Research on sex in relationships has proliferated in recent years, yielding valuable insights about sexuality in different types of relationships. In this chapter, we highlight recent work that has strengthened our understanding of couples’ everyday sexual experiences and their links to relational and broader well-being. We review how sexual experiences are shaped by individual differences (e.g., attachment orientation) and by the interplay of both romantic partners. We further highlight how the field has adapted to societal changes in relationships (e.g., consensual non-monogamy, casual sex, technology). Although existing research has discovered many important findings, much of it is limited in its generalizability to diverse populations beyond Western, monogamous, and cisgender man–woman couples. To address this oversight, we offer many minor but meaningful adjustments researchers can make to help ensure their measures and theories are inclusive, thereby helping to ensure future research on sex in relationships is representative of a broader population.

Chapter 3 deepens the theoretical framework by examining variation among protest brokers and exploring how different types of brokers shape protest dynamics. It identifies two central relationships that define broker behavior: the broker’s connection to elites and their ties to the communities they mobilize. Building on these two dimensions, the chapter introduces four key types of protest broker – Issue, Elite, Group, and Independent – and demonstrates how each type influences patterns of protest. Specifically, the chapter explores how broker type affects the variety of issues protested, the likelihood of protests becoming violent, the duration of protests, and the mobilization tactics most likely to succeed. It also investigates the contextual and structural factors that give rise to different broker types within communities. By unpacking the causes and consequences of broker-level variation, this chapter shows that protest brokers are not a monolithic group, and that their differing motivations and positionalities significantly shape protest outcomes. This framework helps explain diverse protest patterns across geographic and political contexts, offering a more nuanced understanding of how collective action is organized and sustained.

The use of transvaginal ultrasoudn (TVS) facilitates early detection and assessmemt of first trimester normally sited or eutopic pregnancy, with evidence of a normaly sited preganncy seen as early as for weeks and three days of gestation. An apprecication of the normal landmarks and charecteristic features of a normal early pregnancy is essential for the accurate diagnosis of early pregnancy complications and for the communication of the ultrasound findings to patients.

The work of Iain Banks has been prominent in exploring the crossing of different kind of borders: national, aesthetic and generic, ontological, gender and class to name but a few. Banks has also been part of a wider preoccupation in contemporary Scottish writing to do with inhabiting border zones, where the border ceases to be an idealised geometric line with almost no width or physical extension, and instead broadens to become a site that one can reside in, the ground against which the figure emerges. The Bridge, along with The Crow Road (1992) forms the background of the chapter. This chapter will illuminate how The Steep Approach to Garbadale’s continuation of and departure from the border explorations and reflections on national identity of his earlier books is rendered through the crucial deployment of the motif of sibling incest in the novel.

This chapter revisits debates on the nature of securitization from the perspective of big picture theorizing. Proponents of the sociological approach led by Thierry Balzacq argue that the original Copenhagen school approach to securitization lacks in detail, ignores context and undertheorizes the role and nature of the audience. This chapter shows that this lack of detail was – following Waltz - informed by a deliberate choice for a parsimonious theory that does not offer 1:1 mapping of each case of securitization, but rather one that offers a broad and generic view of securitization simpliciter reminiscent of Buzan’s big picture theorizing. This is not surprising, after all, the Copenhagen school’s securitization theory facilitated the analytical step of capturing theoretically the broadened security landscape to include alongside states a myriad of other actors (as both referent objects and securitizing actors). Nowadays, however, the sociological strand is more popular than the original philosophical strand. This chapter examines not only why this is, but also what is lost if we don’t do securitization theory as big picture theorizing, and finally whether big picture theorizing in securitization studies has a future? It is argued that nothing less than the discipline of IR is at stake.

The t-matrix approximation applies to a low-density (or dilute) Fermi gas with a short-range interparticle interaction, either attractive or repulsive. This chapter considers the nonequilibrium (time-dependent) version of the t-matrix approximation for fermions in the normal phase, in the perspective of applying it to the BCS–BEC crossover.

This chapter examines how the death penalty operated in practice in Belize, Bermuda and Britain’s Caribbean Dependent Territories from the mid 1960s to early 1977. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office was increasingly diligent in reviewing death sentences during this period and, despite executions in the British Virgin Islands in 1972 and Belize in 1974, British officials mostly pressured governors to commute, even though Britain remained formally committed to the Creech Jones doctrine. Britain’s approach to capital sentences was, moreover, increasingly influenced by diplomatic concerns by the mid 1970s, including, for the first Bermuda, time, international human rights treaty commitments that, exceptionally, prompted British intervention in a capital case in the West Indies Associated State of Dominica. In the Dependent Territories themselves, the execution and reprieve of condemned prisoners prompted protests related to constitutional reforms, local political conflicts and concerns about crime and national identity.

