Echoes of Gaia In Echoes of Gaia, a mesmerizing tale of nature's resurgence unfolds in a world where concrete jungles have given way to verdant, sentient forests. Zara, a young botanist with an extraordinary gift for plant communication, embarks on a captivating journey through this transformed landscape. As she traverses sprawling urban ecosystems, she uncovers an ancient ecological consciousness that has awakened to restore the planet's delicate balance. Zara's quest is not just one of discovery, but of confrontation. She encounters the vestiges of a once-dominant technological society now struggling to find its place in a world reclaimed by nature. Along the way, she forms bonds with a diverse cast of characters, each embodying different facets of the newfound symbiosis between humanity and the natural world. As Zara delves deeper into the mysteries of Gaia's awakening, she grapples with complex ethical dilemmas that challenge her understanding of progress and harmony, all while navigating the delicate balance between human survival and environmental restoration.
Long ago, the Gods came back to earth and banished all science from Earth. When Prome finds an amulet in the ruins of an ancient city, he doesn't expect it to take him and his friend Malia on a quest to discover the long forgotten secret of the Technologists, to meet someone who awakens feelings of love in him, nor to defy the Gods themselves.
Nightmares, especially those caused by trauma, not only disrupt your sleep but can leave you exhausted and on edge, haunting your daylight hours. With in-depth information on the nature of nightmares, international speaker, author, and psychotherapist Linda Yael Schiller shows you how to turn anxiety-filled or heart-pounding dreams into resources for spiritual growth. Her four decades of experience in both dreamwork and trauma treatment provide the reader with guidelines for turning PTSDreams into PTSG: Post Trauma Spiritual Growth. Therapists, counselors, medical professionals, and healers of all stripes, as well as the general public, are often woefully unprepared to deal with their own or their clients' nightmares. Dreamwork and connecting the dots between dreams, nightmares, and a trauma history simply isn't taught in most professional graduate schools. We do ourselves and clients a disservice if we don't have the tools and methods to bring relief from this suffering. PTSDreams offers these tools, informed by Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) methods, to provide safe, non-triggering work and a Jungian active imagination approach that allows us to re-enter these dreams safely. This way, we can rework the dreams, resource the dreamer, and bring healing to both the nightmare and the root cause of the trauma. When unaddressed, these dark dreams can follow us around in other forms, sneaking in through the cracks and fissures of our consciousness until they are finally faced, comforted, and healed. As Jungian analyst Dr. Yorum Kaufman taught, an inability to find a place for these memories keeps us shackled to a constrained, Sisyphean world whereby our movement into the future is thwarted by these "forgotten" memories that keep pushing us back down the hill. While retrieving these memories is a psychological issue, learning to live with what we remember is a spiritual process. Who can benefit from addressing their nightmares? Victims of violence, refugees, veterans, childhood abuse survivors, victims of bullying and gender or racial violence, anyone with shattered or disrupted lives. Trauma can be personal, familial, ancestral, global, and environmental. Both current and historical trauma and stress can benefit from this healing work. Linda's technique is also being used internationally to help war trauma survivors. Armed with effective techniques and Linda's warm compassionate voice, you can learn to safely heal post-traumatic nightmares and their root causes. She teaches the Guided Active Imagination Approach (GAIA), a method she developed based on best-practice trauma treatment and Jungian active imagination principles. Through compelling case descriptions and thoughtful exercises, you will learn how to apply a multiplicity of integrated and embodied dreamwork techniques. Linda also provides somatic, narrative, and psycho-spiritual approaches. Combining neuroscience, healing, mysticism, and creativity, PTSDreams helps you transform nightmares into a new story: one of hope, healing, and life-affirming images.
As information technologies become increasingly distributed and accessible to larger number of people and as commercial and government organizations are challenged to scale their applications and services to larger market shares, while reducing costs, there is demand for software methodologies and appli- tions to provide the following features: Richer application end-to-end functionality; Reduction of human involvement in the design and deployment of the software; Flexibility of software behaviour; and Reuse and composition of existing software applications and systems in novel or adaptive ways. When designing new distributed software systems, the above broad requi- ments and their translation into implementations are typically addressed by partial complementarities and overlapping technologies and this situation gives rise to significant software engineering challenges. Some of the challenges that may arise are: determining the components that the distributed applications should contain, organizing the application components, and determining the assumptions that one needs to make in order to implement distributed scalable and flexible applications, etc.
"The Art of Agent-Oriented Modeling is an introduction to agent-oriented software development for students and for software developers who are interested in learning about new software engineering techniques."--Foreword.
Computer programs and processes that take into account the goals and needs of the user meet with the greatest success, so it behooves software engineers to consider the human element inherent in every line of code they write. Human Factors in Software Development and Design brings together high quality research on the influence and impact of ordinary people on the software industry. With the goal of improving the quality and usability of computer technologies, this premier reference is intended for students and practitioners of software engineering as well as researchers, educators, and interested laymen.
Software architectures that contain many dynamically interacting components, each with its own thread of control, engaging in complex coordination protocols, are difficult to correctly and efficiently engineer. Agent-oriented modelling techniques are important for the design and development of such applications. This book provides a diverse and interesting overview of the work that is currently being undertaken by a growing number of researchers in the area of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2007, held in Honolulu, Hawaii in May 2007 as part of AAMAS 2007. The 16 revised full papers were carefully selected from numerous submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The volume contains the papers presented at the workshop, together with papers resulting from discussions on tools and platforms. The papers have been organized into four sections on: methodology and processes, interacting heterogeneous agents, system development issues, and tools and case studies.
Professionals in the interdisciplinary field of computer science focus on the design, operation, and maintenance of computational systems and software. Methodologies and tools of engineering are utilized alongside computer applications to develop efficient and precise information databases. Computer Systems and Software Engineering: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a comprehensive reference source for the latest scholarly material on trends, techniques, and uses of various technology applications and examines the benefits and challenges of these computational developments. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as utility computing, computer security, and information systems applications, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, students, web designers, software developers, and practitioners interested in computer systems and software engineering.
th CAiSE 2004 was the 16 in the series of International Conferences on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. In the year 2004 the conference was hosted by the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Riga Technical University, Latvia. Since the late 1980s, the CAiSE conferences have provided a forum for the presentation and exchange of research results and practical experiences within the ?eld of Information Systems Engineering. The conference theme of CAiSE 2004 was Knowledge and Model Driven Information Systems Engineering for Networked Organizations. Modern businesses and IT systems are facing an ever more complex en- ronment characterized by openness, variety, and change. Organizations are - coming less self-su?cient and increasingly dependent on business partners and other actors. These trends call for openness of business as well as IT systems, i.e. the ability to connect and interoperate with other systems. Furthermore, organizations are experiencing ever more variety in their business, in all c- ceivable dimensions. The di?erent competencies required by the workforce are multiplying. In the same way, the variety in technology is overwhelming with a multitude of languages, platforms, devices, standards, and products. Moreover, organizations need to manage an environment that is constantly changing and where lead times, product life cycles, and partner relationships are shortening. ThedemandofhavingtoconstantlyadaptITtochangingtechnologiesandbu- ness practices has resulted in the birth of new ideas which may have a profound impact on the information systems engineering practices in future years, such as autonomic computing, component and services marketplaces and dynamically generated software.
We must always remember how even small steps lead us closer to the divine in Nature and to the deep interconnectedness that is magical Deep Ecology." A Greenpeace activist, Wiccan High Priestess, and proud Soccer Mom, Francesca Howell has been involved in magical traditions and wildlife preservation since childhood. In this one-of-a-kind book, she shares her everyday suggestions for spiritual renewal through connecting with nature.
