No Free Lunch

"A welcome addition to the literature striving to eradicate one of the greatest social ills humanity faces-basic economic illiteracy." --Peter J. Boettke, University Professor of Economics and Philosophy George Mason University Most people don't think economics can be life-changing because they confuse it with forecasting, charts, diagrams, numbers, math, and politics. The book you're holding in your hands will change all of that. In plain English, Caleb Fuller shares how economics is about people, how they pursue their dreams, and what hinders them along the way. He shows how you've been too easily persuaded by pithy catchphrases and bumper-sticker slogans, even outright lies, that fail to grapple with the rich complexity of your life and human society as a whole. You'll be offended when you realize that you've been "had," but ultimately relieved when you see economics, and your life, through a new lens.

Darwin's greatest accomplishment was to show how life might be explained as the result of natural selection. But does Darwin's theory mean that life was unintended? William A. Dembski argues that it does not. As the leading proponent of intelligent design, Dembski reveals a designer capable of originating the complexity and specificity found throughout the cosmos. Scientists and theologians alike will find this book of interest as it brings the question of creation firmly into the realm of scientific debate. The paperback is updated with a new Preface by the author.

This edited volume illustrates the connections between machine learning techniques, black box optimization, and no-free lunch theorems. Each of the thirteen contributions focuses on the commonality and interdisciplinary concepts as well as the fundamentals needed to fully comprehend the impact of individual applications and problems. Current theoretical, algorithmic, and practical methods used are provided to stimulate a new effort towards innovative and efficient solutions. The book is intended for beginners who wish to achieve a broad overview of optimization methods and also for more experienced researchers as well as researchers in mathematics, optimization, operations research, quantitative logistics, data analysis, and statistics, who will benefit from access to a quick reference to key topics and methods. The coverage ranges from mathematically rigorous methods to heuristic and evolutionary approaches in an attempt to equip the reader with different viewpoints of the same problem.

The verdict is in: Free enterprise has lifted billions of people out of abject poverty all over the world and provided a higher quality of life than has ever been thought possible. But a growing case is forming in public opinion against free markets, and for a significantly larger command & control management of the economy. Whether you call it socialism or progressive leftism, more and more people are turning away from the forces of freedom and social cooperation that made the last two hundred years of prosperity possible, and embracing a system that deprives human beings of their dignity, impoverishing whole societies both financially and spiritually. What David Bahnsen does here is pull from the masters—the great economic voices of the past and the present—to remind readers of the basic economic truths that must serve as our foundation in understanding the challenges of today. In 250 vital points, he combines pearls of wisdom from economic legends with his own careful commentary to provide readers the perspective, information, and reaffirmation they need in order to see economics for what it is. It will empower you and equip you with the truth—250 truths—that are crucially needed to keep the lights on in civilization and advance the cause of human flourishing.

“Everyone who is successful, regardless of age, race, or ethnicity, at some point in their lives received an opportunity. Someone believed in them enough to give them a chance.”These are the words of Rodney Carroll, one of America’s most innovative minds and a leading architect of the welfare to work movement. They encapsulate his inspiring memoir,No Free Lunch, the story of a man who rose to the top–and returned to bring millions of people along with him. Raised in an area both economically and emotionally depressed, Rodney and his siblings were forced onto welfare after Rodney’s alcoholic and abusive mother was declared unfit to raise her children. Though lured by gangs that aimed to “draft” him into their midst, he clung instead to his wise and loving grandmother and his innate desire to “make a difference.” A part-time job as a truck loader for UPS would change Rodney’s life forever–and eventually change the lives of others who were looking for a chance to work. By improving the efficiency of others at UPS, Rodney was rewarded with promotions. By balancing his successes and setbacks, applauding others’ accomplishments, and disciplining not humiliating, he learned how to manage men and women, lead departments, and, at last, to lift up others who started out as humbly as he had. Putting his own job on the line, Rodney created a program to employ welfare recipients at UPS–a plan that would become a model for others across the country. Initially derided by others as “those people,” these new workers responded to Rodney’s faith in them, and their new self-esteem led to new self-sufficiency. Written with vigor and humor,No Free Lunchis a testament to one man’s tenacity and compassion, a sweeping story that starts in a slum and ends on a stage shared with President Clinton, a stirring book about one American’s fight for the independence of millions.

The set LNCS 2723 and LNCS 2724 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2003, held in Chicago, IL, USA in July 2003. The 193 revised full papers and 93 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 417 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on a-life adaptive behavior, agents, and ant colony optimization; artificial immune systems; coevolution; DNA, molecular, and quantum computing; evolvable hardware; evolutionary robotics; evolution strategies and evolutionary programming; evolutionary sheduling routing; genetic algorithms; genetic programming; learning classifier systems; real-world applications; and search based software engineering.

This book reviews the state-of-the-art developments in nature-inspired algorithms and their applications in various disciplines, ranging from feature selection and engineering design optimization to scheduling and vehicle routing. It introduces each algorithm and its implementation with case studies as well as extensive literature reviews, and also includes self-contained chapters featuring theoretical analyses, such as convergence analysis and no-free-lunch theorems so as to provide insights into the current nature-inspired optimization algorithms. Topics include ant colony optimization, the bat algorithm, B-spline curve fitting, cuckoo search, feature selection, economic load dispatch, the firefly algorithm, the flower pollination algorithm, knapsack problem, octonian and quaternion representations, particle swarm optimization, scheduling, wireless networks, vehicle routing with time windows, and maximally different alternatives. This timely book serves as a practical guide and reference resource for students, researchers and professionals.

Whether kids love or hate the food served there, the American school lunchroom is the stage for one of the most popular yet flawed social welfare programs in our nation's history. School Lunch Politics covers this complex and fascinating part of American culture, from its origins in early twentieth-century nutrition science, through the establishment of the National School Lunch Program in 1946, to the transformation of school meals into a poverty program during the 1970s and 1980s. Susan Levine investigates the politics and culture of food; most specifically, who decides what American children should be eating, what policies develop from those decisions, and how these policies might be better implemented. Even now, the school lunch program remains problematic, a juggling act between modern beliefs about food, nutrition science, and public welfare. Levine points to the program menus' dependence on agricultural surplus commodities more than on children's nutritional needs, and she discusses the political policy barriers that have limited the number of children receiving meals and which children were served. But she also shows why the school lunch program has outlasted almost every other twentieth-century federal welfare initiative. In the midst of privatization, federal budget cuts, and suspect nutritional guidelines where even ketchup might be categorized as a vegetable, the program remains popular and feeds children who would otherwise go hungry. As politicians and the media talk about a national obesity epidemic, School Lunch Politics is a timely arrival to the food policy debates shaping American health, welfare, and equality. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.