Critical for any explanation or theory are well-formulated concepts with clear and unambiguous meaning. Definitions can ensure unambiguous meaning, and the kind of definition most useful for theories are nominal definitions. Nominal definitions have two parts: a definiendum, the term being defined, and definiens, other words that tell what it means. To be useful in explanations a concept should be abstract, clearly defined, and embedded in principles that describe its behavior. Such concepts are the result of thought rather than simply of observations. Their meanings are not tied to any particular time or place. Their definitions include all and only the important elements of whatever phenomena they refer to.

I have argued in this book that different versions of the American ‘story’ are possible. Some writers will offer a generous and optimistic telling of the story that depicts the rise of the nation from humble beginnings to becoming the most powerful and fairest nation that has ever existed, a nation committed to the highest ideals of an often ill-defined Americanism. Other writers have considered the shortcomings of the American experiment, exposing its manifest flaws and blatant violations of liberal values and basic human rights throughout history. Other stories might be considered utopian in their visions of an inclusive and harmonious nation that will finally overcome invidious differences in ethnicities and cultures to achieve a ‘transnational’ America. The choices of what is written about and how various characters and their actions are described and evaluated will vary; in the end, it’s left to the thoughtful reader to distinguish fact from fiction and substantiated conclusions from mere opinion in order to properly evaluate the merits of the author’s argument. Ignorance or denial of history and passive acceptance of propaganda as fact must be challenged wherever they appear, whether in political discourse or in books written by academics and influential public figures.

Decision-making often involves a choice between options whose outcomes are probabilistic and thus cannot be predicted with certainty. A common methodology for understanding people’s risky choices is to develop formal models of their responses to monetary gambles, usually collected in lab experiments. The quest for veridical models of decisions under risk has been one of the most actively debated areas in the behavioural sciences, in particular in psychology and economics. This chapter outlines and compares different routes that have been taken to capture the psychological underpinnings of people’s risky choices: neo-Bernoullian models (e.g., cumulative prospect theory, security-potential/aspiration theory, transfer of attention exchange model), models with context-dependent valuation (proportional difference model, decision-by-sampling theory), heuristics and sequential sampling models (e.g., decision field theory, drift–diffusion model). These modelling frameworks propose diverse psychological constructs, including distorted representation of outcomes, asymmetric representation of gains and losses, asymmetric weighting of outcomes and probabilities, various notions of how decision weights for risky options are derived from probability information, and imbalanced and limited attention. Despite the richness of the theoretical arena, relationships between the constructs are poorly understood. This chapter argues that this disconnect between theories can be overcome by greater efforts towards theory integration, which maps constructs from different models onto each other. We present two examples illustrating the theory integration approach and its possible merits, such as indicating possible mechanistic explanations for patterns in probability weighting.

Linguistic prehistory correlates findings from language history with information from archaeology, ethnohistory, human genetics, and ethnographic analogy to obtain a more complete picture of a people’s past. All the tools for investigating language change and the history of languages can provide information valuable to linguistic prehistory. This chapter presents the fundamental concepts involved in linguistic prehistory, illustrates its various methods and tools, and is seen in action in its application in several captivating cases. The culture of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European as captured from reconstructed vocabulary and the question of the Proto-Indo-European homeland play a large role in this chapter.

This chapter critically reviews the success of existing algorithms in explaining and predicting human behaviour. While traditional statistical methods have limitations in this area, algorithmic approaches have gained popularity. The chapter covers a range of algorithms, including decision trees, neural networks and clustering algorithms, evaluating their strengths and limitations in various applications. It also considers ethical concerns, such as bias and privacy violations and the need for transparency and explainability. The chapter emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration between computer science, statistics and behavioural science, and the need for ongoing development and refinement of these methods. By evaluating the effectiveness of algorithmic approaches to human behaviour, this chapter is a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the field.

Many people are fascinated by the history of words. They wonder about how new words arise and why come some words just drop out of use and disappear. This chapter answers these questions. The various ways that new words arise are explained and exemplified, and the origins of English given names and surnames are revealed.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Italy, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, we reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

We offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

We study cyclic extensions of degree p. We compute the lower ramification groups, cohomological filtrations, and the refined Swan conductors explicitly. The extensions are described by Artin–Schrerer extensions in characteristic p and as Kummer extensions in characteristic 0.

