Search results for ""interactions""

Understanding of polymer interactions is important for effective processing of plastics and their blends, mixing with nanoparticles, and understanding of their mechanical and physical (e.g., electrical) properties. This book describes a new physics of interactions in polymers that challenges existing theories, and explains the concept of entanglement in a very different way.Rheology is formulated with different parameters defi ning the physics of dual-phase and cross-dual-phase. The rubbery behavior of thermoplastics is explained quite differently to conventional theory.Rheo-fluidification experiments which are applicable to industry (injection molding, extrusion, sheet forming, etc.) are described and analyzed, including molding under conditions of reduced viscosity (up to several hundred percent). The application of this theory to industry has already been proven by a number of successful derived inventions.

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Published for The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), the Journal of Social Issues (JSI) brings behavioral and social science theory, empirical evidence, and practice to bear on human and social problems. Each issue of the journal focuses on a single topic — recent issues, for example, have addressed poverty, housing and health; privacy as a social and psychological concern; youth and violence; and the impact of social class on education.

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Josiah Royce and William James lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Irving Street, just two doors apart, and Charles Peirce grew up only blocks away. John Dewey was born and educated in nearby Vermont. These four great thinkers shared more than geographic space; they engaged in a series of formative philosophical discussions. By tracing the interactions of Royce (1855–1916) with James, Peirce, and Dewey, Oppenheim "re-imagines pragmatism" in a way that highlights the late Royce's role as mediator and favors the "seed-plant" image of O. W. Holmes, Jr., over the corridor image of Papini. Josiah Royce emphasized that communities of all sizes—ranging from families to towns—needed "reverence for the relations of life" not only to thrive but to survive. This theme permeates the dialectic of Royce’s interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey. Oppenheim analyzes the agreement and disagreement of these thinkers on the method and content of philosophy, skepticism and intelligibility, and nominalism and intentionality, as he uncovers their varied stances toward transcendent Reality. Oppenheim repudiates Ralph Barton Perry’s tactic of using Royce as a foil to display James positively, by offering a richer portrait of Royce. Oppenheim calls attention to Royce’s "doctrine of two levels" and its effects on the distinction of human and super-human, by showing the contrast of Royce’s "third attitude of will" against two primarily self-centered attitudes of will, and by examining the roles of Spirit, Community, and semiotic process in Royce’s late thought.

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Master the art of user experience design through the 100 laws, guidelines, human biases, and general considerations in this comprehensive, cross-disciplinary encyclopedia. Richly illustrated and easy to navigate, Universal Principles of UX pairs clear explanations of each concept with visual examples of the ideas applied in practice. The book is organized into six broad categories: Consider Empathize Define Research Design Validate And, features principles as diverse as: Design is not neutral Make the choice easy Some complexity cannot be reduced Map the ecosystem So you think you can scroll Don’t grade your own homework User Experience is a field notable for its expansiveness, complexity and persistent evolution. This book is not a chronological retelling of the history of user experience design. It is also not a technical how-to book that will show you how to become a perfect user experience designer one step at a time. It's a philosophical anthology of case studies, situations, problems, and contradictions encountered across more than fifteen years of working on real world client projects that will teach you how to think, rather than tell you what to do. Each principle is presented in a two-page format. The left-hand page contains a succinct definition, a full description of the principle, examples of its use, and guidelines for use. Sidenotes appear to the right of the text, and provide elaborations and references. The right-hand page contains visual examples and related graphics to support a deeper understanding of the principle. This landmark reference is the standard for designers, engineers, managers, and students who seek to broaden and improve their user experience design expertise. The titles in the Rockport Universal series offer comprehensive and authoritative information and edifying and inspiring visual examples on multidisciplinary subjects for designers, architects, engineers, students, and anyone who is interested in expanding and enriching their design knowledge.

