Course Schedule and Catalog

Department: University Courses

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Lecture

Credit Hours: 3

Description: TECHNOLOGICAL DISASTERS AND CATASTROPHES ***** This spring semester seminar is open to all majors and is taught by Dagobert Brito of Economics and Robert Curl of Chemistry. Through the technology produced by the scientific revolution, we now control forces of previously unimaginable power in a world of instant communications and vast complexity. But how well do we control these enormously powerful forces? We all know that sometimes things go wrong with disastrous consequences. How does this happen and what can be done to prevent catastrophes? The course will utilize a case study approach. We will study such disasters as the Columbia space shuttle, Exxon Valdez, Bhopal, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, the AIDS epidemic, and the collapse of Enron in order to develop general ideas about the causes and control of disasters and society's reaction to them. As a seminar course, class periods will be used primarily for discussion. We intend very few lectures, but there will be videos and occasional brief presentations by outside experts. ***** Course offered Spring 2005. ***** Instructor(s): Curl, Brito.