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The new space industry has the potential to impact and sustain life on Earth and beyond. For example, emerging space technology can shape the way we design habitats, food, and spacecraft for low-Earth orbit or the Lunar surface, as well as the products we use here on Earth. However, this requires us to take a deeper look at the potential influence on humanity and pushes us to declare our life mission as a lens for what we engineer. The aim of this IntroSem is to help undergraduate students "shoot for the moon" and "declare their mission" via an integration of curriculum from aerospace engineering and human-centered design. In this 10-week course, students will engage with some of life's hardest questions: Who are you?; Why are you here (i.e., on Earth and at Stanford)?; What do you want?; and How will you get there (i.e., Mars or your dream job after Stanford)? In addition, students will pitch new space-related, human-centered technology to potential stakeholders. To give students exposure to actual careers in aerospace design and engineering, mentors from industry will be invited to engage with students throughout the course and provide feedback on design projects. Are you go for launch?

In space, large structures are often advantageous - large solar arrays are required for collecting solar power and allowing spacecraft to operate in deep space, large diameter telescopes allow us to explore the origins of our universe, and large antennas allow us to track climate change and get large amounts of data back down to Earth. However, our ability to get large structures into space is limited by the size of modern rocket fairings, causing large space structures to be designed very differently from those on Earth. This seminar focuses on the design principles used by aerospace engineers to realize large space structures. Over the quarter, we will discuss techniques for deployable space structures folded on the ground and unfolded in orbit including origami, foldable thin structures, and inflatables. The seminar will also introduce students to current developments in space structures such as on-orbit assembly, in-space manufacturing, and reconfigurable space structures. We will examine the materials used in these structures, overview mathematical principles used for their design, and learn from past failures of deployable structures. The seminar will allow students to delve deeper into the concepts with hands-on experimentation, analysis of existing space structures (ex. James Webb, the ISS solar arrays, and CubeSat missions), and will allow students to practice written and oral communication skills.By the end of the course students will be able to:Explain the need for large space structures.Identify and compare the engineering approaches for the realization of large space structures.Analyze the challenges associated with large space structures.Design space structures using simple numerical models.

Preference to freshmen. Why people want to know where they are: answers include cross-Pacific trips of Polynesians, missile guidance, and distraught callers. How people determine where they are: navigation technology from dead-reckoning, sextants, and satellite navigation (GPS). Hands-on experience. How GPS works; when it does not work; possibilities for improving performance.

It's an exciting time for space exploration. Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are launching rockets into space and bringing them back for reuse. NASA is developing the world's most powerful rocket. Startups are deploying constellations of hundreds of cubesats for communications, navigation, and earth monitoring. The human race has recently gotten a close look at Pluto, soft landed on a comet, and orbited two asteroids. The upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope will allow astronomers to look closer to the beginning of time than ever before. The workings of space systems remain mysterious to most people, but in this seminar we'll pull back the curtain for a look at the basics of "rocket science." How does a SpaceX rocket get into space? How do Skybox satellites capture images for Google Earth? How did the New Horizons probe find its way to Pluto? How do we communicate with spacecraft that are so distant? We'll explore these topics and a range of others during the quarter. We'll cover just enough physics and math to determine where to look in the sky for a spacecraft, planet, or star. Then we'll check our math by going outside for an evening pizza party observing these objects in the night sky. We'll also visit a spacecraft production facility or Mission Operations Center to see theory put into practice.

Provenance refers to the chain of custody of a particular art object during its lifetime. Put another way, provenance refers to all the individuals, communities, and institutions who have owned (both legally and illegally), kept, stored, exhibited, displayed, managed, and sold an art object. Knowledge of provenance can both inflate and deflate the value of an art object and it can also shed light upon legal and ethical questions including assessing repatriation and restitution claims for African art objects. Furthermore, by telling the story of how a particular object moved through multiple pairs of hands, often over the course of centuries and across several continents, we gain nuanced appreciation of the social currency of artwork as well as of changing perceptions of aesthetic and monetary value, and insight into the extractive dynamics of colonialism and postcolonial global economies. For this class, you will have the unique opportunity to work first hand with an important African art collection in North America: the Richard H. Scheller Collection at Stanford University. You will select one object from the collection and create a detailed provenance history, documenting and detailing its origins, its movement across space and time, and its arrival to the Scheller collection in Silicon Valley. You will use archival materials from Scheller¿s collection, online databases and archives, and secondary literature. Your final project for the class will be to create a visual StoryMap that allows you to display your provenance history with narrative text and multimedia content. In this way, you will not only have completed a class assignment: you will also have constructed for posterity a remarkable hitherto unknown history of an important African art object.

