"A college education doesn't come with a sticker price. Maybe it should. Millions of Americans miss out on the economic benefits of a college education because of concerns around the costs. Financial aid systems offer limited help and produce uneven distributions. In the United States today, the systems meant to improve access to education have added a new layer of deterrence. In Mismatch, economist Philip B. Levine examines the role of financial aid systems in facilitating (and discouraging) access to college. If markets require prices in order to function optimally, then the American higher-education system--rife as it is with hidden and variable costs--amounts to a market failure. It's a problem of price transparency, not just affordability. Ensuring that students understand exactly what college will cost, including financial aid, could lift the lid on not only college attendance for more people, but for greater representation across demographics and institutions. As Levine illustrates, our conversations around affordability and free tuition miss a larger truth: that the opacity of our current college-financing systems is a primary driver of inequities in education and society. Mismatch offers a bold, trenchant new argument for an educational reform that is well within reach"--

There are a myriad of fitness professionals, scientists and religious scholars who attest to the power of our mind and how our thoughts allow us to reach our goals or not. Just like there's super food for the brain, heart, lungs etc., this book serves as super food for your spirit. Whether you're new to fitness or starting over due to illness, injury, or a lifestyle change, Udeka uses logic and inspiration to get you moving. With quotes and real-life stories from everyday people and fitness greats such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, there's no excuse not to get started.

A “bracing and well-argued” study of America’s college debt crisis—“necessary reading for anyone concerned about the fate of American higher education” (Kirkus). College is far too expensive for many people today, and the confusing mix of federal, state, institutional, and private financial aid leaves countless students without the resources they need to pay for it. In Paying the Price, education scholar Sara Goldrick-Rab reveals the devastating effect of these shortfalls. Goldrick-Rab examines a study of 3,000 students who used the support of federal aid and Pell Grants to enroll in public colleges and universities in Wisconsin in 2008. Half the students in the study left college without a degree, while less than 20 percent finished within five years. The cause of their problems, time and again, was lack of money. Unable to afford tuition, books, and living expenses, they worked too many hours at outside jobs, dropped classes, took time off to save money, and even went without adequate food or housing. In many heartbreaking cases, they simply left school—not with a degree, but with crippling debt. Goldrick-Rab combines that data with devastating stories of six individual students, whose struggles make clear the human and financial costs of our convoluted financial aid policies. In the final section of the book, Goldrick-Rab offers a range of possible solutions, from technical improvements to the financial aid application process, to a bold, public sector–focused “first degree free” program. "Honestly one of the most exciting books I've read, because [Goldrick-Rab has] solutions. It's a manual that I'd recommend to anyone out there, if you're a parent, if you're a teacher, if you're a student."—Trevor Noah, The Daily Show

Selected by CHOICE as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1995,

This book outlines a set of issues that are critical to all of parallel architecture--communication latency, communication bandwidth, and coordination of cooperative work (across modern designs). It describes the set of techniques available in hardware and in software to address each issues and explore how the various techniques interact.

In recent years, genetic programming has attracted many researcher's attention and so became a consolidated methodology to automatically create new competitive computer programs. Concise and efficient synthesis of a variety of systems has been generated by evolutionary computations. Evolvable hardware is a growing discipline. It allows one to evolve creative and novel hardware architectures given the expected input/output behaviour. There are two kinds of evolvable hardware: extrinsic and intrinsic. The former relies on a simulated evolutionary process to evaluate the characteristics of the evolved designs while the latter uses hardware itself to do so. Usually, reconfigurable hardware such FPGA and FPAA are exploited. One of the main problems that still faces researchers in the field of evolutionary machine design is the scalability. This book is devoted to reporting innovative and significant progress in automatic machine design. Theoretical as well as practical chapters are contemplated. The scalability problem in evolutionary machine designs is addresses. The content of this book is divided into two main parts: evolvable hardware and genetic programming; and evolutionary designs. In the following, we give a brief description of the main contribution of each of the included chapters.