"Why do bad things happen?"
"God, I don't understand "
Heartbreak and loss happen to us all. On New Year's Day, at the age of thirty-seven, Karen Jensen's husband died suddenly in his bed, leaving her alone to raise two grieving boys and pastor a bewildered congregation.
Despite her strong faith and love for God, she had some serious questions.
Has tragedy shaken the foundation of your life? Have you been blindsided by an event you never expected to face? What "should" we do when we're going through the dark places in life?
...when we've lost everything?
...when we're in pain?
...when we're wondering why?
With a mix of sharp insight and warm optimism, Karen skillfully combines experience and scripture to guide you through the land mines of doubt and confusion that come with loss. She then provides solid principles for moving forward past the pain and into a brighter future.

The knowledge and decisions of professionals influence all facets of modern life, a fact reflected by the increasing and distinct emphasis on public accountability for what professionals know and do. The nature of this accountability has been fundamentally transformed in response to a changing context of market pressures, network arrangements, declining discretion and public trust, and public managerialism. To tackle these challenges, an important body of research has emerged which concentrates on the material elements and processes of professional learning, and considers how these affect wider society. This volume presents specific pressures on professionals' learning in different occupational contexts ranging from public school teaching to medicine and creative industry. These pressures are wrought by changing regulatory frameworks, changing modes of organising, changing demands and changing knowledge authorities in professional practice. The authors stress the importance of understanding these relations as sociomaterial webs through which the important moments of professional action and decisions emerge. This approach moves us beyond accepting 'learning' as an identifiable, individualist phenomenon by emphasising the multiplicities around professional practice 'standards' and 'quality', workarounds, responsibility, agency, and knowledge practices. As the chapters here demonstrate, sociomaterial perspectives raise new questions and methodologies that can highlight what is often invisible in the sometimes messy dynamics of professional learning, and point to new ways of promoting and supporting professional education. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education and Work.

Natural language is easy for people and hard for machines. For two generations, the tantalizing goal has been to get computers to handle human languages in ways that will be compelling and useful to people. Obstacles are many and legendary. Natural Language Processing: The PLNLP Approach describes one group's decade of research in pursuit of that goal. A very broad coverage NLP system, including a programming language (PLNLP) development tools, and analysis and synthesis components, was developed and incorporated into a variety of well-known practical applications, ranging from text critiquing (CRITIQUE) to machine translation (e.g. SHALT). This books represents the first published collection of papers describing the system and how it has been used. Twenty-six authors from nine countries contributed to this volume. Natural language analysis, in the PLNLP approach, is done is six stages that move smoothly from syntax through semantics into discourse. The initial syntactic sketch is provided by an Augmented Phrase Structure Grammar (APSG) that uses exclusively binary rules and aims to produce some reasonable analysis for any input string. Its `approximate' analysis passes to the reassignment component, which takes the default syntactic attachments and adjusts them, using semantic information obtained by parsing definitions and example sentences from machine-readable dictionaries. This technique is an example of one facet of the PLNLP approach: the use of natural language itself as a knowledge representation language -- an innovation that permits a wide variety of online text materials to be exploited as sources of semantic information. The next stage computes the intrasential argument structure and resolves all references, both NP- and VP-anaphora, that can be treated at this point in the processing. Subsequently, additional components, currently not so well developed as the earlier ones, handle the further disambiguation of word senses, the normalization of paraphrases, and the construction of a paragraph (discourse) model by joining sentential semantic graphs. Natural Language Processing: The PLNLP Approach acquaints the reader with the theory and application of a working, real-world, domain-free NLP system, and attempts to bridge the gap between computational and theoretical models of linguistic structure. It provides a valuable resource for students, teachers, and researchers in the areas of computational linguistics, natural processing, artificial intelligence, and information science.

ALA's popular and respected Whole Library Handbook series continues with a volume specifically geared towards those who serve young adults, gathering stellar articles and commentary from some of the country's most innovative and successful teen services librarians. Sections focusing on practice, theory, and the philosophical underpinnings of the profession are supported by current research and historical perspectives. Both instructive and reflective in scope, this essential handbook Provides a comprehensive introduction to the background and day-to-day realities of teen librarianship for LIS students and those new to the field Offers expert tips and wisdom invaluable to those already working with teens Highlights trends, challenges, and opportunities in the changing world of how teens interact with libraries, and what they expect Emphasises advocacy across all spectrums, including in local communities and among fellow staff who may be anxious about teens in the library Guides staff in providing readers' advisory to teens Includes ready-to-use marketing resources, templates, and sample teen services and teen volunteer plans Anyone who works with young adults will benefit from the thorough coverage provided by this volume's expert contributors.