meaning and major critical areas that constitute the concept of Contemporary Issues in Education. The word contemporary means modern, current, present-day or existing. In this context, Contemporary issues in Education refer to the various events, policies and developments of an educational nature which exist in the modern world.

Explores the changing map of the public and the private in pre-industrial and modern societies and examines how that map affected men's and women's production and consumption of goods and leisure. The reproductive strategies of women, either in conjunction with or in opposition to their families, is another major theme. How did an ideal of the "domestic" arise in the early modern west, and to what extent did it limit the economic position of women? How has it been challenged, and with what success, in the post-industrial period? Focuses on western Europe since the Middle Ages and on the United States, but some attention to how these issues have played themselves out in non-Western cultures. This course will explore the relation of women and men in both pre-industrial and modern societies to the changing map of public and private (household) work spaces, examining how that map affected their opportunities for both productive activity and the consumption of goods and leisure. The reproductive strategies of women, either in conjunction with or in opposition to their families, will be the third major theme of the course. We will consider how a place and an ideal of the "domestic" arose in the early modern west, to what extent it was effective in limiting the economic position of women, and how it has been challenged, and with what success, in the post-industrial period. Finally, we will consider some of the policy implications for contemporary societies as they respond to changes in the composition of the paid work force, as well as to radical changes in their national demographic profiles. Although most of the material for the course will focus on western Europe since the Middle Ages and on the United States, we will also consider how these issues have played themselves out in non-western cultures.

Electric cars are more than a novel means of mobility. They have been recognized as an essential building block of the energy transition. Fulfilling their promise will imply a significant change in the technical, digital and social dimensions of transport and energy infrastructure. As the massive adoption of electric mobility will deeply change our society and our individual routines, government intervention is called for. If you are interested in learning about the roles of government in shaping the transition towards electric mobility and renewable energy systems, then this is the course for you.

In this course, you will explore the promise of electric mobility from different public policy perspectives and different levels of government, and learn how they interact. After completing this course, you will be able to assess a policy plan to support the introduction of electric cars and make a motivated choice between alternative policy instruments. In the final week, the course will be concluded by connecting the different track perspectives.

The course includes video lectures, presentations and exercises, which are all illustrated with real-world case studies from projects that were implemented in the Netherlands.

European gas and electricity markets have largely been liberalized. Due to the specific physical characteristics and public interest aspects of electricity and gas, and to the fact that the networks continue to be natural monopolies, these markets require careful design. In this class, it is analyzed what the market design variables are and how the ongoing process of market design depends on policy goals, starting conditions and physical, technical and institutional constraints. In addition, a number of current policy issues will be discussed, such as security of supply, the CO2 emissions market, the integration of European energy markets and privatization. Participation in a simulation game, in which long-term market dynamics are simulated, is mandatory.

This course explores the theoretical and empirical perspectives on individual and industrial demand for energy, energy supply, energy markets, and public policies affecting energy markets. It discusses aspects of the oil, natural gas, electricity, and nuclear power sectors and examines energy tax, price regulation, deregulation, energy efficiency and policies for controlling emission.

This course explores the proper role of government in the regulation of the environment. It will help students develop the tools to estimate the costs and benefits of environmental regulations. These tools will be used to evaluate a series of current policy questions, including: Should air and water pollution regulations be tightened or loosened? What are the costs of climate change in the U.S. and abroad? Is there a "Race to the Bottom" in environmental regulation? What is "sustainable development"? How do environmental problems differ in developing countries? Are we running out of oil and other natural resources? Should we be more energy efficient? To gain real world experience, the course is scheduled to include a visit to the MIT cogeneration plant. We will also do an in-class simulation of an air pollution emissions market.

This course presents an examination of ethical issues relevant to systems-based research procedures, professional conduct, social and environmental impacts, and embedded ethics in research and professional practice in RESS based jobs. In this course, you will consider case studies of ethical issues that can arise when engaging renewable energy and sustainability systems. You will also develop an ethics case study based on your area of RESS interests. The goals of the course are to provide you with tools for analyzing ethical issues both in the line of professional duties and in consideration of the various ethical issues that face an entire sector of renewable energy and that underpin the very reasons for taking a sustainable and renewable approach.

Continuation of Finance Theory I, concentrating on corporate financial management. Topics: Capital investment decisions, security issues, dividend policy, optimal capital structure, hedging and risk management, futures markets and real options analysis. The objective of this course is to learn the financial tools needed to make good business decisions. The course presents the basic insights of corporate finance theory, but emphasizes the application of theory to real business decisions. Each session involves class discussion, some centered on lectures and others around business cases.

" This course explores the foundations of policy making in developing countries. The goal is to spell out various policy options and to quantify the trade-offs between them. We will study the different facets of human development: education, health, gender, the family, land relations, risk, informal and formal norms and institutions. This is an empirical class. For each topic, we will study several concrete examples chosen from around the world. While studying each of these topics, we will ask: What determines the decisions of poor households in developing countries? What constraints are they subject to? Is there a scope for policy (by government, international organizations, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs))? What policies have been tried out? Have they been successful?"

Urban governance comprises the various forces, institutions, and movements that guide economic and physical development, the distribution of resources, social interactions, and other aspects of daily life in urban areas. This course examines governance from legal, political, social, and economic perspectives. In addition, we will discuss how these structures constrain collective decision making about particular urban issues (immigration, education‰Ű_). Assignments will be nightly readings and a short paper relating an urban issue to the frameworks outlined in the class.

The studio will focus on the district of Gaoming, located in the northwest of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) - the fastest growing and most productive region of China. The District has recently completed a planning effort in which several design institutes and a Hong Kong planning firm prepared ideas for a new central area near the river. The class will complement these efforts by focusing on planning and design options on the waterfront of the proposed new district and ways of integrating water/hydrological factors into all aspects and land uses of a modern city (residential, commercial, industrial) - including watershed and natural ecosystem protection, economic and recreational activities, transportation, and tourism.

Have you seen a Clean Coal baseball cap? In the challenge to meet soaring energy demand with limited resources, volatile issues like those related to the environment, national security and public health are often addressed outside of normal market transactions and are called externalities, or nonmarket factors. Stakeholders can act in resourceful ways to create a nonmarket environment that best serves their interest. A firm may challenge a law that makes it expensive or difficult to do business or compete with others, for example. An individual may organize a boycott of products or services that violate the individual's interests or principles--hey, don't buy from them! Nonmarket strategy in the energy sector is the subject of this engaging course.

This is a guide to good practices for college and university open-access (OA) policies. It's based on the type of rights-retention OA policy first adopted at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and the University of Kansas. Policies of this kind have since been adopted at a wide variety of institutions in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, for example, at public and private institutions, large and small institutions, affluent and indigent institutions, research universities and liberal arts colleges, and at whole universities, schools within universities, and departments within schools.

This course examines systematically, and comparatively, great and middle power military interventions, and candidate military interventions, into civil wars from the 1990s to the present. These civil wars did not easily fit into the traditional category of vital interest. These interventions may therefore tell us something about broad trends in international politics including the nature of unipolarity, the erosion of sovereignty, the security implications of globalization, and the nature of modern western military power.