Books on the topic 'Growing Robots'

We are running out of water, robots will take our jobs, we are eating ourselves to an early death, old age pension and health systems are bankrupting governments, and an immigration crisis is unravelling the European integration project. A growing number of nightmares, perfect storms, and global catastrophes create fear of the future. One response is technocratic optimism — we’ll invent our way out of these impending crises. Or we’ll simply ignore them as politically too hot to handle, too uncomfortable for experts — denied until crisis hits. History is littered with late lessons from early warnings. Cynicism is an excuse for inaction. Populism flourishes in the depths of despair. Despite the gloom, there is another way to look at the future. We don’t have to be pessimistic or optimistic — we can find realistic hope. This book is written by an international and influential collection of future shapers. It is aimed at anyone who is interested in learning to refresh the present, forge new common ground, and redesign the future.

Studies of animal locomotion and its control have generally focused on species with articulated, stiff skeletons, largely ignoring the contributions of soft tissues. Attempts to create animal-like performance in robots illustrate the limitations of using rigid-body mechanics alone. There is a growing appreciation that soft structures are critical for producing robust and adaptable behaviors in complex environments. Studies of predominantly soft animals could help to accelerate our understanding of the biomechanical role of deformable materials and their control. This chapter focuses on our current understanding of locomotion in terrestrial soft animals. It highlights the critical distinction between purely hydrostatic systems that control movements by pressurization and those that can remain relatively soft and exploit stiff substrates (the environmental skeleton strategy). The final section describes biomimetic devices that have been inspired by both animal strategies to show how such biological solutions might be employed to build controllable, highly deformable mobile machines.

Before flying saucers, robot monsters, and alien menaces invaded the movies of the 1950s, there was already a significant body of animated science fiction, produced by such studios as Disney, the Fleischers, and Terrytoons. That work has largely been overlooked or forgotten, despite the fact that the same pre-World War II era that produced this group of short films also saw the more prominent development and flourishing of SF as a literary genre. This book surveys that neglected body of work to show how it helped contribute to the burgeoning SF imagination that was manifested in pulp literature, serials, feature films, and even World’s Fairs of the era. It argues that prewar cartoons helped to create a familiarity with the scientific and technological developments that were spurring that SF imagination and build an audience for this new genre. Demonstrating the same modernist spirit as SF literature and feature films, these cartoons adopted many of the genre’s most important motifs (rockets and space travel, robots, alien worlds and their inhabitants, and fantastic inventions and inventors), offered comic visions of the era’s growing fascination with science and technology, and framed that matter in a nonthreatening fashion. Popular animation thereby not only added another dimension to the SF imagination, but also helped prepare postwar audiences to embrace SF’s vision of the future and of inevitable change.

Digital technologies are exerting a growing influence on the lives of children and teenagers: from video monitoring of babies and educational robots in nursery school to AI-powered learning assistants used to guarantee individual success in education. However, issues relating to privacy, surveillance and data protection are seldom reflected on with regard to this sensitive and important social sphere. The majority of these applications generate data which reveal a great deal about the adolescents who use them. This study addresses this subject area. Together with practitioners from the field of education and with the goal of laying the foundations for addressing this issue in both academic and (socio-) political discourse, it depicts interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary exchange that extends beyond disciplines and academic borders. The authors Regina Ammicht Quinn, Jutta Croll, Sephan Dreyer, Michael Freidewald, Elena Frense, Marit Hansen, Asmae Harrach-Lasfaghi, Jessica Heesen, Gerrit Hornung, Andreas Janson, Nicole Krämer-Mertens, Leonie Kreidel, Marco Leimeister, Yannic Meier, Judith Meinert, Maxi Nebel, Carsten Ochs, Dr. Senta Pfaff-Rüdiger, Alexander Roßnagel, Sofia Schöbel, Reinhold Schulze-Tammena, Matthias Söllner, Ingrid Stapf and Prof. Dr. Isabel Zorn.

Most philosophers of psychiatry as well as psychiatrists themselves believe that instead of revising psychiatric categories, researchers should attempt to discover causal mechanisms that can explain these common clusters of signs and symptoms. But what sorts of causal explanations can realistically be hoped for? We argue here that psychiatric nosologists should aim to construct categories that represent robust patterns in the data that emerge from our best theories. The portmanteau term “robust pattern” introduces two philosophical terms: Dennett’s real patterns, and Wimsatt’s theory of robustness. Robust patterns are best seen heuristically, as categories growing out of empirical theories in response to practical needs. In the case of schizophrenia, we explore how a robust pattern approach might differ from a traditional diagnostic kind as formulated by the DSM. We conclude by considering the ontological status of diagnostic categories viewed as robust patterns, and comparing this with a “natural kinds” approach.

