City of mountains : Denver and the Mountain West

This study is an urban history of Denver, Colorado, viewed through the lens of its constantly evolving physical, political, cultural and economic relationship with its mountain hinterland. From the town's early years as a 19th century mining and ranching depot to its 20th century emergence as a hub of tourism and technology, that relationship informs every aspect of the city's urban, cultural and environmental history. This study seeks, first, to analyze Denver's historical appropriation and utilization of its mountain hinterland, whether for water, wealth, recreation and cultural identity. Second, it highlights how access to and control over the Rocky Mountain hinterland shaped Denver's evolving political, class and racial landscapes throughout the city's history. Integrating the methodologies of environmental, urban, and social history, it demonstrates how different social groups competed for access, control, and the ability to vii assign value to the mountain hinterland. Every Denverite in the city's history, regardless of station, has lived within the context of this tense and constantly changing relationship. Since the city's founding, that relationship has been the constant object of human agency, accommodation, and change, and in it can be read the story of Denver itself.Histor

Compressing Labels of Dynamic XML Data using Base-9 Scheme and Fibonacci Encoding

The flexibility and self-describing nature of XML has made it the most common mark-up language used for data representation over the Web. XML data is naturally modelled as a tree, where the structural tree information can be encoded into labels via XML labelling scheme in order to permit answers to queries without the need to access original XML files. As the transmission of XML data over the Internet has become vibrant, it has also become necessary to have an XML labelling scheme that supports dynamic XML data. For a large-scale and frequently updated XML document, existing dynamic XML labelling schemes still suffer from high growth rates in terms of their label size, which can result in overflow problems and/or ambiguous data/query retrievals. This thesis considers the compression of XML labels. A novel XML labelling scheme, named “Base-9”, has been developed to generate labels that are as compact as possible and yet provide efficient support for queries to both static and dynamic XML data. A Fibonacci prefix-encoding method has been used for the first time to store Base-9’s XML labels in a compressed format, with the intention of minimising the storage space without degrading XML querying performance. The thesis also investigates the compression of XML labels using various existing prefix-encoding methods. This investigation has resulted in the proposal of a novel prefix-encoding method named “Elias-Fibonacci of order 3”, which has achieved the fastest encoding time of all prefix-encoding methods studied in this thesis, whereas Fibonacci encoding was found to require the minimum storage. Unlike current XML labelling schemes, the new Base-9 labelling scheme ensures the generation of short labels even after large, frequent, skewed insertions. The advantages of such short labels as those generated by the combination of applying the Base-9 scheme and the use of Fibonacci encoding in terms of storing, updating, retrieving and querying XML data are supported by the experimental results reported herein

Recent Application in Biometrics

In the recent years, a number of recognition and authentication systems based on biometric measurements have been proposed. Algorithms and sensors have been developed to acquire and process many different biometric traits. Moreover, the biometric technology is being used in novel ways, with potential commercial and practical implications to our daily activities. The key objective of the book is to provide a collection of comprehensive references on some recent theoretical development as well as novel applications in biometrics. The topics covered in this book reflect well both aspects of development. They include biometric sample quality, privacy preserving and cancellable biometrics, contactless biometrics, novel and unconventional biometrics, and the technical challenges in implementing the technology in portable devices. The book consists of 15 chapters. It is divided into four sections, namely, biometric applications on mobile platforms, cancelable biometrics, biometric encryption, and other applications. The book was reviewed by editors Dr. Jucheng Yang and Dr. Norman Poh. We deeply appreciate the efforts of our guest editors: Dr. Girija Chetty, Dr. Loris Nanni, Dr. Jianjiang Feng, Dr. Dongsun Park and Dr. Sook Yoon, as well as a number of anonymous reviewers

Second International Workshop on Harmonic Oscillators

The Second International Workshop on Harmonic Oscillators was held at the Hotel Hacienda Cocoyoc from March 23 to 25, 1994. The Workshop gathered 67 participants; there were 10 invited lecturers, 30 plenary oral presentations, 15 posters, and plenty of discussion divided into the five sessions of this volume. The Organizing Committee was asked by the chairman of several Mexican funding agencies what exactly was meant by harmonic oscillators, and for what purpose the new research could be useful. Harmonic oscillators - as we explained - is a code name for a family of mathematical models based on the theory of Lie algebras and groups, with applications in a growing range of physical theories and technologies: molecular, atomic, nuclear and particle physics; quantum optics and communication theory

Civic Center and Cultural Center: The Grouping of Public Buildings in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit and the Emergence of the City Monumental in the Modern Metropolis

