Conferences Books

This book is a powerful summary of where relativity and gravitational theory were at the end of 1994. From Don Page's succint look at black holes and information to John Moffat's collaborator D.C. Tatarski's defence of the consistency of NGT these works make for a wide and rich variety and consideration of Gen. Rel. and Gravity. Not for the faint-hearted or those looking for the most up-to-the minute results, the book never-the-less represents a breadth of scholarship and - especially in conjuction with the full set of reference's given for each article (Dr. Page's has 291 references alone) - an excellent place to jump in and begin deeper study of this fascinating field. Sorry, I'm not giving up my copy :-) (Note: This is NOT a book for the layman unless they have mastered advanced math and physics concepts already :-) )

Reviewed by Linda Benninghoff for Reader Views (4/07)

This compilation of 10 papers deals with people's reactions to a wide variety of disasters, including not only terror and Hurricane Katrina, but child abuse and the trauma suffered by families of service members.

In the 7th paper, "The Dissociation of Abigail," Abigail, a victim of child abuse, is "confronted with aspects of human capacity for malevolent behavior greater than the ability of the mind to comprehend." Perhaps this definition gets at the true nature of terror also. The author speaks of Abigail experiencing cognitive dissonance as opposed to consonance.

Cognitive dissonance is also experienced by the personnel at Abu Ghraib prison. In his essay, "Why Good People Go Bad, A Case Study of the Abu Ghraib Prison Abuse Courts Martial," Alan Hensley discusses the horror of living in Iraq where people are killed on a daily basis and compares the Stanford Prison experiment, where guards began similarly abusing prisoners because of poor conditions there.

These poor prison conditions, including all-female guards being given responsibility for a predominantly male prison population--something intolerable in Arab culture--contributed to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A situation of cognitive dissonance is created--where the individual cannot comprehend his world and is in disharmony with it.

In "Culture and Ethics in the Eye of the Storm: Engaging Katrina Survivors in Pennsylvania," by Kenneth Glass and Tasha Graves, the authors discuss how the hurricane primarily impacted poor blacks. The author writes: "In my inner psychic world there is the reality that as successful black woman I am guilty of having basked in my feeling of being separate from such uneducated poverty-stricken individuals that happen to share the same race as I." Yet she becomes incensed at the care given the victims of the hurricane and comes to realize her own vulnerability.

Another essay, "Pandemics and Biological/Chemical Terrorism Attacks: A New Role for Disaster Mental Health," by Thom Curtis, looks into the threat of avian influenza as well as chemical attacks. It suggests that mental health professionals can take care of those afflicted with anxiety or psychological disorders because of the threat, to remove the burden from medical personnel coping with the actual outbreak of the disease or the attacks.

Taken together, the papers are fascinating. The "Proceedings of the 5th Rocky Mountain Region Disaster Mental Health Conference" provides insight into the nature of the individual's response to terror and disaster. They should be interesting reading for everyone who either indirectly or directly has been affected.

Reviewed by Paige Lovitt for Reader Views (3/08)

The 6th Annual Rocky Mountain Disaster Mental Health Conference was held in Cheyenne, Wyoming from November 8-10, 2007. The main theme was: "From Crisis to Recovery: Resilience and Strategic Planning for the Future." Presenters from the conference put their materials into articles which are in this book. This is an excellent resource for people who attended the conference because they can use this as a reference for the information presented.

The purpose of this conference is to present information, "to promote the development and application of practice, research and training in disaster mental health, critical incident stress management, traumatology, and other emergency response interventions and to promote community awareness, resilience and recovery." This information is needed by people who deal with critical incident stress management, behavioral health professionals, first responders and others who might be dealing with crisis situations.

I did not attend this conference; however, I found the information presented to be fascinating. Several important topics were discussed, in areas of critical importance to what is happening in our world today. It is imperative that people who are involved in crisis situations read this material. It is all well written and presented in a way that is easily understood and very interesting.

Some of the topics covered traumatic stress in the workplace with issues like police suicide. Others involved emergency preparedness. It is so important that people who deal with emergency and disaster situations are appropriately trained and have resources to handle the stressors of dealing with these situations. Many times, their lives have been impacted in a way in which they are unable to handle the aftermath of having dealt with horrific situations, such as having to deal with an airplane crashing. There are also discussions about the importance of having disaster readiness plans in places such as tourist vacation spots where natural disasters or terroristic acts can occur. In addition to needing to be trained in advance about how to handle these events, people also need to have an understanding of the traditions of the cultures that they might be helping.

