Early childhood is a time of profound growth and development and early experiences during this period have important implications for life-long health and development. Evidence for the benefit of investing in early childhood is so strong that it is considered a public health issue by many researchers and policymakers. This chapter explores efforts within Cooperative Extension in fostering health and well-being among young children, suggesting a holistic approach that involves supporting children’s parents and caregivers, early childhood educators, and fostering a positive context in which children can thrive. Extension continues to play important roles in providing culturally responsive education to families, working with families to cocreate knowledge, and assisting communities in supporting the well-being of young children for lifelong success. Specific examples of promising programs are provided to highlight the impactful work conducted by Extension to support young children around the country.

Rural communities. Rural families. Both face challenges and opportunities for viability and security. The Rural Families Speak Project has been studying rural families with low incomes for over twenty years, listening to the voices of families and sharing their stories of challenges as well as resiliency with policymakers and community educators. Select findings of this rich body of work focused on four domains – food insecurity, economic security, health, and family well-being – and are shared in this chapter along with implications and recommendations for community outreach and education. In particular, the roles that Extension can play in serving rural communities and families are presented. This chapter illustrates the translational linkage between research and Extension work highlighting the importance of integrating research and practice.

Entrepreneurship can have transformative impacts that benefit rural areas and uplift underserved communities. In higher education, entrepreneurship instruction has grown over the last half century but is in its nascent stage in nonformal youth development settings. This chapter highlights the value of Extension youth entrepreneurship education programs that are contextualized, account for the audience’s unique needs and available resources, are designed with clear program goals to frame effective delivery and evaluation, and that build capacity for sustainable programmatic implementation. We further propose that Extension can draw from and capitalize on the current literature on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education for best practices in program development. Finally, we describe UpStarts, an entrepreneurship program that is intended to support positive socio-cognitive outcomes (e.g., entrepreneurial mindsets) and foster social connections among youth in rural communities. Implications focus on the role of Extension in translating research to effective practices to support youth entrepreneurship education in the communities.

The family is a critical context for youth development. Whether it is through neighborhood, school, or activities, families are critical to determining which spaces youth are accessing and in which spaces they are learning. Some of these determinations are intentional, such as when a parent registers a child to participate in an activity; other determinations are unintentional, such as a neighborhood highway prevents a child from getting to an afterschool activity. Families are also responsible for the more mundane aspects of youth programs such as cost, transportation, and scheduling. Extension is uniquely positioned to support the health and well-being of youth, and in helping meet various challenges through family engagement. Extension has talented staff with skills and expertise in building community partnerships, working within and on behalf of families and communities, and working in partnership with youth, families, and communities to develop new ways of working. This chapter explores ways in which Extension has promoted positive youth development through family engagement and offers new ways of thinking about how Extension might do this work differently going forward.

As the largest publicly funded, nonformal education system in the United States, Cooperative Extension (a.k.a. “Extension”) has played a critical role in how technologies and innovations generated through state agricultural experiment stations (AES) and land-grant universities (LGUs) in the United States have been translated and shared directly to its constituents for over a century. Extension has served as a unique and robust system to collaborate, generate, and disseminate research, as well as to engage in mission-oriented work to support communities in optimizing their current and future circumstances and through collaborative partnerships shaping the ways in which we cultivate and preserve food, how we educate and care for our children, manage our finances, work with communities, and support populations disproportionality affected by structural inequities. The current volume brings together leading scholars to discuss Extension’s contributions to the well-being of children, youth, families, and communities; and to critically reflect on Extension’s future directions in light of significant shifts in the context in which it now operates.

The Cooperative Extension System plays a critical role in the tripartite mission of the land-grant university system – serving as a means of disseminating research findings generated in universities and research centers for the direct benefit of people of the community in which it is embedded. Rooted in agricultural education and initially focused on supporting well-being among residents of rural communities, Extension has evolved to address the needs among the country’s changing demographic. In this chapter, we will provide an overview of demographic changes that have had important implications for Extension programming; describe examples of federal, state, and regional initiatives that address new challenges and meet the needs of a rapidly diversifying audience base; as well as highlight current gaps and areas that need further attention. We end the chapter by proposing future directions in Extension programming to better address the needs of diverse populations.

Extension is uniquely positioned to reach and support underserved and underrepresented families. Although Extension excels at providing evidence-based programming for mothers, children, and youth, it has generally been less successful in engaging fathers. Recent evidence finds increased balanced sharing of caregiving responsibilities and fathers’ desire to engage with their children. Engaging fathers and incorporating father-centric programming is more important than ever. This chapter will highlight promising strategies for engaging fathers in Extension, including an example of a statewide needs assessment, technology-based programming, and community-based partnerships. We describe available evidence-based programs and approaches, both currently utilized with fathers and aptly positioned to accommodate fathers, along with promising opportunities and important considerations for Extension moving forward. Shifting the focus to better serve fathers in family-based programming will better engage and support underserved and vulnerable families, and Extension is a system that is critically important for meeting this challenge.

