Cambridge University Press strana 7 z 64

There are many different types of decisions – from the important and life-changing to the mundane and everyday – but all are important for our functioning as humans. This book offers an accessible guide to the complex process of human decision-making, tailored for both undergraduate and graduate students. It combines recent research with real-life examples to provide a comprehensive understanding of the underlying biology of decision-making, its relationship to cognitive abilities such as working memory, executive function and attention, and its intersection with development. The book also explores applications and theories of decision-making, giving readers a broader perspective on the field. Presented in an accessible format with in-depth explanations, the work provides everything needed to build a strong basis of understanding of the underlying biology to the more complex topics of how decision-making develops and impacts on other behaviours. Discussion points are included throughout to encourage deeper reflection on the content covered.

Economic Displacement examines China's economic displacement of the United States in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and its implications for global geopolitics. Through data analysis and case studies, Francisco Urdinez demonstrates how China has filled the economic void left by US retrenchment from 2001 to 2020. He argues that this economic shift has led to a significant erosion of US political influence in the region, affecting public opinion, elite perspective, and voting patterns in international organizations. Providing a multifaceted view of this geopolitical transformation in this timely and important book, the author offers crucial insights into the changing landscape of global influence and the future of US–China rivalry in Latin America.

Elements of Structural Equation Models (SEMs) blends theoretical foundations with practical applications, serving as both a learning tool and a lasting reference. Synthesizing material from diverse sources, including the author's own contributions, it provides a rigorous yet accessible guide for graduate students, faculty, and researchers across social, behavioral, health, and data sciences. The book covers essential SEM concepts – model assumptions, identification, estimation, and diagnostics – while also addressing advanced topics often overlooked, such as Bayesian SEMs, model-implied instrumental variables, and categorical variables. Readers will gain insights into missing data, longitudinal models, and comparisons with Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). By presenting complex technical content in a clear, structured way, this authoritative resource deepens readers' understanding of SEMs, making it an indispensable guide for both newcomers and experts seeking a definitive treatment of the field.

This leading textbook introduces students and practitioners to the identification and analysis of animal remains at archaeology sites. The authors use global examples from the Pleistocene era into the present to explain how zooarchaeology allows us to form insights about relationships among people and their natural and social environments, especially site-formation processes, economic strategies, domestication, and paleoenvironments. This new edition reflects the significant technological developments in zooarchaeology that have occurred in the past two decades, notably ancient DNA, proteomics, and isotope geochemistry. Substantially revised to reflect these trends, the volume also highlights novel applications, current issues in the field, the growth of international zooarchaeology, and the increased role of interdisciplinary collaborations. In view of the growing importance of legacy collections, voucher specimens, and access to research materials, it also includes a substantially revised chapter that addresses management of zooarchaeological collections and curation of data.

Afrodescendant religious music in the Caribbean and Latin America typically foregrounds drumming and centuries-old songs of praise to spirit deities. In recent years, a new form of worship, known as a violín or toque de violín, which features the violin alongside the guitar, electronic piano, and/or other instruments commonly associated with popular music, has gained popularity in Cuba. Violines can be understood as loosely defined spaces for performance that developed in a context of cultural oppression and dominance. They can be viewed as a concession to Eurocentric and secular tastes, or as a blackening/creolizing of those same practices, or both. They express religious faith in pluralistic ways, incorporating repertoire from various Black religions alongside influences from folk Catholicism, and classical, commercial, and folkloric music. Drawing from an encyclopedic knowledge of Cuban music, ethnographic work, and interviews, Robin D. Moore's groundbreaking book is the first to explore the compelling violín ceremony in detail.

There are many different types of decisions – from the important and life-changing to the mundane and everyday – but all are important for our functioning as humans. This book offers an accessible guide to the complex process of human decision-making, tailored for both undergraduate and graduate students. It combines recent research with real-life examples to provide a comprehensive understanding of the underlying biology of decision-making, its relationship to cognitive abilities such as working memory, executive function and attention, and its intersection with development. The book also explores applications and theories of decision-making, giving readers a broader perspective on the field. Presented in an accessible format with in-depth explanations, the work provides everything needed to build a strong basis of understanding of the underlying biology to the more complex topics of how decision-making develops and impacts on other behaviours. Discussion points are included throughout to encourage deeper reflection on the content covered.

This commentary on the second epistle of Peter offers a fresh examination of a key New Testament text. Relying on newly available research, A. Chadwick Thornhill brings a multi-pronged approach to his study through his use of a range of methods including narrative theology, and historical, social, cultural, literary, rhetorical, discourse, and linguistic analysis. Thornhill challenges existing paradigms pertaining to the composition of 2 Peter, asks new questions regarding authorship and genre, and revisits the identification of the text as a pseudonymous testament, as it has most recently been understood. His study enables new insights into the letter's message as it would have been understood in its ancient context. Written in an accessible style, Thornhill's commentary concludes by offering reflections on 2 Peter's contributions to the theology of the New Testament and its relevance for the late modern world.

This bold, sweeping history of the turbulent American-Russian relationship is unique in being written jointly by American and Russian authors. David Foglesong, Ivan Kurilla and Victoria Zhuravleva together reveal how and why America and Russia shifted from being warm friends and even tacit allies to being ideological rivals, geopolitical adversaries, and demonic foils used in the construction or affirmation of their national identities. As well as examining diplomatic, economic, and military interactions between the two countries, they illuminate how filmmakers, cartoonists, writers, missionaries and political activists have admired, disparaged, lionized, envied, satirized, loved, and hated people in the other land. The book shows how the stories they told and the images they created have shaped how the two countries have understood each other from the eighteenth century to the present and how often their violent clashes have arisen from mutual misunderstanding and misrepresentations.