This book explores the intertwining domains of artificial intelligence (AI) and ethics—two highly divergent fields which at first seem to have nothing to do with one another. AI is a collection of computational methods for studying human knowledge, learning, and behavior, including by building agents able to know, learn, and behave. Ethics is a body of human knowledge—far from completely understood—that helps agents (humans today, but perhaps eventually robots and other AIs) decide how they and others should behave. Despite these differences, however, the rapid development in AI technology today has led to a growing number of ethical issues in a multitude of fields, ranging from disciplines as far-reaching as international human rights law to issues as intimate as personal identity and sexuality. In fact, the number and variety of topics in this volume illustrate the width, diversity of content, and at times exasperating vagueness of the boundaries of “AI Ethics” as a domain of inquiry. Within this discourse, the book points to the capacity of sociotechnical systems that utilize data-driven algorithms to classify, to make decisions, and to control complex systems. Given the wide-reaching and often intimate impact these AI systems have on daily human lives, this volume attempts to address the increasingly complicated relations between humanity and artificial intelligence. It considers not only how humanity must conduct themselves toward AI but also how AI must behave toward humanity.

Computational propaganda is a growing concern in Western democracies, with evidence of online opinion manipulation orchestrated by robots, fake accounts, and misinformation in many recent political events. China, the country with the most sophisticated regime of Internet censorship and control in the world, presents an interesting and under-studied example of how computational propaganda is used. This chapter summarizes the landscape of current knowledge in relation to public opinion manipulation in China. It addressees the questions of whether and how computational propaganda is being used in and about China, whose interests are furthered by this computational propaganda; and what is the effect of this computational propaganda on the landscape of online information in and about China. It also addresses the issue of how the case of computational propaganda in China can inform the current efforts of Western democracies to tackle fake news, online bots, and computational propaganda. This chapter presents four case studies of computational propaganda in and about China: the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield project; positive propaganda on Twitter aimed at foreign audiences; the anti–Chinese state bots on Twitter; and domestic public opinion manipulation on Weibo. Surprisingly, I find that there is little evidence of automation on Weibo and little evidence of automation associated with state interests on Twitter. However, I find that issues associated with anti-state perspectives, such as the pro-democracy movement, contain a large amount of automation, dominating Chinese-language information in certain hashtags associated with China and Chinese politics on Twitter.

We live at a time when human lifespans have increased like never before. As average lifespans stretch to new lengths, how does this impact the values we hold most dear? Do these values change over the course of our ever-increasing lifespans? Ending Midlife Bias argues that at different life stages, different values emerge as central. During early life, caring and trust matter more, given human vulnerability and dependency. By early adulthood, growing independence provides a reason to value autonomy more. Later in life, heightened risk for chronic disease and disability warrants focusing on maintaining capabilities and keeping dignity intact. Part I (Chapters 1–5) sets forth a conceptual framework that captures these shifting life stage values. Chapter 1 argues against the privileging of midlife values (midlife bias) and explains why population aging lends urgency to identifying values for later life. Chapters 2 and 3 introduce dignity as a central concern for older adults and argue that respecting dignity requires supporting central human capabilities. Chapter 4 explores the metaphor of life as a story, which serves as a corrective for midlife bias by keeping attention on the whole of life. Chapter 5 sets forth principles for age group justice. Part II (Chapters 6–12) turns to practical concerns, including geriatric and pediatric bioethics (Chapter 6); caregiving by family members, migrant workers, and robots (Chapters 7 and 8); ageism in clinical trials, healthcare allocation, and mandatory retirement (Chapter 9); and ethics at the end-of-life (Chapter 10). The closing chapters explore the future of population aging (Chapter 11) and make a pitch for life stage sensitive moral theory (Chapter 12).

This chapter sets out the importance of adolescent mental health—how the first 1,000 weeks of life provide a more robust time frame for health and development—despite being underserved, underresourced, and underdeveloped. Both positive and negative mental health can affect adolescent well-being. There is a growing evidence base on need and emerging interventions that should be incorporated into holistic adolescent services. This chapter provides an overview of pathways of promise, ranging from social protection, individual and group work, parenting and community interventions, and the promise of a pathway in cyberspace. Mental and physical health are intimately intertwined, and no program of provision for adolescents should fail to address mental health and well-being.

Anxiety disorders are highly common in children and adolescents and are associated with significant impairment. This group of disorders includes a broad range of specific diagnoses that often co-occur. Well-established assessment measures exist to facilitate accurate differential diagnosis and characterization of anxiety disorders. Evidence-based treatments also are available. Cognitive behavior therapy has a uniquely broad and robust evidence base, although newer treatments such as attention bias modification training and parent accommodation interventions are the source of growing attention. Current research in the field includes attempts at understanding the basic nature of anxiety disorders, the development of new treatments, and innovative approaches to addressing the key challenge of limited access to treatment.

The current chapter considers personality disorder in adolescents. In keeping with the evidence-based approach taken in this volume, the focus is on adolescent borderline personality disorder (BPD), as BPD currently has the most robust evidence base in terms of assessment and treatment in adolescents. While understudied relative to other disorders of childhood and adolescents, the current chapter summarizes the nascent, but rapidly growing, literature base for the definition, prevalence, assessment, and intervention of BPD in adolescents. Assessment and intervention are considered from the vantage points of both the leading treatment approaches to BPD, namely, dialectical behavior therapy and mentalization-based treatment. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the next frontier for BPD research in adolescents.

