Weather regime type and frequency are key diagnostics to interpret regional climate. The statistical methods used to downscale the centres of action in the mean atmospheric state to their family of weather regimes (WR) according to climate mode phases are presented in detail. The North Atlantic–European region is used as an example of WR decomposition of the mean climate. The chapter focuses on the identification of WR types for each region of the Southern Hemisphere and their spatio-temporal variability in relation to climate mode phase. These are the reference WRs for the interpretation of synoptic paleoclimate in each of the climate proxy chapters that follow. WRs are presented for the Maritime Continent, northern and central Australia, South Pacific Convergence Zone, Tasman Sea, New Zealand and southwest Pacific, eastern Pacific, Brazil to Uruguay, southwest Africa, southern Africa, eastern Africa, subtropical western Australia, southwestern Australia, southeastern Australia, the south Indian, south Pacific, and south Atlantic sectors of the Southern Ocean, and coastal Antarctica, including Patagonian South America, the Antarctic Peninsula, and the East Antarctic.

This chapter explores the history of anticolonial sociology in Latin America between 1950 and 1970 with two case studies from the region: (a) the nationalist sociology promoted by Afro-Brazilian scholar Alberto Guerreiro Ramos (1915–1982) and (b) the critique of scientific colonialism advanced by Colombian Orlando Fals Borda in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which led to a new form of social science methodology called Participatory-Action Research (PAR). Despite their differences, Ramos and Fals Borda shared a diagnosis of colonialism as a cultural and economic phenomenon that jeopardized the autonomous development of peripheral societies. While most postcolonial and decolonial scholars are skeptical about the democratizing potential of sociology, Fals Borda and Ramos demonstrate that it is possible to integrate a radical political position against colonialism into a rigorous form of sociology that does not reject the common heritage of the discipline.

This chapter focuses on the glaciochemistry of Antarctic ice cores and their applications as aerosol tracers of atmospheric, sea ice, and oceanic variability. Marine aerosol–climate relationships are discussed using marine boundary layer, air–sea exchange, and cloud science. Glaciochemistry theory is presented for interpreting marine ion concentrations in ice cores as circumAntarctic wind-field and paleoweather tracers, sea ice extent, concentration, and polynya tracers. Similarly, non-marine aerosol ion glaciochemistry is examined, with applications including nitrate concentration as polar stratosphere and katabatic wind-field proxies; non-sea-salt sulphate as a volcanism proxy; and mineral dust as long-range air-mass tracers. Dust typing and mineral fingerprinting methods are discussed to identify Southern Hemisphere source areas. Air mass trajectory methods, both forward and backward, are presented to relate ice core ion glaciochemistry and dust particles as aerosol tracers to reconstruct large-scale atmospheric circulation, climate mode, and regional weather regime history during the interglacial and glacial periods.

This chapter assesses the critique of Indian anticolonial nationalism by A. R. Desai, a Marxist sociologist during the post-independence period (1950s to 1990s). By initiating a debate on the class orientation of Indian nationalism and analyzing the exploitative capitalist processes by the nation-state in post-independence India, Desai overturned the complex and convoluted relationship between anticolonial thought, nationalism, coloniality, and social science scholarship in India. He confronted the existing social anthropological and structural functionalist school of thought dominating sociology in the early years after independence while his project of Marxist historical sociology contributed to the creation of new areas of research for sociology in India. The chapter also highlights some of the limitations in Desai’s scholarship and suggests that his sociology was about opening up new areas of research rather than doing a rigorous Marxist analysis of class relations.

Drawing on an ongoing conflict over hydrocarbon development in a protected area in Southern Bolivia, this chapter explores resource frontiers as key sites of juristocratic reckoning, where international and national discourses of rights are simultaneously invoked and undermined by violent processes of accumulation by dispossession. A leading example of transformative constitutionalism, Bolivia’s 2009 Constitution defined the country as a “Plurinational State” and recognized an array of new rights for Indigenous, originary, and peasant peoples, including in relation to territory and the environment. Yet state dependence on natural gas extraction has produced a widening gap between legal discourse and practice. This chapter asks: What new forms of politics emerge as communities at extractive frontiers reckon with the possibilities and limits of law and rights to confront ongoing processes of environmental dispossession? The arrival of oil companies in the Tariquía Reserve catalyzed a wave of human rights education in remote rural communities, yet a series of failed constitutional challenges have exposed the limits of law and rights as instruments to counter state-led extraction. Rather than turning away from rights, the chapter argues that community activists in Tariquía see themselves as custodians of the 2009 Constitution against the state. Their embodied praxis of territorial defense points to a form of juristocratic politics from below, in which the state’s monopoly on political and legal authority is called into question.

Companies come into existence through registration. As discussed in Chapter 4, for a company to be registered it must have a constitution and/or have adopted all or some of the replaceable rules set out in the Corporations Act. The constitution and/or replaceable rules establish the internal rules that govern how the company operates. This chapter discusses the importance of these rules, whom they bind, and how they can be amended. It also discusses the rules that apply when there is a variation of the rights attaching to shares.

