What Alberto Manguel claims for Talmudic and Islamic book culture can be extended to the history of reception of storytelling through text and image in Mesopotamia. In this book, storytelling, in general, and mythmaking, in particular, have been categorized as essential cognitive and cultural strategies of world-making to make sense of experience, to explain social and cosmic order, and, consequently, to structure knowledge in order to respond to future challenges and expectations. Thus, cognition and cultural learning merge in the process by which the ancient scholars, whom I regard as the primary agents behind the creation of texts and images receive, reactualize, and rework former material. Due to their orientational and expository nature, storytelling and mythmaking can claim their rightful place as systems of knowledge besides other systems of knowledge, including divination, magic, Listenwissenschaft, et cetera and should be considered on a par with logical reasoning. In other words, in its endeavor to create meaning, mythmaking is an epistemic and world-making endeavor. The diachronic approach in this book made it obvious that, despite its localized expression, the creation of a cultural repertoire of text and image revolving around the ruler was shared by the elites throughout Mesopotamia and contributed to their cultural identity, self-understanding, and self-representation. This repertoire was informed by core metaphors and conveyed in all media including myth, image, architecture, and ritual, with each medium creating its own narrative framework. It has also shown that the transfer of knowledge over centuries and millennia was not transmitted in a linear manner, but rather that scholarly communities shared and retained collective knowledge over generations, choosing and reviving particular tropes in specific historical situations and contexts.

The concluding chapter synthesizes the book’s core findings and situates them within debates on foreign aid and economic development, the political economy of development in Africa, and China’s global economic strategy. Overall, the allocation of finance in all three country case studies, Ethiopia, Zambia, and Ghana, serves to secure political support and sustain incumbents in power. However, the strategies employed to achieve these goals differ based on each country’s unique political history and ethnic dynamics. In Ethiopia’s authoritarian context, the central challenge is maintaining loyalty and support from non-coethnics within the state. The EPRDF established ethnic federalism and justified centralized control through economic growth. In Zambia, the focus is on allocating finance to maintain the support of coethnics, prioritizing loyalty within the ethnic group. In Ghana, on the other hand, preserving power involves attracting swing voters through nonethnic coalitions, resulting in the distribution of finance aimed at broad-based support. The chapter concludes by drawing policy implications for financiers and governments, emphasizing designs that account for political incentives and strengthen transparency and oversight.

2.1 Motivations and Objectives

We have argued in Chapter 1 that a more uniform distribution of income in a population makes individuals better off economically in respect of income. Since high income inequality is likely to generate financial hardship for the lower-income sections of the population and social discontentment and political instability, any society should reduce its high inequality to a reasonably low level.

For determining the level of equality we need a yardstick that summarizes the closeness of incomes of different individuals. Such an indicator gives us a concrete idea about the deviation of the actual distribution from the norm, the distribution of perfectly equal incomes. An adequate indicator of income equality should incorporate interpersonal comparisons so that a redistribution of income from a better-off individual to a worse-off individual, such that the donor does not become poorer than the recipient, generates a better state of incomes, as desired from a social welfare standpoint. Equivalently, we say that equality increases under a progressive transfer of income, a Robin Hood operation. In the literature this notion of value judgment is known as the Pigou–Dalton transfer principle. It represents the egalitarian ethic that higher equality of incomes among individuals is socially preferred. A second value judgment involved in equality evaluation is anonymity; any reordering of incomes does not change the degree of equality – reflecting irrelevance of all characteristics other than income.

Much has been written about Maltese and its transformation into a language in its own right, both through external contact with other languages and due to internal factors. Less has been said about the English of Malta. In spite of regular criticism from purists, Maltese English has started to be regarded as a variety, distinct from others. This chapter examines the complex plurilinguistic context within which the variety has emerged and continues to flourish. It demonstrates how the socio-political context provided perfect conditions for the establishment of English as the de facto second language of Malta. Extensive use of English in different domains has also contributed to shaping the local variety in distinct ways to reflect the needs of the community (or subsets thereof) it serves. The chapter also outlines some of the more salient characteristics of the variety, in terms of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, meaning and discourse.

This chapter explores some of the distinctive characteristics of English in Tyneside in relation to the socio-historical and sociolinguistic contexts in which they have emerged, evolved and in some cases declined. The main focus is on features of phonetics and phonology, but some consideration is also given to lexis, as a useful introduction to many of the historical influences that have played a part in moulding the dialect, and to aspects of grammar and discourse, which will be seen to reflect some of the same factors that have shaped the accent. In all of these areas, there is some loss of older, traditional forms, but the story is not just one of the increasing prevalence of supraregional variants; there are also more recent developments and current changes which are themselves distinctive and therefore help to maintain the individual character of Tyneside English.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies that have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

The “information system” should provide understanding, which is needed for the practice of good citizenship. But it is not working well. This started with the rise of advertising in the late 19th century, when industrial output rose so dramatically that consumers had to be persuaded – on the basis of impulses and sentiments – to buy what they wanted rather than what they needed. When this sort of talk became obviously effective, public relations emerged to make businessmen, like Rockefeller, look good, and then, during World War I, propaganda was used to make the government look less warlike than the nasty “Huns.” Thus a powerful language of selling was introduced into American life, preferring efficacy rather than Enlightenment standards of truth, veracity, and reason. Scholarly explanations for how this all worked started with Marshall McCluhan who said that each “medium” – such as books or the telegraph – controls what kind of messages we can transmit. Then Neil Postman pointed out that the medium of commercial television will “amuse us to death” by ignoring our real needs in favor of peddling profitable wants. Thus Postman alerted us to how, since he wrote, getting our attention via slippery language has become the dominant business model for corporations today and has corrupted the marketplace for ideas.

