Sections offered SPRING 2024:

Alzheimer’s dementia is the only disease in the 10 leading causes of death of Americans that cannot be prevented, slowed or cured. An estimated 5.5 million Americans of all ages are currently living with Alzheimer’s, which plagues one in 10 people aged 65 years and older. This course examines the physical, psychological, social, economic and spiritual dimensions of dementia. Through in-depth readings and physician-guided discussions, students aspiring to careers in the health professions and related fields will gain deep insight into the experiences of patients and families with dementia.

Sections offered SPRING 2024:

***THIS CLASS IS OPEN ONLY TO FRESHMAN WELLS SCHOLARS***

Description: The natural world is fundamentally important to us all, but how are its uses and fate decided? Using paleontology — the study of fossils and extinct life — as the focus, we will ask “who ‘owns’ the natural world?” Because it is the only direct record of Life’s history, the origin of humanity, and past events like extinctions, climate change, and origin of species, paleontology is a type of natural heritage common to us all. We will examine how science, economy, culture, conservation, recreation, the rights of indigenous peoples, religion, individual rights, and constitutional politics have collided to bring paleontology into current political debate.

Sections offered SPRING 2024:

Language, Intelligence, and the Machine

Addressing state-of-the-art technologies in Artificial Intelligence, Linguistic and Natural Language Processing capabilities of advanced Large Language Models, and the perspectives of Machines becoming intelligent. This course addresses not just the technologies and applications of AI and possible Artificial General Intelligence but also aspects of human cognition and intelligence from a psycholinguistic perspective, as well as philosophical and sociological issues, risks, and improvements for society and human life.

Sections offered SPRING 2024:

In the medical desert that has become rural America, nothing is more basic or more essential than access to doctors, but they are increasingly difficult to find. The federal government now designates nearly 80 percent of rural America as “medically underserved.” It is home to 20 percent of the U.S. population but fewer than 10 percent of its doctors, and that ratio is worsening each year because of what health experts refer to as “the gray wave.” Rural doctors are three years older than urban doctors on average, with half over 50 and more than a quarter beyond 60. Health officials predict the number of rural doctors will decline by 23 percent over the next decade as the number of urban doctors remains flat. This course considers the economic, social, geographic, and other significant challenges by focusing reflectively and creatively, in considering all possible “rural desert” factors and finding viable and sustaining solutions.

Sections offered SPRING 2024:

Eugenics, the notion that it is possible to decrease suffering, increase happiness, and even enhance humanity itself by altering patterns of reproduction, once exerted powerful sway over scientists, intellectuals, and policy makers in the US. IU’s seventh president, biologist David Starr Jordan, who was also the first president of Stanford University, once stood in the vanguard of American eugenicists. In this physician-taught interdisciplinary course, we will explore eugenics’ biological origins and influence, examine ethical arguments for and against it, and consider its future social prospects in light of advancing genetic science and technologies.

Sections offered SPRING 2024:

*This class meets during the Thirteen Week Session (01/29/2024-05/03/2024)

Course Description

Every day, billions of people interact with information technologies on the Internet and contribute to a world of valuable information. But the human brain simply cannot fathom the quantity of data generated daily. The term big data refers to data that is so large, fast, or complex that it’s difficult or impossible to process using traditional methods.

We are living in a historic moment where big data and artificial intelligence are shaping many parts of society. Accordingly, we must make such technologies compatible with our core human values. The focus on big data in society should look beyond the extraordinary volume of information in order to assess the value that organizations can extract from such data.

In this seminar-style, discussion-oriented course, students will learn to think critically and make their own decisions in the likely future scenarios that involve data-related, potentially ethically challenging situations. With that goal in mind, this course introduces students to new social and ethical challenges arising from big data use in various organizational contexts. We will discuss technical and societal approaches to tackling such challenges. The course also provides students with an understanding of the morals and ethical dilemmas involved in the use of big data.

Sections offered SPRING 2024:

Between 1967 and 1979 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of movie censorship, the decline of the Hollywood studio system, economic changes in the film industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie. An unusually large number of films from this period have become recognized as classics of the American cinema — including The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate, Nashville, and Apocalypse Now  – while many others are considered to represent the pinnacle of their particular genres – including Bonnie and Clyde, Klute, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. These were major works of art in continuous dialogue with the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of their tumultuous times.

The films of this period reflected the era’s social and political upheavals: the civil rights movement, the domestic consequences of the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, the end of the long postwar economic boom, the saga of the Nixon Administration and Watergate. Hollywood films, in this brief, exceptional moment, embraced a new aesthetic and a new approach to storytelling, creating self-consciously gritty, character-driven explorations of moral and narrative ambiguity. Although the emergence of blockbuster hits like Jaws and Star Wars in the second half of the 1970s largely ended the Hollywood studios’ embrace of more challenging films, filmmakers in this decade showed that it was possible to combine commercial entertainment with serious explorations of politics, society, and personal relationships.

Students in this course are not expected to have any prior experience in film criticism or history – just an interest in learning to think critically about movies and American culture. The goal of this course is to introduce students to the relationship between movies, culture and society by focusing on American films of the 1970s, and through these films, to trace a path through the history of American culture during one of the most fertile periods in the history of American media. The readings, screenings, assignments, and classroom activities in this course are intended to help students develop competence in critical thinking about movies, culture and society — as demonstrated through exams and short essays — and advanced skill in the writing of critical analysis and reasoned arguments — as demonstrated in formal papers. In addition to our regular classroom meetings, students will be required to view each of the assigned movies online. We will then discuss and analyze each movie in class.

Textbooks:

Jonathan Kirshner, Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012
Jonathan Kirshner & Jon Lewis, eds., When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019

Additional readings will be available on Canvas.