"Proceedings of the 6th Rocky Mountain Region Disaster Mental Health Conference" is a must have for first responders and mental health professionals. Addressing the needs of people who work in these fields is critical. The better trained they are to be emotionally equipped for disasters, the better they can help others. I think that the 120 pages of information covered in this book will be some of the most important information needed by people in this field today.

These proceedings contains information about Ethylene Manufacturing. Summarizes Best Practices used by major producers around the world. Excellent resource for technological development and improving Chemical Manufacturing performance.

Henning Andersen: A Glimpse of the Homeland of the Slavs-Ecological and Cultural Change in Prehistory; Jeannine Davis-Kimball: Burial Practices Among the Iranian Sarmatians; Angelique Gulermovich Epstein: Divine Devouring-Further Notes on the Morrigan and the Valkyries; John D. Frauzel: Impersonal Absolutes in Indo-Iranian, Greek, Latin and Baltic and the Origin of the Indo-European Absolute Construction; Gayané Hagopian: The Classical Armenian Term Skndik; Yelena Izbitser: Wheeled Vehicles and the Homeland of the Indo-Europeans; Anatoly Liberman: English Girl under the Asterisked Sky of the Indo-Europeans; Dean A. Miller: Destroyer or Builder and other Bifurcations-Notes on Indo-European Sovereignty; Marianna Nikolaidou: Religious Symbols in Minoan Scripts and Iconography-Elements of Formulaic Expression; Yevgeniy Novitskiy: Semantic Analysis of the Early Metal Period Sculpture of the Northern Black Sea Region; Christopher M. Stevens: The Consonants of German and Germanic.

Theo Vennemann: Andromeda and the Apples of the Hesperides, Vycheslav Ivanov: Indo-European Expressions of Totality and the Invitation to the Feast of All the Gods, Miriam Robbins Dexter: Queen Medb, Female Autonomy in Ancient Ireland, and Irish Matrilineal Traditions, Anna M. Ranero: An Old Indo-European Motif Revisited--The Mortal Combat between Father and Son, Christopher Wilhelm: Prometheans and the Caucasus--The Origins of the Prometheus Myth, Andrew Minard: Of Horses and Humans--The Divine Twins in Celtic Mythology and Folklore, Dean Miller: The King, The Hero and the Gods--An Exploratory Note on the Functions and the Supernatural, Martin E. Huld--Albanian Evidence for the Sigmatic Aorist, Kazuhiko Yoshida: Assibilation in Hittite.

Introduction; Language Abbreviations; Stephanie Jamison: On Translating the Rig Veda-Three questions; Jorma Koivulehto: Finno-Ugric Reflexes of North-West Indo-European and Early Stages of Indo-Iranian; Olga Petrova: Grimm's Law in Optimality Theory; Joshua T. Katz: Evening Dress-The Metaphorical Background of Latin uesper and Greek ê______; Martin E. Huld: Reinventing the Wheel-the Technology of Transport and Indo-European Expansions; Kristin M. Reichardt: Curse Formulae in Hittite and Hieroglyphic Luwian; Ilya Yakubovich: Laryngeals from Velars in Hittite-A Triple-Headed Argument; David Atkins: An Alternative Principle of Succession in the Hittite Monarchy; Christopher Wilhelm: On the Possible Origins of the Philistines; Sandra Olsen: Reflections of Ritual Behavior at Botai, Kazakhstan; John Leavitt: The Cow of Plenty in Indo-Iranian and Celtic Myth; Betsy McCall: Metathesis, Deletion, Dissimilallon and Consonant Ordering in Proto-Greek; Jens Elmegård Rasmussen: The Growth of IE Ablaut-Contrastive Accent and V®ddhi; Harold Koch: Order and Disorder in the Reconstruction of the Ablaut Pattern of Athematic Verbs in Proto-Indo-Europ-ean; Carol F. Justus: The Age of Indo-European Present -R Person Endings; Alexander Nicholaev: PIE Ergativity and the Genitive in *-osyo; Anatoly Liberman: Pseudolaryngeals (Glottal Stops) and the Twilight of Distinctive Voice in Germanic; Vycheslav V. Ivanov: Early Slavic/Indo-Iranian Lexical Contacts; Index