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Grand Narratives of colonization, especially ones related to the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, began circulating soon after 1492. The danger of these Grand Narratives is that they are often mistaken as reality and eclipse all other possible narrations pertaining to a particular place and/or time. As more Caribbean territories become independent, the questioning of Grand Narratives has permeated many disciplines in the region, and archaeology is no exception.This work attempts to examine the lifeways at the archaeological site of Concepción de la Vega during its occupation from 1494 through 1564, using a Decolonial approach. Situated in present-day Dominican Republic (Hispaniola island), this site was one of the earliest and most affluent in Caribbean colonial history.The Decolonial approach used here critically analyzes and reinterprets primary data about Concepción from the point of view of those colonized, particularly non-elite, Indigenous peoples, and those of African descent. This approach uses various sources of data to recreate early lifeways, and helps gain a better understanding of the process through which the Spanish-American cultural tradition was created, and later disseminated, to the rest of Latin America.

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Complicating the common view that immigrant incorporation is a top-down process, determined largely by parents, Vikki Katz explores how children actively broker connections that enable their families to become woven into the fabric of American life. Children’s immersion in the U.S. school system and contact with mainstream popular culture enables them more quickly to become fluent in English and familiar with the conventions of everyday life in the United States. These skills become an important factor in how families interact with their local environments. Kids in the Middle explores children’s contributions to the family strategies that improve communication between their parents and U.S. schools, healthcare facilities, and social services, from the perspectives of children, parents, and the English-speaking service providers that interact with these families via children’s assistance. Katz also considers how children’s brokering affects their developmental trajectories. While their help is critical to addressing short-term family needs, children’s responsibilities can constrain their access to educational resources and have consequences for their long-term goals. Kids in the Middle explores the complicated interweaving of family responsibility and individual attainment in these immigrant families.Through a unique interdisciplinary approach that combines elements of sociology and communication approaches, Katz investigates not only how immigrant children connect their families with local institutional networks, but also how they engage different media forms to bridge gaps between their homes and mainstream American culture. Drawing from extensive firsthand research, Katz takes us inside an urban community in Southern California and the experiences of a specific community of Latino immigrant families there. In addition to documenting the often-overlooked contributions that children of immigrants make to their families’ community encounters, the book provides a critical set of recommendations for how service providers and local institutions might better assist these children in fulfilling their family responsibilities. The story told in Kids in the Middle reveals an essential part of the immigrant experience that transcends both geographic and ethnic boundaries.

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With this important work, written around current behavioral psychology research and practice as it applies to school-age children, the authors address both experimental and applied issues in the assessments and interventions used with this population. Among the issues examined are the legal, bureaucratic, and psychological complications involving the newly mandated Functional Assessment law. Included with this book is a software package designed specifically to provide tools to conduct and calculate outcomes for functional assessment procedures on notebook computers.

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The book analyses how international law addresses interactions between international organizations. In labour governance, these interactions are ubiquitous. They offer each organization an opportunity to promote its model of labour governance, yet simultaneously expose it to adverse influence from others. The book captures this ambivalence and examines the capacity of international law to mitigate it. Based on detailed case studies of mutual influence between the International Labour Organization, the World Bank, and the Council of Europe, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the pertinent law and its key challenges, both at institutional and inter-organizational level. The author envisions a law of inter-organizational interactions as a normative framework structuring interactions and enhancing the effectiveness and legitimacy of multi-institutional governance.

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When Archaeology Meets Communities' examines the history of nineteenth-century Sicilian archaeology through the archival documentation for the excavations – official and casual – at Tindari, Lipari and nearby minor sites in the Messina province from Italy’s Unification to the end of the First World War (1861-1918). The area and historical period have been fully neglected by past scholars and need in-depth investigation. The substantial evidence includes sets of approximately six hundred new records and black and white images from Italian and UK archives. The historical reconstruction, based on analysis of these records, lays the foundations for the entire volume and forms the basis from which the book develops innovative outlines on Sicilian archaeology. The structure follows this central concept. Furthermore, the volume seeks: a) to clarify relationships between the Italian Ministry of Public Education, the Museum of Palermo and local government authorities (‘3-level’ structure of interaction) and to pinpoint contacts with the contemporary social context; b) to compare archaeological research during the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the post-Unification period in northern Sicily in terms of methods, history of collecting, antiquities safeguarding and legislation; and c) to contextualise this work in terms of the evolution of archaeology and social change in the wider Italian and European contexts.

