We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Brazil, 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.

Prediction is explored as both a core human cognitive function and a defining strength of AI systems. The chapter traces the history of prediction from statistical forecasting to modern personalization engines. It explains how humans rely on heuristics, experience, and context, while AI systems leverage large-scale data and probabilistic modeling. Applications in advertising, healthcare, and education illustrate AI’s predictive power, but the chapter also warns of pitfalls such as overfitting, bias, and Goodhart’s Law (when metrics distort outcomes). The key argument is that prediction succeeds when human judgment and machine learning complement one another, not when either acts alone.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Mexico, 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.

This chapter examines differences among the chairs based on their support for Donald Trump. It looks at how Trump supporters, skeptics, and opponents vary in their demographic backgrounds as well as their political viewpoints, with Trump supporters representing the more populist faction in the party. It additionally looks at Trump’s success in winning over his skeptics over the course of 2023.

This introduction to Part One introduces the topic of why the ceremonial parchment in the National Archives should not be considered the definitive text of the Declaration of Independence.

This chapter introduces the paradox in a constitutional order in which there is parliamentary supremacy: the Parliament may make any law it pleases, including a law that undermines the rule of law in such a way as to undermine parliamentary supremacy. It then sketches the tension in A. V. Dicey’s classic treatment of the two ‘constitutional fundamentals’ of parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. It shows how deeply that tension is embedded in the common law and how post-war developments in the European Convention of Human Rights, the Human Rights Act 1998, and the institutional machinery of the constitutional order deepen the tension by expressing an ever-firmer commitment to human rights while preserving parliamentary supremacy. The chapter sets up the argument of the next chapter: that the Rwanda Act could both be perfectly valid and unconstitutional in that it introduced a dangerous incoherence into the UK constitutional order.

Throughout the twentieth century, feminist organizations and movements appropriated strategies from the fashion industry to offer women new identities, representations, rituals, and ways of being. This chapter explores the sometimes tense, often mutually invigorating, engagement of feminism with fashion in the feminist periodical press in the first decades of the twentieth century in Britain. In suffrage publications such as Votes for Women, feminist journalists considered dress as a mode of signaling feminist identity, as a route to interrogations of embodiment and visual representation, as a mechanism for engaging and resisting the rituals of consumer culture, and as a vehicle for rethinking rituals of behavior. This chapter considers how the interwar publication Woman’s Outlook (affiliated with the Women's Co-operative Guild) reimagined a feminist relation to fashion through attention to issues of production and consumption, thus rethinking feminist style.

The parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence, enshrined in the National Archives, is not the most relevant text of the document. The correct text is the text distributed to the American people – the Dunlap Broadside, which was printed on the night of July 4, 1776. The parchment copy was not created until later, for ceremonial purposes, and its eccentric handwriting should not be taken as definitive, a mistake that many historians have made.

This chapter surveys the major institutions of Song dynasty governance. It constructs a model of these institutions as a dynamic interaction between two competing visions and modalities of governance. Imperial technocracy focuses on the Song monarch (either male emperors or female empress regents) as the sole sovereign power that presided over an officialdom of technocrats trained to perform specific technical functions of government. These groups included military officials, imperial relatives, eunuchs, and the emperor’s female secretariat. In contract, Confucian instititionalism, promoted by committed Confucian officials advocating a vision of “shared governance” and grounded in a system of interlocking, hierarchically ordered agencies, challenged the monarchy’s claim to absolute authority. This chapter also includes a discussion of the various systems of state service that administered the professional lives of these groups. As the dynasty progressed, both creative and destructive tension between these two political visions and forces generated an ever-changing, hybrid mixture of institutional variations that provide the backdrop for understanding Song politcal history.

As the British Empire expanded in Asia, the concept of piracy was reconstructed: the pirate became part-criminal and part-sovereign—a desperate savage born of anarchic geography, yet a powerful despot wielding political violence against the enshrined freedoms of humanity. The paradox of piratical statehood saw potentates punished as if they were pirates, and seafarers warred upon as if they were states. The British construed their own sea power as a force for modernity while consigning those who challenged them to a bygone era. Such ‘pirates’ were not to be found upon the high seas, but along coastlines and in converging straits and waterways, where dynamic, local sovereignties had hitherto held sway. As a criminalising category, charges of piracy were not levelled by the hegemonic authorities of a monolithic empire, but arose in the conversations between administrators, the petitions of merchants, in newspaper columns, and through the diplomacy of ‘men on the spot’. The condemned seldom conformed to any pirate archetype; they could at best be described as ‘piratical’—a semantic slippage that transformed the specific actions of individuals into a pervasive and immutable condition.

The first decade of the nineteenth century in Britain stood out for the rise of the juvenile tradition. The felt symbolism of the new century provided a representational force auspicious and propulsive for young writers. Before 1810 Browne, Byron, Clarke, Hunt, Moore, Shelley, and Smythe published as teenagers. Southey edited collections of the dead young poets Chatterton and Kirke White. Such ‘literary remains’ provided the juvenile tradition with a heritage in this decade at a calendrical juncture that brought together past, present, and future. Kirke White’s ‘literary remains’ inspired living poets to take up this form to express their sense of current neglect and hope for future recognition. Literary remains as a form changed understandings of Romantic lyric. To writers sure of early death, subjectivity was not a privilege taken for granted. Collecting scraps to capture the remnants of the dead was not abstract but poignant because so inertly material.

This chapter argues that two of the common methods used in behavioural and social sciences to reduce the chances that models overfit the available data, namely heavy reliance on benchmark models and rigorous parameter estimation techniques, can slow the advancement of these sciences. An examination of classical decision research highlights how applying these methods shaped the field but have also led to limited success. As an alternative, the chapter proposes a prediction-oriented approach to the development of behavioural models. Evaluating and comparing models based on their predictive power inherently guards against overfitting and also facilitates accumulation of knowledge. The chapter reviews research employing the prediction-oriented approach in behavioural decision research and demonstrates that, in contrast to a common misconception, the focus on predictions can also facilitate better understanding of the underlying processes.