This is an introduction to the history of languages, from the distant past to a glimpse at what languages may be like in the distant future. It looks at how languages arise, change, and ultimately vanish, and what lies behind their different destinies. What happens to languages, he argues, has to do with what happens to the people who use them, and what happens to people, individually and collectively, is affected by the languages they speak.
The book opens by examining what the languages are the hunter-gatherers might have spoken and the changes to language that took place when agriculture made settled communities possible. It then looks at the effects of the invention of writing, the formation of empires, the spread of religions, and the recent dominance of world powers, and shows how these relate to great changes in the use of languages. Tore Janson discusses the appearance of new languages, the reasons why some languages spread and others die, considers whether similar cyclical processes are found at different times and places, and examines the causes of internal changes in languages and dialects.
The book ranges widely among the world's languages and mixes thematic chapters on general processes of change with accounts of specific languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Greek, and English.

The average person spends twenty-six years of their life sleeping. That time was created not only to enjoy the physical benefits of rest but to engage in the presence of God and access his guidance for our days. In The Power of Your Dreams: A Guide to Hearing and Understanding How God Speaks, pastor and talk show host Stephanie Ike Okafor shows that everyone is a dreamer. Alongside personal stories of how dreams equipped her with insight for pivotal moments, Stephanie gives readers practical tools to help remember and discern their dreams, identify biblical meanings of common symbols and numbers, and reflect on discussion questions in each chapter.

Anchored in biblical truth, The Power of Your Dreams answers the most perplexing questions readers have about dreams, such as:

• Are all dreams from God?
• How do I know if my dream contained a message from God?
• How do I interpret my dreams?
• Do nightmares have any meaning?

Embark on a transformative journey to unlock hidden treasures of wisdom by discovering God's voice in your dreams. With this expansive teaching on one of the prevalent ways God speaks, readers will discover confidence in their purpose, and a strengthened relationship with God.

Peasants, Lords and State: Comparing Peasant Conditions in Scandinavia and the Eastern Alpine Region, 1000-1750 challenges the once widespread view, rooted in the historical thinking of the nineteenth century, that Scandinavian and especially Norwegian peasants enjoyed a particular "peasant freedom" compared to their Continental counterparts. Markers of this supposed freedom were believed to be peasants' widespread ownership of land, extensive control over land and resources, and comprehensive judicial influence through the institution of the thing. The existence of slaves and unfree people was furthermore considered a marginal phenomenon. The contributors compare Scandinavia with the eastern Alpine region, two regions comprising fertile plains as well as rugged mountainous areas. This offers an opportunity to analyse the effect of topographical factors without neglecting the influence of manorial and territorial power structures over the long time-span of c.1000 to 1750. With contributions by Markus Cerman, Tore Iversen, Michael Mitterauer, John Ragnar Myking, Josef Riedmann, Werner Roesener, Helge Salvesen, and Stefan Sonderegger.

Perception plays a key role in numerous aspects of life in contemporary society. By developing tools to effectively measure perception and spatial recognition, a range of relevant applications can be utilized. A Simplex Approach to Learning, Cognition, and Spatial Navigation: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an innovative source of scholarly material that presents a unique perspective on the convergence of game-based learning, empathy, cognition, and spatial understanding. Including a range of pertinent topics such as gender considerations, space representation, and user interfaces, this book is an ideal reference publication for academics, researchers, students, and educators interested in the role of spatial reference systems in education.

Traditional "schools" of crime prevention, like the criminal justice model, social crime prevention or situational crime prevention, have proved to be too narrow and do not combine well with other approaches. However, each of these models provides important insights and contributions for reducing crime. By extracting the main preventive mechanisms of these diverse approaches, this book develops a more holistic, general model that consists of nine preventive mechanisms: building normative barriers to crime, reducing recruitment, deterrence, disruption, incapacitation, protecting vulnerable targets, reducing benefits of crime, reducing harm, and facilitating desistance. The measures to activate the preventive mechanisms may differ according to the type of crime, as may the actors in charge of implementing the relevant measures. However, Tore Bjorgo demonstrates how his model of crime prevention can be effectively applied to diverse forms of crime, from domestic burglaries to criminal youth gangs and driving under the influence to organized crime and terrorism. In doing so, this important book will be of interest to scholars and students of policing, security studies and criminology, as well as practitioners and policy-makers.