The United States is among the most religiously diverse countries in the world. Although such diversity is not a new phenomenon, its degree and visibility have increased dramatically in the past fifty years, reigniting the debate over a fundamental civic question: What is the common identity that binds us together? How we respond to religious diversity in the context of education has enormous implications for our democratic society. To the extent that previous frameworks such as exclusion or assimilation ever were desirable or effective, they no longer are. Increased religious diversity is an established fact and growing trend. The United States needs a more inclusive and robust civic framework for religious diversity in the twenty-first century—pluralism—and this framework should be an essential component of civic education.

This chapter reviews the status quo of research on talent management in nations with emerging economies. It highlights a number of major challenges confronting these nations and some of the initiatives of the nation states to combat the bottleneck caused by talent shortages in their economic development. The chapter highlights the research conducted on various aspects of talent management, and it presents a set of research agendas for future studies. Further, it shows that research on talent management in emerging economies has largely focused on a small number of countries and multinational corporations. While there is a growing level of understanding of the effectiveness and types of talent-management activities in different national contexts and types of organizational settings, future research in this field would benefit from drawing on a broader set of disciplinary perspectives and using more robust research design and systematic analysis of practices, processes, and outcomes.

Countries worldwide recognise the need for further efforts to develop robust and comparable policy-relevant evidence on government performance that can feed into the policy-making cycle. Despite this consensus and the growing quantity of data along with technological advances, many governments still have trouble generating, collecting, synthesising, and using evidence to inform decisions. This chapter looks at both the supply and demand sides of policy-related evidence to highlight some of the challenges faced by evidence producers and users as well as some of the solutions that have emerged and seem to hold potential. The search for appropriate indicators to monitor and evaluate open government initiatives provides a practical example of how the challenges can be dealt with. From the discussion arise a number of recommendations for improving governance indicators, the evidence on which they are based, and the way their findings can be put to use.

This chapter explores the emergence of “new British nature writing” in the twenty-first century and identifies new approaches to its subject and form produced in response to the scale of harm registered by the growing awareness of environmental crisis. It interrogates the notion of “new” nature writing and the ways that it has been received, considering its continuities and breaks with the legacies of the tradition in Britain alongside ecocritical arguments concerning the concept and representation of nature and human–nonhuman relations. The chapter examines defining characteristics of the form— interest in urban, suburban, and industrial landscapes; attention to spatial and temporal intersections of people and place; a re-evaluation of ideas such as “natural” and “wild”; and a critical self-consciousness regarding the representation of nature — in key works by writers including Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie, Helen Macdonald, Roger Deakin, and Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts.

Chapter 11, “Brian Tatler and His Family,” describes a middle-class European American family with two children. Brian and his younger brother went to day care and spent two afternoons a week with their grandmothers while their parents worked full-time. Brian was a placid child and an avid participant in pretend play, whose special stuffed animals were almost like family members. The Tatler family enjoyed a robust expressive life, which included singing, book reading, and telling a hybrid genre of stories of their own invention, which became part of Brian’s bedtime ritual. Brian was learning to be comfortable with his feelings within a set of family practices that were highly attuned to the full spectrum of emotional life. His parents believed that he had high self-esteem, citing his growing awareness of his own successes, his positive attitude, his willingness to try new things, and his ability to shift focus when upset.

Since the first edition of theOxford Handbook of New Religious Movements(2004), the growing field of media, religion, and culture has moved at a rapid clip. The previous emphases on theoretical approaches that imagined a significant distinction between online and offline practices has been largely replaced by approaches that attend to the entanglement of digital and physical worlds. Research within this new analytical turn speaks about the Internet and religion in terms of third spaces, distributed materialities or subjectivies, and co-constitutive histories and locations. Highlighted within these works are the negotiations and intersections of consumer practices, popular culture, information control and religious pluralism online. As the field continues to develop, theoretical approaches that emphasize entanglement will help disclose the various relationships of power by which the material practices of religion, media, and technology are produced - allowing scholars to trace robust histories of multiplicity by which the contemporary imaginaries of religion, media, and technology are inherited.

Key points• Memory clinics provide a valuable service for the assessment and management of people with memory difficulties.• They have also provided a focus for the initiation and monitoring of antidementia drug treatments.• They have grown in number and range of services they provide over the years.• A robust accreditation programme exists to assess the services and service standards.• As the number of people coming forward for investigation of memory problems increases, memory clinics may need realigning more to community and primary care settings.

