When the Unacceptable Becomes the Norm is an essential guide for any person looking to place a relative in care or already in the care system. Few subjects have aroused public concern since the millennium more than care for the elderly in the UK, and in particular residential care homes for the elderly. With a rapidly aging population this is a major issue for both national and local government, as well as a personal problem for innumerable people finding themselves in this situation. The media have widely reported the shortcomings of care homes for the elderly and in particular the many cases of abuse, neglect and malpractice. By definition, such people are often frail, in poor health and are always very vulnerable. The book seeks to provide advice for the increasing number of people looking for a suitable home for their elderly loved ones, based on both long personal experience and detailed research.The advice on how to choose a care home, and then how to keep an elderly loved one safe and well there, is practical and down to earth. The author also tells the story of his own battle to protect his mother and his experience dealing with the many outside agencies concerned with care for the elderly, including their many shortcomings and what lessons he learnt along the way.

Young women throughout history have been systematically programmed into thinking they cannot achieve in male dominated careers. This mindset is embedded from an early age in the portrayal of children’s toys and children’s stories that many of us have shared over the years. Then as our young girls enter the educational system, the K-12 textbooks help to stage the platforms for societal norms in life. The goal of this book is to bring awareness of how gender bias has systematically programmed a females mind to choose their roles in life and careers. In this book, I will uncover some of the ways the American Society has systematically programmed females to think that they are less than the dominant male, share living testimonies of women who have gone against societal norms and share ways that we can do better. So, let’s take a journey, get ready to educate yourself and exercise your Power to Become and teach it to our children.

Your attitude determines your altitude. With good attitude, you are esteemed. For Christians to come to the level of holiness and greatness before God and man, they have to change their bad attitude. The way Christians live and practice their faith has to change for good so that God will be glorified. As for us, we have this crowd of witnesses around us. So then, let us rid ourselves of everything that gets in the way and of the sin that holds on us highly, and let us run with determination the race that lies before us. Let us keep our eyes fixed on Jesus Christ, on whom our faith depends from the beginning to the end.

The Central Asian Republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan won their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Now they are emerging from the shadow of dominance and are subjects of intense interest from the West. The modern culture and customs of the various peoples in these geopolitical hotspots, straddling the far reaches of Europe into Asia, are revealed to a general audience for the first time. This will be the must-have volume for a broad, authoritative overview of these traditional civilizations as they cope with globalization.

"It is not the consciousness of men that defines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness." Karl Marx In recent years, several researchers have argued that the design of multi-agent sys tems (MAS) in complex, open environments can benefit from social abstractions in order to cope with problems in coordination, cooperation and trust among agents, problems which are also present in human societies. The agent-mediated electronic institutions (e-institutions for short) is a new and promising field which focuses in the concepts of norms and institutions in order to pro vide normative frameworks to restrict or guide the behaviour of (software) agents. The main idea is that the interactions among a group of (software) agents are ruled by a set of explicit norms expressed in a computational language representation that agents can interpret. Such norms should not be considered as a negative constraining factor but as an aid that guides the agents' choices and reduces the complexity ofthe environment making the behaviour of other agents more predictable.

For roughly the first decade after the demise of the GDR, professional and popular interpretations of East German history concentrated primarily on forms of power and repression, as well as on dissent and resistance to communist rule. Socio-cultural approaches have increasingly shown that a single-minded emphasis on repression and coercion fails to address a number of important historical issues, including those related to the subjective experiences of those who lived under communist regimes. With that in mind, the essays in this volume explore significant physical and psychological aspects of life in the GDR, such as health and diet, leisure and dining, memories of the Nazi past, as well as identity, sports, and experiences of everyday humiliation. Situating the GDR within a broader historical context, they open up new ways of interpreting life behind the Iron Curtain – while providing a devastating critique of misleading mainstream scholarship, which continues to portray the GDR in the restrictive terms of totalitarian theory.

This encyclopedia is divided into three sections: individual bilingualism; bilingualism in society and bilingual education. It includes many pictures, graphs, maps and diagrams. The book concludes with a comprehensive bibliography on bilingualism.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in an agricultural cooperative running a training programme for aspiring farmers, this book explores the possibilities of agrarian and land-based modes of livelihood in contemporary Japan. The book is organised around the four key hurdles faced by new agricultural entrants: the acquisition of land and housing, farming know-how, capital, and market outlets. New farmers look with fresh eyes at agricultural issues, and their experiences provide a vantage point over the institutions shaping rural and agricultural life. The book documents the mounting problem of land and house abandonment in regional Japan, the role of agriculture in the revitalisation of rural communities, and the transformation of Japan’s agrifood system. To avoid reinforcing Japan’s exceptionalism, agricultural policy, farming practices, and fresh food distribution are analysed from a comparative perspective, shedding new light on processes of agrarian change in developed market economies. Providing an in-depth insight into pro-rural migration in the face of Japan’s shrinking regions and its declining agricultural sector, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Japanese society, agrarian policy, and rural sociology.

The Artful Species explores the idea that our aesthetic responses and art behaviors are connected to our evolved human nature. Our humanoid forerunners displayed aesthetic sensibilities hundreds of thousands of years ago and the art standing of prehistoric cave paintings is virtually uncontested. In Part One, Stephen Davies analyses the key concepts of the aesthetic, art, and evolution, and explores how they might be related. He considers a range of issues, including whether animals have aesthetic tastes and whether art is not only universal but cross-culturally comprehensible. Part Two examines the many aesthetic interests humans take in animals and how these reflect our biological interests, and the idea that our environmental and landscape preferences are rooted in the experiences of our distant ancestors. In considering the controversial subject of human beauty, evolutionary psychologists have traditionally focused on female physical attractiveness in the context of mate selection, but Davies presents a broader view which decouples human beauty from mate choice and explains why it goes more with social performance and self-presentation. Part Three asks if the arts, together or singly, are biological adaptations, incidental byproducts of nonart adaptations, or so removed from biology that they rate as purely cultural technologies. Davies does not conclusively support any one of the many positions considered here, but argues that there are grounds, nevertheless, for seeing art as part of human nature. Art serves as a powerful and complex signal of human fitness, and so cannot be incidental to biology. Indeed, aesthetic responses and art behaviors are the touchstones of our humanity.

Now available in paper for the first time, this volume brings together leading contributors to provide a comprehensive review of theory, research, and practice in child and adolescent personality assessment. Organized for easy reference, the book is divided into four parts. Part I summarizes basic theories, issues, and concepts, setting forth a framework for assessment as a hypothesis- generating, problem-solving process. Part II describes and evaluates a wide range of relevant approaches, tests, and techniques, marshaling the available data and reviewing administration procedures, scoring, and interpretation. In Part III, the process by which personality assessment is translated into effective intervention strategies and programs for children is examined in depth. A summary of major perspectives and recommended practices is presented in Part IV, which also considers future needs and directions for the field.