From the author of Mauve, an obsessively readable memoir that brings the mania for stamp collecting to life From the Penny Red to the Blue Mauritius, generations of collectors have been drawn to the mystique of rare stamps. Once a widespread pastime of schoolboys, philately has increasingly become the province of older men obsessed with the shrewd investment, the once-in-a-lifetime find, the one elusive beauty that will complete a collection and satisfy an unquenchable thirst. As a boy, Simon Garfield collected errors--rare pigment misprints that create ghostly absences in certain stamps. When this passion reignited in his mid-forties, it consumed him. In the span of a couple of years he amassed a collection of errors worth upwards of forty thousand pounds, pursuing not only this secret passion, but a romantic one as his marriage disintegrated. In this unique memoir, Simon Garfield twines the story of his philatelic obsession with an honest and engrossing exploration of the rarities and absences that both limit and define us.The end result is a thoughtful, funny, and enticing meditation on the impulse to possess.

Is rapid world population growth actually coming to an end? As population growth and its consequences have become front-page issues, projections of slowing growth from such institutions as the United Nations and the World Bank have been called into question. Beyond Six Billion asks what such projections really say, why they say it, whether they can be trusted, and whether they can be improved. The book includes analysis of how well past U.N. and World Bank projections have panned out, what errors have occurred, and why they have happened. Focusing on fertility as one key to accurate projections, the committee examines the transition from high, constant fertility to low fertility levels and discusses whether developing countries will eventually attain the very low levels of births now observed in the industrialized world. Other keys to accurate projections, predictions of lengthening life span and of the impact of international migration on specific countries, are also explored in detail. How good are our methods of population forecasting? How can we cope with the inevitable uncertainty? What population trends can we anticipate? Beyond Six Billion illuminates not only the forces that shape population growth but also the accuracy of the methods we use to quantify these forces and the uncertainty surrounding projections. The Committee on Population was established by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1983 to bring the knowledge and methods of the population sciences to bear on major issues of science and public policy. The committee's work includes both basic studies of fertility, health and mortality, and migration; and applied studies aimed at improving programs for the public health and welfare in the United States and in developing countries. The committee also fosters communication among researchers in different disciplines and countries and policy makers in government, international agencies, and private organizations. The work of the committee is made possible by funding from several government agencies and private foundations.

Traditional Christian Ethics features two exhaustive alphabetical lists of affirmative commandments and prohibitions from the earliest Christian ethics, as found in writers before the mass apostasy of 249-251 AD. The affirmatives, or positives, list consists of what Christians are/were commanded or encouraged to do. The other list is of negatives or prohibitions, i.e. what Christians are/were discouraged from doing, similarly arranged. The source material for the work encompasses far more than the ten-volume Ante-Nicene Fathers edited by Roberts and Donaldson. It also draws from all writings of the period: Christian, Jewish, and pagan, available in English or French translation, plus a few Latin translations. Some translations have been published only in scholarly journals, and some only in the twenty-first century. Volumes Two and Three form a single exhaustive alphabetical list of affirmative commandments or precepts, including mental attitudes, i.e. what Christian ethics commanded or encouraged according to writers on Christian ethics before 250 AD. Using earlier drafts of this set of books, Dr. Brattston's articles and booklets synthesizing early and contemporary Christianity have been published by a wide variety of denominations and ministries in every major English-speaking country. He hopes readers will use them as a starting-point for writing articles, papers, and sermons of their own.

This is the first book dedicated to Textpattern development, a popular web site framework that allows its users to build up standards-compliant professional web sites with only a basic knowledge of the underlying technology. Written by five experts, it is suitable for every level of reader from novice to expert, taking the reader from the basics of the subject such as installation, right up to advanced subjects like writing plugins. It includes case studies and reference sections. It is also open source, so free to use, and has become very popular with tens of thousands of downloads to date.

This is a book of history, ethics, and philosophy. It is a record of teachings passed down through the generations from the East and the West. It contains the fullness of the sealed covenant established between man and the laws of the universe. As we evolve as a race, we take things out of our lives because we better understand who we are and what we have achieved. The divine refers to the laws of nature and the universe that guide us in our everyday lives. The creator that guides our everyday lives is not something that we should worship or pray to out of fear or love; it is something that remains unseen and works in natural forces to explain all the events that happen on Earth. It is merely a force and it is not necessary to belong to a group to experience the light. The path to the light is straight and broad. The creator of the universe is a divine and intellectual force, by which all things came into being. The sealed covenant is a pact between all of humanity to the world around us and the universal laws that guide our everyday lives to come together and love one another and come to make the world a better place for all people. This shall usher in the evolution of religious traditions and humanity to a new age of prosperity.

Experiencing Fictional Worlds is not only the title of this book, but a challenge to reveal exactly what makes the “experience” of literature. This volume presents contributions drawing upon a range of theories and frameworks based on the text-as-world metaphor. This text-world approach is fruitfully applied to a wide variety of text types, from poetry to genre-specific prose to children’s story-books. This book investigates how fictional worlds are built and updated, how context affects the conceptualisation of text-worlds, and how emotions are elicited in these processes. The diverse analyses of this volume apply and develop approaches such as Text World Theory, reader-response studies, and pedagogical stylistics, among other broader cognitive and linguistic frameworks. Experiencing Fictional Worlds aligns with other cutting-edge research on language conceptualisation in fields including cognitive linguistics, stylistics, narratology, and literary criticism. This volume will be relevant to anyone with interests in language and literature.