Fail U

The cost of a college degree has increased by 1,125% since 1978—four times the rate of inflation. Total student debt has surpassed $1.3 trillion. Nearly two thirds of all college students must borrow to study, and the average student graduates with more than $30,000 in debt. Many college graduates under twenty-five years old are unemployed or underemployed. And professors—remember them?—rarely teach undergraduates at many major universities, instead handing off their lecture halls to cheaper teaching assistants. So, is it worth it? That’s the question Charles J. Sykes attempts to answer in Fail U., exploring the staggering costs of a college education, the sharp decline in tenured faculty and teaching loads, the explosion of administrative jobs, the grandiose building plans, and the utter lack of preparedness for the real world that many now graduates face. Fail U. offers a different vision of higher education; one that is affordable, more productive, and better-suited to meet the needs of a diverse range of students—and one that will actually be useful in their future careers and lives.

This book presents 15 tutorial lectures by leading researchers given at the 11th edition of the International School on Formal Methods for the Design of Computer, Communication and Software Systems, SFM 2011, held in Bertinoro, Italy, in June 2011. SFM 2011 was devoted to formal methods for eternal networked software systems and covered several topics including formal foundations for the inter-operability of software systems, application-layer and middleware-layer dynamic connector synthesis, interaction behavior monitoring and learning, and quality assurance of connected systems. The school was held in collaboration with the researchers of the EU-funded projects CONNECT and ETERNALS. The papers are organized into six parts: (i) architecture and interoperability, (ii) formal foundations for connectors, (iii) connector synthesis, (iv) learning and monitoring, (v) dependability assurance, and (vi) trustworthy eternal systems via evolving software.

Presidents are surrounded by political strategists and White House counsel who presumably know enough to avoid making the same mistakes as their predecessors. Why, then, do the same kinds of presidential failures occur over and over again? Why Presidents Fail answers this question by examining presidential fiascos, quagmires, and risky business-the kind of failure that led President Kennedy to groan after the Bay of Pigs invasion, 'How could I have been so stupid?' In this book, Richard M. Pious looks at nine cases that have become defining events in presidencies from Dwight D. Eisenhower and the U-2 Flights to George W. Bush and Iraqi WMDs. He uses these cases to draw generalizations about presidential power, authority, rationality, and legitimacy. And he raises questions about the limits of presidential decision-making, many of which fly in the face of the conventional wisdom about the modern presidency.

The refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications, RTA 2003, held in Valencia, Spain in June 2003. The 26 revised regular papers and 6 system descriptions presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. All current aspects of rewriting are addressed.

An award-winning guide to faster and easier debugging is now updated with the latest tools and techniques. It demystifies one of the toughest aspects of software programming, showing clearly how to discover what caused software failures, and fix them with minimal muss and fuss.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Typed Lambda Calculi and Applications, TLCA'99, held in L'Aquila, Italy in April 1999. The 25 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 50 submissions. Also included are two invited demonstrations. The volume reports research results on various aspects of typed lambda calculi. Among the topics addressed are noncommutative logics, type theory, algebraic data types, logical calculi, abstract data types, and subtyping.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications, COCOA 2014, held on the island of Maui, Hawaii, USA, in December 2014. The 56 full papers included in the book were carefully reviewed and selected from 133 submissions. Topics covered include classic combinatorial optimization; geometric optimization; network optimization; optimization in graphs; applied optimization; CSoNet; and complexity, cryptography, and games.

Most machine learning research has been concerned with the development of systems that implememnt one type of inference within a single representational paradigm. Such systems, which can be called monostrategy learning systems, include those for empirical induction of decision trees or rules, explanation-based generalization, neural net learning from examples, genetic algorithm-based learning, and others. Monostrategy learning systems can be very effective and useful if learning problems to which they are applied are sufficiently narrowly defined. Many real-world applications, however, pose learning problems that go beyond the capability of monostrategy learning methods. In view of this, recent years have witnessed a growing interest in developing multistrategy systems, which integrate two or more inference types and/or paradigms within one learning system. Such multistrategy systems take advantage of the complementarity of different inference types or representational mechanisms. Therefore, they have a potential to be more versatile and more powerful than monostrategy systems. On the other hand, due to their greater complexity, their development is significantly more difficult and represents a new great challenge to the machine learning community. Multistrategy Learning contains contributions characteristic of the current research in this area.