"A glorious success...The science manages to be as exciting and spellbinding as the juiciest gossip" (San Franscisco Chronicle) in the story of the discovery of "Lucy"--the oldest, best-preserved skeleton of any erect-walking human ancestor ever found. When Donald Johanson found a partical skeleton, approximately 3.5 million years old, in a remote region of Ethiopia in 1974, a headline-making controversy was launched that continues on today. Bursting with all the suspense and intrigue of a fast paced adventure novel, here is Johanson's lively account of the extraordinary discovery of "Lucy." By expounding the controversial change Lucy makes in our view of human origins, Johanson provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of the history of pealeoanthropology and the colorful, eccentric characters who were and are a part of it. Never before have the mystery and intricacy of our origins been so clearly and compellingly explained as in this astonighing and dramatic book.

How do contemporary teenagers experience and understand religious, spiritual, gender and sexual diversity? How are their experiences mediated by where they go to school, their faith and their geographic location? Are their outlooks materialist, religious, spiritual, or do they have hybrid identities? Freedoms, Faiths and Futures: Teenage Australians on Religion, Sexuality and Diversity offers powerful insight into how teenagers make sense of the world around them. Drawing on rich data from a major national study, this book creates new ways of understanding the complexity of young people's lives and how school education covering diversity best addresses their world. This book argues that school education focused on worldviews is founded on ways of thinking about young people that do not reflect the complexities of Generation Z's everyday experiences of diversity and their interactions with each other. It argues that certain kinds of education in schools can play a significant role in developing religious literacy, tolerance and positive attitudes to diversity.

Obwohl Komik und Behinderung gerade in den Kunsten immer wieder zusammentreffen, gibt es so gut wie keine theoretisch und methodisch fundierten Auseinandersetzungen mit dieser Thematik in den Literatur-, Kultur- oder Sozialwissenschaften. Gerade im Kontext von Inklusionsdiskussionen jedoch sind Fragen nach dem Potential des Lachens und der Komik, aber auch nach deren Ambivalenz im Zusammenhang mit Behinderung von weitreichender Bedeutung. Der vorliegende Band unternimmt eine Bestandsaufnahme moeglicher Theorien und Analysekonzepte anhand konkreter Einzelanalysen. Die Autor:innen vertreten die Sozial-, Erziehungs-, Literatur-, Kultur-, Medien-, Theater- und Filmwissenschaften.

This book presents a biographical history of the field of systems thinking, by examining the life and work of thirty of its major thinkers. It discusses each thinker's key contributions, the way this contribution was expressed in practice and the relationship between their life and ideas. This discussion is supported by an extract from the thinker's own writing, to give a flavour of their work and to give readers a sense of which thinkers are most relevant to their own interests.

Social and environmental factors have profound impacts on health and diseases across the lifespan. Each year, hundreds of millions of animals are used in biomedical research. Yet many experimental studies utilize animals housed in standard conditions conferring minimal physical, social, and mental stimulation. Lacking appreciation of macroenvironment impacts on physiology and disease risks of the laboratory animals may not only hinder the use of appropriate animal models for human diseases, but also question the validity of preclinical assessments of therapeutic agents.This book summarizes our work on environmental enrichment, a housing condition for laboratory animals, recapitulating an active lifestyle by providing a complex physical, social, and cognitive stimulations. Environmental enrichment exerts a wide range of benefits on energy balance, cancer, immunity, stress, behavior, and healthy aging. One underlying mechanism is the activation of a specific neuroendocrine brain-adipocyte axis with brain-derived neurotrophic factor as the key brain mediator. This book integrates recent discoveries regarding mechanisms, mediators, and biomarkers of environmental enrichment, and discusses its translational potential.By providing a timely review and discussion of murine models, this book should be of interest to basic, translational, and clinical researchers, as well as psychologists, nutrition scientists, and students that have interest in cancer, obesity, aging, and genetic disorders.

Sustainable development helps undo the havoc that has been created by human beings in the last few years in the name of development and growth. It helps to promote a more social, environmental, and economical way of living. There are many ways in which we all can practice sustainable development in our daily lives and further study is required. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Sustainable Human Development focuses on all agendas of sustainable development goals and offers approaches to develop a transdisciplinary perspective that encompasses the natural, social, and human sciences in the search for a sustainable society. Covering topics such as green economy, social innovation, and climate change, this premier reference work is ideal for environmentalists, government officials, policymakers, researchers, scholars, academicians, practitioners, instructors, and students.

"Santo Daime: A New World Religion" deals with a young, exotic and controversial religious movement. Emerging in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1930s, Santo Daime has since spread to many of the world's major cities. Santo Daime is a mixture of indigenous, popular Catholic, Afro-Brazilian, esoteric, Spiritist, and new age beliefs and activities. Ritual practice is centred on the consumption of a psychotropic beverage called 'Daime' which members believe enhances their interaction with the supernatural world. Because Daime is treated as an illegal narcotic in many parts of the world, outside of its Brazilian homeland most Santo Daime rituals are practised clandestinely. This book unites extensive fieldwork experience with an established theoretical background and makes a significant contribution to understanding the contemporary interface of religion and late-modern society. Individualization and religious subjectivism, pluralization and religious hybridism, transformation and detraditionalization, globalization and religious identity, and commoditization and religious consumption are among the many issues engaged by this book. "Santo Daime: A New World Religion" is an accessible and multi-disciplinary book suitable for undergraduate students and researchers working in Religious Studies, Sociology of Religion, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Latin American Studies.

