The increasing urbanization of many parts of the world coupled with other global issues such as environmental pollution, energy consumption, and resources shortage are resulting in major urban crises in many parts of the world. In an effort to explore and map the challenges and opportunities of sustainable development, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at Al-Fateh University and the Center for the Study of Architecture in the Arab Region (CSAAR) have joined together to organize an international conference on sustainable architecture and urban development.

Ptolemy writes that geography is the study of the entire world or large sections or countries of it, while chorography is the study of its smaller parts--provinces, regions, cities, or ports.

You're not alone. According to a 2009 Forrester Research study, 60 percent of companies are using IE6 as their default browser at work, as their IT departments are reluctant to upgrade and support a current browser. If you're in this situation, we've put together a letter you can pass on to your IT department. Just copy and paste it into an e-mail and customize it as you see fit. Get your colleagues to send a letter too.

We learned a lot through experimentation with a working prototype; we had a staging server set up that mirrored the actual site and was pulling from live databases. This enabled editors to publish actual content via the prototype, allowing us to identify bugs in the design and editorial workflows before launch.

The aim of the Pomodoro Technique is to use time as a valuable ally in accomplishing what we want to do in the way we want to do it, and to enable us to continually improve the way we work or study.

publishing the Defining Noncommercial study report and raw data, released under a CC Attribution license and CC0 public domain waiver respectively — yes, this report on “noncommercial” may unambiguously be used for commercial purposes.

Your telephone may know more about your private life than you do, according to a new study of mobile phone calls. The insight opens the door to mining massive data sets from mobile phone call logs, which should allow researchers to test theories for how relationship networks make or break businesses, shape the flow of information, and even affect the course of epidemics.

The paper shows case study of a multi-phase transformation taking data from a legacy ASCII-based interchange format, to XML based on a standardized vocabulary. The transformations illustrate the power of new features including regular expression handling, grouping, recursive functions, and schema-aware processing.

Building Rome in a Day

Entering the search term Rome on Flickr returns more than two million photographs. This collection represents an increasingly complete photographic record of the city, capturing every popular site, facade, interior, fountain, sculpture, painting, cafe, and so forth. It also offers us an unprecedented opportunity to richly capture, explore and study the three dimensional shape of the city.