The Asko meetings were an annual forum where leading economists and ecologists came together to discuss the myriad issues and challenges surrounding sustainable development. Organized by the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics and held on the Island of Asko in the Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden, the meetings facilitated a dialogue in which various players with differing perspectives could arrive at common conclusions and solutions that benefit us all.

Agile software development has become an umbrella term for a number of changes in how software developers plan and coordinate their work, how they communicate with customers and external stakeholders, and how software development is organized in small, medium, and large companies, from the telecom and healthcare sectors to games and interactive media. Still, after a decade of research, agile software development is the source of continued debate due to its multifaceted nature and insufficient synthesis of research results. Dingsoyr, Dyba, and Moe now present a comprehensive snapshot of the knowledge gained over many years of research by those working closely with or in the industry. It shows the current state of research on agile software development through an introduction and ten invited contributions on the main research fields, each written by renowned experts. These chapters cover three main issues: foundations and background of agile development, agile methods in practice, and principal challenges and new frontiers. They show the important results in each subfield, and in addition they explain what these results mean to practitioners as well as for future research in the field. The book is aimed at reflective practitioners and researchers alike, and it also can serve as the basis for graduate courses at universities.

For over a decade, software process improvement (SPI) has been promoted as an approach to improve systematically the way software is developed and managed. Mostly this research and the relevant experience reports have been focussed on large software companies.

Conradi and his co-authors have collected the main results from four Norwegian industrial research and development projects on SPI carried out between 1996 and 2005, which, in contrast to other treatments, concentrated on small- and medium-sized companies, typically characterized by fast-changing environments and processes. The presentation is organized in five sections: general principles and methods of SPI, knowledge management for SPI, process modelling and electronic process guides, estimation methods, and object-oriented and component-based systems. A spectrum of empirical methods has been used, e.g. case studies, large-scale experiments, surveys and interviews, and action research.

The book mainly targets researchers and graduate students in (empirical) software engineering, and software professionals working in development or quality assurance.

Faster, better and cheaper are challenges that IT-companies face every day. The customer's expectations shall be met in a world where constant change in environment, organization and technology are the rule rather that the exception. A solution for meeting these challenges is to share knowledge and experience - use the company's own experience, and the experience of other companies. Process Improvement in Practice - A Handbook for IT Companies tackles the problems involved in launching these solutions.
Process Improvement in Practice - A Handbook for IT Companies is designed for small IT companies who wish to start with systematic improvement. The methods and techniques in this handbook are tried in practice, and have proven to be easy to use and scalable for local needs. Managers and developers will discover useful tips to initiate improvement work efficiently. This practical handbook is based on the authors' improvement work in a range of companies since the mid-nineties.
Process Improvement in Practice - A Handbook for IT Companies is designed for a professional audience, composed of researchers and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable for graduate-level students in software process improvement and software engineering.

Sports coaching is a social activity. At its heart lies a complex interaction between coach and athlete played out within the context of sport, itself a socio-culturally defined set of practices. In this ground-breaking book, leading international coaching scholars and coaches argue that an understanding of sociology and social theory can help us better grasp the interactive nature of coaching and consequently assist in demystifying the mythical 'art' of the activity. The Sociology of Sports Coaching establishes an alternative conceptual framework from which to explore sports coaching. It firstly introduces the work of key social theorists, such as Foucault, Goffman and Bourdieu among others, before highlighting the principal themes that link the study of sociology and sports coaching, such as power, interaction, and knowledge and learning. The book also outlines and develops the connections between theory and practice by placing the work of each selected social theorist alongside contemporary views on that work from a current practicing coach. This is the first book to present a critical sociological perspective of sports coaching and, as such, it represents an important step forward in the professionalization of the discipline. It is essential reading for any serious student of sports coaching or the sociology of sport, and for any reflective practitioner looking to become a better coach.

