The collection focuses on the advancements of characterization of minerals, metals, and materials and the applications of characterization results on the processing of these materials. Advanced characterization methods, techniques, and new instruments are emphasized. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: * Novel methods and techniques for characterizing materials across a spectrum of systems and processes. * Characterization of mechanical, thermal, electrical, optical, dielectric, magnetic, physical, and other properties of materials. * Characterization of structural, morphological, and topographical natures of materials at micro- and nano- scales. * Characterization of extraction and processing including process development and analysis. * Advances in instrument developments for microstructure analysis and performance evaluation of materials, such as computer tomography (CT), X-ray and neutron diffraction, electron microscopy (SEM, FIB, TEM), and spectroscopy (EDS, WDS, EBSD) techniques. * 2D and 3D modelling for materials characterization. The book explores scientific processes to characterize materials using modern technologies, and focuses on the interrelationships and interdependence among processing, structure, properties, and performance of materials.

When John Swift moves his family to Centerville, South Carolina to begin his ministery at the church there, the action, mystery, and intrigue begins. Smith had been an outstanding baseball player in his younger days, but when injured by an unscrupulous player his hopes for a professional career were ended with a serious knee injury. After undergoing several surguries, he was able to attend college, married, and coached high school baseball for several years before deciding to enter the ministry full time. Soon after his move to Centerville Smith learns that the very person that had inflicted the knee injury and ended his professional baseball hopes, is now the baseball coach at the local high school. When his son Billy, who has become an outstanding baseball player, is told by Chip Kincade that he isn't welcome to play in the Centerville summer baseball program because of who his dad is, the action begins. If you like baseball, romance, and mystery in a church and faith changing setting, you will love, "A Bridge To Cross."

NORMAN BEREFT Norman D Beech has narrowly squeezed by a fatal pile-up on life's highway. Alcohol-induced blackouts have deeply cratered all lanes behind him. The road ahead is fogbound, obscured by uncertainty and doubt. Jobless, beset by creditors, and facing DUI charges, the troubled 40-year-old engineer struggles to get his life in order. Putting his Connecticut house up for sale, he flies back to his boyhood home near Washington, DC, to be with his widowed mother, Ethel. Depression and anxiety attacks impede his recovery. At his mother's urging, he seeks and receives help from her pastor, Father Bob Hopkins. The two men discover much in common, meeting often to confront their fears together and begin a close friendship. Unemployed for over a year, Norm lands a job and meets Kay Bradley, whose charms overcome his fear of getting involved. Unwilling to wait for the Church's annulment of his previous marriage, they elope to Las Vegas. His job-travel demands soon test the strength of their union, but he is ecstatic when he learns that she is pregnant. A Trojan horse of uncertainty works its way back into Norm's life. A tiny seed of doubt precipitates a tragic act leading to the loss of all he holds dear. Overwhelmed by grief and depression, he fixates on an alcoholic teenager as the source of all his misery. Norm has nothing left to live for but his revenge-Warren Ward must pay with his life

The dark night was strangely quiet. The moon had disappeared behind the clouds, and there were absolutely no sounds. Not just quiet, but total silence. Then the lonesome cry of a whippoorwill broke the silence. Or was it really a whippoorwill!

A strange ghost-like figure appears during the night as the twins and their cousin are camping in the Ozark Mountains above Moore's Lake near Heber Springs, Arkansas. Akiela, the last of a mysterious tribe of Native Americans, has come to warn the young adventurers about evil men in the area of the lake. He seems to be able to appear and disappear at will. He is very tall, and pale, almost deathlike...his long white hair flowing to his narrow shoulders. His eyes burn with agitation and displeasure at what is happening to his beloved mountains.

Language Policy beyond the State invites readers to (re-)consider the ways language policy is constituted, taken up, and researched if we look within and past the state. Contributors to this edited volume draw attention to language policy as always in the making, focusing on agency, on-the-ground practices, and ideologies. The chapters of the book reveal how simultaneous, and at times contradicting, language policies exist within a state and explore the complex roles played by families, businesses, educational institutions, and media in generating and appropriating these policies. By moving away from language policy analysis concerned primarily with how official state policies address well-defined language problems, some of the contributions of the volume highlight how the problems themselves can be ideological artifacts or are discursively constructed in language ideological debates that are provoked by changes in the geopolitical situation in the region. Using qualitative and descriptive research, the book uses Estonia as a setting to examine the ways historic and contemporary populations navigate language policies in both local and transnational spaces. As a whole, the collection speaks eloquently and powerfully to current efforts to understand and map the ways multiple institutions and individuals-not just the state-play an active role in forming and taking up language policies.

This book celebrates some of the most memorable moments of motherhood. The joy, laughter, and even embarrassment that only a mother can love.

Norman D Beech enters the world on D-Day just as the mighty Allied armada is landing on the shore an ocean away. He is marked at birth as different from others, a sign of divinely infused belief conflicted by a compelling bias toward self-indulgence. George Beech, moderate in all things except his unlimited love for his firstborn, is later rewarded with insolence, rebellion, and estrangement. Norman, a lowly foot soldier in the war between good and evil, wanders into the dangerous no-man's-land of mediocrity. The prodigal son's comic misadventures turn deadly as the action shifts from Washington, DC, to New England. His war is waged on a battlefield where the markers between the real and the imaginary are constantly shifting as he seeks escape in an alcoholic fog. To know Norman is to love him; to love him is to put your sanity, if not your life, in peril. He leaves bottles, beauties, and bodies in his wake as he wages his relentless assault on the world. Penitent, Norman seeks forgiveness from his earthly father, only to find him hopelessly lost in the miasma of Alzheimer's. He fights on, searching for love, knowledge, and God, while risking everything to the demons of selfishness, drunkenness, and despair. Teetering on the brink of extinction, he is driven by unseen forces to a final showdown at the Last Chance Saloon.

When Sydney is stuck with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill at Red Bud Cove, and is not able to pay for the metal detector and the microscope she had ordered, she gets mad. Mad enough to bring the crooks to justice. She, aided by her twin sister Taryn, and cousins Dylan and Bailey, makes life miserable for the crooks as they constantly investigate how and where the counterfeiters are operating. However, before the criminals are brought to justice the twins are captured, left on a snake and alligator infested island in the middle of the swamp to die, and are conked on the head and left adrift in a boat, without gasoline or paddles, headed for a waterfall into the Forshe River hundreds of feet below. A clue that Sydney uncovers with her metal detector helps lead the twins to "Mr. Big" and with the help of Heber Springs Chief of Police Gary Cupp, the crooks end up behind bars where they belong.

America's Culture of Professionalism proves an emerging culture of interdependence is possible if and when enough professionals and laypersons refashion their roles and relationships having both something to contribute and something to learn from each other.