Khartoum’s war-displaced residents had to fight for safe space to live, work, and think, and over the late 1980s and early 1990s this was a battle over bulldozers, deportations, exploitation, and exclusion. This chapter sets out this fight over the city under the al-Ingaz regime’s civilising project from 1989, from the perspective of its new residents. To them, this was a project not of forcible acculturation but of silencing, exclusion, and disciplining of an exploitable labour force. Former residents explain their choices in navigating these forces to make measures of security and neighbourhood safety, including their renaming of space in this new displaced city. The political geography that this period of state violence and popular resistance created by 1994 sets the terrain for the rest of the book.

As the most ‘delightful’ and ‘useful’ of genres, biography occupied a high place in Johnson’s ranking of literary genres, and he wrote many kinds of biography. All were aimed at raising the audience’s moral aspirations, showing them what was humanly possible. By the same token, sentimental panegyrics were no use, because they were too unrealistic to help the reader; they might also be based on falsehood, and Johnson is consistently sceptical towards stories that sound too good to be true. In his early biographies, Johnson explicitly draws conclusions about virtue and vice – even condemning his late friend Richard Savage, who despite his many admirable qualities set a dangerous example of contravening ordinary ethical standards. Yet by the time Johnson wrote the Lives of the Poets more than three decades later, he approached these questions more subtly, speculating on the connection between bad morals and bad writing, and delivering his lessons with restrained irony.

In previous chapters, we introduced the fundamental principles behind understanding the value of financial investments, such as stocks, bonds, and options. However, many of these investments (such as shares of stock or bonds issued by a company or call options that allow the holder to purchase shares of a company’s stock) are based on specific companies. To fully understand such investments, it is necessary to better understand the companies that they are based on. In Chapter 8 we examined company financial statements as a first step toward analyzing companies in more detail. We now expand upon this and explore how the information from financial statements can be used to estimate the economic value of a company.

In this chapter we focus on further developing and applying our valuation tools to better understand company value. We begin by taking the perspective of an observer examining a company from the “outside,” that is, someone who cannot influence the way a company is run. In other words, given how a company is being managed by its current managers, what should its value be? Starting in the next chapter, we will consider the perspective of a manager from within a company, and determine how the actions of those running a company can affect its value.

A mini course on the functional analytic approach to convexity-based optimization theory. Familiarity with this appendix is a prerequisite for the main text.

With a legacy of sociopolitical and economic exclusion, ethnic conflicts, and an extremely arid climate, the Turkana people struggle to meet the two most basic necessities of life – food and water. One perennial river flowing from Uganda replenishes the groundwater on which the survival and growth of Lodwar depends. Lodwar’s water utility ranks poorly across national regulation metrics delivering an average of 24 litres per person per day to half of the town’s residents. Violent flash floods are known to wash away homes, people and animals almost every year. Relocating to safer grounds in peri-urban areas means losing income opportunities, education and healthcare services, and most importantly, water. A vibrant informal market has emerged, with tanker trucks and motorbikes selling water from the utility’s boreholes at high costs. For those who cannot afford vended water, scooping out dry riverbeds is the only option. With the discovery of crude oil and untapped groundwater reserves, coupled with construction of regional transport links, there is optimism for economic development in this marginalised county. Yet unless there is action to address the fundamental lack of capacity or coordination among multiple stakeholders, Lodwar’s water woes are likely to limit human and economic development.

In this chapter we review an important source of information about companies: financial statements. Financial statements are reports published by businesses and other organizations that provide investors and other stakeholders with information about a firm’s assets, liabilities, existing and potential cash flows, and so on. The core financial statements, which are usually published quarterly and annually, are the balance sheet, the income statement, and the statement of cash flows. Financial statements provide information about a firm’s current and past financial state, information that is key in figuring out a firm’s current economic value and the outlook on how the firm may perform in the future.