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the demise of the logical positivism programme. The answers given to these qu- tions have deepened the already existing gap between philosophy and the history and practice of science. While the positivists argued for a spontaneous, steady and continuous growth of scientific knowledge the post-positivists make a strong case for a fundamental discontinuity in the development of science which can only be explained by extrascientific factors. The political, social and cultural environment, the argument goes on, determine both the questions and the terms in which they should be answered. Accordingly, the sociological and historical interpretation - volves in fact two kinds of discontinuity which are closely related: the discontinuity of science as such and the discontinuity of the more inclusive political and social context of its development. More precisely it explains the discontinuity of the former by the discontinuity of the latter subordinating in effect the history of science to the wider political and social history. The underlying idea is that each historical and - cial context generates scientific and philosophical questions of its own. From this point of view the question surrounding the nature of knowledge and its development are entirely new topics typical of the twentieth-century social context reflecting both the level and the scale of the development of science.

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Approaches to Disruptions and Interactions in Archaeology is a collection of some of the papers presented at the Graduate Archaeology at Oxford Conferences over the years 2017, 2018, and 2019. The GAO conference has become an annual fixture in the calendar of graduate study in the School of Archaeology in Oxford, typically held in the spring each year and organised by graduate students from the School. The aims of the conferences have been primarily to provide a platform for graduate students and early career researchers to share their work, and to encourage discussions and connections amongst scholars from different fields within archaeology. In total, around 150 delegates participated, approximately 80 papers were presented, and 20 posters were displayed in the three conferences represented in this volume. The book represents 8 papers from the wider benefits and results of the GAO conferences over the three years. The papers draw out different aspects of the key themes of interaction, mobility, entanglement and disruption amongst various communities and demonstrated through material culture, relating to a range of time periods. Subjects include Japanese fans, Romano-British coins, Chinese architecture, the establishment of the Silk Road(s), chaos as shown in classical theatre, the threat to Indian urban sites, Buddhist grottoes in Northern Sichuan, and Phoenician colonisation of parts of Portugal. It is proposed that definitions and distinctions can be a mirage, and it is interaction and mobility that characterises much of the past.

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Taking literally Joanna Baillie's claim that drama can promote social justice, the study explores how plays by Baillie, novels by Walter Scott, and Imaginary Conversations by Walter Savage Landor address problems of capital punishment, poverty, and political participation. Baillie's and Scott's preoccupation with affective responses to criminals and beggars takes on new significance when situated next to nationalist efforts to use legal differences to promulgate an image of Scotland as a more compassionate society than England and when contrasted with Landor's confidence in political claims-making to meet social needs. The study enlists analogies between the 'symbolic interaction' prompted by the selected writers and the concepts of 'symbolic interaction' still evolving from the sociology of Jane Addams, George Herbert Mead, and subsequent practitioners to recover a belief in the social efficacy of literature that was accepted during the pre-disciplinary Romantic era but contested throughout much of the twentieth century. The study advocates the renewal of literary interventionism in our post-disciplinary age.

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Develop the valuable skills of communication, motivation, and assertiveness to become a more effective home visitor by successfully carrying out your job duties and conveying messages in the most positive and accessible manner. Loaded with tools and strategies to help you build these skills, The Home Visitor's Manual complements your knowledge of topics such as nutrition, regulations, policies, documentation requirements, and child development that helps you teach, support, and encourage providers. The Home Visitor's Manual is an ideal reference for: • addressing a difficult situation • working with a hostile provider •motivating an unresponsive provider • dealing with an unsafe environment • delivering an unpleasant or difficult message

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This book follows the treatment of a mentally disabled person from an institutional perspective, in which a unit is presented as an objectified subject of other people's actions, revealing a situation of isolation and personal dependence, and from a personnel perspective, as they respect the autonomy and self-determination of their charges. The text highlights how to create, maintain, and reconstruct social order within a nursing home and achieve internal balance and stabilization within a care institution.

