What would happen if I accepted an invitation to Bible Study from Jehovah's Witnesses? What would attending a Kingdom Hall meeting involve? And if I invited door-knocking Witnesses into my home? This book introduces Jehovah's Witnesses without assuming prior knowledge of the Watch Tower organization. After outlining the Society's origins and history, the book explains their key beliefs and practices by taking the reader through the process of the seeker who makes initial contact with Witnesses, and progresses to take instruction and become a baptized member. The book then explores what is involved in being a Witness - congregational life, lifestyle, rites of passage, their understanding of the Bible and prophetic expectations. It examines the various processes and consequences of leaving the organization, controversies that have arisen in the course of its history, and popular criticisms. Discussion is given to the likelihood of reforms within the organization, such as its stance on blood transfusions, the role of women and new methods of meeting and evangelizing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Global Trends of Smart Cities provides integrated analysis of 135 cities that participated in the IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge in 2010-2017. It establishes evidence-based benchmarking of city geographies, city sizes, governance structures, and local planning contexts in smart cities. This book uses a combination of descriptive statistical analysis and real-world case study narratives to evaluate the ways in which each individual urban variable or their combination matter in the diversity of smart city approaches around the globe. It is acknowledged that the Smarter Cities Challenge offers a particular set of smart initiatives and is not representative of all smart cities around the world. Nevertheless, the global presence of the Challenge across five continents and its involvement with 135 cities of all size and socioeconomic status provides a solid foundation to conduct comparative research on smart cities. Considering limited comparative research available in the smart city debate, this book makes significant contribution in understanding the state of smart city development in urban governments worldwide.

Disasters undermine societal well-being, causing loss of lives and damage to social and economic infrastructures. Disaster resilience is central to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, especially in regions where extreme inequality combines with the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters. Disaster risk reduction and resilience requires participation of wide array of stakeholders ranging from academicians to policy makers to disaster managers. Disaster Resilient Cities: Adaptation for Sustainable Development offers evidence-based, problem-solving techniques from social, natural, engineering and other disciplinary perspectives. It connects data, research, conceptual work with practical cases on disaster risk management, capturing the multi-sectoral aspects of disaster resilience, adaptation strategy and sustainability. The book links disaster risk management with sustainable development under a common umbrella, showing that effective disaster resilience strategies and practices lead to achieving broader sustainable development goals.

This multi-disciplinary volume is the first collective effort to explore Istanbul, capital of the vast polyglot, multiethnic, and multireligious Ottoman empire and home to one of the world's largest and most diverse urban populations, as an early modern metropolis. It assembles topics seldom treated together and embraces novel subjects and fresh approaches to older debates. Contributors crisscross the socioeconomic, political, cultural, environmental, and spatial, to examine the myriad human and non-human actors, local and global, that shaped the city into one of the key sites of early modern urbanity. Contributors are: Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano , Zeynep Altok, Walter G. Andrews, Betul Basaran, Cem Behar, Maurits H. van den Boogert, John J. Curry, Linda T. Darling, Suraiya Faroqhi, Emine Fetvaci, Shirine Hamadeh, Cemal Kafadar, Cigdem Kafescioglu, Deniz Karakas, Leyla Kayhan Elbirlik, B. Harun Kucuk, Selim S. Kuru, Karen A. Leal, Gulru Necipoglu, Christoph K. Neumann, Asli Niyazioglu, Amanda Phillips, Marinos Sariyannis, Aleksandar Shopov, Lucienne Thys-Senocak, Nukhet Varlik, N. Zeynep Yelce, Gulay Yilmaz, and Zeynep Yurekli.

Divided by the Word refutes the assumption that the entrenched ethnic divide between South Africa’s Zulus and Xhosas, a divide that turned deadly in the late 1980s, is elemental to both societies. Jochen Arndt reveals how the current distinction between the two groups emerged from a long and complex interplay of indigenous and foreign born actors, with often diverging ambitions and relationships to the world they shared and the languages they spoke.

