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.

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.

Innovation is a high-risk endeavor and success is dependent upon a firm's understanding of customer needs. A company's initial resistance to adopting innovation is mitigated with a solid foundation of customer trust in the firm. This book uniquely combines the work of scholars and practitioners to examine how trust and customer-centricity impacts every phase of the innovation journey. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, the contributions in this collection consider different aspects of innovating for trust. Beginning with the notion of trust itself, authors examine the importance of trust in futures thinking, business model innovation, service design, co-creation, the innovative organization and self-service technologies. The book also contains a valuable collection of case studies based upon innovation with major service providers, which supports the final emphasis on the importance of trust in commercializing innovations. Practical and engaging, Innovating for Trust will appeal to enlightened business managers aiming to build and maintain customer trust, as well as students and researchers of innovation, trust and strategy. Contributors include: T.W. Andreassen, K. Bentsen, J. Blomkvist, D. Chasanidou, S. Clatworthy, M. Filho, A. Fjuk, A. Folstad, J. Gloppen, D. Groenquist, R. Halvorsrud, W. Haukedal, T. Hillestad, M.T. Hossain, S. Jorgensen, A. Karahasanovic, T. Kobbeltvedt, P. Kristensson, S. Kurtmollaiev, K. Kvale, L. Lervik-Olsen, M. Luders, H. Nysveen, P.E. Pedersen, T. Saebi, S.E.R. Skard, B.A. Solem, C. Tepfers, H. Thorbjornsen, L.J. Tynes Pedersen, B. Yttri

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.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of probably the most horrific solo terrorist operation the world has ever seen. On 22 July 2011 Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people when he bombed the Government District in Oslo, before he conducted a shooting attack against a political youth camp at Utoya. The main focus of the book is on the operational aspects of the events, particularly the target selection and decision-making process. Why did Breivik choose the targets he finally attacked, what influenced his decision-making and how did he do it? Using unique source material, providing details never published before, the authors accurately explain how even this ruthless terrorist acted under a number of constraints in a profoundly dynamic process. This momentous work is a must read for scholars, students and practitioners within law enforcement, intelligence, security and terrorism studies.

In the eleventh century, the rulers of the lands surrounding the North Sea are all hungry for power. To get power they need soldiers, to get soldiers they need silver, and to get silver there is no better way than war and plunder. This vicious cycle draws all the lands of the north into a brutal struggle for supremacy and survival that will shatter kingdoms and forge an empire. The Wolf Age takes the reader on a thrilling journey through the bloody shared history of England and Scandinavia, and on across early medieval Europe, from the wild Norwegian fjords to the wealthy cities of Muslim Andalusia. Warfare, plotting, backstabbing and bribery abound as Tore Skeie weaves sagas and skaldic poetry with breathless dramatization to bring the world of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons to vivid life.

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.

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.

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.

In February 2014, al-Qaida issued a statement that shocked the entire Jihadi movement. For the first time in its history, the group declared that a local affiliate, the Islamic State in Iraq, was no longer part of al-Qaida. The renegade Iraqi group, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had expanded its operations to Syria, taking over the regional branch Jabhat al-Nusra; but in the process, the group had defied orders from al-Qaida's amir, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Islamic State's actions, and increasingly aggressive posture towards fellow Jihadis, eventually ignited a Jihadi civil war--a period defined by internal tensions that ultimately turned global. With devastating impact, this fitna left the Jihadi movement more polarised and fragmented than ever, seriously threatening its internal cohesion. 'Jihadi Politics' presents the first exhaustive account of infighting within the global Jihadi movement. Based on years of digital anthropology, hundreds of primary documents, and interviews with Jihadis, it offers an unprecedented glimpse into historic and current conflicts between and within Jihadi groups. This thorough examination of the years 2014-2019 offers a more nuanced understanding of the current state of Jihadism, with important insights into its future evolution--including Islamic State's role in Afghanistan.

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.

This book is relevant for phonologists, morphologists, Slavists and cognitive linguists, and addresses two questions: How can the morphology-phonology interface be accommodated in cognitive linguistics? Do morphophonological alternations have a meaning? These questions are explored via a comprehensive analysis of stem alternations in Russian verbs. The analysis is couched in R.W. Langacker's Cognitive Grammar framework, and the book offers comparisons to other varieties of cognitive linguistics, such as Construction Grammar and Conceptual Integration. The proposed analysis is furthermore compared to rule-based and constraint-based approaches to phonology in generative grammar. Without resorting to underlying representations or procedural rules, the Cognitive Linguistics framework facilitates an insightful approach to abstract phonology, offering the important advantage of restrictiveness. Cognitive Grammar provides an analysis of an entire morphophonological system in terms of a parsimonious set of theoretical constructs that all have cognitive motivation. No ad hoc machinery is invoked, and the analysis yields strong empirical predictions. Another advantage is that Cognitive Grammar can identify the meaning of morphophonological alternations. For example, it is argued that stem alternations in Russian verbs conspire to signal non-past meaning. This book is accessible to a broad readership and offers a welcome contribution to phonology and morphology, which have been understudied in cognitive linguistics.

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.

Containing ideas and perspectives, this monograph examines the evolutionary and future considerations for diversity in aging.

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.

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.