Depressive disorders are highly prevalent and among the most debilitating conditions in late life. If untreated, depression has profound effects on quality of life and health; it also increases the risk for dementia, other comorbidities, functional decline, and mortality. Although primary care is the principal setting for the detection and treatment of depression, older adults and particularly, minorities do not always receive evidence-based treatment guidelines. Thus, new care models are urgently needed. This chapter considers the role of community- and home-based approaches to depression care, their theoretical underpinnings and advantages, and exemplary programs. Twenty-three rigorously tested community- and home-based interventions with positive depression outcomes are identified, suggesting a robust and growing evidence base. Community- and home-based approaches may overcome persistent mental health disparities by reaching underserved populations, minimizing stigma by normalizing depression detection and delivering treatments at home, and increase access to nonpharmacological approaches—such as psychosocial and behavioral approaches—f or older adults who are at risk for or have late-life depression.

The Pilbara region in Australia’s arid northwest is rich in flora that is suited to extreme temperatures and boom and bust cycles of moisture availability. It is also a region important for its natural resources. In places where mining activities have finished and the land is under management for ecological restoration, there is increasing demand for information about native plant communities and the biology of their seeds. Pilbara Seed Atlas and Field Guide is the first book to combine plant identification with robust, scientific criteria for cost-effective seed-based rehabilitation. It describes 103 regional plant taxa and provides guidelines for effective collection, cleaning, storage and germination of their seeds. It addresses issues such as timing of collection, quality and viability of seed, and dormancy release, which are essential for successful restoration programs. With photographs to portray the subtle differences and unique features of each species’ biology, this book will be of great use to practitioners in the field, including environmental consultants, rehabilitation companies, commercial seed collectors and government authorities, as well as naturalists and people interested in growing the Pilbara’s remarkable plants.

Sánchez and Sanchez have selected, edited, translated, and written an introduction to some of the most influential texts in 20th century Mexican philosophy. Together, these texts reveal and give shape to a unique and robust tradition that will certainly challenge and complicate traditional conceptions of philosophy. The texts collected here are organized chronologically and represent a period of Mexican thought and culture that emerges out of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and cultimates in la filosofía de lo mexicano (the philosophy of Mexicanness), which reached its peak in the 1950s. Though the selections respond to a variety of philosophical questions and themes and will be of interest to a wide range of readers, they represent a tendency to take seriously the question of Mexican national identity as a philosophical question—an issue that is complicated by Mexico’s indigenous and European ancestries, its history of colonialism, and its growing dependency on foreign money and culture. More than an attempt simply to describe the national character, however, the texts gathered here represent an optimistic period in Mexican philosophy that aimed to affirm Mexican philosophy as a valuable, if not urgent, contribution to universal thought and culture.

As media consumption in modern society has expanded, along with the number of outlets by which individuals consume media, there is an ever-growing body of popular television shows that underscore ideas related to criminological theory as well as the criminal justice system. Crime TV provides an examination of criminological theory as well as the criminal justice system as manifested in popular television shows. The contributions to the volume approach these issues from a variety of angles. Some center on classical, positivist, and social structural theories such as techniques of neutralization, labeling theory, and social bonds, using shows including Archer, Criminal Minds, 13 Reasons Why, Breaking Bad, and The Fall. Others highlight critical and cultural criminological frameworks such as radical feminism and conflict theory through shows including The Walking Dead, Mr. Robot, Homeland, The Defenders, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and The Handmaid’s Tale. Finally, several address the criminal justice system and crime through shows including Game of Thrones, American Crime, Westworld, Black Mirror, and Follow the Money. The specific benefits of the current volume are multifaceted. First, it can be used as a pedagogical tool to attract students to criminological theory and the criminal justice system. Second, as a significant proportion of students have access to streaming services, the shows exemplified in the text are generally accessible to them. Third, the volume highlights information pertaining to the criminal justice system and criminological theory commonly misconstrued in pop culture.

Oil palms are ubiquitous-grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Jonathan E. Robins shows, sweeping social transformations carried the plant around the planet. First brought to the global stage in the holds of slave ships, palm oil became a quintessential commodity in the Industrial Revolution. Imperialists hungry for cheap fat subjugated Africa’s oil palm landscapes and the people who worked them. In the twentieth century, the World Bank promulgated oil palm agriculture as a panacea to rural development in Southeast Asia and across the tropics. As plantation companies tore into rainforests, evicting farmers in the name of progress, the oil palm continued its rise to dominance, sparking new controversies over trade, land and labor rights, human health, and the environment. By telling the story of the oil palm across multiple centuries and continents, Robins demonstrates how the fruits of an African palm tree became a key commodity in the story of global capitalism, beginning in the eras of slavery and imperialism, persisting through decolonization, and stretching to the present day.

The influence of the ICESCR in Latin America is significant, since countries in the region have increasingly incorporated ESCR into their legal systems during the last three decades. Several national constitutions contain such rights, and domestic courts have growingly recognized their justiciability. Also, ESCR have entailed new collective procedures and discussions about access to justice and the role of the judiciary. While the great majority of Latin American States have adopted a regional instrument dealing with ESCR, the delay between its adoption and entry into force allowed the ICESCR to decisively influence the regional bodies. Notwithstanding the robust normative incorporation of ESCR into domestic legal systems, the region is marked by poverty, inequality, and basic ESCR deprivation, which shows a failure to translate legal advances into a reduction of social injustice. The huge gap between legal recognition of rights and their implementation is a central challenge to be addressed.

