This chapter reviews research on the effects of age on emotion as well as decision making. After reviewing the neural regions involved in emotion, the chapter delves into the topics of emotion identification, emotion regulation, life satisfaction, socioemotional selectivity theory, and emotion and memory. Turning to the research on decision making and reward, the chapter considers how age affects brain activity during tasks involving reward, economic decisions, and gambling. It also discusses economic decision making in a social context and future directions in motivation research.

Australia’s botanical diversity has shaped its literature of the environment. Through a selection of novels, short stories, and poetry, this overview focuses on the literary depiction of native species such as the coolabah, paperbark, and wattle. Structured chronologically, the discussion begins with Indigenous Australian narratives of plants, arguably the world’s oldest literary representations of botanical life. In the narratives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, plants are wellsprings of material and spiritual sustenance. Between British settlement and Federation, non-Indigenous narratives of Australian flora begin to appear. In these decades, literature negotiates the strangeness of antipodean plants in comparison to familiar European species. In post-Federation literature, the relationship between flora and nation becomes more pronounced. During this period, writers increasingly foreground the clearance of forests in the post-colonial state. Contemporary literature reveals an expanded understanding of plant ecologies and conservation realities. The work of Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal during these years establishes a precedent for later literary activism. The Anthropocene literature of recent decades confronts humanity’s escalating impacts on plants especially in Australian regions. Literary works critique climate disturbance, habitat degradation, urban development, and related exigencies that continue to imperil the future of plants in Australia.

This chapter reviews the development and implementation of English school education policy following an exploratory report by the Department for Education and Skills on the future of primary school collaboration and three major Blair (Labour) government initiatives focused on inter-school collaboration: the New Labour Academies; the Secondary Leadership Incentive Grant programme; and the Networked Learning Communities programme (and their further evolution under Brown (Labour)) until 2010. It traces the dramatic intensification of these policies under the Conservative–Liberal Coalition including incentives to create new academies and Teaching Schools. The Conservative policy also revolutionised school administration and performance by removing the remaining state schools from local government control. The stated aim of a 2016 White Paper ‘Education Excellence Everywhere’ was that, by 2022, every English state school would be in a multi academy trust. It is now past 2022 and, while this goal has not been attained, there is no doubt that ten years of a combination of policy and austerity have transformed England’s state school systems.

In this chapter, we derive Sturm–Liouville theory that introduces a broad class of eigenfunctions that are convenient to use for representing functions. Sturm–Liouville theory provides the basis of the Fourier-series method of representing functions that is the main focus of the chapter and that also is the foundation of Fourier analysis. We show how to calculate Fourier series and to use Fourier series to obtain the solution of boundary-value problems posed in Cartesian coordinates. It is seen that the main advantage of an eigenfunction approach for solving boundary-value problems is that either the inhomogeneous source term in the differential equation or the boundary values may be time dependent, which they cannot be in the method of separation of variables.

Anyone can conceive the fantastical image of a ‘green sun’, but to create a world inside which a green sun will be credible and command belief requires a special skill, ‘a kind of elvish craft’. Note the metafictional artifice: fairy tales, which so often have elves as their characters, are themselves a product of elvish magic or enchantment, the ability to create imaginary worlds that other people will take for the real one. Inside these worlds, what the world contains is true: it accords with the laws of that world. J. R. R.Tolkien distinguishes between magic and enchantment. The former aims to produce a change in the real world, what Tolkien calls the primary world. Modern technology, in the sense of machine technology, Tolkien regards as akin to magic, a desire for power and for making the will more immediately effective; the word he uses in this context is ‘bulldozing’, an act of destruction, levelling mountains and filling valleys.

One family’s history of grazing in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge results in a month-long armed occupation and standoff, which ends in the fatal shooting of one rancher organizer.

The wheels came off the Japanese economy in the early 1990s, throwing into question the expos that had emerged from and contributed to the previous two decades of growth. The first casualty was the Tokyo World City Expo, planned in the late 1980s and cancelled in 1995. By the end of the decade, there was a wave of nostalgia for Expo 70, as middle-aged creatives mourned the betrayal of its promises, or bemoaned its continuing hold on the present. But expos continued to have their uses. Alongside the laments, this chapter explores how the national bureaucracy and local authorities continued to use a new system and new kinds of expos to coordinate and foster development in the regions. It argues that the complicated genesis and unexpected success of Expo 2005 in Aichi, which evolved from a spur for regional development to the first eco-expo recognized by the United Nations, shows how expos remain a tool in the armory of development, even if observers in the West and intellectuals in Japan think their time has passed.

This chapter discusses literary representations of plants in the French and francophone tradition, referencing texts and writers from Europe, the Caribbean, North America, Western Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia. Without pretending to offer an impossibly exhaustive history or a complete list of references, this essay considers a diverse set of examples to signal the broad range of these imaginary encounters with the vegetal, as well as shifting (though sometimes overlapping) approaches to botanical knowledge from the Middle Ages to the present. It also examines how and why plants have served as potent allegorical figures, and then focuses on select images of the plants themselves, noting some of their most popular species as well as the ways in which literary authors have tried to understand the otherness of the vegetal.

The main goal of this chapter is to introduce one type of AI used for law enforcement, namely predictive policing, and to discuss the main legal, ethical, and social concerns this raises. In the last two decades, police forces in Europe and in North America have increasingly invested in predictive policing applications. Two types of predictive policing will be discussed: predictive mapping and predictive identification. After discussing these two practices and what is known about their effectiveness, I discuss the legal, ethical, and social issues they raise, covering aspects relating to their efficacy, governance, and organizational use, as well as the impact they have on citizens and society.

The economic history of colonization of India is a contested field. Nationalist historiography emphasized the drain of wealth and deindustrialization. Imperialist historiography point to the globalization of the economy, construction of the railway network and access to the international capital market. This book brings together empirical evidence over four centuries to assess India’s long run development from 1600 and emphasizes the decline and stagnation in agriculture and the failure of colonial policy to increase productivity in this sector.