Mary Jo Bane and David T. Ellwood examine the welfare system - its recipients, its providers and the many policy ideas surrounding it. Focusing on the AFDC Programme (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), they identify three models that have been used to explain welfare dependency and test them against an accumulating body of evidence, offering suggestions for identifying potential long-term recipients so that resources can be targeted to encourage self-sufficiency. Finally, they review policy options.

Based on the major primary sources of Roman history, this book recalls the experiences of the ancient Romans through a thousand years of their history.

The fantastic reality that is modern physics is open for your exploration, guided by one of its primary architects and interpreters, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek. Some jokes, some poems, and extracts from wife Betsy Devine's sparkling chronicle of what it's like to live through a Nobel Prize provide easy entertainment. There's also some history, some philosophy, some exposition of frontier science, and some frontier science, for your lasting edification. 49 pieces, including many from Wilczek's award-winning Reference Frame columns in Physics Today, and some never before published, are gathered by style and subject into a dozen chapters, each with a revealing, witty introduction. Profound ideas, presented with style: What could be better? Enjoy.

How can we co-opt digital tools to build a more beautiful future? In the spring of 2020-amidst a global pandemic, economic depression, and transformational movement for racial equity-we talked to artists and activists about tech's potential to help reinvent our shared realities. Published by Pioneer Works Press in collaboration with The Creative Independent and Are.na, Software for Artists Book: Building Better Realities is edited by Willa Köerner, and features contributions from Salome Asega, Stephanie Dinkins, Grayson Earle, ann haeyoung, Rindon Johnson, Ryan Kuo, and Tsige Tafesse-plus 47 Digital Diary entries from our community. A free PDF version of the book will be released on the occasion of Software for Artists Day 6, happening on July 18 & 19, 2020.

Impossible Realities is one of the first books to examine the science behind psychic and paranormal activity. A former Defense Department expert on artificial intelligence, Maureen Caudill provides evidence for a wide range of paranormal phenomena.Impossible Realities presents a wealth of anecdotal and empirical evidence to prove the existence (and power) of:psychokinesis (most famously spoon bending)remote viewingenergy healingtelepathy, animal telepathyprecognitionsurvival after deathreincarnationCaudill presents the strongest case yet for bringing paranormal phenomena from the margins into the realm of the normal and credible. This is a book both for true believers and skeptics alike.

The recognition that cyberspace is a fiction -- a narrative that creates a coherence it would like to imagine "really" exists -- is crucial to any theoretically sophisticated critique of the limitations of this consensual hallucination and the discontents it imperfectly masks. In this groundbreaking volume Robert Markley and his co-authors set out to discover why "cyberspace provokes often-rapturous rhetoric but resists critical analysis." Taking a variety of approaches, the authors explore the ways in which virtual realities conserve and incorporate rather than overthrow the assumptions and values of a traditional, logocentric humanism: the Platonist division of the world into the physical and metaphysical in which ideal forms are valued over material content. Cyberspace, David Porush suggests, represents not a break with our metaphysical past but an extension of its basic theistic postulates. Richard Grusin argues that the claims for new forms of electronic communication depend upon the very notions of authorship -- and subjectivity -- they claim to transcend. N. Katherine Hayles examines debates about cybernetics in the 1950s to demonstrate that the history of mind-body ideas in the age of computers and feedback loops is itself conflicted. David Brande analyzes cyberspace as an extension of the logic of late twentieth-century capitalism. And Robert Markley explores the entangled roots of cyberspace in the philosophy of mathematics. "One of the ironies of our culture's fascination with cyberspace is that our material and psychic investments in Virtual Reality suggest that the death of print culture -- or its disappearance into the matrix -- has been greatly exaggerated.... Cyberspace is unthinkable, literally inconceivable, without the print culture it claims to transcend. It is, in part, a by-product of a tradition of metaphysics that, boats against the current, bears us back relentlessly to our past." -- Robert Markley, from the introduction

A CHILLING NOVEL ABOUT THE ISOLATION OF BEING STALKED AND THE ABUSE OF POWER. Olivia Peters is over the moon when her literary idol, the celebrated novelist and muchadored local priest Mark D. Brendan, offers to become her personal writing mentor. But when Father Mark's enthusiasm for Olivia's prose develops into something more, Olivia's emotions quickly shift from wonder to confusion to despair. Exactly what game is Father Mark playing, and how on earth can she get out of it? This remarkable novel about overcoming the isolation that stems from victimization is powerful, luminous, and impossible to put down.

Realities is the fictional biography of Sam Turner, who has a PhD in theoretical physics; is a Nobel Prize winner; is a senior faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, New Jersey; is Time Magazines Man of the Year 2018; and is the codeveloper of the Turner-Simcock Propulsion System (TSPS), which will enable mankind to travel to the stars. He is also a lover of beauty, especially but not limited to, the feminine kind. Dr. Turner lives in five realitiesone real and four virtual, or so he thinks at first. But are the virtual realities virtual realities or alternate realities? Is his real reality just one of many alternate realities, all equally real? Not even Dr. Vihaan Patel, inventor of the Patel VR Theater, can answer these questions. As Dr. Turner says, The beauty is, we will never know. The realities Dr. Turner lives in are inhabited by a group of women whose various histories are interwoven. These are Nancy Swann, the most beautiful woman Sam has ever seen; Becky Alsace and Sarah Burke, fellow students with Sam at Columbia University, linked with him for life; Caroline Williams, director at the New York Museum of Modern Art; a Catholic nun in Tanzania; the Vietnamese trio, Pham Thi Hua, Mai Thi Lan, and Nguyen Thi Tran, all of whom are involved with Sam in the final days of the Vietnam War and alternately in Manhattan; and Pam Windham, botanist and widow of a panda expert. You will wonder, along with Sam, what is and what isnt real. You, along with Sam, will have to come to your own conclusions. And you will enjoy, along with Sam, the entire adventure. Start reading and meet Nancy Swann.

Business is woven into the very fabric of American life, yet rarely surfaces in the nation's literary history. Even in novels about business, it proves an elusive motif that fails to mirror actual business organizations. This book argues that literary representations of business remain ineffable because business serves potential aesthetic functions, subtly yet meaningfully impacting readers. Exploring the complex representation of business in realist, naturalist and modernist works, Erhan Simsek reveals these functions by analyzing how the motif intertwines with social developments, literary movements and author biographies. He thus illuminates the motif itself while highlighting the utility of a focus on the changing functions of literature.