In the past several decades, there has been a growing chorus of voices contending that the Supreme Court and federal judiciary should stay out of foreign affairs and leave the field to Congress and the president. Challenging this idea, this book argues instead for a robust judicial role in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. The book demonstrates that the Supreme Court and federal judiciary have the power and duty to apply the law without deference to the other branches. Turning first to the founding of the nation, the book shows that the Constitution's original commitment to separation of powers was as strong in foreign as domestic matters, not least because the document shifted enormous authority to the new federal government. This initial conception eroded as the nation rose from fledgling state to superpower, fueling the growth of a dangerously formidable executive that today asserts near-plenary foreign affairs authority. The book explores how modern international relations makes the commitment to balance among the branches of government all the more critical and considers implications for modern controversies that the judiciary will continue to confront. At a time when executive and legislative actions in the name of U.S. foreign policy are only increasing, the book makes the case for a zealous judicial defense of fundamental rights involving global affairs.

The Cold War was a period of hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union as the two superpowers engaged in a nuclear arms race. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, some scholars perceived that Russia’s military-industrial complex has deteriorated considerably, and that the country has fallen behind the United States and Europe in the area of information technologies and other strategically important sectors of national economy. Others insist that the image of Russia’s political irrelevancy and demotion of the country to a status of a “small” or even “medium” power is mistaken. The new Russia, they argue, has never surrendered its claims as a great power. Discussions about Russia’s global role have been fueled by its continuing nuclear standoff with the United States, along with growing concerns about its plans to develop more robust nuclear deterrents and modernize its nuclear arsenals. There is substantial scholarly literature dealing with Russia’s foreign, security, military, and nuclear policy, as well as the role of nuclear weapons in the Russian security framework. What the studies reveal is that the nuclear option remains an attractive alternative to Russia’s weakened conventional defense. Today, as before, Russia continues to place a high premium on the avoidance of a surprise attack and relies on its nuclear capabilities for strategic deterrence. There are a host of issues that deserve further investigation, such as the safety of Russia’s nuclear sites and the regional dimension of its nuclear policy.

This volume provides a practical, hands on guide to the design, planning, conduct, analysis, and interpretation of epidemiological studies. The learning points are applicable to all human studies of health and disease that require the collection and analysis of data to answer questions on disease risk, health outcomes, and the effects of interventions in ‘real world’ populations. It summarizes the main study designs used in epidemiological from purely quantitative studies to assess incidence and prevalence, to the range of observational studies used in the modern practice of epidemiology. A substantial section is devoted to the practical aspects of conduct of epidemiological studies, balancing scientific quality with practicality: the latter covering issues such as costs and ethics. This book also provides a detailed menu of activities that takes the investigator through all the necessary steps following the collection of individual subject data through to generating the statistically robust results necessary to reach conclusions about the questions asked. It provides insights into how to use existing data (secondary data analysis) to answer epidemiological questions, an increasing activity in this era of ‘big data’. Similarly, with a growing epidemiological literature, with multiple studies seemingly addressing the same question, the volume explores how practically to synthesize the results of such multiple investigations and the role of meta-analysis. The book’s ultimate goal is to provide a practical toolkit to enable the successful completion of questions appropriate for applying epidemiological methods.

In this fresh and fascinating chronicle of Christianity in the contemporary South, historian and minister James Hudnut-Beumler draws on extensive interviews and his own personal journeys throughout the region over the past decade to present a comprehensive portrait of the South’s long-dominant religion. Hudnut-Beumler traveled to both rural and urban communities, listening to the faithful talk about their lives and beliefs. What he heard pushes hard against prevailing notions of southern Christianity as an evangelical Protestant monolith so predominant as to be unremarkable. True, outside of a few spots, no non-Christian group forms more than six-tenths of one percent of a state’s population in what Hudnut-Beumler calls the Now South. Drilling deeper, however, he discovers an unexpected, blossoming diversity in theology, practice, and outlook among southern Christians. He finds, alongside traditional Baptists, black and white, growing numbers of Christians exemplifying changes that no one could have predicted even just forty years ago, from congregations of LGBT-supportive evangelicals and Spanish-language church services to a Christian homeschooling movement so robust in some places that it may rival public education in terms of acceptance. He also finds sharp struggles and political divisions among those trying to reconcile such Christian values as morality and forgiveness—the aftermath of the mass shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E. Church in 2015 forming just one example. This book makes clear that understanding the twenty-first-century South means recognizing many kinds of southern Christianities.

