Books on the topic 'Descriptive complexity theory'

The monograph covers the main aspects of studies on West African languages related to the diversity of structural patterns and complexity of their linguistic assignment. It includes various topics ranging from linguistic description and conceptualization patterns to the sociolinguistics of contemporary refugee camps. Typological diversity is enriched with the presentation of pidgin structures and sign languages. Structural differences between languages are seen from a comparative perspective, which also indicates the areal dimension of linguistic processes. The presentations of linguists from both Europe and Africa develop the idea of convergence area in West Africa, which is motivated by the contact between languages of different affiliations to language families and common cultural basis of language development.

The descriptive poems of the Song (sometimes called waṣfs) are three long texts that punctuate and lend a sense of overall structure to the Song. In these poems, the lover’s body is described as a landscape. This chapter offers a reading of these three texts together as a conceit of process. It argues that the landscape concept relies on an intuition of perspective—of viewing—that orders the audience’s response to the poem’s subject. The descriptive poems build a progressively more developed vision of the lover’s body as a map. As they do so, they model a way of seeing—a lover’s vision—that sees with increasing complexity over time.

The work of Chapman and Enskog opened a long period, lasting about three decades, in which most of the activity in kinetic theory was directed to the computation of the transport coefficients for different types of intermolecular potentials. Seeking the solution of the full Boltzmann equation itself was not much in focus, mostly on account of its daunting complexity. This situation took a sharp turn in 1949, with the publication of Harold Grad’s thesis. This Chapter presents the derivation of generalized hydrodynamics beyond the realm of the Navier-Stokes description, with special reference to Grad’s thirteen-moment formulation.

Psychotherapists have come to realize that, given the complexity of human behavior, no single theory or treatment can ever suffice for all patients, disorders, and situations. The ideological Cold War has abated as clinicians look across single-school approaches to see what can be learned—and how patients can benefit—from alternative orientations. Integrative now constitutes the most frequent orientation of mental health professionals. This volume provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art description of psychotherapy integration by leading proponents. Replete with clinical vignettes, this unique handbook will prove invaluable to practitioners, students, and researchers alike.

This chapter examines Wittgenstein’s critique of philosophy’s premium on simplicity and generality. Although philosophy overlaps with the sciences, it also leans toward the humanities in the open-ended character of its core issues. Additionally, the author discusses Alasdair MacIntyre’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s different views on the appeal of stories, and discusses as well how the insights of stories have the same features as those of the humanities in being indexical, prescriptive, and perspectival. The social sciences occupy a midpoint between the natural sciences and humanities, aiming to be descriptive, with high value on collective knowledge. But because they deal with human societies, there are constraints on efforts to minimize indexicality. And, because many issues about human societies cannot be addressed without understanding the viewpoints of individuals in the societies, there are also challenges in minimizing perspectivality and complexity.

Globalization and mobility reconfigure families with historical continuities and modern innovations. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, parental emigration reveals the impact of historical rural-to-urban and international migration on current parental ethnotheories. This chapter discusses life in this global city through the description of a focal family that stays, the Mendozas. Their neighborhood, Las Orquideas, is a microcosm of family structure variations, egregious class disparity, the intransigence of aspirations, and the complexity of urban life. These factors influence the decisions to migrate and to stay that dually redefine families in Guayaquil. As parents emigrated and children stayed, the experience of dispersing and maintaining ties led to different developmental consequences. These qualitative representations encourage analyses of families in their kin networks, neighborhoods, and dynamic sociocultural settings while also building systematic connections between the cases for understanding parenting at a distance.

Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is a chronic inflammatory arthritis affecting mainly the sacroiliac joints and spine, resulting in pain, stiffness, and reduced movement. Over the past decade there have been major advances in many aspects of the disease, including a broadening of the disease description to axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA). While the many advances have transformed the lives of patients with axSpA, they have also increased complexity for non-specialists in this area. This handbook contains a timely update of the key developments and current state of play in axSpA. It is intended primarily for the many healthcare professionals who encounter patients with this condition, in both primary and secondary care settings. It will also be of interest to the wider medical and research community.The handbook is written by rheumatologists with active research programmes and clinical expertise in these conditions. The topics covered include: • the clinical features • extra-articular manifestations and complications • the impact on patients’ lives • the major advances in genetics and pathogenesis • imaging advances • classification criteria and diagnosis (and the important differences between these) • treatment advances (particularly TNF inhibitors and upcoming biologics)

