Cultural Heritage in the Gulf: Blight or Blessing? A Discussion of Evidence from Dubai, Jeddah and Doha

In the Gulf and after gaining independence in the 1960s and 1970s many cities witnessed a staggering rapid urban growth. The urban centers, which formed the central parts of these cities, underwent continuous pressures of destruction and redevelopment. A large number of these centers have been often demolished and replaced by alien imported high-rise buildings. The urban cores which escaped complete demolition have survived as isolated pockets in the middle of hybrid environments. This dilemma raises important questions; is this surviving cultural heritage blight or blessing? Is it "blight" and obstacle that stifles our cities from moving forward to aspire for a bright and prosperous future, or is it "blessing" an asset that can form a major catalyst to promote our cities while maintaining strong roots with their past? Accordingly, what should be the future of these surviving historic centers? Will they be demolished to pave way for more ambitious growth or can they be conserved and sustained for present and future generations? Will the historic city, the heart of urban life and the main protector of our cities identities, survive and continue to be places for living within the emerging global cities of today and tomorrow? This paper attempts to highlight the importance of dealing with the conservation and development issue, by raising and discussing the following question: How can our cultural heritage be a setting of appropriate conservation and development in the emerging global environments? In order to discuss this issue, three historic cities from the Gulf; Old Dubai in UAE, Old Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and Old Doha in Qatar will form the setting of this research

Effects of superimposed eigenstrains on the overall thermoelastic moduli of composites

International audienceThis study investigates the effects that an initial local eigenstrain field, when superimposed on the thermal eigenstrain field, has on the overall thermal expansion coefficients and heat capacities of thermoelastic composites. The study can also be seen as an investigation into how a local residual stress field affects these overall moduli, as initial eigenstrains are generally a source of residual stresses. The approach taken is thermo-dynamic. Expressions that include the superimposed eigenstrain field are developed for the overall moduli within the framework of small strain ther-moelasticity with temperature dependent materials. These expressions, which are written in terms of the concentration tensors and residual fields (stress and strain fields given rise to by the eigenstrains under zero overall stress and strain, respectively), contain correction terms that are absent in the expressions developed within linear thermoelasticity. Taking into account the temperature dependence of the constituent moduli is shown to be essential to capture the effects of the superimposed eigenstrain field. A Ti-6Al-4V/ZrO2 composite is investigated for which the correction terms are found to be negligible for the heat capacities but significant for the thermal expansion coefficients. This suggests that, for applications with large temperature changes, using the linear-thermoelasticity-based expressions can affect the accuracy of the estimates of the overall mod-uli, and therefore the accuracy of thermostructural analyses of composite structures. The proposed expressions can be of use to estimate the overall thermoelastic moduli in contexts in which the strains remain small, temperature changes are large, and superimposed eigenstrains may be present

Elastic perfectly plastic oscillator under random loads: Linearization and response power spectral density

International audienceThe randomly-excited elastic-perfectly-plastic oscillator-hysteretic bilinear oscillator with zero secondary stiffness-has been extensively researched. The vast majority of the work on that system has investigated the time-domaine statistics of the response. No studies have focused on the power spectral densities. This study specifically examines the system's velocity power spectral density-the system's displacement is nonstationary-under wide-band random excitations by means of a statistical linearization/stochastic averaging technique that is developed in one existing and two new procedures, one with constant, the other with amplitude-dependent parameters. The three procedures are evaluated against Monte Carlo simulation and classical Gaussian linearization in terms of the velocity average power, the peak frequency of the power spectral density, its peak value, its bandwidth, and its overall shape around the main frequency. The best predictions were yielded by the new procedure with amplitude-dependent parameters, which combines an extended amplitude-phase transformation, a linearization with random parameters into a Maxwell system, a correlation-function-based criterion, the conditional power spectral density concept, and a power conservation correction step. The new procedures can be adapted to apply to other hysteretic systems

Cultural Heritage Tourism as a Catalyst for Urban Regeneration: Case of the Doha Historic Center in Qatar

Heritage and tourism have become during the last two decades dynamic areas of development in the world. The idea of heritage is crucial to the critical decision-making process as to how irreplaceable resources are to be utilized by people of the present or conserved for future generations in a fast changing world. In view of the importance of ‘heritage’ to the development of a tourist destination the emphasis on developing appropriate adaptive reuse strategies cannot be overemphasized. In October 1999, the 12th general assembly of the ICOMOS in Mexico stated, that in the context of sustainable development, two interrelated issues need urgent attention, cultural tourism and historic towns and cities. Without adequate rehabilitation actions to ensure a sustainable future for these historic resources, may lead to their complete vanishing. According to the World Tourism Organization, natural and cultural heritage resources are and will remain motivating factors for travel in the near future. According to the experts, people choose travel destinations where they can learn about traditional and distinct cultures in their historic context. Historic centers in the Gulf are now being recognized as valuable resources for sustainable development. This paper focuses on the role of heritage tourism and its implications for urban regeneration in the context of Doha in Qatar and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Therefore, in order to use heritage wisely, it will be necessary to position heritage as an essential element of sustainable development, giving particular attention to heritage tourism

