Fritz Adam, a German Jewish entrepreneur, owner of one of the most prestigious department stores in central Berlin, finds himself at odds with the political developments at the time of the Weimar republic. Fritz is an enthusiastic supporter of the Olympic ideal and sees the promotion of sports as the way forward to increase cooperation between nations in the form of healthy competition so as to prevent future military confrontations. Also an adventurer at heart, and sponsor of many of the first exploratory voyages around the globe, he sees his beliefs and ideals threatened and finally shattered as the Nazis return to values of order, discipline, and military expansionism. As a Prussian officer who fought in the great war, he regards himself as a German, a Berliner and a Jew, in that order. Despite being forced into bankruptcy and witnessing the increasing repression of the Jewish people, he holds on to his belief that it is only a temporary phase and that the army will restore order in time. As the political situation deteriorates, the tension between Fritz and his eldest son, an ardent pacifist, increases and threatens the family unity. Fritz has to decide whether to stay or leave the Germany that he loves.
One man's descent into another's madness. A detective and a serial killer stalk each other in 1949 New York City. 1949. A depraved serial killer stalks the streets in his yellow taxi, dumping the ravaged bodies of random women in the back alleys of New York City. Homicide Detective Drake Harper is condemned to pick up the pieces, but as the body count rises, Drake's personal life spirals out of control and no amount of booze can silence the voices of his past.
A Lit Wick is an explosive collection of poetry and short stories from award-winning author Christopher Charlton, that blazes a trail of brutal honesty, heartbreak and humor. Battles between the head and the heart in this interpretive self-portrait are woven into tales of regret, travel, grief, the healing power of nature, self-love and letting go of the things we cannot change. Like a match held to a shattered mirror, each piece provides new insights and perspectives to the whole, with stories and poems acting as keys to unlock hidden layers within one another.
A Critical Companion to Robert Zemeckis offers a comprehensive, academic and detailed study of the works of Robert Zemeckis, whose films include successful productions such as the Back to the Future trilogy (1985-90), Forrest Gump (1994), Contact (1997), Cast Away (2000) and The Polar Express (2004), but also lesser known films such as I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), Used Cars (1980), and Allied (2015). Most of Zemeckis’ major productions were not only successful when they were first released but continue to enjoy popularity—with critics and fans alike—even today. This volume investigates several distinct areas of Zemeckisʼ works and addresses the different approaches: the philosophical, the artistic, the socio-cultural, and the personal. The methodologies adopted by the contributors differ significantly from each other, thus offering the reader a variegated and compelling picture of Zemeckisʼ oeuvre, which includes nineteen films. Contrary to the few volumes published in the past on the subject, the chapters in this volume offer specific case studies that have been previously ignored (or only partially mentioned) by other scholars. A Critical Companion to Robert Zemeckis offers a great variety of interdisciplinary approaches to Zemeckis’ films, illuminating, re-reading and/or interpreting for the first time the entire career of the director, from his first films to the most recent ones.
The development of low-cost sensors has generated a corresponding movement to integrate them into many different applications. One such application is determining the rotational attitude of an object. Since many of these low-cost sensors are less accurate than their more expensive counterparts, their noisy measurements must be filtered to obtain optimum results. This work describes the development, testing, and evaluation of four filtering algorithms for the nonlinear sounding rocket attitude determination problem. Sun sensor, magnetometer, and rate sensor measurements are simulated. A quaternion formulation is used to avoid singularity problems associated with Euler angles and other three-parameter approaches. Prior to filtering, Gauss-Newton error minimization is used to reduce the six reference vector components to four quaternion components that minimize a quadratic error function. Two of the algorithms are based on the traditional extended Kalman filter (EKF) and two are based on the recently developed unscented Kalman filter (UKF). One of each incorporates rate measurements, while the others rely on differencing quaternions. All incorporate a simplified process model for state propagation allowing the algorithms to be applied to rockets with different physical characteristics, or even to other platforms. Simulated data are used to develop and test the algorithms, and each successfully estimates the attitude motion of the rocket, to varying degrees of accuracy. The UKF-based filter that incorporates rate sensor measurements demonstrates a clear performance advantage over both EKFs and the UKF without rate measurements. This is due to its superior mean and covariance propagation characteristics and the fact that differencing generates noisier rates than measuring. For one sample case, the "pointing accuracy" of the rocket spin axis is improved by approximately 39 percent over the EKF that uses rate measurements and by 40 percent over the UKF without rates. 7
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