The grouping of public buildings into civic centers and cultural centers became an obsession of American city planners at the turn of the twentieth century. Following European and ancient models, and inspired by the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and the McMillan Commission plan for the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 1901, architects sought to create impressive horizontal ensembles of monumental buildings in urban open spaces such as downtown plazas and quasi-suburban parks in direct opposition to the vertical thrust of commercial skyscrapers. Hitherto viewed largely through narrow the stylistic prism of the City Beautiful vs. the city practical movements, the monumental center (as Jane Jacobs termed it) continued to persist beyond the passing of neoclassicism and the rise of high modernism, thriving as an indispensable motif of futurist aspiration in the era of comprehensive and regional planning, as municipalities sought to counteract the decentralizing pull of the automobile, freeway, air travel and suburban sprawl in postwar America. The administrative civic center and arts and educational cultural center (bolstered by that icon of late urban modernity, the medical center) in turn spawned a new hybrid, the center for the performing arts, exemplified by Lincoln Center and the National Cultural Center (the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), as cities sought to integrate convention, sports, and live performance venues into inner-city urban renewal projects. Through the key case studies of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit, one-time juggernauts of heavy industry and twenty-first century regions of rust-belt collapse, this study examines the emergence of the ideology of grouping public buildings in urban planning as well as the nineteenth century philology of the keywords civic center and cultural center, terms once actively employed in discourses as diverse as Swiss geography, American anthropology, Social Christianity, the schoolhouse social center movement, and cultural Zionism. It also positions these developments in relation to modern anxieties about the center and its loss, charted by such thinkers as Hans Sedlmayr, Jacques Derrida, and Henri Lefevbre, and considers the contested utopian aspirations of the monumental center as New Jerusalem, Celestial City, and Shining City on a Hill

Expo 67, or the Architecture of Late Modernity

The 1967 Universal and International Exhibition, the Montreal world's fair commonly known as Expo 67, produced both continuations of and crises in the emancipatory project of modern architecture. Like many world's fairs before it, Expo 67 was designed to mediate relations between peoples and things through its architecture. The origins of this work lay in the efforts of Daniel van Ginkel and Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, architects and town planners who, in remarkable reports, drawings, and architectural ideals advanced between 1962 and 1963, outlined the basis of a fundamentally new, though never fully realised, world's fair in the late twentieth century. Party to the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne and its influential prewar edicts on functionalist town planning as well as to groups like Team 10 and their opposition to diagrammatic generalisations by an emphasis on the personal, the particular, and the precise, the van Ginkels also drew on contemporary theories and practices of North American urban renewal when first conceiving Expo 67 as an instrument for redeveloping downtown Montreal. The resulting work, Man and the City, which officially secured the world's fair bid but remained unbuilt, carefully drew on the legacies of most great exhibitions, especially those of the nineteenth century, in order to conceive of sufficiently heroic structures making immanent novel forms of human interaction, social control, and the technical organisation of space. In 1967, this was to suggest a new world historical project - in a space existing for only six months but crowded with 50 million visitors - promoting senses of fraternal self-awareness through the unrelenting promise of progress. The resulting well-known Expo 67 theme, Man and His World, was a paean to contemporary humanism first used by the van Ginkels and their architect allies to reject the most enduring symbols of world exhibitions: the nation-state and its emblematic architecture. They imagined new kinds of architecture that could somehow engender new senses of political consciousness (inspired by, for example, UNESCO or the celebrated Family of Man photography exhibition of 1955) outside nationalist chauvinism. This was a vision of late modernity: a transitional form of political subjectivity still clinging to the shared passions of the citizen (thus for the polis) before being subsumed by mass culture - in other words, a moment during which nationalisms could still be channelled into alternative forms of political belonging free of narrow self-interest. The belief marked every aspect of the van Ginkels early plans and had half-lives in two consequential works: the theme pavilions Man the Producer and Habitat 67, which, with outward emphasis on the aesthetics and technics of innovative structures (and mass production), were seen as fulfilling the ambitions of the megastructural movement in the 1960s. As such, theses architectures of late modernity reflected a markedly modernist conviction of long duration: on the one hand, an abiding faith in technological salvation and, on the other hand, the sense of some liberative social mass giving rise to a new citizen of the world. At the very same moment, this universalism was fraught with ambiguity: on the one hand, any abiding faith in techno-scientific salvation was shaken in the aftermath of global war and the terror of nuclear holocaust; on the other hand, assumed geopolitical ideals were being upended, however temporarily, by, say, decolonisation and resulting alternative global alignments on a postwar world's fair). Expo 67, perhaps the most consequential twentieth-century world's fair in terms of utopian hopes of modern architecture, was prey to these and related desires to reinvigorate the modern project of uniting instrumental reason, mass edification, and popular spectacle in a genuinely new public realm. It would irrevocably shape the ways in which Canada, as a host nation purposely celebrating its centennial in the ambit of a world's fair, was to confront its collective sense of cultural representation and global belonging

The D.C. Freeway Revolt and the Coming of Metro

Monograph on the revolt that lead to the creation of the D.C. Metro