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Searching For The Ideal Machine: How Strategy Drives VEX IQ Robot Design (MRI Inspiration & Outreach Series) (Volume 4)

Searching For The Ideal Machine: How Strategy Drives VEX IQ Robot Design is a handbook that explores the relationship between strategy and engineering design in the field of competitive robotics. The book provides a methodology for finding success in competitive robotics. The process starts by determining the key functional requirements of a season’s game, and details and discusses a variety of machines and mechanisms that can satisfy such requirements, using the 2015 VEX IQ Highrise game as an illustrative example. These machines and mechanisms can be versatile (or general purpose) or specialized (or of limited purpose but with higher performance). The problem of building stable irregular stacks is discussed and solved in a mathematically rigorous way. Next the authors develop a taxonomy of robots, classifying the various common types of machines into a set of six robot “families” – pushbots, clawbots, harvesters, plowbots, gantries and (task-optimized) cherrypickers. The authors show how compliance of designs with game rules on robot sizing can be evaluated prior to construction using simple trigonometry. The book applies these principles to the 2015 VEX IQ Highrise game, developing a variety of strategies for transport, sorting and stacking of game objects. Next the authors show how these specialized strategies can be combined for improved competition performance using an evaluation schema that considers the maximum and likely score and the reliability of the machine to assess the suitability of each machine for solo and alliance telerobotics as well as autonomous robotics based upon its strengths in transport, sorting and stacking of game objects. After describing their favored solution to the exemplary problem, the authors provide a detailed methodology for extending such an approach to future competitions. Written in plain English for a middle school audience (both students and coaches), most of the book is accessible to elementary schoolers as well. Two sections of the book are mathematically sophisticated– particularly the sections on designing robots for rules compliance, and the mathematically rigorous solution to the problem of building stable irregular stacks. Elementary and middle robotics coaches may find this book useful to illustrate robotics concepts and help train their students in designing the optimal machine for their chosen strategy. The machines, mechanisms and assessment process described in this book will prove useful to future season robotics competitions.

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Searching for Faith: Carissa Jones, Book 1

A heart-pounding suspense thriller written by New York Times and USA Today best-selling author Kristen Middleton.

A missing child.

A gifted psychic.

A serial killer who preys on the innocent.

When a seven-year-old girl goes missing near Two Harbors, Minnesota, psychic Carissa Jones offers to help locate her. Desperate to find the child, and with no real leads, the local authorities agree to pull her into the case.

This is book one in The Missing series. Each story will focus on Carissa Jones and her involvement in each case.

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Writings on the Wall: Searching for a New Equality Beyond Black and White

Best-selling author, basketball legend, and cultural commentator Kareem Abdul-Jabbar explores the heart of issues that affect Americans today.

Since retiring from professional basketball as the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, six-time MVP and Hall of Fame inductee Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has become a lauded observer of culture and society, a New York Times best-selling author, and a regular contributor to The Washington Post, TIME magazine and TIME.com.

He now brings that keen insight to the fore in Writings on the Wall: Searching for a New Equality Beyond Black and White, his most incisive and important work of nonfiction in years. He uses his unique blend of erudition, street smarts, and authentic experience in essays on the country’s seemingly irreconcilable partisan divide, both racial and political; parenthood; and his own experiences as an athlete, an African American, and a Muslim. The audiobook is not just a collection of expositions; he also offers keen assessments of and solutions to problems such as racism in sports while speaking candidly about his experiences on the court and off.

Timed for publication as the nation debates whom to send to the White House, the combination of plain talk on issues, life lessons, and personal stories places Writings on the Wall squarely in the middle of the conversation, as many of Abdul-Jabbar’s topics are at the top of the national agenda. Whether it is sparring with Donald Trump, within the pages of TIME magazine, or full-length features in The New York Times Magazine, writers, critics, and readers have come to agree on what The Washington Post observed: Abdul-Jabbar “has become a vital, dynamic and unorthodox cultural voice.”