This book confronts the hotly debated prospect of mounting job losses from automation, and the divergent hopes and fears that prospect evokes, and proposes a strategy for mitigating the losses and spreading the gains from shrinking demand for human labor. Leading economists have concluded that automation is already exacerbating inequality by destroying more decent middle-skill jobs than it is creating. As ongoing innovations in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics continue to chip away at the comparative advantages of human labor in a range of work tasks, those innovations are likely to yield growing job losses in the foreseeable future—or likely enough that we should reckon with this prospect. The book argues that we should set our collective sights on ensuring broad access to adequate incomes, more free time, and decent remunerative work even in a world with less of it. That will require not a single “magic bullet” solution like universal basic income or a federal job guarantee, but rather a multifaceted strategy centered on conserving, creating, and spreading work. The book elaborates that strategy in the US context, but much of it is broadly relevant to other advanced economies. And while the proposed strategy is designed to address a foreseeable future of job scarcity, it will also help to rebalance lives already plagued by either too much work or not enough and to counter both economic inequality and racial stratification. The proposed strategy makes sense here and now, and especially as we face up to a future of less work.

What kind of nuclear strategy and posture does the United States need to defend itself and its allies? According to conventional wisdom, the answer to this question is straightforward: the United States needs the ability to absorb an enemy nuclear attack and respond with a devastating nuclear counterattack. These arguments are logical and persuasive, but, when compared to the empirical record, they raise an important puzzle. Empirically, we see that the United States has consistently maintained a nuclear posture that is much more robust than a mere second-strike capability. How do we make sense of this contradiction? Scholarly deterrence theory, including Robert Jervis’s seminal book, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy, argues that the explanation is simple—policymakers are wrong. This book takes a different approach. Rather than dismiss it as illogical, it explains the logic of American nuclear strategy. It argues that military nuclear advantages above and beyond a secure, second-strike capability can contribute to a state’s national security goals. This is primarily because nuclear advantages reduce a state’s expected cost of nuclear war, increasing its resolve, providing it with coercive bargaining leverage, and enhancing nuclear deterrence. This book provides the first theoretical explanation for why military nuclear advantages translate into geopolitical advantages. In so doing, it resolves one of the most intractable puzzles in international security studies. The book also explains why, in a world of growing dangers, the United States must possess, as President Donald J. Trump declared, a nuclear arsenal “at the top of the pack.”

India is fast overtaking China to become the most populous country on Earth. By mid-century, its 1.7 billion people will live in what is projected to become the world’s second-largest economy after China. While a democracy and an open society compared to China, assertive Hindu nationalism is posing new challenges to India’s democratic freedoms and institutions at a time when illiberal democracies and autocratic leaders are on the rise worldwide. How India’s destiny plays out in the coming decades will matter deeply to a world where the West’s influence in shaping the 21st century will decline as that of these two Asian giants and other emerging economies in Africa and Latin America rise. In India in the 21st Century, Mira Kamdar, a former member of the New York Times Editorial Board and an award-winning author, offers readers an introduction to India today in all its complexity. In a concise question-and-answer format, Kamdar addresses India’s history, including its ancient civilization and kingdoms; its religious plurality; its colonial legacy and independence movement; the political and social structures in place today; its rapidly growing economy and financial system; India’s place in the geopolitical landscape of the 21st century; the challenge to India posed by climate change and dwindling global resources; wealth concentration and stark social inequalities; the rise of big data and robotics; the role of social media and more. She explores India’s contradictions and complications, while celebrating the merging of India’s multicultural landscape and deep artistic and intellectual heritage with the Information Age and the expansion of mass media. With clarity and balance, Kamdar brings her in-depth knowledge of India and eloquent writing style to bear in this focused and incisive addition to Oxford’s highly successful What Everyone Needs to Know® series.

In the 1980s, health was a marginal issue on the international political agenda, and it barely figured into donor states’ foreign aid allocation. Within a generation, health had developed a robust set of governance structures that drove significant global political action, incorporated a wide range of actors, and received increasing levels of funding. What explains this dramatic change over such a short period of time? Drawing on the English School of international relations theory, this book argues that global health has emerged as a secondary institution within international society. Rather than being a side issue, global health now occupies an important role. Addressing global health issues—financially, organizationally, and politically—is part of how actors demonstrate their willingness and ability to help realize their moral responsibility and obligation to others. In this way, it demonstrates how global health governance has emerged, grown, and persisted—even in the face of global economic challenges and inadequate responses to particular health crises. The argument also shows how English School conceptions of international society would benefit from expanding their analytical gaze to address international economic issues and incorporate non-state actors. The book begins by building a case for using the English School to understand the role of global health governance before looking at global health governance’s place in international society through case studies about the growth of development assistance for health, the international response to the Ebola outbreak, and China’s role within the global health governance framework.