The earliest roots of the divide lie in the eras of exploration and colonization, when European officials and naturalists classified South Africa’s indigenous population on the basis of skin color and language. Later, missionaries collaborated with African intermediaries to translate the Bible into the region’s vernaculars, artificially creating distinctions between Zulu and Xhosa speakers. By the twentieth century, these foreign players, along with African intellectuals, designed language-education programs that embedded the Zulu-Xhosa divide in South African consciousness.

Using archival sources from three continents written in multiple languages, Divided by the Word offers a refreshingly new appreciation for the deep historicity of language and ethnic identity in South Africa, while reconstructing the ways in which colonial forces generate and impose ethnic divides with long-lasting and lethal consequences for indigenous populations.

Management of IoT Open Data Projects in Smart Cities demonstrates a key project management methodology for the implementation of Smart Cities projects: Principles and Regulations for Smart Cities (PaRSC). This methodology adopts a basis in classic Scrum soft management methods with carefully considered expansions. These include design principals for high-level architecture design and recommendations for design at the level of project teams. This approach enables the deployment of rule-based linguistic models for IoT project management, supporting the design of high-level architecture and providing rules for Scrum Smart Cities team. After reading this book, the reader will have a thorough grounding in IoT nodes and methods of their design, the acquisition and use of open data, and the use of project management methods to collect open data and build business models based on them.

In original essays drawn from a myriad of archival materials, Society Women and Enlightened Charity in Spain reveals how the members of the Junta de Damas de Honor y Merito, founded in 1787 to administer charities and schools for impoverished women and children, claimed a role in the public sphere through their self-representation as civic mothers and created an enlightened legacy for modern feminism in Spain.

Youth studies in Latin America and Spain face numerous challenges. This book delves into youth experiences in the 21st century, shaped by complex and pressing issues: the surge of youth cultures and groups, visual images of youth throughout time, and fragmented youth experiences in radically unequal societies. It analyzes young people as precarious natives in global capitalism and labor uncertainty, juvenicide, feminist discourse, social networks, intimacy and sexual affection among young people in a context of growing claims of gender equality. Also included are rural and indigenous youth as political actors, the actions of young political activists within government administrations, the experience of youth migration and empowerment, and young people dealing with the digital world. How have youth studies approached these issues in Latin America and Spain? Which were the main developments and transformations in this research field over the past years? Where is it heading? Contributors are: Jorge Benedicto, Maritza Urteaga, Dolores Rocca, Jose Antonio Perez Islas, Juan Carlos Revilla, Mariano Urraco, Almudena Moreno, Oscar Aguilera, Marcela Saa, Rafael Merino, Ana Miranda, Carles Feixa, Gonzalo Saravi, Antonio Santos-Ortega, David Munoz-Rodriguez, Arantxa Grau-Munoz, Jose Manuel Valenzuela, Silvia Elizalde, Monica Figueras, Mittzy Arciniega, Nele Hansen, Tanja Strecker, Elisa G. de Castro, Melina Vazquez, Rene Unda, Daniel Llanos, Sonia Paez de la Torre, Pere Soler, Daniel Calderon, and Stribor Kuric.

"Relax The horror stories you have heard about adolescence are false."
This is Dr. Laurence Steinberg's reassuring message to parents in this newly revised edition of his classic book "You and Your Adolescent," which "Publishers Weekly "says is "filled with solid advice for the parents of adolescents." Among the new topics in this updated edition:
* An expanded definition of adolescence to age 25, recognizing that college graduates often remain dependent on their parents for an extended period, creating a new parent-child dynamic
* A discussion of social media that addresses whether parents of preteens and young teens should monitor use of these new communication tools
* What new research into the adolescent brain tells us about teenage behavior
As Dr. Steinberg writes, "Most books written for parents of teenagers were survival guides (many still are). Nowadays, adolescence is too long--15 years in some families--for mere survival. Knowledge, not fortitude, is what today's parents need. That's where this book comes in."