Imagine Architecture Research Articles

Imagine Architecture: Artistic Visions of the Urban Realm

Imagine Architecture: Artistic Visions of the Urban Realm

Libraries in Second Life: Linking Collections, Clients, and Communities in a Virtual World

The multi-user virtual environment Second Life has drawn attention from many librarians who established virtual libraries and information spaces there. Even as interest in Second Life diminishes, it is worthwhile to look at how libraries in Second Life were established and what models they followed. This study examines the purposes, users, collections, and community integration of Second Life libraries. Researchers identified over 75 libraries in Second Life through the professional literature and search results within Second Life. Using this sample, they identified seven general categories of libraries and discuss examples of each. Some Second Life library spaces help to set a scene and contribute to the ethos of a larger space. Other Second Life libraries connect physical libraries with virtual communities. Still others serve communities that exist only in virtual spaces, supporting common interests or role-playing scenarios. Finally, some Second Life libraries expand understandings of what a virtual library might be, whether through imaginative architecture or unusual collections. Second Life libraries offer collections of resources tailored to the needs of individual communities and make them available in different formats. They also offer social and educational programs, much as physical libraries do. Whatever the future of Second Life, the libraries that have been established there raise important questions for future virtual library work.

Role of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in Rural Asset Creation in India –An Analysis

The MGNREGA ranks among the most powerful initiatives ever undertaken for transformation of rural livelihoods in India. The unprecedented commitment of financial resources is matched only by its imaginative architecture that promises a radically fresh programme of rural development. However, for MGNREGA to realise its potential, it must focus on raising the productivity of agriculture in India’s most backward regions. This can then lead further to the creation of allied livelihoods on the foundation of water security. This is also the only way we can envision a decline in the size of the work guarantee over time, as public investment under MGNREGA leads to higher rural incomes, that in turn spurs private investment and greater incomes and employment.

THE ABIDING PRESENCE OF CONSCIENCE: CRIMINAL JUSTICE AGAINST THE LAW AND THE MODERN CONSTITUTIONAL IMAGINATION

In much contemporary constitutional thought the exercise of state power unbounded by or contrary to the law is nothing other than the failure of justice in the constitutional order. Yet it has not always been so. For a substantial period of common-law legal history the exercise of judgment despite the law was viewed as essential to seeing that justice was done. This article argues that attention to the imaginative architecture of our criminal justice system discloses the continued presence of the concept of the positive conscience-based exception as a dimension of modern constitutionalism. This article looks at jury nullification, the royal prerogative of mercy, and prosecutorial discretion as abiding expressions of the idea that law and reason alone are insufficient to give full expression to our sense of state justice. The persistence of these sites for conscience-based decisions unbounded by the law ought to trouble prevailing theories of modern constitutionalism based on the pre-eminence of a reason-driven proportionality in which all decisions must be contained and regulated by the reason of law. Without denying the dangers of the exception, this article suggests that the conscientious decision made against or in spite of the law remains an important component of the way in which we imagine criminal justice.

The abiding presence of conscience: Criminal justice against the law and the modern constitutional imagination

In much contemporary constitutional thought the exercise of state power unbounded by or contrary to the law is nothing other than the failure of justice in the constitutional order. Yet it has not always been so. For a substantial period of common-law legal history the exercise of judgment despite the law was viewed as essential to seeing that justice was done. This article argues that attention to the imaginative architecture of our criminal justice system discloses the continued presence of the concept of the positive conscience-based exception as a dimension of modern constitutionalism. This article looks at jury nullification, the royal prerogative of mercy, and prosecutorial discretion as abiding expressions of the idea that law and reason alone are insufficient to give full expression to our sense of state justice. The persistence of these sites for conscience-based decisions unbounded by the law ought to trouble prevailing theories of modern constitutionalism based on the pre-eminence of a reason-driven proportionality in which all decisions must be contained and regulated by the reason of law. Without denying the dangers of the exception, this article suggests that the conscientious decision made against or in spite of the law remains an important component of the way in which we imagine criminal justice.

Building the Future of Learning

Could it be that in our excitement about e‐learning we forgot about buildings? With the advent of the personal computer and ubiquitous networks were we enticed into thinking that they would suffice and learning would follow removing the need for places and communities for learners? We now seem to have woken up, however, as there is an enormous resurgence of interest in new building in Universities, Schools and Colleges — a real opportunity to ‘build’ our learning futures. But if the interest is just in building then it's an opportunity lost. However, if it is about transformation, place and community we could create the connected learning society, both physically and virtually, that we aspire to.New 21st century buildings and refurbished spaces should reflect our educational approaches and philosophies and, even more importantly, they should not disable tomorrow's possibilities. The buildings that we build today can prevent us from doing what tomorrow might become the dominant ways of working and learning. Our buildings should combine educational ideas, with imaginative technology and architecture to create the learning futures we wish to see.The Saltire Centre at Glasgow Caledonian University, which opened in January 2006, started from the premise of a building that is flexible and does not disable the future. The building, through its variety of spaces, embraces learner differences and supports a concept of learning as a social process putting human social interaction and conversation at its heart. This article uses the Saltire Centre as a case study to illustrate how some current key ideas in educational thinking can influence the learning facilities that we provide.