This book is a collection of papers given at the 2003 Creation conference. One question many ask is, why do so many scientists respond to creationism (and intelligent design as well) so vehemently (and, I might add, irrationally)? This book responds to the many common, but demonstratively false, ideas and conclusions about creation research and arguments. The authors note that several reasons exist for this state of affairs. A major one is the critics have not done their homework by objectively looking at both sides The more important question is, why are so many scientists hostile to the evidence that creation requires an intelligent creator? At least three separate (though related) sources of resistance to Intelligent Design research exist. First, the vast majority of scientists work (or at least were trained) in an academic environment where naturalism (actually often atheism) is widely assumed and I.D. research threatens their worldview. Some scientists are passionate atheists and react with hostility to I.D. because they see that it opens the door to theism. Second, many scientists who are not hostile to theism are repelled by what they think I.D. is because they obtain most (or all) of their information from the popular news media (and not books such as this one) that, almost without exception, grossly misrepresents what they are doing and why. They have naïvely bought into the propaganda and equate science with anti-ID. They assume that everything that is pro-ID, is ipso facto anti-science. Finally, a surprisingly large number of practicing scientists are close-minded about new ways of looking at the world, and this includes especially to those ideas that have philosophical or religious implications. They have their prejudices like everyone else. Yet, fortunately, many supporters exist among scientists but, unfortunately, many feel that they must stay in the closet (for now at least). The authors of this work have risked their careers and have come out of the closet.

Introduction, Abbreviations, I. FORM AND MEANING IN INDO-EUROPEAN: Helmut Rix: Towards a Reconstruction of Proto-Italic: the Verbal System, Joseph F. Eska: The Distribution of the Old Irish Personal Object Affixes and Forward Reconstruction, Annamaria Bartolotta: Towards a Reconstruction of Indo-European Culture: Semantic Functions of IE *men- , Nicoletta Puddu: Reflecting on *se-/s(e)we-: From Typology to Indo-European and Back, Jens Elmegård Rasmussen: The Marker of the Animate Dual in Indo-European, Brian D. Joseph: Evidentiality in Proto-Indo-European? Building a Case, Karl Praust: A Missing Link of PIE Reconstruction: The Injunctive of *HIes- 'to be', II. STYLE, SENSE, AND SOUND: Craig Melchert: PIE "thorn" in Cuneiform Luvian?, Martin E. Huld: An Indo-European Term for 'harvested grain', Giovanna Rocca: Ideology and Lexis: Umbrian uhtur, Latin auctor, Angelo O. Mercado: A New Approach to Old Latin and Umbrian Poetic Meter, III. UNMASKING PREHISTORY: Jon Christian Billigmeier: Crete, the Dorians, and the Sea Peoples, Gregory E. Areshian: The Zoomorphic Code of the Proto-Indo-European Myth Cycle of "Birth-Death-Resurrection": A Linguistic-Archaeological Reconstruction, Karlene Jones-Bley: Basal Motifs and Indo-European Ritual, IV. MOLDING AND MODELLING THE PAST: Paul-Louis van Berg: Arts, Languages, and Reality in the Mesopotamian and Indo-European Worlds, Marc Vander Linden: The Band vs. the Cord, or Can Indo-European Reconstructed Institutions Be Tested against Archaeological Data?, Index

Theo Vennemann: Andromeda and the Apples of the Hesperides, Vycheslav Ivanov: Indo-European Expressions of Totality and the Invitation to the Feast of All the Gods, Miriam Robbins Dexter: Queen Medb, Female Autonomy in Ancient Ireland, and Irish Matrilineal Traditions, Anna M. Ranero: An Old Indo-European Motif Revisited--The Mortal Combat between Father and Son, Christopher Wilhelm: Prometheans and the Caucasus--The Origins of the Prometheus Myth, Andrew Minard: Of Horses and Humans--The Divine Twins in Celtic Mythology and Folklore, Dean Miller: The King, The Hero and the Gods--An Exploratory Note on the Functions and the Supernatural, Martin E. Huld--Albanian Evidence for the Sigmatic Aorist, Kazuhiko Yoshida: Assibilation in Hittite.