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Technical drawings by the architects and engineers of the Renaissance made use of a range of new methods of graphic representation. These drawings—among them Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawings of mechanical devices—have long been studied for their aesthetic qualities and technological ingenuity, but their significance for the architects and engineers themselves is seldom considered. The essays in Picturing Machines 1400-1700 take this alternate perspective and look at how drawing shaped the practice of early modern engineering. They do so through detailed investigations of specific images, looking at over 100 that range from sketches to perspective views to thoroughly constructed projections.
In early modern engineering practice, drawings were not merely visualizations of ideas but acted as models that shaped ideas. Picturing Machines establishes basic categories for the origins, purposes, functions, and contexts of early modern engineering illustrations, then treats a series of topics that not only focus on the way drawings became an indispensable means of engineering but also reflect the main stages in their historical development. The authors examine the social interaction conveyed by early machine images and their function as communication between practitioners; the knowledge either conveyed or presupposed by technical drawings, as seen in those of Giorgio Martini and Leonardo; drawings that required familiarity with geometry or geometric optics, including the development of architectural plans; and technical illustrations that bridged the gap between practical and theoretical mechanics.
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Scholars working at the intersection of African-American history and the history of technology are redefining the idea of technology to include the work of the skilled artisan and the ingenuity of the self-taught inventor. Although denied access through most of American history to many new technologies and to the privileged education of the engineer, African-Americans have been engaged with a range of technologies, as makers and as users, since the colonial era. A Hammer in Their Hands (the title comes from the famous song about John Henry, "the steel-driving man" who beat the steam drill) collects newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements for runaway slaves, letters, folklore, excerpts from biography and fiction, legal patents, protest pamphlets, and other primary sources to document the technological achievements of African-Americans.
Included in this rich and varied collection are a letter from Cotton Mather describing an early method of smallpox inoculation brought from Africa by a slave; selections from Frederick Douglass's autobiography and Uncle Tom's Cabin; the Confederate Patent Act, which barred slaves from holding patents; articles from 1904 by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, debating the issue of industrial education for African-Americans; a 1924 article from Negro World, "Automobiles and Jim Crow Regulations"; a photograph of an all-black World War II combat squadron; and a 1998 presidential executive order on environmental justice. A Hammer in Their Hands and its companion volume of essays, Technology and the African-American Experience (MIT Press, 2004) will be essential references in an emerging area of study.
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This book contains theoretical principles sufficient to gain an introduction to each technique, appreciating its capabilities and allowing an informed selection for research applications. It includes extensive reference to examples and published work.
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Rapid advances in information processing, communication and sensing technologies have enabled more and more devices to be provided with embedded processors, networking capabilities and sensors. For the field of estimation and control, it is now possible to consider an architecture in which many simple components communicate and cooperate to achieve a joint team goal. This distributed (or networked) architecture promises much in terms of performance, reliability and simplicity of design. However, at the same time, it requires extending the traditional theories of control, communication and computation and, in fact, looking at a unified picture of the three fields. From an estimation and control perspective, the presence of real communication channels can lead to a significant performance loss due to the introduction of non-classical information patterns into the problem. This book deals with new design principles to counter such performance degradation. The chief idea explored in this book is the joint design of information flow and the control law. While traditional control design has concentrated on calculating the optimal control input by assuming a particular information flow between the components, our approach seeks to synthesize the optimal information flow along with the optimal control law that satisfies the constraints of the information flow. Thus besides the question of What should an agent do?, the questions of Whom should an agent talk to?, What should an agent communicate?, When should an agent communicate? and so on also have to be answered. The design of the information flow represents an important degree of freedom available to the system designer that has hitherto largely been ignored. As we demonstrate in the book, the joint design of information flow and the optimal control input satisfying the constraints of that information flow yields large improvements in performance over simply trying to fit traditional design theories on distributed systems.
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This book not only provides a history of our nuclear endeavors in space over the past 60 years but it also provides the current aspirations of the Russian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese and American programs.
It is well written and is far from the stodgy style that you might expect from a government agency. The photographs, many colored, are excellent.
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Wrox's Professional Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio is one of the first guides to Microsoft's new platform for visualizing and programming robotics applications. Written by the founding architect of the product, Professional Microsoft Robotics Studio is heavy on examples making this a hands-on guide that will get readers building robotics applications quickly using 3 case-study robots: an indoor security robot, winning Magellan competitor and a chess-playing robotic arm.
Topics include:
* Common Concurrency Runtime
* Sending and Receiving Messages
* Building and Accessing Services
* Using a browser and the Internet as the UI for a robot
* Using supported hardware and integrating new hardware
* Simulating the real world for robotic interactions
* Extending the simulation environment
* Deploying to hardware
* Using the Visual Programming Language
* and more.
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Written by an expert with over 20 years of experience in the field, this timely volume provides;in a single source;all aspects of humidity measurement and instrumentation, including rudiments and theory, common applications, advantages and limitations of frequently used sensors and techniques, and guidelines for installation, maintenance, and calibration.
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