No church founder or planter likely intends to start a church with the stated goal of allowing abuse or abusing those within it. Yet sadly and too often, even in the best of churches abuse does occur. The bitter fruit of abuse does not appear from nowhere. Its origins, the soil in which it grows, and the structures that support it need be understood if we are to eradicate this fruit from within our churches and Christian organizations. Bitter Fruit: Dysfunction and Abuse in the Local Churc...

"As I wrote these pages, I felt like I peeled away my past and present layer by layer, freeing the energy for the future that I always wanted to live. I inhaled the freedom and exhaled the attachments to my wounds. There are no scars left" — Auzzy The true story of how a broke, freshly diagnosed woman from the Great Caucasus Mountains found herself. My interest in Magick started when I was young. I had always loved playing the witch. I would always cast my innocent little spells and patien...

Data is a valuable corporate asset and its effective management is vital to an organisation’s success and survival. With this book you will learn to master the key principles of data management and use them to implement best practices in your organization.This professional guide covers all the key areas of data management, including database development and corporate data modelling. It is business-focused, providing the knowledge and techniques required to successf...

It is almost universally accepted that requirements documents for new or enhanced IT systems by business analysts should include a ‘data model’ to represent the information that has to be handled by the system. Starting from first principles, this book will help business analysts to develop the skills required to construct data models through comprehensive coverage of entity relationship and class modelling, in line with, and beyond, the BCS Data Analysis syllabus.

Powerful, low-cost database development tools make it possible for virtually anybody to create their own database—and this hands-on guide makes it fun and easyDatabases permeate every nook and cranny of our highly connected, information-intensive world, from ATMs to personal finance, online shopping, and networked information management. Databases have become so integral to the business environment that, nowadays, it's next to impossible to stay competitive without...

Want to tap the tremendous amount of valuable social data in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+? This refreshed edition helps you discover who’s making connections with social media, what they’re talking about, and where they’re located. You’ll learn how to combine social web data, analysis techniques, and visualization to find what you’ve been looking for in the social haystack—as well as useful information you didn’t know existed.Each standalone chapter introduces technique...

"This book manages to convey the practical use of UML 2 in clear and understandable terms with many examples and guidelines. Even for people not working with the Unified Process, the book is still of great use. UML 2 and the Unified Process, Second Edition is a must-read for every UML 2 beginner and a helpful guide and reference for the experienced practitioner."--Roland Leibundgut, Technical Director, Zuehlke Engineering Ltd."This book is a good s...

Data is a valuable corporate asset and its effective management can be vital to an organisation’s success. This professional guide covers all the key areas of data management, including database development and corporate data modelling. It is business-focused, providing the knowledge and techniques required to successfully implement the data management function. This new edition covers web technology and its relation to databases and includes material on the management of master data.

Ten years ago, groupware bundled with email and calendar applications helped track the flow of work from person to person within an organization. Workflow in today's enterprise means more monitoring and orchestrating massive systems. A new technology called Business Process Management, or BPM, helps software architects and developers design, code, run, administer, and monitor complex network-based business processesBPM replaces those sketchy flowchart diagrams that business analyst...

Essential Skills--Made Easy!Learn how to create data models that allow complex data to be analyzed, manipulated, extracted, and reported upon accurately. Data Modeling: A Beginner's Guide teaches you techniques for gathering business requirements and using them to produce conceptual, logical, and physical database designs. You'll get details on Unified Modeling Language (UML), normalization, incorporating business rules, handling temporal data, and analytical database de...

Create your own natural language training corpus for machine learning. Whether you’re working with English, Chinese, or any other natural language, this hands-on book guides you through a proven annotation development cycle—the process of adding metadata to your training corpus to help ML algorithms work more efficiently. You don’t need any programming or linguistics experience to get started.Using detailed examples at every step, you’ll learn how the MATTER Annotation Developm...

This book discusses how model-based approaches can improve the daily practice of software professionals. This is known as Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) or, simply, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE).MDSE practices have proved to increase efficiency and effectiveness in software development, as demonstrated by various quantitative and qualitative studies. MDSE adoption in the software industry is foreseen to grow exponentially in the near future, e.g., due to the convergence ...