The Roman family was supposedly dominated by the father who trained his sons to take up prestigious careers and his daughters to advance the family by marrying well. This conservative ideal was reflected in the exemplary tales from Roman history on which young Romans were raised, but the reality was somewhat different. In this course we study Roman comedies, love poetry, private letters, biographical anecdotes, and artistic representations. By learning about these unusual families that shaped our world, we come to a better understanding of our own patterns of life. Risk, Uncertainty, and Markets.
Games of chance are fascinating for both practitioners and the more academically inclined.
The seminar looks at how markets operate, how markets respond to new information, the meaning of market efficiency, and what this means for measuring risk and determining value. In this seminar, we consider the lives of renowned figures from the perspective of the psychobiographer. Although much of our knowledge of how the brain and nervous system work has been obtained in the past fifty years, philosophers and scientists have studied the brain for centuries. Emphasis is placed on the mechanisms of discovery used by those who studied the brain, and on the social implications of the knowledge gained. Students also consider how these ideas contribute to our current body of knowledge about brain function and disease, and where the study of neuroscience is going in the future.