Chapter 10 is based on the voluminous correspondence between Gao Pian’s military headquarters in Yangzhou (Cassia Grove) and the court-in-exile at Chengdu in 881–84 that is preserved in the Cassia Grove Collection of Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn. The issues addressed are grouped under five headings. “Central Harmony” concerns Emperor Xizong’s situation in Sichuan and Huainan’s loyalist positioning relative to the exiled government. In “Demotions and Promotions,” Gao reacts to his removal from his (now defunct) national offices and elevation in honorific rank. “Family Matters” examines the symbolic kinship relations that tied the sovereign to his subjects. Under “A Circuit of Giving,” the substitution of ritual tribute offerings for tax payments from Huainan is discussed. In exchange, the emperor returns ceremonial gifts. In “The End of the Huang Chao Rebellion,” Gao responds to the court’s preparations to return to the capital after the defeat of the insurrection. The documentation provided in this chapter reveals the ideological slant of the official record regarding Gao Pian’s relations with the emperor during these pivotal years for the Tang.

This chapter aims to analyse the Polish ‘integration clause’: Article 90 of the Constitution as an element of the Polish constitutional imaginary. The notion of constitutional imaginary as formulated by Martin Loughlin will provide the theoretical framework for these considerations. Perceived through the lens of Louglin’s constitutional imaginary concept, Article 90 turns out to be the provision that shapes intricate relations of two big ineffable ideas: sovereignty and European integration. The latter has been perceived in the constitutional practice as both the ineffable aspiration and the object of serious concerns. Since Poland’s accession to the EU, for a long time, constitutional practice with regard to the EU was a syncretic collection of cautious friendliness towards EU law, emphasis on (formal) constitutional supremacy and narrowing down the interpretation of ‘the conferral of competences’. Nevertheless, until recently, the constitutional text had tended to be interpreted as facilitating rather than limiting Poland’s participation in European integration. Therefore, the recent Eurosceptic turn after 2015 was not justified either in the sphere of thought or in the constitutional text. It disturbed the existing balance between ideology and utopia.

The marginalisation of care in public discourse serves as a pointed reminder of the need for more inclusive contestation. Contestation needs work. One way to envisage that work is in the form of a good conversation. Conversation skills are by no means all that is required to do the job, of course. Realists know that engaging as if the temper of the country were hospitable to a rounded appreciation of the conditions of good citizenship does not itself bring those conditions about. Good negotiation of the public interest seems by its nature to involve thinking and acting as if the world might be different, and better. So the politicisation of care is a vital element of any mapping of the public interest. A further reason for care's neglect lies in the way choice has been valorised, sometimes in political theory but more emphatically still in the rhetoric of marketisation.

Chapter 2 draws on Chapter 1 and helps readers understand five different dimensions of the in-store decision-making model from the first chapter. The first dimension relates to selective attention and shows that we become consciously aware of less than half a per cent of the assortment of products. Various preconscious selection mechanisms are described, and examples of how to ‘cheat the selective attention system’ are given. The second dimension is the flipside of selective attention – selective blindness. Here it is discussed how one or two exposures to a stimulus that we consciously deem as uninteresting is enough for the selective attention systems to filter out that stimulus in the future. The third dimension shows how the context enhances the chances for a related product to be seen. The psychological process behind this is called ‘spreading activation’ and works in such a way that if shoppers are thinking ‘sandwich’, they will more effortlessly be able to spot cheese in the store. The fourth dimension shows that perhaps all decisions involve both reason and less logical ‘arguments’ from the shopper’s senses. For instance, a larger display will be interpreted as containing cheaper products than a smaller one even if the price is the same. Finally, fifth dimension shows that a product’s use can be more effortlessly understood if products that are used together are displayed adjacently.

This chapter presents our theory, which claims that lawmaking institutions and outcomes in autocracies depend upon the nature and dynamics of factional politics. When factional politics is balanced, because the factions that make up the autocratic coalition are highly united and embedded in organizations, they establish reviser legislatures mandated to intervene in all lawmaking processes and empowered not only to review but also to amend and reject government initiatives. In contrast, when factional politics is unbalanced, because factions are less united and embedded, regimes establish notary legislatures with limited and contingent intervention in lawmaking processes, and empowered to amend but not necessarily reject government bills. Reviser legislatures typically amend and reject significant shares of government bills and are able to impose important changes in policy, whereas notary legislatures typically amend government initiatives, but rarely reject them, and are hardly able to impose important policy changes. Variation in the resources of factions may lead legislatures to oscillate between these two extreme types.

In October 1642 Parliament made a commitment to financially support soldiers who had been wounded in their service as well as the widows of those who had been killed. The administration of military welfare was the responsibility of the Justices of the Peace at each county’s Quarter Sessions and this chapter will examine the process in Kent. This county did not experience large scale military action until 1648 and yet it was profoundly affected by the events of the mid-seventeenth century and witnessed loss and division within its own borders throughout the 1640s. This chapter will present evidence taken from Quarter Sessions records in order to discuss who received pensions in Kent and what impact local and national politics had on the administration of that relief.