The chapters in this volume concentrate on the Dissenting traditions of the United Kingdom, the British Empire, and the United States. The Introduction weaves together their arguments, giving an overview of the historiography on Dissent while making the case for seeing Dissenters in different Anglophone connections as interconnected and conscious of their genealogical connections. The nineteenth century saw the creation of a vast Anglo-world which also brought Anglophone Dissent to its apogee. Yet any treatment of the subject must begin by recognizing the difficulties of spotting ‘Dissent’ outside the British Isles, where church–state relations were different from those that had originally produced Dissent. The chapter starts by emphasizing that if Dissent was a political and constitutional identity, then it was a relative and tactical one, which was often only strong where a strong Church of England existed to dissent against. It also suggests that in most parts of the world the later nineteenth century saw a growing enthusiasm for the moral and educational activism of the state, which plays against the idea of Dissent as a static, purely negative identity. The second section of the Introduction suggests identifying a fixation on the Bible as the watermark of Dissent. This did not mean there was agreement on what the Bible said or how to read it: the emphasis in Dissenting traditions on private judgement meant that conflict over Scripture was always endemic to them. The third section identifies a radical insistence on human spiritual equality as a persistent characteristic of Dissenters throughout the nineteenth century while also suggesting it was hard to maintain as they became aligned with social hierarchies and imperial authorities. Yet it also argues that transnational connections kept Dissenters from subsiding into acquiescence in the powers that were. The fourth section suggests that the defence and revival of a gospel faith also worked best when it was most transnational. The final section asks how far members of Dissenting traditions reconciled their allegiance to them with participation in high, national, and imperial cultures. It suggests that Dissenters could be seen as belonging to a robust subculture, one particularly marked by its domestication of the sacred and sacralization of the domestic. At the same time, however, both ‘Dissenting Gothic’ architecture and the embrace by Dissenters of denominational and national history writing illustrate that their identity was compatible with a confident grasp of national and imperial identities. That confidence was undercut in some quarters by the spread of pessimism among evangelicals and the turn to premillennial eschatology which injected a new urgency into the world mission. The itinerant holiness evangelists who turned away from the institutions built by mainstream denominations fostered Pentecostal movements, which in the twentieth century would decisively shift the balance of global Christianity from north to south. They indicate that the strength and global reach of Anglophone Dissenting traditions still lay in their dynamic heterogeneity.

