The quest for sustainable development is for the individual person largely conditioned by personal endowments and natural and social context. The mass of individual behaviours determines how the collective future unfolds, which in turn affects contexts. How such futures might unfold can be explored in a mix of qualitative story-telling and quantitative modelling, also known as scenarios. Many (world) futures scenarios have been constructed since one of the first ones, The Limits to Growth report (1971), was published. Their names reflect the underlying worldviews. The worldview framework can explicitly be used to link dominant values and beliefs to probable events and pathways, with the use of computer models. It should start with the narrative of Modernity and an investigation of counternarratives. It gives an impression of what humanity can expect in the coming century, and the potential overshoot-and-collapse risks. It can shape the agenda of sustainability science. In the end, however, it is primarily for the individual human being to (re)orient towards a more sustainable way of life and a corresponding state of consciousness and maturity.

In 1782, Rüdiger published a book titled Von der Sprache und Herkunft der Zigeuner aus Indien (On the Indic Language and Origin of the Gypsies). In that book, Rüdiger postulated an Indian origin of the Romani language and its speakers and its connection to languages of the Indian subcontinent such as Hindi and Bengali. He used a surprisingly modern methodology, collecting his Romani data directly from a Romani speaker (which he admitted to finding “tiresome and boring”) and his Hindi data from a manual written by a missionary. He examined the vocabularies of Romani and Hindi, including numerals like ekh/ek ‘one’, duj/do ‘two’, trin/tīn ‘three’, and so on (the first numeral in each pair listed here is from Romani and the second is from Hindi). Noticing similarities across numerous vocabulary items, Rüdiger surmised that these similarities must derive from the common origin of the two languages. But Rüdiger did not limit himself to examining the vocabulary of Romani and other languages we now call Indo‑Aryan. He wrote: “As regards the grammatical part of the language the correspondence is no less conspicuous, which is an even more important proof of the close relation between the languages” (Rüdiger [1782] 1990: 7).

Chapter 10 covers INFERENCES INVOLVING THE MEAN OF A SINGLE POPULATION WHEN σ IS KNOWN and includes the following specific topics, among others: Estimating the Population Mean, μ, Interval Estimation, Confidence Intervals, Hypothesis Testing and Interval Estimation, Effect Size,Type II Error, and Power.

Chapter 6 covers SIMPLE LINEAR REGRESSION and includes the following specific topics, among others: the “best-fitting” line, accuracy of prediction, standardized regressin, R as a measure of overal fit and the importance of the scatterplot..

Chapter 4 covers the re-expression/trannsformatin of variables and includes the following specific topics, among others: Linear and Nonlinear Transformations, Standard Scores, z-Scores,Recoding Variables, Combining Variables, Data Management Fundamentals, and the importance of the .do-File.

If you have gone through some or all of the preceding chapters, you may be left with the feeling of what to do, who to be? Hopefully, the preceding texts also touch the heart, because, in Aristotle’s words, ‘educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all’.

In this chapter, we consider two large language families, Uralic and Turkic, as well as several smaller language families and isolates. Section 4.1 examines the Uralic language family. The realm of Uralic languages stretches from northern Scandinavia in the northwest and the Great Hungarian plain in the southwest to east of the Ural Mountains, the mountain chain that separates Europe and Asia. In section 4.2 we examine Turkic languages and in section 4.3 languages of Siberia that do not belong to the Turkic or Uralic family. This vast region – larger than any independent country – is home to dozens of indigenous languages still spoken today. Finally, section 4.4 introduces an unusual linguistic phenomenon that is found in Turkish and several of the Siberian languages (as well as some other languages elsewhere), called grammatical evidentiality (or evidentiality, for short).

Minerals, notably metals and construction materials, have been used for millennia, but the extent and diversity has enormously increased with industrialization. They occur as deposits of chemically bonded elements, accumulated over geological time and non-renewable on a human scale. Unlike energy, materials accumulate in stocks of goods, buildings, machinery, etc., and waste. Material flow analysis (MFA) covers the entire chain of extraction, processing, manufacturing, (re-)using and dissipation. Problems arise with depletion of high-grade deposits and with pollution of the environment (mining, waste, etc.) and its impacts for human and ecosystem health. In particular, the production and use of existing and new persistent chemicals -- with plastics as the most visible example -- are a great and only partly understood threat. Parts of the flows are unrecoverably dissipated; this should be minimized by increasing efficiency, reducing losses and collecting and processing waste along the chain. Redesign, reuse and recycling and developing substitutes are other approaches to mitigate geopolitical tensions and environmental destruction. How successful this can and will be depends on worldviews and their relative dominance, for instance in continuing growth with corporate tech versus local--regional regulation and behavioural change.

Chapter 12 covers AN INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCH DESIGN and includes the following specific topics, among others: Descriptive, Relational, and Causal Research Studies , Blocking, Quasi-Experimental Designs, Threats to Internal Validity, and Threats to External Validity.

In Part II, we discussed how human populations have dispersed throughout the biosphere and become a planetary force. In Part III, this was investigated with help of the worldview framework. This permits an interpretation of socio-ecological developments in terms of extreme manifestations of particular values and beliefs and the dynamic responses to it. Both science and ethics are important components in this venture.

The ’good life’ many people aspire to has many component. Three of them I call ’pillars of development’: health, education and mobility (HEM). Health has greatly improved for many people, due to a decline in mortality and morbidity rates. It shows up in the rise in life expectancy worldwide. This is primarily thanks to better food, hygiene and medical services. Because casues of mortality shifted from infectious diseases to chronic non-communicative degenerative ailments, the notion of health transition has been introduced. The level of formal education is also rising worlwide, with important consequences for political organization and rights for women. Mobility has experienced an enormous growth, which has resulted in ever larger distances travelled within an hour due to changes to faster modes (walk - bicycle - car/train/bus - plane). Many technological, economic and sociopolitical developments affect the future of HEM-infrastructure and services. All three have an inherent public-good character, which gives rise to divergent worldviews regarding their provision and quality (private versus state, efficiency versus availability).

Chapter 2 covers univariate distributions and includes the following specific topics, among others: Frequency and Percent Distribution Tables, Bar Charts, Pie Charts, Stem-and-Leaf Displays, Histograms, Line Graphs, Shape of a Distribution, Cumulative Percent Distributions, Percentiles, Percentile Ranks, and Boxplots.

Dominated by the imposing Great Caucasus Mountains (which includes Europe’s highest mountain, Mount Elbrus), the Caucasus region stretches between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Although historically its location at the center of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene (essentially “the Old World”) made it a vital crossroads for many a century, nowadays it is more often than not overlooked in geographical descriptions. Yet it is fascinating from the ethnolinguistic perspective, not only because of the sheer number of ethnic groups that inhabit, and languages that are spoken in, this relatively small region, much of which is an uninviting terrain, but also because of a number of linguistic peculiarities that the languages here exhibit.

Chapter 7 covers PROBABILITY FUNDAMENTALS and includes the following specific topics, among others: the discrete case, additive rules of probability, complement rule of probability, multiplicative rule of probability,conditional probability, Bayes’ theorem, the Law of Large Numbers.