New Releases by Andrew Meredith

ClojureScript is a pragmatic functional programming language for building web applications. Whether you are an experienced JavaScript developer or a brand-new programmer, this book is your guide to creating impressive web apps in the simple and elegant ClojureScript language. The tutorial-style lessons are easy to follow at your own pace, and the practical capstone projects will reinforce what you have learned. By the end of the book, you will have created: - A weather forecast widget - A personal contact manager - A text-based adventure game - A group chat app - And more!

“A darkly funny memoir about family reckonings” (O, The Oprah Magazine)—the story of a young man who, by handling the dead, makes peace with the living. Andrew Meredith’s father, a literature professor at La Salle University, was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. It’s a transgression that resulted in such long-lasting familial despair that Andrew cannot forgive him. In the wake of the scandal, he frantically treads water, stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence—falling in and out of school, moving blindly from one half-hearted relationship to the next. When Andrew is forced to move back home to his childhood neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia and take a job alongside his father as a “remover,” the name for those unseen, unsung men whose charge it is to take away the dead from their last rooms, he begins to see his father not through the lens of a wronged and resentful child, but through that of a sympathetic, imperfect man. Called “artful” and “compelling” by Thomas Lynch in The Wall Street Journal, Meredith’s poetic voice is as unforgettable as his story, and “he tucks his bittersweet childhood memories between tales of removals as carefully as the death certificates he slips between the bodies he picks up and the stretcher-like contraption that transports each body to the waiting vehicle” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). “Potent” (Publishers Weekly), and “ultimately rewarding” (The Boston Globe), The Removers is a searing, coming-of-age memoir with “lyrical language and strong sense of place” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).

Abstract: During the last thirty years, the ARINC 429 standard for avionics data transfer has become the most used standard in the commercial aviation industry for aircraft local area networks. The standard has proven effective and safe. However, it has not advanced and evolved in the ways the rest of the aviation and network industry has. This thesis explores the possibility of using Wireless Sensor Networks use as a supplement, and maybe a replacement for ARINC 429 on aircraft avionics systems. Also, it will go on to show how Wireless Sensor Networks may be capable of emulating existing ARINC 429 features, with minimal changes to existing systems, and further expand on the current capabilities of those existing systems to create new capabilities that did not exist before.

"This thesis is a lot about fathers and sons--in Philadelphia mostly, but sometimes on the Pacific."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.

In this thesis, my main research question is whether bodily-kinaesthetic skills, expressive movement, and non-verbal communication can enhance methods towards expressive conducting. I investigate the aspects of bodily-kinaesthetic learning that are being used in conducting textbooks, the role of the mind-body connection, motor skill development, and proprioception in the development of kinaesthetic learning. I also investigate how the movement theories of Laban, Dalcroze, Delsarte, Alexander, and Feldenkrais, and the use of non-verbal communication skills and concepts, can be used to enhance expressive conducting.I discuss how conducting textbooks identified in my two surveys teach expressive gestures and the use of the left hand, which are two areas that have been identified by experienced secondary school conductors in Melbourne as ongoing weaknesses in their conducting vocabularies, noting how each textbook approaches conducting instruction from a kinaesthetic standpoint. A priority for the training of conductors at all levels of entering behaviour is to facilitate instruction in the bodily-kinaesthetic domain, as too much instruction can often occur in verbal and written form. The significance of proprioception to expressive conducting is the relationship proprioception stimulates between movement and sensory awareness, including its influence on the development of fine motor skills and non-verbal communication.I explore how the use of the expressive movement theories of Laban, Dalcroze, Delsarte, Alexander, and Feldenkrais can enhance expressive conducting at all levels of entering behaviour, and examine commonalities of these five expressive movement theories. Firstly, all five are strongly in favour of the integration between body and mind, which is vitally important for conductors, whose gestures must reflect the music and thought processes happening in their brain. Secondly, all five represent an educational process, and as such, are highly relevant to the teaching of expressive conducting, particularly in the early stages. Thirdly, all five are learnable by anyone, not just those with high entering behaviour. Being learnable, they should be employed in the earliest stages of conductor training. Finally, the importance of proprioception is acknowledged in all five of the expressive movement theories.Conductors can enhance expressive conducting through an examination of the categories of non-verbal communication, such as emblems, illustrators, affect displays, regulators, and adaptors, and the coding of non-verbal communication, particularly kinesics. Although corrective mode gestures and universally understood emblems are important for conductors to be taught, as they emphasise clarity and precision, I believe that more use could be made of illustrators and affect displays by conducting teachers in order to access the declamatory mode. Furthermore, more use could be made of regulators and affect displays by conducting teachers in order to access the narrative mode.