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This volume continues the retrospective analyses of Volumes I and II, but goes beyond that in an attempt to understand how phenolic acids are partitioned in seedling-solution and seedling-microbe-soil-sand culture systems and how phenolic acid effects on seedlings may be related to the actual and/or conditional physicochemical properties (e.g., solubility, hydrophobicity, pKa, molecular structure and soil sorption/desorption) of simple phenolic acids. Specifically, it explores the quantitative partitioning (i.e., source-sink relationships) of benzoic and cinnamic acids in cucumber seedling-solution and cucumber seedling-microbe-soil-sand systems and how that partitioning may influence phenolic acid effects on cucumber seedlings. Regressions, correlations and conceptual and hypothetical models are used to achieve these objectives. Cucumber seedlings are used as a surrogate for phenolic acid sensitive herbaceous dicotyledonous weed seedlings. This volume was written specifically for researchers and their students interested in understanding how a range of simple phenolic acids and potentially other putative allelopathic compounds released from living plants and their litter and residues may modify soil chemistry, soil and rhizosphere microbial biology, seedling physiology and seedling growth. In addition, this volume describes the potential relationships, where they may exist, for direct transfer of organic compounds between plants, plant communication and plant-plant allelopathic interactions and addresses the following questions: Can physicochemical properties of phenolic acids be used as tools to help understand the complex behavior of phenolic acids and the ultimate effects of phenolic acids on sensitive seedlings? What insights do laboratory bioassays and the conceptual and hypothetical models of laboratory systems provide us concerning the potential behavior and effects of phenolic acids in field systems? What potential role may phenolic acids play in broadleaf-weed seedling emergence in wheat debris cover crop no-till systems?

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Now in a revised second edition, Nutrigenomics and Proteomics in Health and Disease brings together the very latest science based upon nutrigenomics and proteomics in food and health. Coverage includes many important nutraceuticals and their impact on gene interaction and health. Authored by an international team of multidisciplinary researchers, this book acquaints food and nutrition professionals with these new fields of nutrition research and conveys the state of the science to date. Thoroughly updated to reflect the most current developments in the field, the second edition includes six new chapters covering gut health and the personal microbiome; gut microbe-derived bioactive metabolites; proteomics and peptidomics in nutrition; gene selection for nutrigenomic studies; gene-nutrient network analysis, and nutrigenomics to nutritional systems biology. An additional five chapters have also been significantly remodelled. The new text includes a rethinking of in vitro and in vivo models with regard to their translatability into human phenotypes, and normative science methods and approaches have been complemented by more comprehensive systems biology-based investigations, deploying a multitude of omic platforms in an integrated fashion. Innovative tools and methods for statistical treatment and biological network analysis are also now included.

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Essential Japanese Kanji uses a natural approach to learning the most basic kanji encountered in everyday situations in Japan.This new edition is packed with fun quizzes and useful exercises for those wishing to improve their Japanese ability. It has been repackaged in a more compact, value-for-money size while losing none of the content that has made it a long-selling favorite. Key features of Essential Japanese Kanji include: Introductory quizzes to introduce everyday situations in which the Kanji are used A vocabulary section to help you understand the readings and meanings of each Kanji New character charts presenting all the Kanji clearly and systematically Definitions, readings, stroke orders and compounds for each character Practice sections help you to improve your skills Advanced Placement Exam practice questions follow the format of the College Board exam Everyday tasks like finding a street address or buying a train ticket in Japan require a basic working knowledge of kanji—the Japanese system of writing based on Chinese characters. Essential Japanese Kanji, teaches you the kanji you'll need in everyday situations in lessons prepared by teachers from the prestigious University of Tokyo.

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Religiöses Wissen, so die Grundannahme des DFG-Graduiertenkollegs "Religiöses Wissen im vormodernen Europa (800-1800)", entsteht in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem in der Bibel offenbarten, aber nicht greifbaren Wissen. Im alltäglichen Umgang der religiösen Experten und Laien wird es jedoch immer wieder transformiert und an die zeitspezifischen Gegebenheiten angepasst. Die dabei entstehenden diskursiven Konkurrenzen zwischen religiösem Wissen und anderen Wissensfeldern stehen im Fokus des interdisziplinär angelegten Sammelbands. Die Beiträge thematisieren die unterschiedlichen Verfahrensweisen, durch die religiöses Wissen in den Bereichen der Naturforschung, Kunst oder Literatur adaptiert und modelliert wird, sowie die dabei zu Tage tretenden Spannungen, Konkurrenzen oder Synergien.

