Ten years on, I’d still make the case for leaving the EU. On reflection I’m proud that a majority of voters valued democratic accountability over short-term practical and economic advantages. I regret that Leave supporters were labelled old, stupid, little Englanders. This was about identity, community and belonging. It’s better to acknowledge that this is something we all need, rather than sneer. Could we have taken a more pro-active part in shaping subsequent events? The government of the day called the referendum, and the government of the day owned the outcome. Arguably something like Change Britain might have come into being immediately after the referendum, but practically it’s hard to see how the cross-party nature of the organisation could have been maintained, or indeed financed. The EU referendum could have been planned better both before and after the votes were counted. Professor Alan Renwick at UCL convened a group of politicians, academics and practitioners to reflect on what might be considered good practice in the future. Direct participatory democracy can unleash forces which become difficult to reign in, even in mature parliamentary democracies.

This chapter explores how online data and mobile phone technologies have transformed our ability to study collective human behaviour. By analysing vast digital traces – from web searches, Wikipedia usage and social media posts to geolocation and sensor data collected via smartphones – researchers can now observe, model and predict individual and societal behaviours at unprecedented scales and temporal resolutions. This chapter highlights key methodological developments and applications in domains such as public health, economics, finance, mental well-being and urban mobility. Through detailed examples, we illustrate how digital behavioural data reveal patterns of attention, intention and sentiment, offering new insights into how people respond to cultural events, policy shifts and environmental changes. They also address the ethical and privacy challenges posed by the collection and use of granular digital data, especially the limitations of traditional anonymisation techniques. Ultimately, the chapter highlights both the promise and the responsibility that come with leveraging online and mobile data for understanding and shaping collective behaviour in the digital age.

The ABCs – attention, behaviour and consequences – provide a framework for understanding approaches to behavioural influence. They help identify what initiated a behaviour, why a certain action was taken, why some actions are not completed and how to motivate the desired actions through consequences. The ABCs are a lens to organise existing frameworks and identify what to look for in new approaches. There are various strategies and techniques that fall under the lens of ABC, such as the EAST framework, Thaler and Sunstein’s nudge approach and boosting. These approaches focus on making behaviour easy, capturing attention and reducing effortful processing. Although human behaviour is complex, triggering behaviour, helping it to happen and making the ending worthwhile are a good rule of thumb. Data science can help identify influential factors, but they are more likely to be successful when informed by strong behavioural intuitions. It is important to test these strategies and techniques through experiments and A/B testing. While none of these strategies will work in every situation, most are supported by the weight of evidence, including meta-analyses that combine research from numerous studies.

Culture is presented as the invisible force shaping how AI is designed, adopted, and lived with around the world. The chapter contrasts technological determinism with constructivism, showing that AI reflects social norms, values, and narratives as much as code. Examples range from Japanese caregiving robots shaped by local customs to Latin American projects like Latam-GPT, highlighting how cultural metaphors and WEIRD versus non-WEIRD contexts influence trust, resistance, and enthusiasm toward AI. It also examines generational and regional differences in attitudes toward AI, calling for inclusive design and training that bridge cultural divides. Ultimately, AI is shown as not universal but plural, inseparable from the cultural systems that give it meaning.

This chapter is about change in grammar. A number of grammatical changes in the history of English are unpacked and explained. They give appreciation and understanding of the ways in which grammars can change. Through the exposition of major grammatical changes in the history of English, readers gain an understanding of the mechanisms of grammatical change, reanalysis, extension, and grammatical borrowing. Grammaticalization is also demonstrated.

This chapter explores the enumeration of national legislative powers as a cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution’s compound republic, arguing that it both empowers and limits Congress to specific domains while also curbing executive authority. Despite the Constitutional Convention’s initial rejection of enumerated powers in favor of broad legislative authority over matters where states were incompetent, the Committee of Detail enumerated powers so that it could assign historically royal prerogatives, like war and commerce, to the legislature. The chapter highlights Federalist assertions, from Madison to Wilson, that Congress is confined to these enumerated powers, reinforced by the Tenth Amendment and debates over a bill of rights, which Federalists deemed unnecessary due to limited national authority. It critiques revisionist claims that Congress was not strictly bound by enumeration, finding them unpersuasive. The enumeration, the chapter concludes, ensures a balanced federal system, aligning with the Framers’ intent to create a government competent for national purposes while preserving state sovereignty and minimizing the risk of executive tyranny.