Souk Waqif: A Landmark In Doha, Qatar Rehabilitation, Social And Economic Sustainability

Heritage and tourism have become during the last two decades dynamic areas of development in the world. The idea of heritage is crucial to the critical decision-making process as to how irreplaceable resources are to be utilized by people of the present or conserved for future generations in a fast changing world. In view of the importance of ‘heritage’ to the development of a tourist destination the emphasis on developing appropriate adaptive reuse strategies cannot be overemphasized. In October 1999, the 12th general assembly of the ICOMOS in Mexico stated, that in the context of sustainable development, two interrelated issues need urgent attention, cultural tourism and historic towns and cities. These two issues underscore the fact that historic resources are non-renewable, belonging to all of humanity. Without adequate adaptive reuse actions to ensure a sustainable future for these historic resources, may lead to their complete vanishing. The growth of cultural tourism and its role in dispersing heritage to everyone is developing rapidly. According to the World Tourism Organization, natural and cultural heritage resources are and will remain motivating factors for travel in the foreseeable future. According to the experts, people choose travel destinations where they can learn about traditional and distinct cultures in their historic context. The Qatar rich urban heritage is now being recognized as a valuable resource for future development. This paper focuses on the role of heritage tourism and its implications for urban conservation in the context of Old Doha, therefore, in order to use heritage wisely, it will be necessary to position heritage as an essential element of sustainable development, giving particular attention to cultural tourism. Conservation for the sake of conservation appears to be an outdated concept. Many irreplaceable natural and cultural sites are being compromised because local authorities are not giving economic consideration to the value of rehabilitating such sites. The question to be raised here is how can heritage be used wisely for tourism without compromising its educational and social role in enhancing and pertaining the local cultural identity of the city

NOTICE: A Framework for Non-functional Testing of Compilers

International audience—Generally, compiler users apply different optimizations to generate efficient code with respect to non-functional properties such as energy consumption, execution time, etc. However, due to the huge number of optimizations provided by modern compilers, finding the best optimization sequence for a specific objective and a given program is more and more challenging. This paper proposes NOTICE, a component-based framework for non-functional testing of compilers through the monitoring of generated code in a controlled sand-boxing environment. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach by verifying the optimizations performed by the GCC compiler. Our experimental results show that our approach is able to auto-tune compilers according to user requirements and construct optimizations that yield to better performance results than standard optimization levels. We also demonstrate that NOTICE can be used to automatically construct optimization levels that represent optimal trade-offs between multiple non-functional properties such as execution time and resource usage requirements

A Novelty Search-based Test Data Generator for Object-oriented Programs

International audienceIn search-based structural testing, meta-heuristic search techniques have been frequently used to automate test data generation. In this paper, we introduce the use of novelty search algorithm to the test data generation problem based on statement-covered criterion. In this approach, we seek to explore the search space by considering diversity as the unique objective function to be optimized. In fact, instead of having a fitness-based selection, we select test cases based on a novelty score showing how different they are compared to all other solutions evaluated so far

Real-time Detection of Vehicles Using the Haar-like Features and Artificial Neuron Networks

AbstractIn this document, a vehicle detection system is presented. This system is based on two algorithms, a descriptor of the image type haar-like, and a classifier type artificial neuron networks. In order to ensure rapidity in the calculation extracts features by the descriptor the concept of the integral image is used for the representation of the image. The learning of the system is performed on a set of positive images (vehicles) and negative images (non-vehicle), and the test is done on another set of scenes (positive or negative). To address the performance of the proposed system by varying one element among the determining parameters which is the number of neurons in the hidden layer; the results obtained have shown that the proposed system is a fast and robust vehicle detector

Finite pure bending of curved pipes

We present an original treatment for the finite bending of curved pipes with arbitrary cross sections. The curved pipe is successively regarded as a three-dimensional continuum and a shell, and a formulation is proposed for each model. We show that, from a numerical point of view, the finite bending problem is reducible to an axisymmetric analysis augmented with 1 d.f. We also show how to take advantage of this analogy to solve the bending problem using standard axisymmetric FE routine