From Pulitzer Prize winner Brent Staples, an evocative memoir that poses universal questions: Where does the family end and the self begin? What do we owe our families, and what do we owe our dreams for ourselves? What part of the past is a gift and what part a shackle? For Brent Staples there is the added dimension of race: moving from a black world into one largely defined by whites. The oldest song among nine children, Brent grew up in a small industrial town near Philadelphia. First a scholarship to a local college and then one for graduate study at the University of Chicago pulled him out of the close family circle. While he was away, the industries that supported the town failed, and drug dealing rushed in to fill the economic void. News of arrests and premature deaths among Brent's childhood friends underscored the precariousness of his perch in a world of mostly white achievers. A younger brother became a cocaine dealer and was murdered by one of his "clients." His death propelled Brent into a reconsideration of his childhood and coming-of-age that offers vivid portraits of family and place, of values that supported and pressures that tore apart, of the appeal and pain of entering a predominantly white world, and of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the black world he grew away from.

Locally computable (NC0) functions are "simple" functions for which every bit of the output can be computed by reading a small number of bits of their input. The study of locally computable cryptography attempts to construct cryptographic functions that achieve this strong notion of simplicity and simultaneously provide a high level of security. Such constructions are highly parallelizable and they can be realized by Boolean circuits of constant depth. This book establishes, for the first time, the possibility of local implementations for many basic cryptographic primitives such as one-way functions, pseudorandom generators, encryption schemes and digital signatures. It also extends these results to other stronger notions of locality, and addresses a wide variety of fundamental questions about local cryptography. The author's related thesis was honorably mentioned (runner-up) for the ACM Dissertation Award in 2007, and this book includes some expanded sections and proofs, and notes on recent developments. The book assumes only a minimal background in computational complexity and cryptography and is therefore suitable for graduate students or researchers in related areas who are interested in parallel cryptography. It also introduces general techniques and tools which are likely to interest experts in the area.

In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor: Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot--née Marian Evans.

There was a time when 'universe' meant all there is. Everything. Yet, as Brian Greene's extraordinary book shows, ours may be just one universe among many, like endless reflections in a mirror. He takes us on a captivating exploration of parallel worlds - from a multiverse where an infinite number of your doppelg ngers are reading this sentence, to vast oceans of bubble universes and even multiverses made of mathematics - showing just how much of reality's true nature may be hidden within them.

What do Scientists Say About Time Travel? It's fair to say that most scientists today will tell you that time travel is impossible. Three of today's top physicists - Charles Liu, Brian Green and Michio Kaku - all hold that time travel is, if not impossible, unlikely in the extreme. However, one of the most brilliant minds of our time, physicist Stephen Hawking, disagrees - although only partially. He believes that time travel is theoretically possible, but only into the future. …. But What Do Real People Experience? The opinion of science, however, has never stopped thousands of people around the world from reporting what they firmly believe are actual experiences of spontaneous time travel! Still others insist that time travel is not only possible, but they have already done it as part of top secret government programmes. Claims for time travel range from the highly flaky to the astoundingly believable. They are especially difficult to dismiss when time travel reports come from absolutely ordinary, rock-solid people who have nothing to gain by proclaiming they travelled in time. Many people who report time travel experiences don't necessarily believe it themselves. What happened to them was so strange, so unexpected, yet so real; they simply have no other good explanation for their experience. You will meet a number of such individuals in this book, most of their stories straight out of the headline of local newspapers. No doubt, a story or two will strike the reader as pure balderdash. On the other hand, some of these cases of time travel are tantalizing and unexplainable. They also come with a certain amount of solid evidence, such as stopped clocks, frozen machines and electromagnetic devices acting in inexplicable ways. Physicist and NASA scientist Tom Campbell said that scientific advances always 'come from the fringe.' Thus, even if you consider some of these stories stepping dangerously 'out there' onto that fringy edge, remember that many of yesterday's fringe theories are today's scientific fact. At the very least, it doesn't hurt to approach the idea of time travel with an open mind and a sense of wonder.

The national bestselling author of The God Equation takes us on a thrilling journey to explore black holes and time machines, multidimensional space and the possibility that parallel universes may lay alongside our own. “A wonderful tour, with an expert guide.” —Brian Greene, New York Times bestselling author of The Elegant Universe Kaku skillfully guides us through the latest innovations in string theory and its latest iteration, M-theory, which posits that our universe may be just one in an endless multiverse, a singular bubble floating in a sea of infinite bubble universes. If M-theory is proven correct, we may perhaps finally find answer to the question, “What happened before the big bang?” This is an exciting and unforgettable introduction into the new cutting-edge theories of physics and cosmology from one of the pre-eminent voices in the field.

The finite-difference time-domain (FTDT) method has revolutionized antenna design and electromagnetics engineering. This book raises the FDTD method to the next level by empowering it with the vast capabilities of parallel computing. It shows engineers how to exploit the natural parallel properties of FDTD to improve the existing FDTD method and to efficiently solve more complex and large problem sets. Professionals learn how to apply open source software to develop parallel software and hardware to run FDTD in parallel for their projects. The book features hands-on examples that illustrate th.

Literary Nonfiction. Criminal Law. Here is a unique bringing together of nonfiction (the lawyer's perspective) and fiction (the writer's view) on a topic of devastating concern to victims and the accused. Alex Landon (the lawyer) and Elaine Halleck (the writer) explore a particularly difficult topic, the effect of laws enacted in the aftermath of brutal child abductions and murders on those accused of lesser sexual crimes or those falsely accused and on society as a whole.

This is an introductory book on supercomputer applications written by a researcher who is working on solving scientific and engineering application problems on parallel computers. The book is intended to quickly bring researchers and graduate students working on numerical solutions of partial differential equations with various applications into the area of parallel processing.The book starts from the basic concepts of parallel processing, like speedup, efficiency and different parallel architectures, then introduces the most frequently used algorithms for solving PDEs on parallel computers, with practical examples. Finally, it discusses more advanced topics, including different scalability metrics, parallel time stepping algorithms and new architectures and heterogeneous computing networks which have emerged in the last few years of high performance computing. Hundreds of references are also included in the book to direct interested readers to more detailed and in-depth discussions of specific topics.

You will discover how to significantly and effectively: reduce your fear of evaluation, negative thinking, anger, and embarrassment. Raise your self-confidence and social effectiveness at work and play. Say good-bye to your loneliness, make friends, and date more comfortably. Control you stress and deal with criticism, disagreements, and rejection. Make the impression on others you want them to have. Create your own career opportunities.