Fifteen-year-old Adriana Nicu lives in the sheltered world of Bucharest, Romania, in the year 1987. Under the rule of Communist president Nicolae Ceaușescu, citizens of Bucharest live with the eyes and ears of the government ever present. Adriana's future, which will involve becoming an engineer, is locked in against her will. During a visit to her aunt's apartment, Adriana walks through a wardrobe into a hidden room filled with stacks of forbidden novels. Stories bring light into the darkest of circumstances as her family begins to unravel and her life strangely parallels those of her novels' heroines. Adriana's childhood loyalties and her belief that God doesn't exist are called into question as her circumstances force her to rethink things she once believed were certain.

The Six Degrees of Petrovitch Michael is an AI of incalculable complexity trapped under the remains of Oshicora tower. Petrovitch will free him one day, he just has to trust Michael will still be sane by the time he does. Maddy and Petrovitch have trust issues. She's left him, but Petrovitch is pretty sure she still loves him. Sonja Oshicora loves Petrovitch too. But she's playing a complicated game and it's not clear that she means to save him from what's coming. The CIA wants to save the world. Well, just America, but they'll call it what they like. The New Machine Jihad is calling. But Petrovitch killed it. Didn't he? And the Armageddonists tried to kill pretty much everyone by blowing the world up. Now, they want to do it again. Once again, all roads lead back to Petrovitch. Everyone wants something from him, but all he wants is to be free. . .

A modern and unified treatment of the mechanics, planning, and control of robots, suitable for a first course in robotics.

All typical and special modal and response analysis methods, applied within the frame of the design of spacecraft structures, are described in this book. It therefore addresses graduate students and engineers in the aerospace field.

The subject of earthquake engineering has been the focus of my teaching and research for many years. Thus, when Mario Paz, the editor of this handbook, asked me to write a Foreword, I was interested and honored by his request. Worldwide, people are beginning to understand the severity of the danger to present and future generations caused by the destruction of the environment. Earthquakes pose a similar threat; thus, the proper use of methods for earthquake-resistant design and construction is vitally important for countries that are at high risk of being subjected to strong-motion earthquakes. Most seismic activity is the result of tectonic earthquakes. Tectonic earthquakes are very special events in that, although they occur frequently, their probability of becoming natural hazards for a specific urban area is very small. When a severe earthquake does occur near an urban area, however, its consequences are very large in terms of structural destruction and human suffering.

This is a textbook for a first course in mechanical vibrations. There are many books in this area that try to include everything, thus they have become exhaustive compendiums, overwhelming for the undergraduate. In this book, all the basic concepts in mechanical vibrations are clearly identified and presented in a concise and simple manner with illustrative and practical examples. Vibration concepts include a review of selected topics in mechanics; a description of single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) systems in terms of equivalent mass, equivalent stiffness, and equivalent damping; a unified treatment of various forced response problems (base excitation and rotating balance); an introduction to systems thinking, highlighting the fact that SDOF analysis is a building block for multi-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) and continuous system analyses via modal analysis; and a simple introduction to finite element analysis to connect continuous system and MDOF analyses. There are more than sixty exercise problems, and a complete solutions manual. The use of MATLAB® software is emphasized.

Race mixture, or mestizaje, has played a critical role in the history, culture, and politics of Latin America. In Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom, Peter Wade draws on a multidisciplinary research study in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. He shows how Latin American elites and outside observers have emphasized mixture's democratizing potential, depicting it as a useful resource for addressing problems of racism (claiming that race mixture undoes racial difference and hierarchy), while Latin American scientists participate in this narrative with claims that genetic studies of mestizos can help isolate genetic contributors to diabetes and obesity and improve health for all. Wade argues that, in the process, genomics produces biologized versions of racialized difference within the nation and the region, but a comparative approach nuances the simple idea that highly racialized societies give rise to highly racialized genomics. Wade examines the tensions between mixture and purity, and between equality and hierarchy in liberal political orders, exploring how ideas and scientific data about genetic mixture are produced and circulate through complex networks.

Developed from three decades' worth of lecture notes which the author used to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this unique textbook presents a comprehensive treatment of structural dynamics and mechanical vibration. The chapters in this book are self-contained so that instructors can choose to be selective about which topics they teach. Written with an application-based focus, the text covers topics such as earthquake engineering, soil dynamics, and relevant numerical methods techniques that use MATLAB. Advanced topics such as the Hilbert transform, gyroscope forces, and spatially periodic structures are also treated extensively. Concise enough for an introductory course yet rigorous enough for an advanced or graduate-level course, this textbook is also a useful reference manual - even after the final exam - for professional and practicing engineers.

The true story, and the black citizens, behind the evolution of racial equality in Minnesota He had just given a rousing speech to a packed assembly in St. Paul, but Frederick Douglass, confidant to the Great Emancipator and conscience of the Republican Party, was denied a hotel room because he was black. This was Minnesota in 1873, four years after the state had approved black suffrage—a state where “freedom” meant being unshackled from slavery but not social restrictions, where “equality” meant access to the ballot but not to a restaurant downtown. Spanning the half-century after the Civil War, Degrees of Freedom draws a rare picture of black experience in a northern state and of the nature of black discontent and action within a predominantly white, ostensibly progressive society. William D. Green reveals little-known historical characters among the black men and women who moved to Minnesota following the Fifteenth Amendment; worked as farmhands and laborers; built communities (such as Pig’s Eye Landing, later renamed St. Paul), businesses, and a newspaper (the Western Appeal); and embodied the slow but inexorable advancement of race relations in the state over time. Within this absorbing, often surprising, narrative we meet “ordinary” citizens, like former slave and early settler Jim Thompson and black barbers catering to a white clientele, but also personages of national stature, such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, all of whom championed civil rights in Minnesota. And we see how, in a state where racial prejudice and oppression wore a liberal mask, black settlers and entrepreneurs, politicians, and activists maneuvered within a restricted political arena to bring about real and lasting change.

This book is an introduction to the mathematical theory of design for articulated mechanical systems known as linkages. The focus is on sizing mechanical constraints that guide the movement of a work piece, or end-effector, of the system. The function of the device is prescribed as a set of positions to be reachable by the end-effector; and the mechanical constraints are formed by joints that limit relative movement. The goal is to find all the devices that can achieve a specific task. Formulated in this way the design problem is purely geometric in character. Robot manipulators, walking machines, and mechanical hands are examples of articulated mechanical systems that rely on simple mechanical constraints to provide a complex workspace for the end- effector. The principles presented in this book form the foundation for a design theory for these devices. The emphasis, however, is on articulated systems with fewer degrees of freedom than that of the typical robotic system, and therefore, less complexity. This book will be useful to mathematics, engineering and computer science departments teaching courses on mathematical modeling of robotics and other articulated mechanical systems. This new edition includes research results of the past decade on the synthesis of multi loop planar and spherical linkages, and the use of homotopy methods and Clifford algebras in the synthesis of spatial serial chains. One new chapter on the synthesis of spatial serial chains introduces numerical homotopy and the linear product decomposition of polynomial systems. The second new chapter introduces the Clifford algebra formulation of the kinematics equations of serial chain robots. Examples are use throughout to demonstrate the theory.