A magical world that will captivate fans of Kate DiCamillo and Diana Wynne Jones. Marah Levi is a promising violinist who excels at school and can read more languages than most librarians. Even so, she has little hope of a bright future: she is a sparker, a member of the oppressed lower class in a society run by magicians. Then a mysterious disease hits the city of Ashara, turning its victims’ eyes dark before ultimately killing them. As Marah watches those whom she loves most fall ill, she finds an unlikely friend in Azariah, a wealthy magician boy. Together they pursue a cure in secret, but more people are dying every day, and time is running out. Then Marah and Azariah make a shocking discovery that turns inside-out everything they thought they knew about magic and about Ashara, their home. Set in an imaginative world rich with language, lore, and music, this gripping adventure plunges the reader into the heart of a magical government where sparks of dissent may be even more deadly than the dark eyes.

The objective of this dissertation is to advance the state-of-the-art in the kinematic modeling, identification, and control of robotic manipulators with rigid links in an effort to improve robot kinematic performance. The positioning accuracy of commercially-available industrial robotic manipulators depends upon a kinematic model which describes the robot geometry in a parametric form. Manufacturing error in the machining and assembly of manipulators lead to discrepancies between the design parameters and the physical structure. Improving the kinematic perfor mance thus requires the identification of the actual kinematic parameters of each individual robot. The identified kinematic parameters are referred to as the arm signature. Existing robot kinematic models, such as the Denavit-Hartenberg model, are not directly applicable to kinematic parameter identification. In this dissertation we introduce a new kinematic model, called the 5-Model, which is applicable to kinematic parameter identification, and use it as the foundation for our development of a general technique for identifying the kinematic parameters of any robot with rigid links.