Discover the Sunset Cluster—railroads that were doomed to fail? The first two decades of the 20th century were the twilight of the Railroad Age. Major routes had long been established, and local service became the focus of new construction. Beginning in 1907, a cluster of five shortline railroads were established in otherwise unconnected parts of Iowa. They, however, would short lived. The five Iowa 'sunset cluster' railroads might appear to deserve eternal obscurity, being at best minor footnotes to American railroad history. After all, their total mileage barely exceeded 100 miles. Their average life span, moreover, covered about five years, and the Des Moines & Red Oak Railway (DM&RO) never turned a wheel. Yet, these Iowa shortlines had an immediate positive impact to their service area, but disappointingly they became victims of modal competition and the Good Roads Movement. Using contemporary newspapers, government reports, and other little-known sources, renowned railway historian H. Roger Grant offers a fascinating look at these shortline railroads. Sunset Cluster explores the almost desperate desire by communities to benefit from steel rails before the regional railroad map finally imploded and the challenges faced by latter-day shortline builders.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery, FSKD 2006, held in federation with the Second International Conference on Natural Computation ICNC 2006. The book presents 115 revised full papers and 50 revised short papers. Coverage includes neural computation, quantum computation, evolutionary computation, DNA computation, fuzzy computation, granular computation, artificial life, innovative applications to knowledge discovery, finance, operations research, and more.

The four-volume set comprising LNCS volumes 5302/5303/5304/5305 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2008, held in Marseille, France, in October 2008. The 243 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 871 papers submitted. The four books cover the entire range of current issues in computer vision. The papers are organized in topical sections on recognition, stereo, people and face recognition, object tracking, matching, learning and features, MRFs, segmentation, computational photography and active reconstruction.

From Nebula Award winner Jack McDevitt comes the eighth installment in the popular The Academy series—Priscilla “Hutch” Hutchins discovers an interstellar message from a highly advanced race that could be her last chance for a mission before the program is shut down for good. Hutch has been the Academy’s best pilot for decades. She’s had numerous first contact encounters and even became a minor celebrity. But world politics have shifted from exploration to a growing fear that the program will run into an extraterrestrial race more advanced than humanity and war. Despite taking part in the recent scientific breakthrough that rejuvenates the human body and expands one’s lifespan, Hutch finds herself as a famous interstellar pilot with little to do, until a message from an alien race arrives. The message is a piece of music from an unexplored area. Despite the fact that this alien race could pose a great danger and that this message could have taken several thousand years to travel, the program prepares the last interstellar ship for the journey. As the paranoia grows, Hutch and her crew make an early escape—but what they find at the other end of the galaxy is completely unexpected.

Clusters - regional concentrations of related firms and organisations - are a key element of economic growth and innovation. This book discusses the case histories of well-known clusters, including: the Hollywood motion picture cluster, Silicon Valley, and Boston and San Francisco biotech regions.