In societies that rely on the economic framework of consumer capitalism, materialistic values, whereby individuals place high importance on acquiring money and material goods to improve well-being and status, tend to be rife. Materialistic values, however, negatively impact human health and well-being. One way in which they do this is by facilitating environmental degradation. Psychological research demonstrates that strong materialistic values can directly lead to lower levels of physical and mental health. In contrast to the problems presented by materialistic values and lifestyles, flow experiences, whereby people are completely immersed in an activity, may offer a means of limiting environmental violence and enhancing human well-being. The benefits of flow for well-being are well documented within the field of positive psychology. Further, research is beginning to show that flow may be able to support sustainable outcomes by occurring in activities with low environmental costs and encouraging stronger self-transcendent values. This chapter reviews the evidence to show that materialistic values support environmental violence before considering how flow experiences can offer an antidote that would allow us to reduce environmental violence and to live better and more sustainably. In doing so, practical recommendations are made for how to encourage flow experiences across society.

Chapter 20 offers insight on the qualities of assessments that are best able to support learners’ linguistic progress. The four principles of assessment are presented to equip teachers with the knowledge they need to select, adjust, and design assessments for their unique learning contexts. Alternative assessments, like e-portfolios, are also discussed as ways in which teachers can improve learners’ attitudes toward the target language.

This chapter introduces compound sentences, as the components of these complicated sentences have equal importance. Four types of common compound sentences are examined: coordinative, successive, incremental, and alternative. Each type is introduced in terms of specific correlative markers and their meanings and uses.

The notion of ’alternative’ is central to analyses of various semantic/pragmatic phenomena, such as disjunction, focus, discourse structure, questions, and implicature. However, basic questions concerning the various notions of alternatives have not received the attention they deserve, e.g. what exactly these notions signify, or how they are supposed to interact. This chapter reflects on such questions, centering on appeals to alternatives in characterizations of focus, disjunction, discourse goals (questions under discussion), and interrogatives. More precisely, this chapter criticizes the conflation of the set of focus alternatives with the meaning of an interrogative, discusses two conceptions of the alternatives introduced by disjunction (algebraic and attention-based), and departs from the predominant view of QUDs as, essentially, linguistic questions that represent discourse goals.

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is widely used among Americans, including older adults. These approaches are not generally taught as part of conventional medical curricula or used in mainstream medicine. Most patients who use CAM also use conventional care, but many do not communicate their use with their conventional providers. There is value in providers familiarizing themselves with CAM philosophies and practices. This would facilitate open communication and ultimately improve patient care. CAM modalities are broadly grouped under the categories of mind and body therapies (e.g., mindfulness, meditation, hypnosis, yoga, tai chi, acupuncture, massage, chiropractic, and reiki), natural products (e.g., herbs, botanicals, vitamins, minerals, and probiotics), and whole medical systems (e.g., traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, homeopathy, and naturopathic medicine). Burgeoning CAM research shows that specific CAM therapies and whole medical system approaches can have positive impacts on illness, well-being, and function, especially in older adults. Moreover, integrative medicine – the selective incorporation of CAM diagnostic and healing approaches into mainstream health care – can enhance health and quality of life for older persons, throughout the continuum of care.

In the USA, commercial contracts often include tiered or stepped dispute resolution schemes that comprise multiple, varied mechanisms for resolving conflict. Contractual relationships are particularly suitable for tiered processes that accommodate business priorities, although critiques raise issues regarding necessity, utility and enforceability. Where courts have found contractual negotiation or mediation provisions to be valid and enforceable, the manner in which they address non-compliance under such agreements varies. When a party to a multi-step process fails or refuses to participate in contractually required negotiation or mediation prior to arbitration, there may be issues as to whether the consequences should be addressed in court or via arbitration. Despite being conventionally disfavoured in the USA, many neutrals have experience with ‘switching hats’ – ie moving from being mediator to being arbitrator, or vice versa – in the course of resolving disputes. Guidelines for the use of multi-tier processes take into account the uncertainties associated with judicial handling of stepped agreements as well as their inherent complexities, while recognising potential benefits.

Mark Bould’s chapter on “Speculative Fiction” begins with Jonathan Lethem’s literary critical counterfactual in which the genre border between science fiction and mainstream literature never existed and all novels about science were considered one group. As Bould points out, the very term slipstream itself was coined by Bruce Sterling to refer to the disconcerting works of science fiction that played across the edges of varied genre definitions. Heady mixtures of literary conventions have informed all regions of fiction since then, as speculative fiction draws on and critiques archaic and futurist literary movements representing empire, environmentalism, disability, illness, violence, as well as racial, gendered and sexual alterities.

The Introduction situates contemporary public banks as socially contested and institutionally dynamic financial institutions. It presents the book's core argument that public banks are resurgent not by virtue of being publicly owned but because of the institutional functions they have acquired over time and can perform within class-divided society. These functions are not neutral within global financialised capitalism but are pulled between private and public interests. This leaves open the possibility for pro-public, green & just orientations. The chapter provides the book's methodology, rationale, and overview of the book’s structure.

The capitalist system cannot exist without unlimited “development,” “growth,” “expansion,”and it is leading,in the next few decades,to an ecological catastrophe without precedent in human history. A radical alternative must therefore be an anticapitalist one.Ecosocialism is one such antisystemic alternative.It is a current of ecological thought and action that appropriates the fundamental gains proposed in Marxism, while shaking off any productivist dross. Ecosocialists see both the logic of markets and the logic of bureaucratic authoritarianism,as it existed in the former USSR,as incompatible with the need to safeguard the environment in general and the climate in particular. Ecosocialism is an attempt to provide a radical civilizational alternative,based on the basic arguments of the ecological movement,and of the Marxist critique of political economy.

We concluded the previous chapter by introducing two methods of inference concerning the parameter vector. Since the Bayesian approach was one of them, we focus here on the competing frequentist or classical approach in its attempt to draw conclusions about the value of this vector. We introduce hypothesis testing, test statistics and their critical regions, size, and power. We then introduce desirable properties (lack of bias, uniformly most powerful test, consistency, invariance with respect to some class of transformations, similarity, admissibility) that help us find optimal tests. The Neyman–Pearson lemma and extensions are introduced. Likelihood ratio (LR), Wald (W), score and Lagrange multiplier (LM) tests are introduced for general hypotheses, including inequality hypotheses for the parameter vector. Monotone LR and the Karlin–Rubin theorem are studied, as is Neyman's structure and its role in finding optimal tests. The exponential family features prominently in the applications. Finally, distribution-free (nonparametric) tests are studied and linked to results in earlier chapters.