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In recent years, exciting new discoveries of inscriptions and archaeological remains on the Arabian Peninsula have led to a re-evaluation of the peoples on the Arabian frontier, which through their extensive contacts with Rome and Persia are now seen as dynamic participants in the Late Antique world. The present volume contributes to this recent trend by focusing on the contrast between the 'outside' sources on the peoples of the frontier - the Roman view - and the 'inside' sources, that is, the precious material produced by the Arabs themselves, and by approaching these sources within an anthropological framework of how peripheral peoples face larger powers. For the first time, the situation on the Arabian frontier is also compared with that on the southern Egyptian frontier, where similar sources have been found of peoples such as the Blemmyes and Noubades. Thus, the volume offers a richly-documented examination of the frontier interactions in these two vibrant and critically-important areas of the Late Antique East. The book is of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, Egyptologists, Arabists, epigraphists and papyrologists and, in general, to all scholars working in the period of Late Antiquity.

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‘Cultural Interactions during the Zhou Period (c. 1000-350 BC): A study of networks from the Suizao corridor’ examines cultural interactions during the Zhou period of China (c. 1000- 350 BCE) between the Suizao corridor (near the present-day Yangtze River region) and its contemporaries within or outside the Zhou realm. It concentrates mainly, but not exclusively, on bronze ritual vessels from the Suizao corridor, and discusses the underlying social and political relations between the dominant cultures and the regional ones in this particular area (the Zeng state for example), which are central to understanding the ways in which the dominant cultures joined their disparate territories into a whole. Newly excavated archaeological evidence show that there were at least three periods when people in the corridor learned about the current traditions employed elsewhere, which are: 1) Yejiashan period (from the 11th to the 10th century BCE); 2) post-Ritual Reform period (from the mid-9th to the mid-7th century BCE); and 3) Marquis Yi’s period (from the mid- 6th to the mid-4th century BCE). In these periods, local people were involved in networks of enormous and constantly changing complexity, in which people, objects, practices, and ideas were mixed together through inter-regional contacts. The choices of local people in adopting foreign materials and ideas from either the dominant cultures or other places depended heavily on the subjective view of their social identity, which can be constructed, maintained, or transited to adapt to different social and political environments.

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Large-scale economic change such as the rise of coinage occurred during the Persian-dominated centuries (6th -4th centuries BCE) in the Eastern Mediterranean and ancient Near East. How do the biblical texts of the time respond to such developments?In this study, Peter Altmann lays out foundational economic conceptions from the ancient Near East and earlier biblical traditions in order to show how Persian-period biblical texts build on these traditions to address the challenges of their day. Economic issues are central to the way that Ezra and Nehemiah approach the topics of temple building and of Judean self-understanding. Economic terminology and considerations also appear in Second Isaiah and the "Holiness Code." Following significant interaction with the material culture and extra-biblical texts, the author devotes special attention to the ascendancy of economics and its theological and identity implications as structuring metaphors for divine action and human community in the Persian period.

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This volume presents the proceedings of the 28th Conference of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants that took place in Palermo, Italy. The articles in this volume are grouped in thematic sections, such as Islam and Religion, History, Literature, Travels, Language and Linguistics, Art and Inscriptions, Law, Philosophy and Sciences. The variety of approaches to the sources and methods employed shows the width of European research on the Arab-Islamic culture. This volume provides an easy access to the newest European scholarship on the Middle East.

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Essential Japanese Kanji, Volume 2 is an easy approach to learning the most basic kanji encountered in everyday situations in Japan.This new edition has been repackaged in a more compact, value-for-money size while losing none of the content that has made it a long-selling favorite. Key features of Essential Japanese Kanji include: Introductory quizzes to introduce everyday situations in which the Kanji are used A vocabulary section to help you understand the readings and meanings of each Kanji New character charts presenting all the Kanji clearly and systematically Definitions, readings, stroke orders and compounds for each character Practice sections help you to improve your skills Advanced Placement Exam practice questions follow the format of the College Board exam Everyday tasks like finding a street address or buying a train ticket in Japan require a basic working knowledge of kanji—the Japanese system of writing based on Chinese characters. Essential Japanese Kanji teaches you the kanji you'll actually need in everyday situations in lessons prepared by teachers from the prestigious University of Tokyo.

