This course will combine readings and methods from philosophy and economics to address ethical questions that are relevant to the goals and evaluation of public policies. These questions include: Should we assess social outcomes, policies and institutions by reference to well-being, fairness, rights, or other criteria? What do these notions consist in and can they be measured? Does well-being consist in happiness, life satisfaction, goal attainment, some combination of these, or something else? Is inequality bad in itself or because of the outcomes to which it leads?

Population centers have evolved around water sources to ensure provision of drinking water, hygiene and sanitation, water for agriculture and for animal husbandry. Water is a requirement for life, and when water supplies are threatened, communities will do whatever they can to protect their limited resources ? even to declaration of war with neighboring regions. Water ways and coastlines are also critical for commerce, fisheries and tourism and can be equally zealously protected.

This course develops the ideas of probability simultaneously from experimental and theoretical perspectives. The laboratory provides a range of experiences that enhance and sharpen the theoretical approach and, moreover, allows us to observe regularities in complex phenomena and to conjecture theorems. Topics include: introductory experiments; axiomatic probability; random variables, expectation, and variance; discrete distributions; continuous distributions; stochastic processes; functions of random variables; estimation and hypothesis testing.

Human population is expected to surpass nine billion in the next century. As our population grows, so will our need for food. Land available to grow food will not increase and degrading environmental conditions will make adequate food production on this land increasingly difficult. We will focus on the challenges to meet the nutritional needs of a growing population as well as look at some of the possible solutions for the future from a scientific standpoint. These challenges/solutions will be investigated at both the world and local (northeast United States) scales.

Strives for mastery of complex grammatical structures and continues work on writing and reading skills. Frequent compositions, selected literary readings, class discussions, and debates on films and current events. Weekly conversation sessions with a native language assistant. May be taken without Spanish 199 to satisfy the language requirement.