Advancements in ceramic production technology during the Song period, coupled with a mature transportation and market system, resulted in ceramics of higher quality and greater variety becoming available to both domestic and overseas consumers. While the export of ceramics began prior to the Song, it reached new heights during this period, as evidenced by the records related to the Maritime Trade Superintendency, archaeological discoveries from the “Chinese Quarter” in Hakata and the Nanhai yihao shipwreck, and the prized collections of Japanese high authorities. As Chinese ceramics became integral to the daily lives of overseas consumers or even took on new functions abroad, ceramics production outside China also progressed, fostering more active exchanges of technologies and commodities between China and the wider world.

This chapter examines the significance of fashion in Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street. Briefly tracing the use of fashion, gloves, and related accessories in American and Black women’s literature, the chapter closely reads two moments in the novel in which the protagonist, Lutie Johnson, dons white gloves. The chapter argues that although the gloves are signs of Lutie’s financial aspirations and facilitate her movement away from her confined apartment, the gloves ultimately fail to protect her from the violence of the street.

This chapter examines Indigenous nation-building as a critical strategy for bridging gaps between policy intent and meaningful connection to Country, focusing on the Western Australian Aboriginal Empowerment Strategy. It highlights persistent disparities stemming from settler-colonial governance, where institutions often fail to address Indigenous cultural, social, economic, and ecological priorities. The analysis shows how empowerment efforts encounter resistance when they challenge entrenched power dynamics, reflecting systemic reluctance toward transformative change. In contrast, Indigenous nation-building provides a self-determined framework for governance, development, and community empowerment rooted in Aboriginal worldviews. The chapter assesses Western Australia’s Closing the Gap Implementation Plan 2023–2025 through this lens, underscoring the importance of cultural integrity, truth-telling, genuine partnerships, and shared decision-making. It concludes with recommendations for institutional reform, arguing that only deep systemic change can deliver equity and improved outcomes for Aboriginal communities.

Understanding the sources and consequences of luck has important behavioural and policy implications. Most prior research has treated luck as the residue of rationality, models or foresight. This chapter proposes a novel approach to help quantify the impact of luck and its interaction with human behaviours, particularly useful for behavioural data scientists. It illustrates the approach using three datasets with contexts that generate idiosyncratic patterns and behavioural implications, labelled swing luck, undeserved luck and network-bounded luck. The chapter concludes by discussing how this approach can be applied to other contexts and its scope conditions.

The probabilistic method is now an integral part of combinatorics. We introduce the basic methods, including Markov’s and Chebyshev’s Inequalities, the local lemma, concentration of measure, the Chernoff Bound, martingales, Poisson approximation, and correlation inequalities. Two salient examples are the Hoeffding– Azuma Inequality and Janson Inequalities, and we give some brief applications of each result, including balancing vectors, random graphs, property B, concentration of chromatic number, and triangles in random graphs. The tools discussed in this chapter are used frequently in the material covered by this text.

This chapter explores the psychological impacts of climate change, focusing on how communities adjust to disruptions in place caused by extreme events. It argues that global adaptation frameworks, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, often overlook psychological factors such as grief, place attachment, and the need to repurpose or redefine damaged environments. Drawing on examples from Australia and the United States, the chapter shows how these psychological dimensions shape community resilience, adaptation, and collective action. By critically examining existing adaptation policies, it identifies significant gaps in acknowledging the central role of psychology in shaping sustainable responses. The chapter advocates for integrating psychological insights into policymaking and community engagement to support more effective, equitable climate strategies. Ultimately, it stresses that recognising these relationships with place is essential for addressing the difficult choices that arise when beloved environments become unliveable due to escalating climate risks.

Mistakes and missteps in theory development and testing are inevitable but there are ways to decrease them. One way to detect potential problems is to outline the definitions, scope conditions, assumptions and finally derivations. Stripping down the theory to the simplest form helps spot definitions that are not precise or derivations that are not sound. Once done, it becomes easier to diagnose problems and think through potential solutions. Another way to find potential problems is to talk through your ideas with others—especially those you know to be skeptical. Having to explain your logic and then your potential tests with others can provide invaluable feedback and can make you rethink aspects of your formulations.

Behavioural Data Science is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of behavioural science, data science, computer science, statistics, engineering and economics. This chapter offers a historical overview of the field’s evolution –from foundational developments in early computation and decision theory to the modern integration of machine learning, artificial intelligence and digital behavioural data. We explore major milestones, methodological innovations and successful applications across health, education, business and public policy. In addition to tracing this growth, we address the complex challenges the field faces, including ethical concerns, data limitations and interpretability of algorithmic models. We demonstrate how these formative tensions shaped the field’s development and continue to inform its future trajectory. The chapter concludes with a forward-looking perspective on how emerging technologies such as generative AI and quantum computing may further refine the goals, tools and ethical frameworks of Behavioural Data Science.

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.

This chapter yokes sartorial fashion and the literary trends that cultural colossus Rabindranath Tagore shapes and critiques in the early twentieth century. Bringing the figure of the dandy to a global stage in his late novel Shesher Kobita or Farewell Song (also translated as The Last Poem, 1928), Tagore lightly cloaks a manifesto on self-fashioning, modernist literary form, and the power of style. Farewell Song not only draws upon the history of textiles in Bengal, but also occasions a contest of fashions between British and Bengali forms of dress. The ensuing debate between Fashion and Style speaks across aesthetic fields and serves to highlight India’s rightful place on the modernist literary stage.