This chapter deals with Scotland’s Northern Isles, Orkney and Shetland, which are home to two of the most conservative and distinctive local dialects in Scotland and Britain. An overview is provided of the local histories that led to the emergence of the present-day dialects and speech communities. Linguistic features are summarised and the linguistic situation discussed with regard to Scots and Scottish Standard English (SSE). To illustrate the local Scots–SSE speech range, a model of vowel variation along with text passages for the two poles is provided for Shetland. A corpus-based study of the lesser-known feature of pulmonic ingressive speech in Orkney and Shetland is presented. The chapter concludes with a discussion of ongoing societal and demographic changes and their potential effects on the linguistic situation and local dialects.

The purpose of this coursebook is to establish inter-linkage among three different features of social wellbeing – namely equality, depolarization, and tax progressivity – all based on society's income distributions. Low equality is socially dispreferred since it refers to the accumulation of a highly significant part of the total income of the society in the possession of a few. Depolarization is concerned with the improvement in the level of wellbeing of the middle-income group of the society. The existence of a rich middle class in a society is always desirable, since a wealthy middle-income group contributes highly to the society's economic growth and development in many ways. Tax progressivity investigates the extent to which equality is raised through taxation.

Chapter 1 presents an introductory outline of the materials analyzed in the remaining chapters. Chapter 2 formally defines and analyzes the notion of equality. Chapter 3 provides a rigorous treatment of the concept of depolarization.

In Chapter 4 we discuss different structural or local indicators of tax progressivity that look at the extent of progression at each income point. We look particularly at the redistributive and departure from the proportionality effects of taxation. We also investigate the implication of structural measures with respect to depolarization. One section of the chapter examines the impacts of equal proportionate income growths on revenue and redistributive effects of taxation. Given the before-tax income distribution, the impacts of equal proportionate increase in taxes on structural measures are investigated as well.

This chapter offers a new outlook on the history of Scots, a minority language related to English, up to 1700. Scots and its history have been a subject of pioneering work in historical linguistics, especially in historical dialectology and digital approaches to language change. The chapter takes stock of previous scholarship and the extra-linguistic events which shaped the linguistic situation in Scotland from the medieval period till the early eighteenth century. It then highlights problematic areas and questions related to constructing a narrative for a history of an unstandardised minority language, with special focus on defining Scots as a language of written communication, its family tree, periodisation and status, as well as metalinguistic perspectives. The discussion finishes with an overview of the most recent research on various aspects of structure and language use, and a summary of available resources for the study of historical Scots.

The 1930s did not resolve doubts about the viability of democracy, but military success in World War II enhanced democracy’s reputation. In 1951, Hannah Arendt pointed out that German citizens had not managed to stop Hitler, but discussion of their failure was set aside by American intellectuals focused on communism during the Cold War. They said, in “the end of ideology” movement, that democrats don’t have to think but to do – to oppose the USSR and to campaign for “incremental economic progress” at home. Therefore, when the Cold War ended, democrats were mostly wedded to marketplace practices of “neoliberalism” without strong political dimensions. Consequently, when that neoliberalism sagged in 2008, there was no widely shared democratic theory available to inspire resentful people. Into this vacuum stepped the Republican Party, which since Barry Goldwater had become ideologically committed to capitalism, hostile to “government activism” (such as the New Deal), enthusiastic about public “school privatization,” scornful of “abortion rights” but zealous about “religious tradition,” and set on appointing right-wing judges who would empower money more than people, as in permitting wealthy individuals and corporations to make unlimited political contributions (Elon Musk alone contributed $250,000,000 to the Republican Party in 2024). Thus the country lapsed more and more into a “culture war,” wherein Democrats were pluralistic and Republicans promoted ideological convictions.

14.1 Introduction to Association Rule Mining

Association rule mining is a rule-based technique to discover the relation between the attributes of a dataset. It is used to find the relation between the sales of item X and item Y. It is often called a “market basket” analysis, as shown in Figure 14.1. Here, the market analyst examines the items that consumers often purchase together to find the relation between the sale of item X and item Y.

In other words, when customers visit a store, they may buy a certain type of items together during a shopping trip. For example, as shown in Figure 14.1, a database of customer’s transactions (e.g., shopping baskets) is shown where each transaction consists of a set of items (e.g., products) purchased during a visit, machine learning (ML) engineers can use association mining for finding out a group of items which are frequently purchased together (customers purchasing behavior). This is also referred to as an analysis of customer purchasing behavior. For example, “IF one buys bread, THEN there is a high probability of buying butter with it”, as it is common that people who buy bread often buy butter with it. The store manager can use this information and arrange the items accordingly to increase sales and the overall efficiency of the store.

Let us consider a situation where the store manager feels that there is a lot of rush and customers always complain about the slow working of his store. He is exploring different ways to improve the efficiency of his store. He performed an association analysis and prepared a list of associated items like bread and butter. He may decide to put all these associated items together on the same shelf or near each other so that customers can find them quickly, reducing their shopping time. It will also improve the overall efficiency of the store and the sale of the products. To further improve the shopping experience of his customers, he can create different combos and put sales over these combos.