Why do some countries succeed while others struggle? Why are some firms profitable while rivals fail? Why do some marriages thrive and others end in divorce? The questions seem unrelated, but societies, companies, and marriages have one important thing in common: They involve more than one individual. They thus face the same fundamental challenges.  How can people be made to help rather than hurt each other? How can they use sacrifice, cooperation, and coercion to promote the common good? In this introductory text, Tore Ellingsen equips readers to answer essential questions around the success and failure of humans in groups, drawing on behavioral game theory, psychology, and sociology. He emphasizes how other-regarding preferences such as altruism and dutifulness matter for societies’ prosperity and analyzes the role of culture in the form of shared values and understandings. One lesson is that cooperation is facilitated when people anticipate that they will hold common memories of past behaviour, especially if agreements take precedence over leaders’ authority. A groundbreaking text, Institutional and Organizational Economics is essential reading for students and scholars of economics, political science, sociology, and public administration.

In Sami Nature-Centered Christianity in the European Arctic: Indigenous Theology beyond Hierarchical Worldmaking, Tore Johnsen unpacks the theological significance of North Sami indigenous Christianity, demonstrating how the tension between Sami nature-centered Christianity and official Norwegian Lutheranism has broad theological relevance. Focusing on Christian cosmological orientation, the author argues that this is not fully given within the Christian faith itself. It is partly shaped by the religio-philosophical frameworks that various historical receptions of Christianity were filtered through. The author substantiates that two different types of Christian cosmological orientation are negotiated in the North Sami Christian experience: one reflecting a Sami historical reception of Christianity primarily filtered through the egalitarian world intuition of the Sami indigenous tradition; another reflecting official Norwegian Lutheranism, primarily filtered through a Greek hierarchical world construct passed down among European intellectual elites. The argument is developed through thick description of local everyday Christianity among reindeer herding, river, and sea Sami communities in Finnmark, Norway; through critical engagement with historical and contemporary Lutheranism; and through constructive dialogue with African and Native American theologies. The author suggests that the egalitarian, multi-relational logic of Sami nature-centered Christianity points beyond the hierarchical binaries delimiting much of the theological imagination of dominant Christian theologies.

Nakhane Toure’s debut novel, Piggy boy’s blues, a distorted pastoral, is for all intents and purposes a portrait of the M. family. Centred mostly on the protagonist, Davide M., and his return to Alice, the town of his birth, the novel portrays a Xhosa royal family past its prime and glory. Davide’s journey, from the city to the country for peace and quiet, is not what he or the characters living in the forgotten and dilapidated house have bargained for. His return disturbs and troubles the silence and day-to-day practices that his uncle, Ndimphiwe, and the man he lives with have kept, resulting in a series of tragic events. Set mostly in the Eastern Cape – modern and historical – in Alice and Port Elizabeth, Piggy boy’s blues is a novel about boundaries, the intricacies of love and how the members of the M. family sometimes fail at navigating them.

This book investigates how fish experience their lives, their amazing senses and abilities, and how human actions impact their quality of life. The authors examine the concept of fish welfare and the scientific knowledge behind the inclusion of fish within the moral circle, and how this knowledge can change the way we treat fish in the future. In many countries fish are already protected by animal welfare legislation in the same way as mammals, but in practice there is still a major gap between how we ethically view these groups and how we actually treat them. The poor treatment of fish represents a massive animal welfare problem in aquaculture and fisheries, both in terms of the number of animals affected and the severity of the welfare issues. Thanks to its interdisciplinary scope, this thought-provoking book appeals to professionals, academics and students in the fields of animal welfare, cognition and physiology, as well as fisheries and aquaculture management.

