Vancouver: Critical reflections on the development experience of a peripheral global city

Highlights • Vancouver is acclaimed for its progressive approach to planning, particularly through the ‘Vancouver model’. • Its lifestyle metrics exceed many other cities’, particularly related to green space, cultural diversity & commitments to public transit. • However, economic underdevelopment associated with marginality within circuits of globalization undermine its position. • The housing crisis threatens the city's social sustainability, and socio-economic inequalities are increasingly evident

A prototype low-cost machine vision system for automatic identification and quantification of potato defects

This paper reports on a current project to develop a prototype system for the automatic identification and quantification of potato defects based on machine vision. The system developed uses off-the-shelf hardware, including a low-cost vision sensor and a standard desktop computer with a graphics processing unit (GPU), together with software algorithms to enable detection, identification and quantification of common defects affecting potatoes at near-real-time frame rates. The system uses state-of-the-art image processing and machine learning techniques to automatically learn the appearance of different defect types. It also incorporates an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) to enable easy set-up of the system by quality control (QC) staff working in the industry

‘History taught in the pageant way’: Education and historical performace in twentieth-century Britain

Historical pageants were important sites of popular engagement with the past in twentieth-century Britain. They took place in many places and sometimes on a large scale, in settings ranging from small villages to industrial cities. They were staged by schools, churches, professional organisations, women’s groups and political parties, among others. This article draws on contemporary studies of heritage and performance to explore the blend of history, myth and fiction that characterised pageants, and the ways in which they both shaped and reflected the self-image of local communities. Pageants were important channels of popular education as well as entertainment and, although they are sometimes seen as backward-looking and conservative spectacles, this article argues that pageants could be an effective means of enlisting the past in the service of the present and future

Historical pageants and the Medieval past in twentieth-century England

This article examines the representation of the medieval past in historical pageants in twentieth-century England. Pageants were an important aspect of popular engagement with the past, and often focused heavily on the medieval period. Different episodes and characters both historical and legendary—Alfred the Great, King John and Robin Hood, for example—featured at different times and in different ways during the twentieth century. Many communities saw their origins as being medieval, and almost all found important stories to tell from this period. However, the emphasis shifted over time, with the lessons of the ‘constitutional Middle Ages’ featuring prominently in Edwardian pageants, whereas by the 1950s elements of the romantic and grotesque were increasingly prominent. Throughout the twentieth century, aspects of civic medievalism were an important feature in pageants, particularly those staged in urban locations, but the style of representation of the medieval period changed over time, partly under the influence of new media—notably the cinema, radio and television. In the second half of the twentieth century, historical pageantry declined significantly, though it never disappeared; and although popular interest in the medieval past was undiminished, it increasingly took different forms