This chapter explores various aspects and examples of analogy and extension, with particular attention to their interrelations. Analogy can be understood as an automatic cognitive process by which what is known is extrapolated to what is considered similar, which leads to similar outcomes, that is, extension. Later cognitive development usually prevents incorrect analogy. Extension following perceptual analogy in conventional semiotic systems produces changes in the system; instead of being interpreted as erroneous, it should be considered as a reflection of evolving human perception. Thus, semiotic systems generally evolve via extension generated by analogy, which can be illustrated by language and graphemics. Analogy between graphemic systems in contact may induce intergraphemic extension, and analogy between different categories of a given graphemic system may lead to intragraphemic extension. Because graphemic systems are related to language in many ways (for example, to elements of phonemic and morphemic systems), analogy concerning graphemics may produce intersemiotic extension, either from language to graphemics or in the opposite direction. The seemingly ideal synchronic correlation between graphemics and linguistic elements may have been caused by historical analogy and extension between them, and this evolution can be studied by diachronic analysis of language–writing relations.

This chapter reviews the existing Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) work on diachronic syntax and morphosyntax and shows how the tools of language description developed by RRG can also be used to account for several aspects of language change. Drawing evidence from developments which have occurred in a wide range of languages, it is argued that RRG allows for a more fine-grained analysis of diachronic processes than theoretically neutral approaches, that it answers fundamental questions about the nature and causes of syntactic change, and that it is not a mere tool of linguistic description, but a theory that makes falsifiable empirical predictions.

Chapter 7 explains rules on the duration of safeguard measures and the system of incentives for the establishment of safeguards with relatively short duration. Chapter 7 also explains the process of review for extension of safeguards and the requirements to that effect. It further explains the gradual liberalization process that is envisaged during the period of application of a safeguard measure and the concept of a mid-term review. Chapter 7 also explains the complex rules foreseen to avoid the reintroduction of safeguard measures that have been applied in the past.

Spinoza’s philosophy of mind has been subject to widely divergent interpretations. What explains this lack of consensus? The principal reason is that Spinoza’s notion of an attribute and its relation to his substance monism is poorly understood. This chapter begins by setting out some interpretative difficulties regarding Spinoza’s notion of an attribute in general. It will then explain Spinoza’s conception of the attributes of thought and extension in particular. Next, it will explain how Spinoza argues for the structural similarity of the mental and physical realms from his claim that the mind and the body are one and the same thing conceived under different attributes. This will require developing a new interpretation of Spinoza’s notion of attribute. This interpretation will both explain why his philosophy of mind has been subject to such contradictory interpretations as well as solve a host of interpretative difficulties that have long vexed commentators. The chapter will conclude by explaining how Spinoza’s denial of mind-body causal explanation is compatible with his assertion of mind-body identity.

Chapter 9 looks beyond CODA in two ways. On the one hand, CODA is only one among many established ways to examine human thought; linguistic analysis can be easily and fruitfully combined with other methods. The first half of this chapter addresses triangulation with performance and other observable data as well as subtler measures such as reaction times and eye movements, and also includes brief discussions of cognitive modelling and corpus linguistic methods. On the other hand, CODA is rarely used purely for its own sake; more often than not, linguistic analysis is part of a wider goal. Results can be used for a multitude of applications and purposes, including implementation in automatic systems that support human everyday needs. Therefore, the second half of Chapter 9 concludes the book with a discussion of practical applications for the methodology in academia and beyond, in applied and interdisciplinary fields such as architecture and artificial intelligence, and also looks at how CODA results can be made more accessible using suitable visualisation tools. The final section provides a brief wrap–up of the book's main messages.

The chapter presents a traditional model of partially defined predicates, its rejection of bivalence, and its responses to versions of the Sorites. An intractable problem with the model is then identified as arising from three assumptions: (i) the language containing the predicates is spoken by a vast but ill-defined community, (ii) the linguistic rules make fine-grained distinctions that go unnoticed by speakers, and (iii) the rules are abstracted from uses of the predicates. Progress, it is argued, requires dispensing with (i), embracing a plurality of micro-languages, and using them to construct perfected versions of (ii) and (iii). The resulting model defines the micro-language centered on an individual x at a time in terms of the dispositions of x to affirm or deny certain predicates of objects. Coordinated languages constructed from micro-languages centered on different individuals in a communicative situation allow one to assign assertive contents to uses of sentences. Given this, one can show how precise, knowable (though unknown) demarcations between items in the range of a vague predicate are determined. The technique, available to both defenders and opponents of excluded middle, can be used to reconstruct attractive responses to the Sorites, without some important defects.