Vassar Moodle

This site will give you a general outline of what you’ll be expected to do on the job, how to do it, and what to expect from us as your employer. We have a lot to tell you, but just work through each item on the list and ask your supervisor if you have any questions along the way. All student employees will need to know the basics laid out in the first few items, and then you'll focus on topics that pertain to your specific part of CIS.

Course Materials for Theoretical Econometrics

This Moodle contains the materials for a course that I taught at Middlebury College in the Fall 2012.  I experimented with flipping the classroom, having the students watch lectures in videos before class and then doing problems together in class.  The videos were produced with Camtasia.  Having made them, I can see lots of ways to improve them.  Comments from others are welcome, too.

Here is the description of the course that I gave to the students:

Theoretical Econometrics will introduce students to the theoretical reasoning underpinning regression analysis as covered in ECON 0211. The course will begin with regression analysis as a method of data summary, focusing on geometric properties that hold for all data sets. We will introduce progressively the assumptions of the classical linear regression model to provide clear relationships between probabilistic assumptions and statistical properties and the arguments that justify them. We will conclude by exploring generalizations to basic regression that are motivated by violations of the classical assumptions. Throughout the course, students will encounter the interaction between economic and econometric modeling. (ECON 0211) 3 hrs. lect.

This Foundations (FLI) seminar introduces the habits of mind at the center of a liberal arts education: careful reading, sustained attention, and the willingness to think and speak in the presence of difficulty. In our two meetings, we’ll treat writing not as the production of text, but as a site of thinking: a process that unfolds over time through uncertainty, revision, and sustained attention. Traditionally, that process has been captured in written form. Here, we will engage many of the same intellectual practices (interpretation, analysis, synthesis, revision) without always committing them to the page. In this sense, we are treating writing as a technology derived from speech, and choosing, at times, to set that technology aside in order to focus more directly on the thinking it was designed to preserve.

This course introduces you to the foundational concepts, themes, debates, and trends in the history of art of the global premodern world, focusing on Asian art and networks of exchange. Defying canonical Euro-centric narratives, we will explore how objects and artistic concepts were circulated across the trans-Asian routes crossing borders in East, Central, North, and South Asia. Why do we find Roman glass in ancient Chinese tombs? How did Buddhist imagery change after Alexander the Great’s failed conquest of India? What do the discoveries of Chinese ceramics in Madagascar and Kenya tell us about maritime trade in the 16 th century? How did artists in the Mongol empire respond to the plague in the Middle Ages? At the heart of these questions are larger issues of trade, war, migration, climate crises, and globalization – major factors in the creation and dissemination of art. The course is designed to reflect aspects of one of Vassar’s historic and foundational humanities courses, ART 105.