Answers to the question 'what is medical progress?' have always been contested, and any one response is always bound up with contextual ideas of personhood, society, and health. However, the widely held enthusiasm for medical progress escapes more general critiques of progress as a conceptual category. From the intersection of intellectual history, philosophy, and the medical humanities, Vanessa Rampton sheds light on the politics of medical progress and how they have downplayed the tensions between individual and social goods. She examines how a shared consensus about its value gives medical progress vast political and economic capital, revealing who benefits, who is left out, and who is harmed by this narrative. From ancient Greece to artificial intelligence, exploring the origins and ethics of different visions of progress offers valuable insight into how we can make them more meaningful in future. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Power struggles between debtors and creditors about unpaid debts have animated the history of economic transformation from the emergence of capitalist relations to the recent global financial crashes. Illuminating how ordinary people fought for economic justice in Mexico from the eve of independence to the early 2000s, this study argues that conflicts over small-scale debts were a stress test for an emerging economic order that took shape against a backdrop of enormous political and social change. Drawing on nearly 1,500 debt conflicts unearthed from Mexican archives, Louise E. Walker explores rapidly changing ideas and practices about property rights, contract law, and economic information. This combination of richly detailed archival research, with big historical and theoretical interpretations, raises provocative new questions about the moral economy of the credit relationship and the shifting line between exploitation and opportunity in the world of everyday exchange.

This Element explores why historic urban places matter emotionally. To achieve this the Element develops a conceptual framework which breaks down the broad category of 'emotion' into three interrelated parts: 1. Emotional responses, 2. Emotional attachments, and 3. Emotional communities. In so doing new lines of enquiry are opened up including the reasons why certain emotional responses such as pride and fear are provoked by historic urban places; the complex interplay of the physical environment and everyday experiences in informing emotional attachments, as well as the reasons why emotional communities coalesce in particular historic urban places. In addition, the Element explores the ways in which emotion, in the form of responses, attachments, and communities, can be considered within heritage management and concludes with a discussion of where next for heritage theories and practices. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Waging Peace dispels lingering myths of the frequently disregarded Vietnam antiwar movement as dominated by a subversive collection of political radicals and countercultural rebels. This comprehensive history defines a broad movement built around a core of liberal and mainstream activists who challenged what they saw as a misguided and immoral national policy. Facing ongoing resistance from the government and its prowar supporters, demonstrators upheld First Amendment rights and effectively countered official rationales for the war. These dissenting patriots frequently appealed to traditional American principles and overwhelmingly used the tools of democracy within conventional boundaries to align the nation's practice with its most righteous vision. This work covers not only the activists and organizations whose coalitions sponsored mass demonstrations and their often-symbiotic allies within the government, but also encompasses international, military, and cultural dissent. Achieving positive if limited impact, the movement was ultimately neither victorious nor defeated.

Now notorious for its aridity and air pollution, Mexico City was once part of a flourishing lake environment. In nearby Xochimilco, Native Americans modified the lakes to fashion a distinctive and remarkably abundant aquatic society, one that provided a degree of ecological autonomy for local residents, enabling them to protect their communities' integrity, maintain their way of life, and preserve many aspects of their cultural heritage. While the area's ecology allowed for a wide array of socioeconomic and cultural continuities during colonial rule, demographic change came to affect the ecological basis of the lakes; pastoralism and new ways of using and modifying the lakes began to make a mark on the watery landscape and on the surrounding communities. In this fascinating study, Conway explores Xochimilco using native-language documents, which serve as a hallmark of this continuity and a means to trace patterns of change.

Criticism and creativity characterised literary reception in eighteenth-century Britain. The press – periodicals, newspapers, and magazines – harboured the reviewing cultures belonging to the emerging professionalisation of literary criticism. It also provided highly fertile ground for creativity, including imitative items inspired by new publications, while critical reviews often incorporated parody. The press fostered experimentation among often anonymous reader-contributors, even while it facilitated the establishment of 'classic' works by recirculating well-known authors' names. Laurence Sterne's reception was energetically shaped by the interaction between critical and creative responses: the press played a major role in forging his status as an 'inimitable' author of note.

This Element explores misinformation as a challenge for democracies, using experiments from Germany, Italy, and the UK to assess the role of user-generated corrections on social media. A sample of more than 170,000 observations across a wide range of topics (COVID, climate change, 5G etc.) is used to test whether social corrections help reduce the perceived accuracy of false news and whether miscorrections decrease the credibility of true news. Corrections reduce the perceived accuracy of misinformation, but miscorrections can harm perceptions of true news. The Element also assesses the mechanisms of social corrections, finding evidence for recency effects rather than systematic processing. Additional analyses show the characteristics of individuals who have more difficulties identifying false news. Survey data is included on characteristics of people who write comments often. The conclusion highlights that social corrections can mislead, but also work as remedy. The Element ends with best practices for effective corrections.

In today's data-driven world, this book offers clear, accessible guidance on the logical foundations of optimal decision making. It introduces essential tools for decision analysis and explores psychological theories that explain how people make decisions in both professional and personal contexts. Using real-world examples, the book covers topics such as decision making under uncertainty, decision trees, strategies of risk management, decisions that are gambles, heuristics, trade-offs, decision making under stress, game theory, decision making in a dispute or conflict, and multi-attribute decision analysis. Readers will identify common decision traps and learn how to avoid them, understand the causes of indecisiveness and find out how to deal with it, gain insights into their own decision-making processes, and build confidence in their ability to make and defend informed decisions across a range of scenarios.