The Greek economic crisis has imperilled the stability of the eurozone, generating much global anxiety. Policymakers, analysts, and the media have daily debated the course of the Greek economy, prescribing ways to move forward. This collection of essays progressively moves from an analysis of the causes of the crisis and the policy responses so far to a debate on some of the countryʼs advantages and capabilities that should underpin its new development model and propel the return to growth. The book analytically chooses to view the glass as half-full and seeks to provide motivation and inspiration for change by indicating some of the economic sectors where Greece maintains a comparative advantage. Therefore, it challenges the emerging picture of Greece as a country doomed to failure, where everything falls apart.

Which dimensions of the religious experience of the ancient Greeks become tangible only if we foreground its local horizons? This book explores the manifold ways in which Greek religious beliefs and practices are encoded in and communicate with various local environments. Its individual chapters explore 'the local' in its different forms and formulations. Besides the polis perspective, they include numerous other places and locations above and below the polis-level as well as those fully or largely independent of the city-state. Overall, the local emerges as a relational concept that changes together with our understanding of the general or universal forces as they shape ancient Greek religion. The unity and diversity of ancient Greek religion becomes tangible in the manifold ways in which localizing and generalizing forces interact with each other at different times and in different places across the ancient Greek world.

This collection of 19 papers celebrates the coming of age of the field of politeness studies, now in its 30th year. It begins with an investigation of the meaning of politeness, especially linguistic politeness, and presents a short history of the field of linguistic politeness studies, showing how such studies go beyond the boundaries of conventional linguistic work, incorporating, as they do, non-language insights. The emphasis of the volume is on non-Western languages and the ways linguistic politeness is achieved with them. Many, if not most, studies have focused on Western languages, but the languages highlighted here show new and different aspects of the phenomena.The purpose of linguistic politeness is to aid in successful communication throughout the world, and this volume offers a balance of geographical distribution not found elsewhere, including Japanese, Thai, and Chinese, as well as Greek, Swedish and Spanish. It covers such theoretical topics as face, wakimae, social levels, gender-related differences in language usage, directness and indirectness, and intercultural perspectives.

The first part of the MIE 2008 conference theme - eHealth Beyond the Horizon - highlights the expectations for the future of ehealth and raises the question: What sort of developments in ehealth services can we imagine emerging above the horizon in the years to come? EHealth Beyond the Horizon contains a good number of high-quality papers giving different perspectives of this future, some of them already available today in picot scale, some of them outlined in visions. The second part of the theme - Get IT There - has triggered a large number of papers describing how to create, evaluate, adjust and deliver products and deploy services in healthcare organizations for the necessary information technology as a basis for the ehealth applications that are essential in order to respond to the challenges of the health systems. The papers in the proceedings are grouped by themes according to the submission categories and the supplied keywords. As the last theme, three doctoral students from different areas of medical informatics were selected to present and discuss their research under the guidance of a panel of distinguished research faculties.

A neurologist and Zen practitioner clarifies the benefits of meditative training, drawing on classical Buddhist literature and modern brain research. In Zen-Brain Horizons, James Austin draws on his decades of experience as a neurologist and Zen practitioner to clarify the benefits of meditative training. Austin integrates classical Buddhist literature with modern brain research, exploring the horizons of a living, neural Zen. When viewed in the light of today, the timeless wisdom of some Zen masters seems almost to have anticipated recent research in the neurosciences. The keen attentiveness and awareness that we cultivate during meditative practices becomes the leading edge of our subsequent mental processing. Austin explains how our covert, involuntary functions can make crucial contributions to the subtle ways we learn, intuit, and engage in creative activities. He demonstrates why living Zen means much more than sitting quietly indoors on a cushion, and provides simplified advice that helps guide readers to the most important points.