UMBC Summer & Winter Blog
According to Feed America, 43.1 million Americans or 13.5 percent of the population lived in poverty in 2015. The Cato institute tells us that federal government spends $668 billion on social welfare programs each year. Combine that figure with state and local spending, and our country contributes $1 billion to counteract poverty annually. But where does that money actually go? How […]
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Ever wonder why certain things happen, or how your mind reaches certain conclusions? Do we begin with a hypothesis and explore options to reach a conclusion? Deductive reasoning. Or do we start with what we see around us, drawing patterns from observations and using those trends to make a generalization? Inductive reasoning. This winter, explore the various ways to […]
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The first recorded observations of comets, solar eclipses and supernovae came from the Chinese. We can thank the Greeks for gears, screws, catapults, and crowbows. The Romans were pioneers in civil engineering and built a highly sophisticated urban civilization. The ancient Egyptians developed simple machines, such as the ramp, to make the construction process easier (After all, the pyramids weren’t built […]
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Ever considered the moral motivation of characters in The Dark Knight? The Joker, one might say, strives for a Hobbesian “state of nature” by trying to eliminate social values. Thomas Hobbes argued that social structures eliminate the inclinations of the state of nature, which pit all men in a war against one another. Bruce Wayne, on the other hand, could be considered moral using […]
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We live in a complex global environment, characterized by state actors, non-state actors, and transnational issues and forces. In POLI/GLBL 483: International Negotiation, students will work on contemporary case studies, including the Iran Nuclear Negotiations, the US-Cuban Rapprochement, and the Global Climate Talks. The exploration of negotiation as a high stakes game will feature conceptual material on issue salience […]
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