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In this book Dr Hardtmuth chronicles the takeover of the medical field by private companies and corporations over the past decades, bringing the profit motive and conflicts of interest into health care to such an extent that there is a growing alienation of the helping professions from their own core identity. Human care, attention and appropriate help are increasingly hindered by the specifications and supposed constraints of economic logic and rationality…. The one-sided profit orientation has not only brought corruption into the health field; Hardtmuth further illustrates how income inequalities and inappropriately applied economic rationality are correlated with illnesses in people as well as ‘illnesses’ in wider society and the environment. Independent thinking, courage and reflection are urgently needed on the core value of a civil society based on mutual support…. In the Afterword, Dr House describes how a separation of economic, political and cultural/spiritual life (which includes health-care) is urgently needed and how a number of initiatives have recently been started which point in this direction.

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A guide for age appropriate use of digital media by children and adolescents for the support of parents, schools and other people affected, with particular attention to the developmental phases of childhood.

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The 18th International Aegean Conference on the subject of Zoia (literally ‘creatures endowed with an anima or life force’) was conceived and organized by Robert Laffineur and Tom Palaima, director of the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP) in the Department of Classics at The University of Texas at Austin, marking 30 years of their collaboration on Aegaeum volumes and conferences. In the event, Covid-19 forced the cancellation of the conference proper. This volume, however, testifies to the dedication of Aegeanist scholars worldwide to accomplish the scholarly objectives of the proposed conference: to examine, from a wide range of specialist research perspectives, how the human societies that developed in the Aegean area in the Middle and Late Bronze Age and the human beings within them interacted with wild, domesticated and semi-domesticated animals of the sea, sky and land socio-politically, economically, religiously, ideologically, imaginatively and artistically. Diamantis Panagiotopoulos stresses in his keynote paper that the 28 papers in Zoia reflect “the dynamic development of Human-Animal Studies” in the last two decades. Papers are grouped under five main topics: identification of the animal environment; human uses of domesticated and wild animals, material economy, diet and society; hybrid and fantastic creatures in animal iconography (seals, frescoes and other forms of representation); animals in beliefs and religion (their contemporary symbolic uses and later uses as relics or heirlooms); and animals in texts (Indo-European and non-Indo-European; Cretan Pictographic, Linear A, Linear B and later Homeric and historical Greek). The results are comprehensive, eclectic, scientifically informative and intellectually provocative. They help us see protohistoric Aegean cultures as the non-human animals inextricably linked to them saw them.

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In Corona and the Human Heart, Dr Gloeckler gives new inspiring perspectives on the significant role of the human heart in the development of the immune system, from early embryological growth through to adulthood, and the importance this understanding has for the Covid crisis. The heart is intrinsically involved in the interplay between inner and outer, the dynamic boundary between self and the environment. At the same time it is the centre and life-blood of the human organism, just as the sun is for the living earth. In exploring the wide fields of the heart's functions, Dr Gloeckler sheds light on how immunity is integrally connected with the heart and the inner sense of self. If we disempower the individual through anxieties and fears, or through dependence on outer authority, we reduce the confidence and strength of self; this in turn leads to a significantly reduced ability of the immune system to fend itself against outer influences, such as viruses and other pathogenetic influences. The author leads us on a path showing how by strengthening our inner spiritual life - our inner sun - we will be strengthening our health and immunity, as well as illuminating riddles of conscience and common sense..... "When people follow their conscience and have the courage to speak the truth, even when it is unpopular, without the fear of stigmatisation or exclusion, not only is the immune system strengthened but also people's trust in the future." M. Gloeckler, MD..... "This timely book represents a breakthrough in phenomenological research that will provide far-reaching insights not only to those who are prompted by the current pandemic to ask deeper questions related to health and medical freedom, but also to all open-minded researchers in pursuit of bridging the mind-body divide." B. Furst, MD

