Describes how the "Financial Fit" program can help families determine how much college will really cost beyond the sticker price and factor cost into the college search, and explains how to maximize financial aid benefits.

Understanding and overcoming the gender gap in computer science education. The information technology revolution is transforming almost every aspect of society, but girls and women are largely out of the loop. Although women surf the Web in equal numbers to men and make a majority of online purchases, few are involved in the design and creation of new technology. It is mostly men whose perspectives and priorities inform the development of computing innovations and who reap the lion's share of the financial rewards. As only a small fraction of high school and college computer science students are female, the field is likely to remain a "male clubhouse," absent major changes. In Unlocking the Clubhouse, social scientist Jane Margolis and computer scientist and educator Allan Fisher examine the many influences contributing to the gender gap in computing. The book is based on interviews with more than 100 computer science students of both sexes from Carnegie Mellon University, a major center of computer science research, over a period of four years, as well as classroom observations and conversations with hundreds of college and high school faculty. The interviews capture the dynamic details of the female computing experience, from the family computer kept in a brother's bedroom to women's feelings of alienation in college computing classes. The authors investigate the familial, educational, and institutional origins of the computing gender gap. They also describe educational reforms that have made a dramatic difference at Carnegie Mellon—where the percentage of women entering the School of Computer Science rose from 7% in 1995 to 42% in 2000—and at high schools around the country.

A comprehensive and up-to-date textbook and reference for computational imaging, which combines vision, graphics, signal processing, and optics. Computational imaging involves the joint design of imaging hardware and computer algorithms to create novel imaging systems with unprecedented capabilities. In recent years such capabilities include cameras that operate at a trillion frames per second, microscopes that can see small viruses long thought to be optically irresolvable, and telescopes that capture images of black holes. This text offers a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to this rapidly growing field, a convergence of vision, graphics, signal processing, and optics. It can be used as an instructional resource for computer imaging courses and as a reference for professionals. It covers the fundamentals of the field, current research and applications, and light transport techniques. The text first presents an imaging toolkit, including optics, image sensors, and illumination, and a computational toolkit, introducing modeling, mathematical tools, model-based inversion, data-driven inversion techniques, and hybrid inversion techniques. It then examines different modalities of light, focusing on the plenoptic function, which describes degrees of freedom of a light ray. Finally, the text outlines light transport techniques, describing imaging systems that obtain micron-scale 3D shape or optimize for noise-free imaging, optical computing, and non-line-of-sight imaging. Throughout, it discusses the use of computational imaging methods in a range of application areas, including smart phone photography, autonomous driving, and medical imaging. End-of-chapter exercises help put the material in context.