How do we know which social and economic policies work, which should be continued, and which should be changed? Jim Manzi argues that throughout history, various methods have been attempted -- except for controlled experimentation. Experiments provide the feedback loop that allows us, in certain limited ways, to identify error in our beliefs as a first step to correcting them. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, scientists invented a methodology for executing controlled experiments to evaluate certain kinds of proposed social interventions. This technique goes by many names in different contexts (randomized control trials, randomized field experiments, clinical trials, etc.). Over the past ten to twenty years this has been increasingly deployed in a wide variety of contexts, but it remains the red-haired step child of modern social science. This is starting to change, and this change should be encouraged and accelerated, even though the staggering complexity of human society creates severe limits to what social science could be realistically expected to achieve. Randomized trials have shown, for example, that work requirements for welfare recipients have succeeded like nothing else in encouraging employment, that charter school vouchers have been successful in increasing educational attainment for underprivileged children, and that community policing has worked to reduce crime, but also that programs like Head Start and Job Corps, which might be politically attractive, fail to attain their intended objectives. Business leaders can also use experiments to test decisions in a controlled, low-risk environment before investing precious resources in large-scale changes -- the philosophy behind Manzi's own successful software company. In a powerful and masterfully-argued book, Manzi shows us how the methods of science can be applied to social and economic policy in order to ensure progress and prosperity.

Outlines an approach to using applications of the scientific method to address economic and social issues, citing successes in randomized trials and explaining how adjustable experiments have the potential for formulating working solutions.

The robotic way people smile is John's first inclination that things are not quite as they seem in Grand Siles. Attending his last year of middle school, the boy's parents are forced to tell him about a plot so abominable that it upends John's world. At the age of fourteen, everyone is brainwashed with a tracking device by a society called Tracker for Globe "T.F.G." John, and his friends, Chase and Hazel, become aware of this hidden society tracking and controlling people when it is their turn to be implanted with the device. Over time plot twists come into play as John starts seeing visions of the future and a second secret group, the Renegades, work with John to fight the T.F.G. While hope of winning the war is right within their grasp, John realizes he might not be the only with special abilities. With a creative use of holograms and plotting, John and his friends, along with the Renegades, take on the T.F.G. in an exciting and unexpected battle.

Face analysis is essential for a large number of applications such as human-computer interaction or multimedia (e.g. content indexing and retrieval). Although many approaches are under investigation, performance under uncontrolled conditions is still not satisfactory. The variations that impact facial appearance (e.g. pose, expression, illumination, occlusion, motion blur) make it a difficult problem to solve. This book describes the progress towards this goal, from a core building block – landmark detection – to the higher level of micro and macro expression recognition. Specifically, the book addresses the modeling of temporal information to coincide with the dynamic nature of the face. It also includes a benchmark of recent solutions along with details about the acquisition of a dataset for such tasks.

This paper analyzes the inflationary process in a centrally planned economy which has an uncontrolled market where prices can move more freely. The maintenance of controls over prices and rationing in the economy leads to the emergence of forces that generate inflation in the uncontrolled market, and that cause shrinkage of the controlled economy as resources move into the uncontrolled market. Decontrol of prices and production of the controlled market is the optimal policy. The adoption of this policy facilitates an increase in income and aggregate demand, which raises the equilibrium prices and total production in the economy.

"Brian Ellis' poems make me want to set fire to my house and run out of the flaming door, through the streets, the fields, up the buildings and across the moon."--Anis Mojgani, author "...every turn and sudden stop is a satisfying lurch in the direction of growing up."-- Simone Beaubien, The Boston Poetry Slam His words shiver, babble, rant and constantly threaten to fall apart under the weight of their own gravity. Ellis' colorful voice is a strong addition to the Boston spoken word tradition. A second-hand microscope examining the fuzzy science of survival, Uncontrolled Experiments in Freedom is a manic and shimmering author at his creative zenith. Filled with tangentially familiar characters--family misremembered, or friends still to be met--all delivered with deft eloquence, frank eye for unlikely detail, and inescapable sense of punk nostalgia.