An important application of ramification groups is to the conductor of Galois representations. We define the Swan conductor using a rescaling function. A refinement called the refined Swan conductor is defined in the quotient of the multiplicative group divided by the units congruent to 1 modulo the maximal ideal. The integrality of the conductor is a consequence of the Hasse–Arf theorem and proved by establishing the induction formula.

This chapter explores language difference over time and space. It traces the history of Chinese from Old Chinese to Middle Chinese to the modern languages, presenting an overview of the methods and materials used for reconstruction of ancient pronunciation and describing a few key syntactic changes. Some key concepts in historical linguistics are introduced, followed by a description of the major dialect groups of Chinese and some of their most salient features.

Perhaps the greatest turning point for Parliamentary involvement in the Brexit process was the 2017 general election. Having won an unlikely majority in 2015, Cameron bequeathed to May a relatively functional dynamic in Parliament. But, tempted by artificial sentiment in polling, May and her team decided to call the 2017 election in an attempt to secure a greater popular mandate for her administration. That decision was fatal. The prior polling was erroneous, or at the very least misread the public appetite for an election, and the campaign May ran was self-defeating. The loss of the Conservative majority at the election left May in the treacherous position of needing a confidence and supply deal with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Even in normal times, the instability of such an arrangement creates complications and often disaster for the ruling party. When you add in the unique circumstances of Brexit, plus the fact that the Northern Irish questions in Brexit were the most difficult and contentious elements of the negotiations, May’s dependence on the DUP was fatal.

The Introduction begins with a short paragraph of conventional views about the Declaration, drawn from legal and historical writings, and argues that everything in this paragraph is wrong. It argues that when we get the Declaration wrong, we get America wrong, and we need to get America right. It then provides an overview of the major themes of the book.

Trust is presented as a cornerstone of human–AI interaction. The chapter reviews psychological, sociological, and computational models of trust, including interpersonal and contractual trust, Luhmann’s theory of trust-as-prediction, and the Computers Are Social Actors theory that explains why people anthropomorphize machines. It examines risks of overtrust (automation bias, misplaced confidence) and undertrust (algorithm aversion, underuse of reliable systems). Strategies such as transparency, explainability, fairness, and accountability are discussed as ways to calibrate trust appropriately. The chapter concludes that trust in AI is dynamic, context-dependent, and must be designed into systems deliberately.

This chapter explores the lives of ordinary men and women in Song China – the majority whose experiences were far less documented than those of the elite. What was daily life like for them? What brought them happiness, and what were their fears? Drawing on the remarkably rich materials from the Yijian zhi 夷堅志 (Record of the Listener), this chapter weaves together the life stories of ordinary people in Song China by examining their livelihoods, spiritual world, and emotional trauma. Through these narratives, it reveals how grand historical forces – commercialization, religious integration, and the brutality of war – shaped the everyday experiences of Song China’s non-elite population.

It was supposed to be a relaxing holiday, a week away cruising the Adriatic in a chartered yacht as the guest of a friend with far deeper pockets, and thus a lifestyle more sumptuous than I had ever experienced. There were just ten of us aboard, some meeting for the first time but, as one day slid into the next under the hot June sun, we started to bond, confide and laugh over the wine-fuelled meals stretching over hours. And so it was that one lunchtime, as the conversation was providing nothing more than a soft and sociable soundtrack to the stunning Croatian coastline, suddenly everything changed. Brexit came up.

The theory of status effects illustrates one important manner in which theories can develop. Regularities in groups faced with tasks requiring group interaction were observed over a wide variety of tasks. Status inequality in particular was obvious. Some group members had more influence and were given more opportunities to interact than others, even when expertise did not differentiate among individuals. Further such inequality seemed reciprocal: group members permitted the inequality and allowed it to stabilize. Researchers developed abstract concepts and propositions to account for these regularities and concluded that inequality arises because the task interaction causes individuals to form performance expectations for themselves and others, and once those expectations form, they affect the distribution of all behavioral components of interaction.