This chapter explores the principles and legal framework of capital maintenance within the European Union’s company law. It examines rules designed to protect creditors and ensure corporate solvency by regulating distributions, reductions and increases of a company’s capital. The chapter analyses key EU directives, national implementations and relevant case law, highlighting the balance between safeguarding financial stability and enabling business flexibility. It also discusses challenges in harmonizing capital maintenance rules across Member States and the impact of recent reforms on corporate governance. The chapter offers insights into how capital maintenance shapes corporate accountability and investor protection in the EU.

We were on opposite sides of the Brexit divide, perhaps the most divisive issue since 1945. Steve publicly campaigned hard to end the jurisdiction of EU law and institutions in the UK. Paul voted Remain but was much less concerned about the issues. Steve is sometimes lauded, but still widely hated for his efforts. Many of Paul’s colleagues were shocked that he didn’t care very much about an issue they saw as existential. We met on Zoom during Covid, when we shared similar concerns about the harms of lockdowns. The libertarian MP and the leftie academic didn’t expect the call to last very long. But we agreed on much more than we expected to – and we liked one another. We wrote against ‘vaccine passports’ in The Times. Paul was astonished by comments on the article, which were overwhelmingly about Steve’s work on Brexit, which had nothing to do with vaccine passports. Paul was attacked by several colleagues not only for disagreeing with lockdowns, but also for collaborating with a horrible Brexiteer.

The Introduction sets out from an ethnographic vignette to specify the book’s anthropological approach to data-rich science. It briefly reviews the literature on the social practices of data use in the sciences. It then argues for setting out from the tenet that humans are fundamentally evaluative and attending to social interactions and accountabilities by means of ethnography. Doing so helps making sense of data-centric socialities: forms of social coordination unfolding in the making, use, and publication of data. Adopting this view, readers discover a view of ethics that is mindful of all participants and see how researchers learn from technicians about data production, instruct new data users, use diagrams to cultivate data, engage mundane reasoning to resolve disjunctive findings, organize collaborative work, manage issues of normativity in “open science,” and seek to encode their knowledge in datasets. The Introduction concludes with a description of ethnographic fieldwork and a discussion of its representativeness and generalizability.

This chapter explores human cognition as a set of interconnected processes – perception, memory, attention, learning, reasoning, and executive function that allow us to adapt flexibly to complex environments. It contrasts human cognition with artificial intelligence, showing how neural networks and transformers borrow inspiration from the brain but lack intuition, context sensitivity, and self-awareness. Through examples from neuroscience and AI, the chapter highlights how both systems process information, learn, and make decisions. It argues that the future lies not in replacing human cognition but in building augmented cognition – partnerships where AI amplifies human thought and creativity rather than substituting for it.

Su Shi was a major poet and outspoken opponent of a major policy reform program enacted during his lifetime. His writings reflecting that opposition eventually succeeded in attracting the ire of the reformers, who tried to make an example of him by imprisoning him and then sending into a series of exiles, each one more distant and harsh than the one before. These actions taken against Su Shi succeeded only in enhancing his fame. His affective buoyancy during periods of exile set him apart from the tradition of self-pitying writings composed by earlier exiled officials and helped to make him into an icon of uncrushable self-sufficiency in the face of political oppression. This chapter discusses the his life in the context of his struggles in an out of imperial officialdom, as well as the circle of friends who rallied around and admired him. Reference is also made to Su Shi’s literary talent for producing poetry that is at once striking for its imaginative flights and unusually accessible in its language, which helps to account for its enduring appeal even to readers today.

(2) This chapter traces Western scholarship on the Song period from 1920 to 2000. Relatively little was published in Western languages on the Song period before World War II, but afterward the field became quite active both in Europe and the US. Etienne Balazs initiated the Sung Project in Paris in 1954. During the same period, in the US considerable progress was made in translating Song primary sources into English. Conferences also helped the field grow, especially ones sponsored by the Committee on Chinese thought. In the US, government and foundation support for China studies in the 1960s and 1970s made it possible for the Song field to steadily grow, and fields like social and economic history became particularly strong. Song scholars formed the Society for Song-Yuan Studies, published a journal, and met each year at the meeting of the Association for Asian Studies.

I present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Slovakia, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, I 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.

I 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 introduce a logarithmic variant of the characteristic form. In the case of abelian extensions, we prove the equality of the filtration by the logarithmic upper ramification groups and cohomological filtration.The logarithmic characteristic form is the same as the refined Swan conductor up to the sign. In the positive characteristic case, the existence of the refined Swan conductor is reduced to computations of Witt vectors. At the end of the book, we give a brief summary of Kato's proof of the existence of the refined Swan conductor in the mixed characteristic case.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Poland, 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 explores how the cotton field structures the symbiotic relationships among American literature, fashion, freedom, and slavery. In an era when most paper was made from cotton rags, the page as well as the shirt or shift began their interconnected lives in the cotton south. In this sense, unfreedom is woven into the physical pages of the texts that connect free U.S. Americans to each other over an increasingly expansive United States. However, worn next to the body, clothing and objects of fashion become apparatuses for forming distinct spheres of public discourse. Attending to the material and labor conditions that generate both fashion and literature, this chapter seeks to expand our understandings of whose lives and experiences engender and constitute public discourse. In the age of the mechanical reproduction of both texts and textiles, freedom and slavery were mass produced.