Join us as we go behind the scenes of some of the big headlines about trouble in Silicon Valley. We'll start with the basic questions like who decides who gets to see themselves as "a computer person," and how do early childhood and educational experiences shape our perceptions of our relationship to technology? Then we'll see how those questions are fundamental to a wide variety of recent events from #metoo in tech companies, to the ways the under-representation of women and people of color in tech companies impacts the kinds of products that Silicon Valley brings to market. We'll see how data and the coming age of AI raise the stakes on these questions of identity and technology. How can we ensure that AI technology will help reduce bias in human decision-making in areas from marketing to criminal justice, rather than amplify it?

How does a child, born without beliefs or expectations about race, grow up to be racist? To address this complicated question, this seminar will introduce you to some of the psychological theories on the development of racial stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Together, these theories highlight how cognitive, social, and motivational factors contribute to racist thinking. We will engage thoughtfully and critically with each topic through reflection and discussion. Occasionally, I will supplement the discussion and class activities with a brief lecture, in order to highlight the central issues, concepts, and relevant findings. We will share our own experiences, perspectives, and insights, and together, we will explore how racist thinking takes root. Come to class with an open mind, a willingness to be vulnerable, and a desire to learn from and with your peers. Students with diverse opinions and perspectives are encouraged to enroll.

Provenance refers to the chain of custody of a particular art object during its lifetime. Put another way, provenance refers to all the individuals, communities, and institutions who have owned (both legally and illegally), kept, stored, exhibited, displayed, managed, and sold an art object. Knowledge of provenance can both inflate and deflate the value of an art object and it can also shed light upon legal and ethical questions including assessing repatriation and restitution claims for African art objects. Furthermore, by telling the story of how a particular object moved through multiple pairs of hands, often over the course of centuries and across several continents, we gain nuanced appreciation of the social currency of artwork as well as of changing perceptions of aesthetic and monetary value, and insight into the extractive dynamics of colonialism and postcolonial global economies. For this class, you will have the unique opportunity to work first hand with an important African art collection in North America: the Richard H. Scheller Collection at Stanford University. You will select one object from the collection and create a detailed provenance history, documenting and detailing its origins, its movement across space and time, and its arrival to the Scheller collection in Silicon Valley. You will use archival materials from Scheller¿s collection, online databases and archives, and secondary literature. Your final project for the class will be to create a visual StoryMap that allows you to display your provenance history with narrative text and multimedia content. In this way, you will not only have completed a class assignment: you will also have constructed for posterity a remarkable hitherto unknown history of an important African art object.

Though marginalized through terms like 'superstition' and 'witchcraft,' magic remained a ubiquitous feature of the United States sociocultural and religious landscape well beyond the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. From dream books to horseshoes to conjure, phenomena once termed black or white magic in Western European and early Anglophone American cultures became a part of an expansive collection of ritual and material practices that occupied the margins of American 'religion' serving as a foil to more mainstream manifestations of the category. Racialized visions of magical creatures and capabilities from faraway places solidified understandings of magic as the province of non-Whites and non-Americans, contributing further to the category's marginalization, even as interest in spiritualism, mesmerism, and other metaphysical movements heightened in the nineteenth-century. The result was a religious milieu in which practices previously deemed 'magic' became entrenched within some mainstream institutional religions and the categorical lines between magic and religion became increasingly blurred in popular culture. Beginning with the religious history of American magic and moving towards the twentieth century, this course explores the American fascination with magic as expressed through the Marvel cinematic universe. Together, we will ask questions of how magic appears in the popular imagination, its role in the success of the Marvel franchise, and the terms on which we define the category.