Between the Visionary and the Archaic: Iannis Xenakis's Cosmic City

Almost parallel with his groundbreaking theoretical work Musiques formelles (Xenakis, 1963), the late composer and architect Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) published “The Cosmic City” (Xenakis, 1965). In this urban proposal, 5 million inhabitants are housed in a single megastructure, a hyperbolic paraboloid of more than 3000 meters high and 50 meters wide. This form is inspired by Xenakis’s concept of “volumetric architecture”, as exemplified in the famous Philips Pavilion in 1958. Totally independent from climatic conditions and topography, the Cosmic City includes homes, places of work, schools and other facilities, while the distribution of the population in the urban fabric is organized according to the same statistical laws and stochastic principles that form the basis of Xenakis’s musical composition. Apart from situating the Cosmic City in Xenakis’s oeuvre, this paper will offer a critical reading and an investigation of its reception in the writings of Françoise Choay and Louis Marin. Both authors have conceptualised the notion of utopia and discussed Xenakis’s project in that context. For Choay, speaking from an anthropologic viewpoint, the Cosmic City is not only a perfect example of “Technotopia”, i.e., a sort of “reduced” utopia (Choay, 1965), but also, despite its visionary intentions, archaic and even irrelevant today (Choay, 2000). However, Marin places Xenakis’s project in a long literary and semiotic tradition. For him, the Cosmic City is a projection of More’s utopia of the New World into the Space Age (Marin, 1973). This paper considers the Cosmic City as a case study of avant-garde urbanism in France in the 1960s, and discusses the opposite appreciation by Choay and Marin as exemplary of its ambiguous reception.status: publishe

Risk factors for breast cancer in a population with high incidence rates.

BackgroundThis report examines generally recognized breast cancer risk factors and years of residence in Marin County, California, an area with high breast cancer incidence and mortality rates.MethodsEligible women who were residents of Marin County diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997-99 and women without breast cancer obtained through random digit dialing, frequency-matched by cases' age at diagnosis and ethnicity, participated in either full in-person or abbreviated telephone interviews.ResultsIn multivariate analyses, 285 cases were statistically significantly more likely than 286 controls to report being premenopausal, never to have used birth control pills, a lower highest lifetime body mass index, four or more mammograms in 1990-94, beginning drinking after the age of 21, on average drinking two or more drinks per day, the highest quartile of pack-years of cigarette smoking and having been raised in an organized religion. Cases and controls did not significantly differ with regard to having a first-degree relative with breast cancer, a history of benign breast biopsy, previous radiation treatment, age at menarche, parity, use of hormone replacement therapy, age of first living in Marin County, or total years lived in Marin County. Results for several factors differed for women aged under 50 years or 50 years and over.ConclusionsDespite similar distributions of several known breast cancer risk factors, case-control differences in alcohol consumption suggest that risk in this high-risk population might be modifiable. Intensive study of this or other areas of similarly high incidence might reveal other important risk factors proximate to diagnosis

Reliable fusion of ToF and stereo depth driven by confidence measures

In this paper we propose a framework for the fusion of depth data produced by a Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera and stereo vision system. Initially, depth data acquired by the ToF camera are upsampled by an ad-hoc algorithm based on image segmentation and bilateral filtering. In parallel a dense disparity map is obtained using the Semi- Global Matching stereo algorithm. Reliable confidence measures are extracted for both the ToF and stereo depth data. In particular, ToF confidence also accounts for the mixed-pixel effect and the stereo confidence accounts for the relationship between the pointwise matching costs and the cost obtained by the semi-global optimization. Finally, the two depth maps are synergically fused by enforcing the local consistency of depth data accounting for the confidence of the two data sources at each location. Experimental results clearly show that the proposed method produces accurate high resolution depth maps and outperforms the compared fusion algorithms

Solid Growth, Untapped Potential

Compares interest in volunteering and giving in Marin County, California, in 2000 and 2007 among both new and long-term residents

On diffeomorphisms over non-orientable surfaces standardly embedded in the 4-sphere

For a non-orientable closed surface standardly embedded in the 4-sphere, a diffeomorphism over this surface is extendable if and only if this diffeomorphism preserves the Guillou-Marin quadratic form of this embedded surface.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure

Tangled Roots, Bittersweet Exposure

Accompanied by tree portraits, this personal narrative reflects upon the intersecting histories between the indigenous peoples of Marin County (north of San Francisco, CA) and the author, who is Euro-American, while contemplating the changing relationship to their shared woodland, the effects of colonization, and possibilities for healing