With the opening of the Black Hills region of South Dakota due to the discovery of gold in 1874, the business-savvy founders of Rapid City, in 1876, saw the potential of this area as a focus for urban development. It was nestled within the beauty of the Black Hills, rich in natural resources, adjacent to a viable water source and in line with major trade routes. Thus, a thriving commercial district evolved, the architecture of which reflects the distinctive periods of a community's growth from a frontier "hay camp" town to a regional metropolitan center. The built environment of Rapid City embodies and exemplifies the skill of local craftsman in interpreting the prevailing stylistic trends, the utilization of local materials, and other cultural influences. All of these elements provide Rapid City with an identifiable character and sense of place that is, clearly and uniquely, South Dakota.

Best Places to Raise Your Family: Experts Choose 100 Top Communities That You Can Afford provides timely facts and expert in-depth analysis on 100 U.S. neighborhoods in an accessible and friendly format. Whether you're mulling over the idea of relocating your family, trying to decide where to live once you have a family, or just curious about how your hometown stacks up, you’ll be intrigued by Best Places to Raise Your Family. In addition to providing population statistics, each city is ranked on a number of essential factors such as: education, standard of living, health and safety, and lifestyle. Easy-to-use tables help you put this wealth of information to work to find the place that best suits your family's special needs and interests.

This book presents a review and in-depth analyses of improved biotechnological processes emphasizing critical aspects and challenges of lignocellulosic biomass conversion into biofuels and value-added products especially using extremophiles and recombinant microorganisms. The book specifically comprises extremophilic production of liquid and gaseous biofuels (bioethanol, biobutanol, biodiesel, biohydrogen, and biogas) as well as value added products (e.g. single cell protein, hydrocarbons, lipids, exopolysaccharides, and polyhydroxyalkanoates). The book also provides the knowledge on how to develop safe, more efficient, sustainable, and economical integrated processes for enhanced conversion of lignocellulosic feedstocks to liquid and gaseous biofuels. Finally the book describes how to perform the techno-economical and life-cycle assessments of new integrated processes involving extremophiles. These modeling exercises are critical in addressing any deficiencies associated with the demonstration of an integrated biofuels and value-added products production process at pilot scale as well as demonstration on the commercialization scale.