Best Selling Books by Ann Arnold

On June 4, 1741, Georg Wilhelm Steller set sail from Avacha Bay in Siberia on the St. Peter, under the command of Vitus Bering. The crew was bound for America on the last leg of an expedition whose mission was to explore, describe, and map Russia’s vast lands from the Ural Mountains across Siberia to the Kamchatka Peninsula, and possibly lay claim to the northwest coast of America – if they could find it, for no European had ever reached America by this route. Officially, Steller was the ship’s mineralogist, but in practice he was its doctor, minister, and naturalist as well. Appointed to the expedition in 1737 by the Academy of Science in St. Petersburg, he was sworn to secrecy concerning any discoveries. Making judicious use of Steller’s richly detailed journals and liberal use of illustrations and maps, Ann Arnold allows the reader to join Steller on this fascinating voyage and its final dangerous mission, which left half the crew dead and the rest suffering from scurvy.

The purpose of this naturalistic inquiry was to explore and analyze aspects of the reported beliefs and practices of a group of preservice elementary mathematics teacher educators. Until now, researchers have had little understanding of beliefs and practices of teachers in elementary mathematics methods classrooms, despite the fact that teacher educators'' beliefs and practices have profound effects on what happens in thousands of classrooms every day. The qualitative research in this study offered insights with the potential to inform higher educational practice in regard to the preparation of elementary mathematics teachers and mathematics teacher educators. Participants were six professors and instructors of elementary math methods courses at six different colleges and universities. A series of 18 in-depth interviews, three with each participant, allowed context, nuance, and detail to be closely examined. Typological analysis led to the emergence of six themes. They dealt with consistency, challenge, content, methods, resources, and reasons. Details related to those themes helped to illuminate what the working experience of a preservice elementary mathematics teacher is like. Study conclusions indicated (a) general consistency, with some exceptions, between reported beliefs and reported practices; (b) some common challenges faced by most participants, particularly in regard to limited elementary classroom experience, and perceived time constraints; (c) wide variation in content and methods despite agreement on teaching philosophy; (d) perceived student needs as the main reported basis of participant teaching decisions, and; (e) some indication of the extent of influence of curricular and pedagogical reform as elementary mathematics teacher educators sought to enact generally constructivist inspired teaching visions. Recommendations for educators, researchers and policy makers stemming from these conclusions have potential benefits for elementary mathematics teacher preparation.

Georgina the duck just wants to have fun!

Human-robotic systems will play a critical role in space exploration, should NASA embark on missions to the Moon and Mars. A unified framework to optimally leverage the capabilities of humans and robots in space exploration will be an invaluable tool for mission planning. Although there is a growing body of literature on human robotic interactions (HRI), there is not yet a framework that lends itself both to a formal representation of heterogeneous teams of humans and robots, and to an evaluation of such teams across a series of common, task-based metrics. My objective in this thesis is to lay the foundations of a unified framework for architecting human-robotic systems for optimal task performance given a set of metrics. First, I review literature from different fields including HRI and human-computer interaction, and synthesize multiple considerations for architecting heterogeneous teams of humans and robots. I then present methods to systematically and formally capture the characteristics that describe a human-robotic system to provide a basis for evaluating human-robotic systems against a common set of metrics.