The nature of causality and techniques for making valid causal inferences have been the subject of intense recent discussion in the social sciences. These topics are also increasingly relevant in government, business, and non-profit sectors amid the growing popularity of evidence-based approaches. Rooted in the potential outcomes framework, this course will discuss various conceptualizations of causality, explore the statistics of causal inference and provide deep coverage of methods for design- and model-based causal inference with experimental and observational data.

This course explores the politics of energy policy by examining a range of cases from around the world, including the United States. What is energy? How does energy impact politics and everyday lives in energy-rich and energy-important countries? What are energy transitions and when do they occur? How do energy markets work? This course provides the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical tools to think critically about such questions.

This is a laboratory course designed to correspond to the lectures in PHYSICS 131. The laboratory experiments performed by students will cover kinematics, dynamics and other aspects of mechanics pertinent to the material covered in PHYSICS 131. This course may be taken simultaneously with PHYSICS 131.