This book, based on a philosopher’s experiences as dean over almost two decades, argues it is appropriate for the sciences and humanities to have different aims and for the values informing their inquiries also to be different. It maintains there are four core differences: (1) it is proper for the sciences but not the humanities to seek insights not limited to particular locations, times, or things; (2) the sciences but not the humanities value findings as independent as possible of the perspectives of the inquirers; (3) the sciences should be wholly descriptive while the humanities can also be concerned with prescriptive claims, which give expression to values; and (4) the sciences are organized to increase collective knowledge, whereas in the humanities individual insight is highly valued independently of its ability to generate consensus. Associated with these differences are secondary distinctions: different attitudes about an endpoint of inquiry; different notions of intellectual progress; different roles for expertise; different assumptions about simplicity and complexity; and different approaches to issues associated with consciousness. Taken together these distinctions constitute an intellectual geography of the humanities and sciences: a mapping of key features of their epistemology. In addition, the book discusses the role of universities in an era attached to sound bites and immediately useful results, and the importance of there being a healthy culture of research for both the sciences and humanities, one that treasures long-term intellectual achievements and whose presiding value is that with respect to many issues it ought not to be easy to have opinions.

The literature on Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) has developed significantly over the past decades. Yet, despite ESOPs being well conceptualized, the deals struck in the real world are often more complex endeavours than suggested. While there are examples of ESOP deals as a one-stage process, it is often the case that ownership is transferred in multiple steps financed through subordinated debt. In addressing this added complexity, we will introduce concepts of ESOPs before providing a detailed description of what an add-on transaction entails. In doing so, we are particularly interested in describing key steps with focus on the impact on business and employee-owners. The paper will provide readers with additional insights into the widely used practice of multi-tranche ESOPs. Understanding the agents involved in the process, as well as the impact and potential pitfalls of add-on transactions are crucial factors in developing ESOPs as an alternative to external buy-outs.

The Tsimshianic languages are entirely morphologically ergative in the agreement system. While there is a split in Tsimshianic, conditioned by both clause type and a person hierarchy, the other side of the split is not the expected nominative-accusative alignment. Rather, other logical groupings of semantic roles are found that are still ergative. This chapter presents a description of the agreement patterns across Tsimshianic, with the aim of explaining these expansions of ergativity, by undertaking a comparative analysis of the individual languages in the Tsimshianic family. This is analysis is extended to the connectives, which are complex, determiner-like morphemes that appear to be sensitive to the semantic role of the NP. This leads to four distinct alignments (nominative, ergative, neutral, and contrastive). An understanding of the alignments in the agreement system can shed light on this complexity, and a comparative analysis eliminates the multiple alignments in the connective system, thus revealing a fairly standard set of determiners.

This book presents a variety of real-life case studies encountered in the context of treating patients complaining of chronic pain. It highlights the complexity of chronic pain and its management. At times, progress can be slow and tedious, but achievable. Both clinician and patient must be clear and realistic about the therapeutic goal(s). Many of the interventions discussed are based on scientifically sound behavioral/psychological principles. However, many of these techniques can be successfully implement by the front-line clinician. Pain Psychology for the Clinician (Cinafrini et al, Oxford University Press, 2021) could be considered a companion volume, as it provides detailed illustrations of how to engage in meaningful clinician–patient interaction. Each case presented herein involves several sections: background information, how to approach assessment, and treatment recommendations; key points are provided for each case. The case studies are designed to be very succinct. The final three chapters provide a detailed discussion of topics including psychogenic pain, description of various psychological/behavioral therapies, and opioid tapering. These chapters can be read before or after the cases studies. They provided useful background information and context within which to understand the approach taken with each individual case.

Creative Team Work: Developing Rapid, Site-Switching Ethnography is much more than a description of a new way of doing rapid ethnography to capture the rich complexity and contradictions of social relations, although it is certainly that. It is about the imagination, stimulation, and reflection that can come with international, interdisciplinary teams sharing the development, application, analysis, and dissemination of research. Although the book is based on a large, seven-year project studying care homes to search for promising practices and is guided by feminist political economy, the lessons we have learned are relevant for everyone undertaking empirical investigation. All research needs to consider theory, the organization of information, ethics, and dissemination, for example. The specific techniques and approaches we discuss can be applied to a wide range of qualitative methods and are not exclusive to this kind of ethnography. By dissecting our experiences together and uniting chapters through the theme of creative, reflexive team work, the book considers issues and methods of interest to all those struggling through the research process, with or without team support. Although some of our strategies may not work for everyone, and some did not work for us, we have identified areas that need to be addressed in research projects big and small, especially in those interested in putting research to work for change.