The chapter provides an introduction to the relationship between politics and semiotics, to Cognitive CDA as a framework for studying politics and semiotics, and to shifts in political performance and media landscapes which demand a multimodal approach to political discourse analysis. It starts by highlighting the symbolic nature of politics and the discursive means by which politics is primarily performed. The historical development of Cognitive CDA is described. The practical aims, theoretical commitments and methodological practices of Cognitive CDA are also discussed. The central position of the media in communicating politics is considered alongside the relationship between political and media institutions. Changes brought about by the advent of the internet and digital social media are discussed with a focus on the new genres of political discourse that have emerged as a result and on the more participatory forms of politics that are potentially afforded. The chapter discusses the rise of right-wing populism that has coincided with changes to the media landscape and the shifts in communicative style by which it is marked.

In virtually all societal domains, algorithmic systems, and AI more particularly, have made a grand entrance. Their growing impact renders it increasingly important to understand and assess the challenges and opportunities they raise – an endeavor to which this book aims to contribute. In this chapter, I start by putting the current “AI hype” into context. I emphasize the long history of human fascination with artificial beings; the fact that AI is but one of many powerful technologies that humanity has grappled with over time; and the fact that its uptake is inherently enabled by our societal condition. Subsequently, I introduce the chapters of this book, dealing with AI, ethics and philosophy (Part I); AI, law and policy (Part II); and AI across sectors (Part III). Finally, I discuss some conundrums faced by all scholars in this field, concerning the relationship between law, ethics and policy and their roles in AI governance; the juxtaposition between protection and innovation; and law’s (in)ability to regulate a continuously evolving technology. While their solutions are far from simple, I conclude there is great value in acknowledging the complexity of what is at stake and the need for more nuance in the AI governance debate.

Dhaka’s rivers are severely polluted by daily discharge of untreated industrial wastewater, coupled with raw sewage, and solid wastes from the city’s 20 million residents. The ready-made garment industry, a key player in the country’s economic growth since the 1990s, significantly contributes to this environmental degradation which disproportionately affects low-income riverbank communities, who rely on the contaminated water for daily activities. We explore these social inequalities through observation of people’s river use behaviour across the dry and wet seasons. In densely populated slums, women and girls turn to the rivers for washing clothes and dishes to avoid long queues at shared water points. Meanwhile, men engage in washing and bathing near bustling marketplaces and boat terminals. During the monsoon, recreational activities like swimming and fishing increase, as the rising water levels create a deceptive appearance of cleanliness. Supported by monthly river quality monitoring, household surveys, and regulatory analysis, these ‘river diaries’ paint the complexities of water-society dynamics. Findings identify priority responses for the most vulnerable today with analysis to guide the sequencing and prioritisation of major investments in water treatment infrastructure in the coming decades.

Review of the inhumane practices of people in both New and Old Worlds prior to Columbian contact. Slave trading and cruelty were widespread, and slave trading was extensive. Most slaves were female, employed in domestic or agricultural environments (with little evidence of gang-labor), and came from a wide range of geographic areas and cultures. Most were born into slavery or were enslaved as a result of raids and wars in which many men on the losing side were killed. Slave markets existed across Eurasia, though in the pre-contact New World such markets were less common. After 1500, transatlantic trafficking came to draw exclusively on Africa or at least on Black people, probably because of the long isolation of the Americas from the rest of the world, and the inability of its Indigenous population to resist harmful pathogens from the Old World. Before 1820 migration to the New World was dominated by Africans rather than Europeans and by males (in contrast to the female-dominated slave populations of the Old World). White slaves were scarcely ever present in the New World.

This conversation centres around innovation in the financial services sector and the related regulatory supervision. Three ‘Techs’ are especially relevant: FinTech, RegTech and SupTech. ‘FinTech’ combines the words ‘financial’ and ‘technology’ and refers to technological innovation in the delivery of financial services and products. ‘RegTech’ joins ‘regulatory’ and ‘technology’ and describes the use of technology by businesses to manage and comply with regulatory requirements. ‘SupTech’, finally, unites the words ‘supervisory’ and ‘technology’ to refer to the use of technology by supervisory authorities such as financial services authorities to perform their functions. Particular approaches presented in this session include regulatory sandboxes to promote innovative technology in the financial sector, automated data analysis, the collection and analysis of granular data, digital forensics and internet monitoring systems. The speakers also address collaboration between financial institutions and supervisory authorities, for example, in the creation of data collection formats and data sharing.