This book illustrates the ways in which communities can strengthen the links and set the stage for long-term partnerships between sustainable agriculture and sustainable rural community development initiatives. It provides lessons learned, first, from the community development literature that can help shape sustainable agriculture strategies, and second, from the sustainable agriculture literature that can prove useful in moulding sound and effective community development strategies. The threads that weave the chapters together is the commitment to a building and expanding the community capital resources that have important bearing on the sustainability of agriculture and the broader community of which it is a part. Certainly, the success of the agriculture/community partnerships is rooted in one critical ingredient - "social capital." To be effective over the long-term, sustainable development depends on a network of people, drawn from a wide array of interests, who have a strong trusting relationship with one another, and who are willing to work together in responding to the economic, environmental, and social challenges facing agriculture and community alike. At the same time, strategies that work to strengthen the stock of all seven types of community capitals are important to pursue. It is balanced investments in all seven types of community capitals that will contribute to the emergence of "community agency" -- the ability of local people to act in a proactive manner in managing, utilizing, and enhancing local resources. With the emergence of "community agency," an important step in the pursuit of a sustainable future for both agriculture and community is possible. This book was published as a special issue of Community Development.

We investigate the optical properties of liquid crystal devices whose dark states are optically compensated to give minimum transmittance. Firstly, the effect of multiple internal reflections on the extinction ratio of perfectly compensated liquid crystal devices is studied. We find the previously unexplained wavelength dependence of light leakage in an ideally compensated device is caused by the interference of the internally reflected ordinary and extraordinary waves. Secondly, we study the off-axis light transmission characteristics of the bright state of common liquid crystal displays including their luminance and color properties. Our research shows there is an unexpected universal shape of the off-axis light transmittance in its bright state, regardless of what liquid crystal mode is used. Thirdly, we have studied the off-axis light transmission properties of the bright state in Pi-cell devices as a function of the white state director configuration. Finally, we explore the phase compensation of the dark states in LCDs, and find that there is a limitation for the compensation of a uniaxial layer even in the most simple director configuration.

Prolog is a programming language, but a rather unusual one. Prolog'' is short for Programming with Logic'', and the link with logic gives Prolog its special character. At the heart of Prolog lies a surprising idea: don't tell the computer what to do. Instead, describe situations of interest, and compute by asking questions. Prolog will logically deduce new facts about the situations and give its deductions back to us as answers. Why learn Prolog? For a start, its say what the problem is, rather than how to solve it'' stance, means that it is a very high level language, good for knowledge rich applications such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and the semantic web. So by studying Prolog, you gain insight into how sophisticated tasks can be handled computationally. Moreover, Prolog requires a different mindset. You have to learn to see problems from a new perspective, declaratively rather than procedurally. Acquiring this mindset, and learning to appreciate the links between logic and programming, makes the study of Prolog both challenging and rewarding. Learn Prolog Now is a practical introduction to this fascinating language. Freely available as a web-book since 2002 (see www.learnprolognow.org) Learn Prolog Now has became one of the most popular introductions to the Prolog programming language, an introduction prized for its clarity and down-to-earth approach. It is widely used as a textbook at university departments around the world, and even more widely used for self study. College Publications is proud to present here the first hard-copy version of this online classic. Carefully revised in the light of reader's feedback, and now with answers to all the exercises, here you will find the essential material required to help you learn Prolog now.