The Second Pedagogical Notebook is a continuation of the first ‘notebook’, dedicated to the Urban Planning Research course. The course and the notebook were created by Prof. Ivana Šverko, with the aim of offering students of architecture in Split the basics of urban planning research in a Mediterranean context. The idea behind the pedagogical notebook is to contribute to the recognition of the research phase as an essential starting point in the entire, complicated process of urban planning and design, as well as an understanding of research methodologies in specific spatial and social conditions. One of the ideal real-world templates for realising this goal is Zrinsko- Frankopanska Street, which developed along one of the Split peninsula’s Roman centuriation lines. This street connects the historical southern city harbour with the newer, northern one. Zrinsko-Frankopanska is an exceptionally important city street, and along its length there are a range of buildings dating from the ancient period to the 21st century, with almost every historical period represented. It is here that the most diverse range of public facilities can be found. The students mapped, studied, and analysed this city street, using historical and morphological analysis of spatial connections, greenery, the relationship between the public and the private, the accessible and inaccessible spaces, purpose, urban equipment, and so on. In doing so, they also noted relevant everyday human activities such as disposing of rubbish, as well as things such as the position and content of graffiti. They also included morphography – the description of forms without reference to their sources and development process – in their analytical approach. After the research phase, the students were instructed to target the problems they detected by proposing improvements to the existing elements, or by redesigning them. They were also required to open up the possibility of alternate uses for the space, up to the point in the design process when an architect or designer would usually take over. By presenting the study of a specific segment in this book, we wish to help students consider the complexity of the urban tissue, define the basic urban elements, research development processes, the typological and morphological characteristics of constriction and, ultimately, to identify everything that constitutes the “urban space as a whole”. We wish to guide them so that with their unique knowledge and tools, and their inclusion of all the other relevant professions in the processes of urban planning, they can become architects with sound professional and ethical principles, and develop into a new generation of responsible city-builders.

The climate system consists of interactions between physical, biological, chemical, and human processes across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Characterizing the behavior of components of this system is crucial for scientists and decision makers. There is substantial uncertainty associated with observations of this system as well as our understanding of various system components and their interaction. Thus, inference and prediction in climate science should accommodate uncertainty in order to facilitate the decision-making process. Statistical science is designed to provide the tools to perform inference and prediction in the presence of uncertainty. In particular, the field of spatial statistics considers inference and prediction for uncertain processes that exhibit dependence in space and/or time. Traditionally, this is done descriptively through the characterization of the first two moments of the process, one expressing the mean structure and one accounting for dependence through covariability.Historically, there are three primary areas of methodological development in spatial statistics: geostatistics, which considers processes that vary continuously over space; areal or lattice processes, which considers processes that are defined on a countable discrete domain (e.g., political units); and, spatial point patterns (or point processes), which consider the locations of events in space to be a random process. All of these methods have been used in the climate sciences, but the most prominent has been the geostatistical methodology. This methodology was simultaneously discovered in geology and in meteorology and provides a way to do optimal prediction (interpolation) in space and can facilitate parameter inference for spatial data. These methods rely strongly on Gaussian process theory, which is increasingly of interest in machine learning. These methods are common in the spatial statistics literature, but much development is still being done in the area to accommodate more complex processes and “big data” applications. Newer approaches are based on restricting models to neighbor-based representations or reformulating the random spatial process in terms of a basis expansion. There are many computational and flexibility advantages to these approaches, depending on the specific implementation. Complexity is also increasingly being accommodated through the use of the hierarchical modeling paradigm, which provides a probabilistically consistent way to decompose the data, process, and parameters corresponding to the spatial or spatio-temporal process.Perhaps the biggest challenge in modern applications of spatial and spatio-temporal statistics is to develop methods that are flexible yet can account for the complex dependencies between and across processes, account for uncertainty in all aspects of the problem, and still be computationally tractable. These are daunting challenges, yet it is a very active area of research, and new solutions are constantly being developed. New methods are also being rapidly developed in the machine learning community, and these methods are increasingly more applicable to dependent processes. The interaction and cross-fertilization between the machine learning and spatial statistics community is growing, which will likely lead to a new generation of spatial statistical methods that are applicable to climate science.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.