Ekphrasis at Kildare: The Imaginative Architecture of a Seventh-Century Hagiographer

Previous articleNext article No AccessEkphrasis at Kildare: The Imaginative Architecture of a Seventh-Century HagiographerLisa M. BitelLisa M. Bitel Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 79, Number 3Jul., 2004 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400089843 Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 2004 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Amy K. Bosworth Learning from the Saints: Ninth-Century Hagiography and the Carolingian Renaissance, History Compass 8, no.99 (Sep 2010): 1055–1066.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00714.xAlfred K. Siewers A Cosmic Imaginarium, (Jan 2009): 111–132.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100527_5

Evaluating the Imagine Stream Architecture

This paper describes an experimental evaluation of theprototype Imagine stream processor. Imagine [Imagine: Media processing with streams] is a stream processor that employs a two-level register hierarchy with9.7 Kbytes of local register file capacity and 128 Kbytesof stream register file (SRF) capacity to capture producer-consumerlocality in stream applications. Parallelism is exploitedusing an array of 48 floating-point arithmetic unitsorganized as eight SIMD clusters with a 6-wide VLIW percluster. We evaluate the performance of each aspect ofthe Imagine architecture using a set of synthetic micro-benchmarks,key media processing kernels, and full applications.These micro-benchmarks show that the prototypehardware can attain 7.96 GFLOPS or 25.4 GOPS of arithmeticperformance, 12.7 Gbytes/s of SRF bandwidth, 1.58Gbytes/s of memory system bandwidth, and accept up to2 million stream processor instructions per second from ahost processor.On a set of media processing kernels, Imagine sustainedan average of 43% of peak arithmetic performance. Anevaluation of full applications provides a breakdown ofwhere execution time is spent. Over full applications, Imagineachieves 39.4% of peak performance, of the remainderon average 36.4% of time is lost due to load imbalancebetween arithmetic units in the VLIW clusters and limitedinstruction-level parallelism within kernel inner loops,10.6% is due to kernel startup and shutdown overhead becauseof short stream lengths, 7.6% is due to memory stalls,and the rest is due to insufficient host processor bandwidth.Further analysis included in the paper presents the impactof host instruction bandwidth on application performance,particularly on smaller datasets. In summary, the experimentalmeasurements described in this paper demonstratethe high performance and efficiency of stream processing:operating at 200 MHz, Imagine sustains 4.81 GFLOPS onQR decomposition while dissipating 7.42 Watts.

Realism or Idealism? Tilt-Up Construction Pioneers

Since their construction in the early 1900's, the innovative concrete buildings of architects Irving Gill and R.M. Schindler have indisputably been influential on modern architecture. Although they experimented with many nascent technologies, their use of tilt-up, a site based method of creating concrete walls which was used by these legendary Californian architects to produce highly regarded, highly imaginative architecture is the focus of this arcticle. In this paper, Dr Glass shows that almost 100 years on, the buildings of Gill and Schindler are still of great architectural importance, and that the popularity of the tilt-up technique is still growing.

Information partnerships--shared data, shared scale.

How can one company gain access to another's resources or customers without merging ownership, management, or plotting a takeover? The answer is found in new information partnerships, enabling diverse companies to develop strategic coalitions through the sharing of data. The key to cooperation is a quantum improvement in the hardware and software supporting relational databases: new computer speeds, cheaper mass-storage devices, the proliferation of fiber-optic networks, and networking architectures. Information partnerships mean that companies can distribute the technological and financial exposure that comes with huge investments. For the customer's part, partnerships inevitably lead to greater simplification on the desktop and more common standards around which vendors have to compete. The most common types of partnership are: joint marketing partnerships, such as American Airline's award of frequent flyer miles to customers who use Citibank's credit card; intraindustry partnerships, such as the insurance value-added network service (which links insurance and casualty companies to independent agents); customer-supplier partnerships, such as Baxter Healthcare's electronic channel to hospitals for medical and other equipment; and IT vendor-driven partnerships, exemplified by ESAB (a European welding supplies and equipment company), whose expansion strategy was premised on a technology platform offered by an IT vendor. Partnerships that succeed have shared vision at the top, reciprocal skills in information technology, concrete plans for an early success, persistence in the development of usable information for all partners, coordination on business policy, and a new and imaginative business architecture.