This book provides a broad overview of monetary developments in Norway over the past 200 years, using a rich variety of graphical illustrations based on a unique data set of historical monetary statistics, which will be documented and made available on the Norges Bank website (in English) at http://www.norges-bank.no/en. Throughout the book, Norway's monetary developments are anchored in a historical context and in the development of monetary thinking. Through their analysis of the historical data, the authors provide new insights and comparisons to other Scandinavian countries, along with an excellent examination of the development and character of the banking and financial system in Norway.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. Pub/ius Vergilius Mara Forests have long been one of mankind's most important natural re sources and not the least because forests are, if properly managed, re newable. They serve us in many different ways, but above all in pro viding us with wood, one of the most remarkable and useful of all natural materials. Reaction wood, compression wood in gymnosperms and tension wood in the arboreal angiosperms, serves the function of making it possible for trees to perform movements. In the ancient Ginkgo and in the conifers, the ability to form compression wood is of vital importance to each and every tree. Compression wood plays a crucial role in the regulation of tree form in these gymnosperms, and their arborescent habit probably depends on their ability to develop this tissue. Few forest and plantation trees are devoid of compression wood in their stem, and all of them have it in their branches. Unfortu nately, what is necessary and beneficial for the tree in this case is harmful to mankind, for compression wood is a very serious defect in both sawtimber and pulpwood. It is now almost 20 years since the last complete survey of compres sion wood was published, namely Arthur H. Westing's excellent review of this subject. My major objective in writing the present book has been to bring together in one single work everything that is currently known about compression wood."

'It was at the time when I was wandering around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one leaves before it has set its mark on them...' Hunger is the first-person story of a young man desperately trying to establish himself in the city as a writer, living in shabby lodgings where he can seldom afford to pay the rent, eating almost nothing, and engaging spasmodically and manically with landladies, eccentric elderly men, policemen, shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, and others on the way. He wanders around the streets, sits on benches trying to write, spends a night locked in a pitch-dark police cell, thinks, slides into remarkably inventive reveries, speculates on his mental health, his ethical comportment, his relation to the divinity, the topics he might write about. The traces of a consistent narrative logic are uncertain and blurred; the voice of the narrator keeps shifting between pragmatic appraisal of his situation, wild fantasies, manic outbursts, anger, and despair. This is a story that lies on the threshold of modernism, anticipating many of the dislocations that narrative will be subject to in the decades to come. This new translation seeks to restore the startling freshness and epidermal unease of Hamsun's breakthrough story of 1890. It remains faithful to the style and voice of the text, the shifts of tense, the indirect free style, and the constant changes of register as the inner monologue moves between poetic sensitivity, wild fantasies, manic outbursts, and hyperbolic emotion. Tore Rem's introduction provides an updated and fresh account of the genesis of Hunger, its book history and its reception. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This book is a result of ISD2000-The Ninth International Conference on Infor mation Systems Development: Methods and Tools, Theory and Practice, held August 14-16, in Kristiansand, Norway. The ISD conference has its roots in the first Polish Scandinavian Seminar on Current Trends in Information Systems Development Method ologies, held in Gdansk, Poland in 1988. This year, as the conference carries into the new millennium this fine tradition, it was fitting that it returned to Scandinavia. Velkommen tilbake Next year, ISD crosses the North Sea and in the traditions of the Vikings, invades England. Like every ISD conference, ISD2000 gave participants an opportunity to express ideas on the current state of the art in information systems development, and to discuss and exchange views about new methods, tools and applications. This is particularly important now, since the field of ISD has seen rapid, and often bewildering, changes. To quote a Chinese proverb, we are indeed cursed, or blessed, depending on how we choose to look at it, to be "living in interesting times.""

'When the snow water had broken crevices open in the mountain a shot or even just a sharp cry was enough to tear loose a huge slab and send it toppling.' Lieutenant Thomas Glahn spends a summer in northern Norway, where the midnight sun triggers a short but intense release of energies. Living out of a rudimentary hut on the edge of the forest, he pursues a solitary existence, hunting, fishing, and engaging intermittently with the inhabitants of the nearby coastal village. Among these is Edvarda, daughter of the wealthy local trader Herr Mack. Their mutual attraction rapidly develops into an erotic fascination shot through with suspicions and jealousies; a series of fraught encounters culminates in violent actions with unforeseen consequences. First published in 1894, Pan was an immediate success and remains a classic of Norwegian literature. It embodies many of the distinctive features of Hamsun's early works, in particular a rejection of psychological stereotypes and a style infused by what Hamsun called a 'poetry of the nerves'. Terence Cave's new translation restores the power and virtuosity of Hamsun's original and includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.