The monograph reflects the problems of Russian psycholinguistics from the moment of its inception in Russia to the present day and presents its main directions that are currently developing. In addition, theoretical developments and practical results obtained in the framework of different directions and research centers are described in a concise form. The task of the book is to reflect, as far as it is possible in one edition, firstly, the history of the formation of Russian psycholinguistics; secondly, its methodology and developed methods; thirdly, the results obtained in different research centers and directions in different regions of Russia; fourthly, to outline the main directions of the further development of Russian psycholinguistics. There is no doubt that in the theoretical, methodological and applied aspects, the main problems and the results of their development by Russian psycholinguistics have no analogues in world linguistics and psycholinguistics, or are represented by completely original concepts and methods. We have tried to show this uniqueness of the problematics and the methodological equipment of Russian psycholinguistics in this book. The main role in the formation of Russian psycholinguistics was played by the Moscow psycholinguistic school of A.A. Leontyev. It still defines the main directions of Russian psycholinguistics. Russian psycholinguistics (the theory of speech activity - TSA) is based on the achievements of Russian psychology: a cultural-historical approach to the analysis of mental phenomena L.S. Vygotsky and the system-activity approach of A.N. Leontyev. Moscow is the most "psycholinguistic region" of Russia - INL RAS, Moscow State University, Moscow State Linguistic University, RUDN, Moscow State Pedagogical University, Moscow State Pedagogical University, Sechenov University, Moscow State University and other Moscow universities. Saint Petersburg psycholinguists have significant achievements, especially in the study of neurolinguistic problems, ontolinguistics. The most important feature of Russian psycholinguistics is the widespread development of psycholinguistics in the regions, the emergence of recognized psycholinguistic research centers - St. Petersburg, Tver, Saratov, Perm, Ufa, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Voronezh, Yekaterinburg, Kursk, Chelyabinsk; psycholinguistics is represented in Cherepovets, Ivanovo, Volgograd, Vyatka, Kaluga, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Vladivostok, Abakan, Maikop, Barnaul, Ulan-Ude, Yakutsk, Syktyvkar, Armavir and other cities; in Belarus - Minsk, in Ukraine - Lvov, Chernivtsi, Kharkov, in the DPR - Donetsk, in Kazakhstan - Alma-Ata, Chimkent. Our researchers work in Bulgaria, Hungary, Vietnam, China, France, Switzerland. There are Russian psycholinguists in Canada, USA, Israel, Austria and a number of other countries. All scientists from these regions and countries have contributed to the development of Russian psycholinguistics, to the development of psycholinguistic theory and methods of psycholinguistic research. Their participation has not been forgotten. We tried to present the main Russian psycholinguists in the Appendix - in the sections "Scientometrics", "Monographs and Manuals" and "Dissertations", even if there is no information about them in the Electronic Library and RSCI. The principles of including scientists in the scientometric list are presented in the Appendix. Our analysis of the content of the resulting monograph on psycholinguistic research in Russia allows us to draw preliminary conclusions about some of the distinctive features of Russian psycholinguistics: 1. cultural-historical approach to the analysis of mental phenomena of L.S.Vygotsky and the system-activity approach of A.N. Leontiev as methodological basis of Russian psycholinguistics; 2. theoretical nature of psycholinguistic research as a characteristic feature of Russian psycholinguistics. Our psycholinguistics has always built a general theory of the generation and perception of speech, mental vocabulary, linked specific research with the problems of ontogenesis, the relationship between language and thinking; 3. psycholinguistic studies of speech communication as an important subject of psycholinguistics; 4. attention to the psycholinguistic analysis of the text and the development of methods for such analysis; 5. active research into the ontogenesis of linguistic ability; 6. investigation of linguistic consciousness as one of the important subjects of psycholinguistics; 7. understanding the need to create associative dictionaries of different types as the most important practical task of psycholinguistics; 8. widespread use of psycholinguistic methods for applied purposes, active development of applied psycholinguistics. The review of the main directions of development of Russian psycholinguistics, carried out in this monograph, clearly shows that the direction associated with the study of linguistic consciousness is currently being most intensively developed in modern Russian psycholinguistics. As the practice of many years of psycholinguistic research in our country shows, the subject of study of psycholinguists is precisely linguistic consciousness - this is a part of human consciousness that is responsible for generating, understanding speech and keeping language in consciousness. Associative experiments are the core of most psycholinguistic techniques and are important both theoretically and practically. The following main areas of practical application of the results of associative experiments can be outlined. 1. Education. Associative experiments are the basis for constructing Mind Maps, one of the most promising tools for systematizing knowledge, assessing the quality, volume and nature of declarative knowledge (and using special techniques and skills). Methods based on smart maps are already widely used in teaching foreign languages, fast and deep immersion in various subject areas. 2. Information search, search optimization. The results of associative experiments can significantly improve the quality of information retrieval, its efficiency, as well as adaptability for a specific person (social group). When promoting sites (promoting them in search results), an associative experiment allows you to increase and improve the quality of the audience reached. 3. Translation studies, translation automation. An associative experiment can significantly improve the quality of translation, take into account intercultural and other social characteristics of native speakers. 4. Computational linguistics and automatic word processing. The results of associative experiments make it possible to reveal the features of a person's linguistic consciousness and contribute to the development of automatic text processing systems in a wide range of applications of natural language interfaces of computer programs and robotic solutions. 5. Advertising. The use of data on associations for specific words, slogans and texts allows you to predict and improve advertising texts. 6. Social relationships. The analysis of texts using the data of associative experiments makes it possible to assess the tonality of messages (negative / positive moods, aggression and other characteristics) based on user comments on the Internet and social networks, in the press in various projections (by individuals, events, organizations, etc.) from various social angles, to diagnose the formation of extremist ideas. 7. Content control and protection of personal data. Associative experiments improve the quality of content detection and filtering by identifying associative fields in areas subject to age restrictions, personal information, tobacco and alcohol advertising, incitement to ethnic hatred, etc. 8. Gender and individual differences. The data of associative experiments can be used to compare the reactions (and, in general, other features of thinking) between men and women, different social and age groups, representatives of different regions. The directions for the further development of Russian psycholinguistics from the standpoint of the current state of psycholinguistic science in the country are seen by us, first of all:  in the development of research in various areas of linguistic consciousness, which will contribute to the development of an important concept of speech as a verbal model of non-linguistic consciousness, in which knowledge revealed by social practice and assigned by each member of society during its inculturation is consolidated for society and on its behalf;  in the expansion of the problematics, which is formed under the influence of the growing intercultural communication in the world community, which inevitably involves the speech behavior of natural and artificial bilinguals in the new object area of psycholinguistics;  in using the capabilities of national linguistic corpora in the interests of researchers studying the functioning of non-linguistic and linguistic consciousness in speech processes;  in expanding research on the semantic perception of multimodal texts, the scope of which has greatly expanded in connection with the spread of the Internet as a means of communication in the life of modern society;  in the inclusion of the problems of professional communication and professional activity in the object area of psycholinguistics in connection with the introduction of information technologies into public practice, entailing the emergence of new professions and new features of the professional ethos;  in the further development of the theory of the mental lexicon (identifying the role of different types of knowledge in its formation and functioning, the role of the word as a unit of the mental lexicon in the formation of the image of the world, as well as the role of the natural / internal metalanguage and its specificity in speech activity);  in the broad development of associative lexicography, which will meet the most diverse needs of society and cognitive sciences. The development of associative lexicography may lead to the emergence of such disciplines as associative typology, associative variantology, associative axiology;  in expanding the spheres of applied use of psycholinguistics in social sciences, sociology, semasiology, lexicography, in the study of the brain, linguodidactics, medicine, etc. This book is a kind of summarizing result of the development of Russian psycholinguistics today. Each section provides a bibliography of studies on the relevant issue. The Appendix contains the scientometrics of leading Russian psycholinguists, basic monographs, psycholinguistic textbooks and dissertations defended in psycholinguistics. The content of the publications presented here is convincing evidence of the relevance of psycholinguistic topics and the effectiveness of the development of psycholinguistic problems in Russia.