In recent years, contact-induced language changes have been hotly discussed (e.g. Heine 2003; Heine and Kuteva 2005), and in this paper, a similar line of argument is presented concerning the Slavic languages, and a similar developmental path is applied to minority languages. Based on analogy, future state of minority languages is predicted. Some languages in the Indo-European family are known to

First part of a series of three articles on the history of freemasonry in the Swedish possession Swedish-Pomerania on German soil.

Optical spectroscopy, and in particular laser spectroscopy, provides numerous possibilities for advanced diagnostics and multi-spectral imaging with real-time capability. We describe applications to the environmental and medical fields and it is noted that the basic approaches are very similar in both areas. Environmental diagnostics discussed includes satellite imagery, long-path absorption atmos

The all spectrum absorption efficiency appears in the physical bounds on antennas expressed in the polarizability dyadics. Here, it is shown that this generalized absorption efficiency is close to $1/2$ for small idealized dipole antennas and for antennas with a dominant resonance in their absorption. Also, the usefulness of this parameter is analyzed for estimation of antenna performance. The res

Analog circuits are often specified using non-linear equations, which are difficult to analyze. Therefore, test generation and diagnosis are problematic issues in practice. In this paper we propose a new method for diagnosis of analog circuits that uses combined information from tests at different frequencies. By solving simultaneously the resulting equations (one for each test frequency), we get

Wave splitting of the time dependent Maxwell's equations in three dimensions with and without dispersive terms in the constitutive equation is treated. The procedure is similar to the method developed for the scalar wave equation except as follows. The up-and down-going wave condition is expressed in terms of a linear relation between the tangential components of E and H. The resulting system of d

To combat the increasing soft error rates in recent semiconductor technologies, it is important to employ fault tolerance techniques. While these techniques enable correct operation, they introduce a time overhead, which may cause a deadline violation in real-time systems (RTS). Since correct operation for RTS is defined as producing correct outputs while satisfying time constraints (deadlines), i

The new NERICA upland rice varieties were developed in Africa for Africa so as to address the continental-wide rice cereal challenge, poverty and food insecurity. To date, the ‘success’ of the dissemination of NERICA amongst smallholder farmers has mainly been established econometrically by measuring production growth or household income gain. This type of analysis allows for capturing shifts in i