Dark Illumination

Dark Illumination is a collection of poetry that revolves around the simple truth that to enjoy the light we must first submit ourselves to the darkness. It is our journey that makes us who we are as individuals, as people, and as a society.

Brenna Strachan's entire life is ahead of her. And it's a long life, since she has joined the ranks of the immortal. She's returned to work as well and one of her first cases a rogue Witch, bent on destroying everything in their way, including her. Now, she must turn to her family and friends for help. But among those closest to her, is someone who has already betrayed the Oath of Protection. The words of the True Prophet are coming to pass and Brenna must deal with the betrayal and her life.

Light pervades the world, and when it is not light, darkness emerges and is combated by electric illumination. Despite this globally shared human experience in which spaces appear radically different depending on time, season, and weather, social science investigation on the subject is meager. From Light to Dark fills this gap, focusing on our interaction with daylight, illumination, and darkness. Tim Edensor begins by examining the effects of daylight on our perception of landscape, drawing on artworks, particular landscapes, and architectural practice. He then considers the ways in which illumination is often contested and can be used to express power, looking at how capitalist, class, ethnic, military, and state power use lighting to reinforce their authority over space. Edensor also considers light artists such as Olafur Eliasson and festivals of illumination before turning a critical eye to the supposedly dangerous, sinister associations of darkness. In examining the modern city as a space of fantasy through electric illumination, he studies how we are seeking—and should seek—new forms of darkness in reaction to the perpetual glow of urban lighting. Highly original and absorbingly written, From Light to Dark analyzes a vast array of artistic interventions, diverse spaces, and lighting technologies to explore these most basic human experiences.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis, SCIA 2009, which was held at the Radisson SAS Scandinavian Hotel, Oslo, Norway, June 15–18. SCIA 2009 was the 16th in the biennial series of conferences, which has been organized in turn by the Scandinavian countries Sweden, Finland, D- mark and Norway since 1980. The event itself has always attracted participants and author contributions from outside the Scandinavian countries, making it an international conference. Theconferenceincludedafulldayoftutorialsand?vekeynotetalksprovided by world-renowned experts. The program covered high-quality scienti?c cont- butions within image analysis, human and action analysis, pattern and object recognition,colorimagingandquality,medicalandbiomedicalapplications,face andheadanalysis,computer vision,andmultispectralcoloranalysis. The papers werecarefully selected based on at least two reviews. Among 154 submissions 79 wereaccepted,leadingtoanacceptancerateof51%. SinceSCIAwasarrangedas a single-track event, 30 papers were presented in the oral sessions and 49 papers were presented in the poster sessions. A separate session on multispectral color science was organized in cooperation with the 11th Symposium of Multispectral Color Science (MCS 2009). Since 2009 was proclaimed the “International Year of Astronomy” by the United Nations General Assembly, the conference also contained a session on the topic “Imageand PatternAnalysis in Astronomyand Astrophysics. ” SCIA has a reputation of having a friendly environment, in addition to hi- quality scienti?c contributions. We focused on maintaining this reputation, by designing a technical and social program that we hope the participants found interesting and inspiring for new research ideas and network extensions. We thank the authors for submitting their valuable work to SCIA.

Dark Skies addresses a significant gap in knowledge in relation to perspectives from the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In providing a new multi- and interdisciplinary field of inquiry, this book brings together engagements with dark skies from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, empirical studies, and theoretical orientations. Throughout history, the relationship with dark skies has generated a sense of wonder and awe, as well as providing the basis for important cultural meanings and spiritual beliefs. However, the connection to darks skies is now under threat due to the widespread growth of light pollution and the harmful impacts that this has upon humans, non-humans, and the planet we share. This book, therefore, examines the rich potential of dark skies and their relationships with place, communities, and practices to provide new insights and understandings on their importance for our world in an era of climate emergency and environmental degradation. This book is intended for a wide audience. It will be of interest to scholars, students, and professionals in geography, design, astronomy, anthropology, ecology, history, and public policy, as well as anyone who has an interest in how we can protect the night sky for the benefit of us all and the future generations to follow. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

What will become of us in these trying times? How will we pass the time that we have on earth? In gorgeously rendered graphic form, Light in Dark Times invites readers to consider these questions by exploring the political catastrophes and moral disasters of the past and present, revealing issues that beg to be studied, understood, confronted, and resisted. A profound work of anthropology and art, this book is for anyone yearning to understand the darkness and hoping to hold onto the light. It is a powerful story of encounters with writers, philosophers, activists, and anthropologists whose words are as meaningful today as they were during the times in which they were written. This book is at once a lament over the darkness of our times, an affirmation of the value of knowledge and introspection, and a consideration of truth, lies, and the dangers of the trivial. In a time when many of us struggle with the feeling that we cannot do enough to change the course of the future, this book is a call to action, asking us to envision and create an alternative world from the one in which we now live. Light in Dark Times is beautiful to look at and to hold – an exquisite work of art that is lively, informative, enlightening, deeply moving, and inspiring.

ThesearetheproceedingsoftheRoboCup2004Symposium,heldattheInstituto Superior T ́ ecnico, in Lisbon, Portugal in conjunction with the RoboCup c- petition. The papers presented here document the many innovations in robotics that result from RoboCup. A problem in any branch of science or engineering is how to devise tests that can provide objective comparisons between alt- native methods. In recent years, competitive engineering challenges have been established to motivate researchers to tackle di?cult problems while providing a framework for the comparison of results. RoboCup was one of the ?rst such competitions and has been a model for the organization of challenges foll- ing sound scienti?c principles. In addition to the competition, the associated symposium provides a forum for researchers to present refereed papers. But, for RoboCup, the symposium has the greater goal of encouraging the exchange of ideas between teams so that the competition, as a whole, progresses from year to year and strengthens its contribution to robotics. One hundred and eighteen papers were submitted to the Symposium. Each paper was reviewed by at least two international referees; 30 papers were - cepted for presentation at the Symposium as full papers and a further 38 were accepted for poster presentation. The quality of the Symposium could not be maintained without the support of the authors and the generous assistance of the referees.