This chapter explores China’s innovative integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into its judicial system through the establishment of Internet Courts. As part of China’s broader digital transformation strategy, these courts utilise AI technologies, such as virtual courtrooms, intelligent case filing, automated document review, and blockchain-based evidence storage to improve efficiency, accessibility, and transparency in legal proceedings. Based on performance data and interviews with judges and legal practitioners, the paper evaluates how AI is reshaping judicial decision-making and court operations. While AI has enhanced speed, consistency, and administrative capacity, concerns persist over algorithmic bias, data quality, and lack of transparency in decision-making processes. Case studies from Internet Courts in Hangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai demonstrate both the practical benefits and the systemic limitations of AI in adjudication. The paper argues that although AI holds significant promise, it must be implemented with robust oversight, legal safeguards, and meaningful human involvement to prevent over-reliance. Preserving judicial discretion, ethical standards, and human empathy is crucial to ensuring that technological progress does not undermine fairness, public trust, or legitimacy in the justice system. The study contributes to broader debates on the responsible governance of AI in law and the future of judicial automation.

The conclusion brings together the findings of the previous chapters. It reiterates the importance of the mid-ninth century, since the written word was used more extensively than in prior decades to uphold and confirm social, political and economic transactions. This provides an important context for understanding the extraordinary literary endeavours of Alfred’s later reign: in the generation before Alfred, both lay and ecclesiastic people were already experimenting with – and thinking about – the social values of literary culture. It must be stressed, however, that developments were not uniform across Kent, Mercia and Wessex. Literary culture was not limited to a single agency or context, and competing visions and practices existed throughout the ninth and early tenth centuries. One of the most striking aspects to this is that, in some contexts, resources and Latin literacy levels appear to have been limited, yet documentary production continued. If anything, such limited resources intensified the value of the written word as a commodity. The Conclusion also considers what follows in the mid- and late tenth century. Several strands of continuity are identified, though social and institutional changes need to be borne in mind.

The archaeology of Byzantium is the archaeology of an empire whose chronological bounds, broadly speaking, spanned the fourth through fifteenth century AD. The authors whose works are collected in this handbook examine methods and practice of Byzantine archaeology as well as the materials typically encountered in artifacts produced within the imperial boundaries. Byzantine archaeology is still a relatively young discipline, and, while vast in its scope and ambition, work in the field tends to be challenging to access. This volume aims to remedy this situation by providing current views of the nature of Byzantine archaeology, exploring crucial studies which elucidate salient features of the empire’s people, as well as offering glimpses of how things may develop in the near future.

Philosophers are increasingly examining climate emotions – feelings experienced in response to the climate crisis. Yet anger has received surprisingly little attention. This is striking, since anger is renowned for being a strong motivator of collective action against injustice and the climate crisis is widely framed as an issue of justice. We begin by clarifying the notion of “climate emotions” and the criteria for assessing their rationality. We then argue that anger is both non-instrumentally justified–because the climate crisis involves clear injustices to which anger is a fitting response–and instrumentally rational, insofar as it can motivate beneficial individual and collective action. In doing so, we identify appropriate targets of eco-anger and argue that climate obstructionists constitute its most urgent object. Our argument is empirically informed and empirically generative, generating specific hypotheses and concrete directions for empirical work on the topic. We conclude by offering recommendations for how eco-anger can be effectively mobilized in the pursuit of climate justice.

Chapter 6 is a case study of multilingual communication in social work. It draws on in-depth interviews carried out with eighteen UK social workers. The interviews included vivid accounts of challenging scenarios. In one of them, a child protection team manager had to sit with a family for two hours while trying to contact a Vietnamese interpreter. A different social worker had concerns that human interpreters could fail to convey explicit but crucial details relating to rape and sexual abuse. Machine translation was used in all such cases. Its balance of risks and benefits was sometimes clear. More often, it was highly complex. Two problems raised by the social workers are foregrounded in the chapter. The first is the issue of languages for which both human and technological resources are less abundant. The second concerns additional needs that involve more than a barrier between verbal languages. The chapter draws attention to the practical challenges of navigating cultural and linguistic differences in the provision of social services. It echoes the social workers’ requests for more guidance and support.