This chapter explores the increasingly important role of advertising in European newspapers by looking at the various ways in which the Americas were presented as a world of new opportunities. Advocates of transoceanic ventures in France, the Dutch Republic, and the Holy Roman Empire used newspapers to attract investors and settlers, but they were outperformed by the periodical press in England which helped to recruit thousands of colonists and indentured servants. This chapter connects advertising in early modern newspapers to patterns of transatlantic migration. There were multiple attempts to use the promotional qualities of the press, for settlements from as far north as Quebec to as far south as Barbados and the Guyanas. The focus will be on the campaign to develop the colony of Carolina in the years around 1650. This ultimately unsuccessful venture, despite advertisements in English and French newspapers, will be juxtaposed with the highly successful promotional campaign of William Penn in the early 1680s, which used newspapers as a way to draw attention to more elaborate treatises promising a great future for Pennsylvania.

Permanent magnets deliver magnetic flux into a region of space known as the air gap, with no continual expenditure of energy. Hard ferrite and rare-earth magnets are ideally suited to generate flux densities comparable in magnitude to their spontaneous polarization Js. Applications are classified by the nature of the flux distribution, which may be static or time-dependent, as well as spatially uniform or nonuniform. Applications are also discussed in terms of the physical effect exploited (force, torque, induced emf, Zeeman splitting, magnetoresistance). The most important uses of permanent magnets are in electric motors, generators and actuators. Power ranges from microwatts for wristwatch motors to megawatts for wind generators. Annual production runs for some consumer applications are tens or even hundreds of millions of motors.

It is possible to pinpoint the moment it became clear that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party was not going to try very hard to repair the economic damage done by Brexit. It came on the evening of 18 April 2024 when the European Commission published an expansive proposal for a youth mobility scheme to allow young Brits and Europeans to live, work and study freely in each others’ countries for two or three years. One EU official in Brussels – keen to emphasise the willingness to rejuvenate the EU–UK relationship under a future Labour government – excitedly described the envisioned scheme as ‘like free movement for young people’. Several European governments, including the mighty Germany, had even suggested that a youth mobility scheme could even provide a gateway to easing restrictions on the movement of business professionals. But the excitement didn’t last out the day. Within hours the Labour Party, then in opposition, rejected the idea out of hand. ‘Labour has no plans for a youth mobility scheme,’ it said in a statement. There was no hedging or hesitation.

This chapter examines how fashion points to alternative forms of pleasure that exceed conventional narratives about choices between a life of political struggle and one of security and luxury. It focuses on British Labour politician Ellen Wilkinson’s novel Clash (1929), which is set during the 1926 General Strike and features a feminist heroine whose male suitors offer two distinctly different futures: one committed to the workers’ cause, and the other an escape into bohemian indulgence. Appropriating the genre of the romance, Wilkinson configures her protagonist’s conflict through two key fashion and design networks of the 1920s, Bloomsbury bohemianism and the European avant-garde, against which a third realm, the world of class struggle, is positioned as a counter-text. Engaging recent theories of affect and aesthetics, this chapter reveals how fashion attunes characters and readers to otherwise foreclosed ways of sensing and being, including unrealized forms of women’s expression and cross-class solidarity.

This chapter examines how Sophoclean tragedy approaches and conceptualises the relationship between divine and mortal. It demonstrates that Sophocles builds on the early Greek theological, philosophical and literary tradition outlined in Chapter 1, but steers his own, distinctive course. It argues that Sophocles’ tragedies deploy ideas and beliefs about humans and gods in three, closely interconnected ways: in the explicitly theological and philosophical discourse uttered by characters and choruses; in the trajectories and experiences of individual characters on the stage; and in the broader, religious and ethical patterns that underlie these trajectories, which are occasionally and partially revealed to audiences. As part of its attempt to foreground the close interrelation of dramatic structure, form and content, the chapter devotes considerable space to a new interpretation of dramatic irony. This general discussion relies on readings of four Sophoclean plays, Oedipus Tyrannus, Ajax, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, as well as on brief comparative analyses of some Aeschylean and Euripidean examples.

We estimate the short-run effects of Brexit border disruption on the UK economy. We estimate relationships for the UK where Brexit effects are identified by the dates of Brexit events, the referendum and the exit from the single market. We find evidence of short-run effects of Brexit: temporary effects on GDP, exports and imports (slightly negative), and on inflation and interest rates (slightly positive). These effects are consistent with modest disruption from introducing a border with the EU, a border due to be made barrier-free and seamless by the UK–EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Previous work using other countries as comparators is vulnerable to difficulties in isolating the Brexit effects among numerous other shocks. We also survey earlier modelling work on the long-run effects of evolving policies of free trade, UK-sourced regulation and liberalised immigration. Models of long-run trade suggest the emergence of substantial gains.