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.

In the next three chapters, I give an overview of how human populations evolved in various places and over time. The stories about ancient civilizations illustrate the socio-political, economic and environmental determinants of rise and decline. A variety of mechanisms and theories are proposed to ‘explain’ these processes (Chapter 3). By the end of the first millennium in the Common Era (CE), some populations on the continent of Europe began, over the course of half-a-dozen centuries, to get a prominent political-economic and military position in the world. It started the story of industrialization and enlightenment, two key aspects of what is known as Modernity. What did this mean in the ‘material’ sense: the numbers on people, economic activity, resource use, environmental destruction? (Chapter 4). Second, what did it mean for the less material aspects of life: the shifting balance between the institutions of state, church and market, the ‘progress’ brought by science and technology, and the concomitant changes in the perception of what is good and bad (Chapter 5)?

Any map of the languages of Canada and the USA looks like a veritable mosaic, whether we look at a map of indigenous languages or a map of languages that arrived in the Americas in the last half a millennium, first with early European colonizers (not only English, but French, Dutch, even Swedish made an impact in the early colonial period), but also with more recent waves of immigrants. The Ethnologue list of immigrant languages spoken in the USA alone includes 203 languages, running alphabetically from Adamawa Fulfulde (a Niger-Congo language from West Africa; see Chapter 7) to Zoogocho Zapotec (an Oto-Manguean language from Northern Oaxaca, Mexico; see Chapter 12). There are altogether 255 living languages spoken in Canada and the USA. Thus, like New Guinea and Australia (see Chapter 10), Canada and the USA exhibit a high degree of linguistic diversity, muted by waves of language extinction in the last few centuries, but coupled with our incomplete understanding of language relatedness in the region, which creates a very muddled picture of the linguistic landscape.