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"The picture we have of viruses and their significance for human beings and nature has fundamentally changed in the last two decades but with hardly any of this more widely known ... Viruses are the oldest, the most common and the most broadly distributed organic structures that evolution has ever created. Viruses basically are the most ancient building blocks of life; without this knowledge we will not be able to understand their role and the part they play in the course of illness." T. Hardtmuth....... Dr Thomas Hardtmuth tackles the many issues of the Covid-19 Corona pandemic. He proceeds from the premise that we first need a thorough understanding of the significance of viruses not just as a cause of illnesses but as a medium, under the right conditions, for building and maintaining health, as a carrier and changer of genetic information in the service of evolution. Still prevalent is the view that all viruses are enemies to be fought, consigning ourselves as in this epidemic to battleground stations, with all that that entails. Governments have described it as a war..... The newest research and understanding, though, is leading to very different conclusions. The prevalent view of a virus attacking us and making us ill, laying the blame fully on the virus, is outdated. Its effect depends on the situation and most importantly the 'host', ie the person - it is not a simple question of cause and effect - or dots on a computer chart touching each other and 'causing infection', as computer modelling tends to be done..... This book delves in more detail into related subjects, in an easily readable language. These themes include the PCR tests and the so-called Ct (or amplification) values; the psychology of fear and power; the inner-outer relationship between human health and environmental health; and the effects of fear as well as other factors on the immune system. In addition, he introduces the subject of alternative therapies and the controversial theme of benefits and risks of vaccination, in general and with regard to the current Covid vaccines. On the latter he details in comprehensible form the processes both by which the different types of vaccines have been produced as well as the different mechanisms by which they affect human cells and immune systems. He goes on to consider the testing processes in production which were significantly shortened for Covid vaccines, the potential risks, and the immunological responses in the organism through vaccines in comparison to responses arising naturally through actual infections - how they are not the same. This leads into a comprehensive survey of the functioning of the human immune system..... In all the sections, the effort is made to explore the issues from a broad, open-minded and holistic perspective, showing how this approach has an important significance also for the details of the Covid pandemic and the various measures being taken. It is written in an easily readable language..... The emphasis: with a comprehensive knowledge incorporating unbiased views of health and human illness, without fears or political pressures, we will be in a better position for discussion on policies as well as for responsible individual choices.

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Two sisters, closely connected, both active on the spiritual path, both with the ability to translate the spiritual world into words... and then one of them dies.... Ten years later they explore a new connection, and through the conversation that follows we gain new visions into what it means to be human. The insights into the afterlife show us how helpful it is when we finally include this part of the soul's path in our view of life. Departed souls are eager to work more closely with incarnated human beings on present and future challenges, with the interactions bringing potential for deep healing and fertilisation - in both directions.... The themes the two sisters cover in their conversations are direct, detailed and breathtakingly lively and highly topical. They include the increasing difficulties souls encounter in crossing the threshold as influenced by our life decisions on earth, from our materialistic orientations, suicides, to various medications - including the serious and disturbing soul effects coming from the new mRNA vaccines through their ability to penetrate a 'divine script' of our body - and what is needed for healing.... The insights Ajra offers on the deep significance and potential of love as a source of strength and growth for our earth incarnations is greatly inspiring, as well as her descriptions of the earth's own potential for development as a spiritually radiating living being which we can learn to interact with.

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With the latest research in immunology, Thomas Hardtmuth's exposition challenges the prevalent medical thinking on what is really needed for children's healthy development into adulthood. From research on the gut-brain axis and the microbiome, to studies on the role our individuality and emotions play in their interaction with - and as part of - the immune system, the insights described in this book are bound to turn many concepts of health upside down. It is essential knowledge for all fields of health, education and parenting. "Extremely informative, clear and easily understandable, Thomas Hardtmuth presents a must-read for all those who deal with children and adolescents and are interested in the development of a healthy, strong immune system... With the latest scientific findings, he takes us on an exciting journey and shows how complex but also how multi-layered and differentiated the human immune system works - and has to learn to work in the first place!... By the end of the reading one not only feels well informed: those who read the book also feel deeply touched, inwardly refreshed and enriched by new aha-experiences - and motivated to put this knowledge into practice." Michaela Gloeckler, MD

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