In Improbable Scholars, David L. Kirp challenges the conventional wisdom about public schools and education reform in America through an in-depth look at Union City, New Jersey's high-performing urban school district. In this compelling study, Kirp reveals Union's city's revolutionary secret: running an exemplary school system doesn't demand heroics, just hard and steady work.

This book is a unique, multidisciplinary effort to apply rigorous thermodynamics fundamentals, a disciplined scholarly approach, to problems of sustainability, energy, and resource uses. Applying thermodynamic thinking to problems of sustainable behavior is a significant advantage in bringing order to ill-defined questions with a great variety of proposed solutions, some of which are more destructive than the original problem. The articles are pitched at a level accessible to advanced undergraduates and graduate students in courses on sustainability, sustainable engineering, industrial ecology, sustainable manufacturing, and green engineering. The timeliness of the topic, and the urgent need for solutions make this book attractive to general readers and specialist researchers as well. Top international figures from many disciplines, including engineers, ecologists, economists, physicists, chemists, policy experts and industrial ecologists among others make up the impressive list of contributors.

The volume Automation Control Theory Perspectives in Intelligent Systems presents new approaches and methods to real-world problems, and in particular, exploratory research that describes novel approaches in the field of cybernetics and automation control theory. Particular emphasis is laid on modern trends in intelligent information technology, system monitoring and proactive management of complex objects The 5th Computer Science On-line Conference (CSOC2016) is intended to provide an international forum for discussions on the latest high-quality research results in all areas related to Computer Science. The addressed topics are the theoretical aspects and applications of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligences, Cybernetics, Automation Control Theory and Software Engineering.