Project Paris

Best friends Imogene and Evie are off to work in Paris for the summer where they will meet with glamorous models and shop at the finest stores--as is required by fashion-savvy apprentices of a famous designer in the fashion capital of the world.

“Gephart once again compassionately creates complex characters...Une histoire d’espoir—a story of hope.” —Kirkus Reviews Fans of the Nate series by Tim Federle and The Fourteenth Goldfish by Jennifer Holm will love Cleveland Rosebud Potts in this poignant and heartfelt novel from the award-winning author of Lily and Dunkin. Cleveland Rosebud Potts has a plan. If she can check off the six items on her très important Paris Project List she will make it out of the small-minded and scorching town of Sassafras, Florida, to a rich and cultured life at The American School of Paris. Unfortunately, everything seems to conspire against Cleveland reaching her goal. Cleveland is ashamed of her father and angry that her mother and sister are never around because they have to work extra shifts to help out the family. Her Eiffel Tower tin has zero funds. And to top it all off, Cleveland’s best friend Jenna Finch has decided she’s too fancy for her and her neighbor Declan seems to be hiding something. As Cleveland puts her talents to the test, she must learn how to forgive family for their faults, appreciate friends for exactly who they are, and bloom where she’s planted—even if that’s in a tiny town in central Florida that doesn’t even have a French restaurant. C’èst la vie!

Investigates how architecture, technology, politics, and urban planning came together in French architect Victor Baltard's creation of the Central Markets of Paris. Presents a case study of the historical process that produced modern Paris between 1840 and 1870.

Stephane Kirkland gives an engrossing account of Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann, and one of the greatest transformations of a major city in modern history Traditionally known as a dirty, congested, and dangerous city, 19th Century Paris, France was transformed in an extraordinary period from 1848 to 1870, when the government launched a huge campaign to build streets, squares, parks, churches, and public buildings. The Louvre Palace was expanded, Notre-Dame Cathedral was restored and the French masterpiece of the Second Empire, the Opéra Garnier, was built. A very large part of what we see when we visit Paris today originates from this short span of twenty-two years. The vision for the new Nineteenth Century Paris belonged to Napoleon III, who had led a long and difficult climb to absolute power. But his plans faltered until he brought in a civil servant, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, to take charge of the implementation. Heedless of controversy, at tremendous cost, Haussmann pressed ahead with the giant undertaking until, in 1870, his political enemies brought him down, just months before the collapse of the whole regime brought about the end of an era. Paris Reborn is a must-read for anyone who ever wondered how Paris, the city universally admired as a standard of urban beauty, became what it is.

A critical examination of metropolitan planning in Paris—the “Grand Paris” initiative—and the building of today's networked global city. In 2007 the French government announced the “Grand Paris” initiative. This ambitious project reimagined the Paris region as integrated, balanced, global, sustainable, and prosperous. Metropolitan solidarity would unite divided populations; a new transportation system, the Grand Paris Express, would connect the affluent city proper with the low-income suburbs; streamlined institutions would replace fragmented governance structures. Grand Paris is more than a redevelopment plan; it is a new paradigm for urbanism. In this first English-language examination of Grand Paris, Theresa Enright offers a critical analysis of the early stages of the project, considering whether it can achieve its twin goals of economic competitiveness and equality. Enright argues that by orienting the city around growth and marketization, Grand Paris reproduces the social and spatial hierarchies it sets out to address. For example, large expenditures for the Grand Paris Express are made not for the public good but to increase the attractiveness of the region to private investors, setting off a real estate boom, encouraging gentrification, and leaving many residents still unable to get from here to there. Enright describes Grand Paris as an example of what she calls “grand urbanism,” large-scale planning that relies on infrastructural megaprojects to reconfigure urban regions in pursuit of speculative redevelopment. Democracy and equality suffer under processes of grand urbanism. Given the logic of commodification on which Grand Paris is based, these are likely to suffer as the project moves forward.

Neural Networks have been the theater of a dramatic increase of activities in the last five years. The interest of mixing results from fields as different as neurobiology, physics (spin glass theory), mathematics (linear algebra, statistics ... ), computer science (software engineering, hardware architectures ... ) or psychology has attracted a large number of researchers to the field. The perspective of dramatic improvements in many applications has lead important companies to launch new neural network programs and start-ups have mushroomed to address this new market. Throughout the world large programs are being set-up: in Japan the government has committed more than $18 million per year to its 20 year Human Frontier Science program; the DARPA and the US Navy have alloted more than $10 million per year each and other US government agencies are contributing to important but less ambitious programs. Neural networks are also a major research are in the supercomputing initiative. Europe has from the beginning taken an active part in funding major projects in the new field with BRAIN, BRA, ANNIE and PYGMALION (Esprit). Approximately $20 million has been invested to date since 1988 and new programs of nearly $30 million are being funded for the next 3 years. National projects in certain countries may globally double these amounts. Neural network conferences are attracting larger audiences than ever before. Prior to 1987 attendance never surpassed 300. The June 1989 IJCNN conference in Washington had over 2200 participants.

It has often been claimed that the aim of semiotics is to establish a general theory of systems of signification. However, as Jean-Claude Coquet notes in a recent collection of essays, what distinguishes one school of semiotics from another is the initial definition given of sign. If, for certain semioticians, the sign is first of all an observable phenomenon, for the Paris School it is first of all a construct and this point of departure has crucial theoretical and practical consequences. The essays appearing in these two volumes are representative of recent work carried out by members of this semiotic school. Essays in Volume I study problems more closely related to theoretical issues, while Volume II focuses more specifically on various fields of application.