This book explores the shared qualities of mountains as naturally-formed landscapes, and of megastructures as manmade landscapes, seeking to unravel how each can be understood as an open system of complex network relationships (human, natural and artificial). By looking at mountains and megastructures in an interchangeable way, the book negotiates the fixed boundaries of natural and artificial worlds, to suggest a more complex relationship between landscape and architecture. It suggests an ecological understanding of the interconnectedness of architecture and landscape, and an entangled network of relations. Urban, colonialist, fictional, rural and historical landscapes are interwoven into this fabric that also involves discontinuities, tensions and conflicts as parts of a system that is never linear, but rather fluid and organic as driven by human endeavor.

Tracing ideas of the sublime in American literature from Puritan writings to the postmodern epoch, Rob Wilson demonstrates that the North American landscape has been the ground for political as well as aesthetic transport. He takes a distinctly historical approach and explores the ways in which experiences of the American landscape instill desire for other kinds of vastness: self-expansion, national expansion, and American political power. As Wallace Stevens put it, the American will takes "dominion everywhere." Wilson sets the stage for his "genealogy" with a discussion of the classical notion of the sublime (taken primarily from Longinus) and the ways that notion was pragmatically transformed by its American setting and appropriated by American poets. He follows this transformation in successive chapters on the Puritans (Bradstreet) through the Naturalists (Livingston and Bryant), from the epitome of the American sublime (Whitman) to the greatest of the modernists (Stevens) and its present-day incarnations (Ashbery and others). Writing today under the sign of Hiroshima, contemporary writers must struggle with the concept of the sublime within a context of spiralling technologies and nuclear force that calls into question the long-standing American sacralization of power. Throughout American Sublime, Wilson engages in an original theoretical inquiry into "the sublime" as term, topic, complex, and controversial idea in literary and critical history. Furthermore, he undertakes his historical study from an avowedly postmodern perspective, one that draws on and extends the work of Jameson, Lyotard, Foucault, Lentricchia, Harold Bloom, and others.

Religion. For thousands of years this thing has dictated which people should live and which people should die, what shape our buildings should have or what colors our garments should contain, what food people should eat or what words people should speak. If religion is the opium of the masses, then beliefs about the end of the world are like overdoses. People touched by such beliefs no longer rely on a hidden, personal and intimate god, contemplated upon from the safe distance of the beating human heart. They live with the promise of divine intervention at a grand scale on the current coordinates of space and time. This can be an exceptional motivator and a game changer in terms of civil obedience, both at an individual and collective level. In the name of an immediate and palpable deity people can commit shocking cruelties. However, such belief can also account for some of the most exceptional social developments in human history.

This book solicits the innovative research ideas and solutions for almost all the intelligent data intensive theories and application domains. The proliferation of various mobile and wireless communication networks has paved way to foster a high demand for intelligent data processing and communication technologies. The potential of data in wireless mobile networks is enormous, and it constitutes to improve the communication capabilities profoundly. As the networking and communication applications are becoming more intensive, the management of data resources and its flow between various storage and computing resources are posing significant research challenges to both ICT and data science community. The general scope of this book covers the design, architecture, modeling, software, infrastructure and applications of intelligent communication architectures and systems for big data or data-intensive applications. In particular, this book reports the novel and recent research works on big data, mobile and wireless networks, artificial intelligence, machine learning, social network mining, intelligent computing technologies, image analysis, robotics and autonomous systems, data security and privacy.