This chapter covers the response of tropical to subantarctic glaciers to variability in tropospheric and sea-surface temperature, lapse rates, and precipitation. Glacial behaviour is reflected in regional weather patterns: air mass transport, temperature, precipitation and humidity, insolation/cloud cover, wind speed, and large-scale circulation. Glacier types, climate zones, and physical processes are used to define the latitudinal continuum of climate–glacier coupling. The glacial archive is examined using indicators of glacial structure and geomorphology, their mapping, and geochronological methods. Glacier mass balance characteristics are defined by climate and glacier morphometrics, including equilibrium line altitude, vertical balance profiles, glacier tongue length, balance ratios, and accumulation–area, area–altitude, and geomorphic–altitude relationships. Glacier mass balance and reaction times are examined via energy balance, glacier dynamics, and flow-line modelling. Approaches to reconstructing glacial behaviour include numerical weather forecast modelling and synoptic typing based on ice core geochemistry and relationships to weather regimes and climate variability.

Chapter 6 shows how it is possible to use demographic metadata to study identities in health-related corpora. We present two case studies, based on research on patient feedback on NHS services in England. The first study compares how cancer patients of different age and sex groups evaluate healthcare services and, specifically, how they use distinct linguistic and rhetorical strategies to do this. The corpus was encoded with demographic metadata which allowed the researchers to explore the language used by people of different age and sex identity groups. For the second study, a different corpus of more general patient feedback was used, one which did not contain demographic information metadata. Instead, targeted searches were used to identify patients’ demographic characteristics based on cases where they made those characteristics explicit within their feedback. In contrasting these case studies, we also evaluate the two different approaches taken, considering the affordances and limitations of both. Taken together, the case studies demonstrate how language and identity can be explored in corpora with and without reliable demographic metadata.

In the ‘betweens’ of art, research and teaching, this chapter adopts an a/r/tographic approach to explore children’s learning through media art within the Anthropocene, a proposed epoch that acknowledges human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. This learning is thought of as ‘connected learning’, a type of learning that emphasises the integration of educational experiences across various settings, leveraging new media to foster innovative approaches to knowledge creation. The idea of connected learning aligns with the linked concept of children’s lifeworlds – which Arnott and Yelland take to encompass the everyday interactions that children negotiate in daily life as well as the less visible social, technical and material forces that shape those experiences – and the significance of Land as a participant in children’s learning. Children co-labour (or collaborate) with words, materials, technologies and Land to make meaning with their lifeworlds (e.g. semiosis as a process of wording and worlding). They do this in situated practice and through speculation (e.g. by asking “What if...?) to examine possible futures and alternative realities.

Why do peat and peatlands matter in modern Russian history? The introduction highlights peatlands as a prominent feature of Russia’s physical environment and reflects on their forgotten role as providers of fuel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It discusses the invisibility of peat and peatlands in most existing historical narratives of the fossil fuel age and identifies peat as a lens to reflect upon Russia’s place within global histories of economic growth and associated resource-use. Situating the book at the intersection of modern Russian, energy, and environmental history, the introduction underscores why the planetary predicament makes the seemingly marginal history of peat extraction a topic of global significance.

This chapter summarizes the key conclusions of the book, which examines how the Internet has transformed human interaction by fostering virtual communities and reshaping knowledge, authority, and legitimacy. Through an analysis of discursive practices in digital spaces, the book reveals how democratic participation online challenges traditional institutions and disrupts established knowledge hierarchies. Central to this inquiry is the tension between increased access to information and the erosion of institutional trust, exemplified by case studies such as the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE) and the COVID-19 ‘infodemic.’ The book further investigates misinformation, political communication through memes, and the rise of online activism, showing how digital communities shape discourse and build connective identities. Critical issues such as online human rights, free speech, and legal regulation are explored, with a particular focus on the metaverse and digital vigilantism. By addressing these complex dynamics, the book highlights the evolving challenges and opportunities of online discourse and stresses the importance of ongoing research as society adapts to the rapidly changing digital landscape, including innovations in Generative AI.

This chapter presents a metacognitive AI approach via formal verification and repair of neural networks (NNs). We observe that a neural network repair is a form of metacognition, where trained AI systems relearn until specifications hold. We detail Veritex, a tool for reachability analysis and repair of deep NNs (DNNs). Veritex includes methods for exact and over-approximative reachability analysis of DNNs. The exact methods can compute the exact output reachable domain, as well as the exact unsafe input space that causes safety violations of DNNs. Based on the exact unsafe input–output reachable domain, Veritex can repair unsafe DNNs on multiple safety properties with negligible performance degradation, by updating the DNN parameters via retraining. Veritex primarily addresses the synthesis of provably safe DNNs, which is not yet significantly addressed in the literature. Veritex is evaluated for safety verification and DNN repair. Benchmarks for verification include ACAS Xu, and benchmarks for the repair include an unsafe ACAS Xu and an unsafe agent trained in deep reinforcement learning (DRL), where it is able to modify the NNs until safety is proven.

This chapter is the first of two chapters that examine what can happen when a company cannot pay its debts. It discusses the types of action that can be taken other than winding a company up, focusing upon receivership, schemes of arrangement, small business restructuring and voluntary administration. The chapter commences with a discussion on insolvency, and how it may be determined. This is a complex question, relying on an array of information specific to each company, beyond a company’s demonstrated assets and liabilities according to a balance sheet. Each of the actions the chapter considers are also demonstrative of different aspects of insolvency law, with different motivations and outcomes. Receiverships differ from other types of arrangements discussed in this chapter because they usually involve a receiver being appointed to look after the interests of one secured creditor.