Learning Outcomes

After reading this chapter, the reader will be able to

• Understand the distribution of energy density in a black body radiation as a function of wavelength and temperature

• Derive classical laws of black body radiation such as Wien distribution law and Rayleigh–Jeans law

• Get an idea about the development of quantum theory of radiation

• Understand Planck's quanta postulates and explain the black body radiation spectrum

• Derive Planck's law of black body radiation

• Verify Planck's law of black body radiation experimentally

• Derive Wien distribution law and Rayleigh–Jeans law and explain ultraviolet catastrophe from Planck's law of black body radiation

• Determine the temperature of cosmic microwave background radiation using Planck's law of black body radiation

• Solve numerical problems and multiple choice questions on black body Radiation

11.1 Introduction

Figure 11.1 The whole electromagnetic spectrum. Thermal radiation ranges in frequency from the shortest infrared rays through the visible-light spectrum to the longest ultraviolet rays.

Radiation emitted from the surface of a heated source is known as thermal radiation. In this process, thermal energy is spread out in all directions in the form of electromagnetic radiation and travels directly to its point of absorption at the speed of light. It does not require an intervening medium for its propagation. The wavelength of thermal radiation ranges from the longest infrared rays through the visible-light spectrum to the shortest ultraviolet rays. Such electromagnetic spectrum is shown in Figure 11.1 as a function of frequency. The distribution of radiant energy with their corresponding intensities within various ranges of wavelengths is governed by the temperature of the emitting surface .

This chapter explores the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and dispute system design (DSD), emphasising AI’s dual role in both generating and resolving civil disputes. It begins with the notion of civil justice, then introduces a general analytic framework for DSD, detailing how conflicts – ranging from neighbourhood disputes to campus tensions – can be managed through facilitative and adjudicative processes, both online and offline. The chapter examines AI’s potential as a third and fourth party in dispute resolution, discussing its applications in predicting conflicts, enhancing negotiation, and designing conflict management systems. Through case studies in social networking, community disputes, and student conflicts, the chapter highlights AI’s ability to analyse data, provide mediation services, and improve accessibility, while also addressing concerns of fairness, accountability, and privacy in technologically driven dispute resolution.

On 15 January 2021, Malaysia requested consultations with the European Union, France and Lithuania pursuant to Article 4 of the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (DSU), Article XXII of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994 (GATT 1994), Article 14 of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement) and Article 30 of the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM Agreement) regarding the measures and claims set out below.

The archaeology of Byzantium is the archaeology of an empire whose chronological bounds, broadly speaking, spanned the fourth through fifteenth century AD. The authors whose works are collected in this handbook examine methods and practice of Byzantine archaeology as well as the materials typically encountered in artifacts produced within the imperial boundaries. Byzantine archaeology is still a relatively young discipline, and, while vast in its scope and ambition, work in the field tends to be challenging to access. This volume aims to remedy this situation by providing current views of the nature of Byzantine archaeology, exploring crucial studies which elucidate salient features of the empire’s people, as well as offering glimpses of how things may develop in the near future.

In this chapter, we aim to put the occurrence and role of emotions in the political arena in a broader sociological and psychological perspective. First, we argue that the increasing manifestation of emotions in political contexts is part of a broader societal trend in the Western world, which we describe as the emotionalisation of society. The informalisation of social relations after World War II in many Western countries has strongly contributed to the blurring of the private and the public but is now further reinforced by the widespread use of social media, Second, we discuss the roles that emotions serve in political contexts, referring to the politicization of emotions. We provide a theoretical framework in the context of increasingly entangled private and public spheres, the growing emphasis on emotions in current society and the group-based and enduring nature of political emotions. We argue that emotions have not only become a strategic tool in parliamentary politics but that emotions more generally have become important in politics at large, serving a moral function in political identities, judgements and actions, which further reinforces the emotionalisation of society.

U.S. empire depends upon the logics of sexual normativity for their natural-seemingness. As an epistemological project, US empire shapes our understanding of what sexuality means. This chapter offers that the history of American literature and empire reveal how sexuality is inherently political, that desire is itself part of the political world; its contours are filtered through the relations of race and power that operate in the public sphere. There is a lot we don’t know about sexuality: it is too amorphous a collection of acts, desires, fantasies, and ideas to claim dominion over. What we know, however, is that US empire’s remapping of power relations, norms, identities, and territory operates with and through the desires we hold to be most intimate, and that American literary study is key to better understanding the sexual scope of empire’s reach.