Sociology, as a discipline, was born at the height of global colonialism and imperialism. Over a century later, it is yet to shake off its commitment to colonial ways of thinking. This book explores why, and how, sociology needs to be decolonized. It analyses how sociology was integral in reproducing the colonial order, as dominant sociologists constructed theories either assuming or proving the supposed barbarity and backwardness of colonized people. Ali Meghji reveals how colonialism continues to shape the discipline today, dominating both social theory and the practice of sociology, how exporting the Eurocentric sociological canon erased social theories from the Global South, and how sociologists continue to ignore the relevance of coloniality in their work. This guide will be necessary reading for any student or proponent of sociology. In opening up the work of other decolonial advocates and under-represented thinkers to readers, Meghji offers key suggestions for what teachers and students can do to decolonize sociology. With curriculum reform, innovative teaching and a critical awareness of these issues, it is possible to make sociology more equitable on a global scale.

Despite the fact that Christianity is understood to be thoroughly intertwined with matter, objects, and things, Christians struggle to cope with this materiality in their daily lives. This volume argues that the ambivalent relationships many Christians have with materiality is a driving force that contributes to the way people in different Christian traditions and in different parts of the world understand and live out their religion. By placing the questions of limits and boundary-work to the fore, the volume addresses the question of exactly how Christianity takes place materially, addressing a gap in studies to date. Christianity and the Limits of Materiality presents ground-breaking research on the frameworks and contexts in relation to and within which Christian logics of materiality operate. The volume places the negotiations at the limits of materiality within the larger framework of Christian identities and politics of belonging. The chapters discuss case studies from North and South America, Europe, and Africa, and demonstrate that the limits preoccupying Christians delimit their lives but also enable many things. Ultimately, Christianity and the Limits of Materiality demonstrates that it is at the interfaces of materiality and the transcendent that Christians create and legitimise their religion.

"Mathematical Models for Society and Biology," 2e, is a useful resource for researchers, graduate students, and post-docs in the applied mathematics and life science fields. Mathematical modeling is one of the major subfields of mathematical biology. A mathematical model may be used to help explain a system, to study the effects of different components, and to make predictions about behavior.

"Mathematical Models for Society and Biology," 2e, draws on current issues to engagingly relate how to use mathematics to gain insight into problems in biology and contemporary society. For this new edition, author Edward Beltrami uses mathematical models that are simple, transparent, and verifiable. Also new to this edition is an introduction to mathematical notions that every quantitative scientist in the biological and social sciences should know. Additionally, each chapter now includes a detailed discussion on how to formulate a reasonable model to gain insight into the specific question that has been introduced.
Offers 40% more content - 5 new chapters in addition to revisions to existing chapters Accessible for quick self study as well as a resource for courses in molecular biology, biochemistry, embryology and cell biology, medicine, ecology and evolution, bio-mathematics, and applied math in general Features expanded appendices with an extensive list of references, solutions to selected exercises in the book, and further discussion of various mathematical methods introduced in the book

Disruptions are being caused in the workplace due to the development of advanced software technology and the speed at which these technological advancements are being produced. These disruptions could take diverse forms and affect various aspects of work and the lives of entities in the workplaces and families of the individual employees. Work and family are caught in the crossfire between technological disruptions and human adaptation. Hence, there is a need to assess the overall effect that the Fourth Industrial Revolution would have on work, employee work-family satisfaction, and employee well-being. Future of Work, Work-Family Satisfaction, and Employee Well-Being in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a critical reference source that discusses practical solutions and strategies to manage challenges and address fears regarding the effect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the future of employment and the workforce. Featuring research on topics such as corporate governance, job satisfaction, and mental health, this book is ideally designed for human resource professionals, business managers, industry professionals, government officials, policymakers, corporate strategists, consultants, work-life balance experts, human resources software developers, business policy experts, academicians, researchers, and students.

Governments must continuously update policies, laws, and legislation as the world continues to rapidly evolve due to technologies and changing cultural perspectives. To streamline policy creation and implementation, governments seek new and efficient methods to ensure their citizens' and communities' safety while also encouraging citizen participation. Advanced Methodologies and Technologies in Government and Society provides research on emerging methodologies in effective governing including sections on public sector management and socioeconomic development. While highlighting the challenges facing government officials and law enforcement such as crisis response and natural disaster management, this book shows how technology use can make those areas of government more efficient and improve preventative measures. This book is an ideal resource for law enforcement, government officials and agencies, policymakers, public servants, citizen activists, researchers, and political leaders seeking cutting-edge information to strengthen their government's relationship with society and their constituents while also strengthening their policy measures through new technology and methods.

New Private Law Theory opens a new pathway to private law theory through a pluralistic approach. Such a theory needs a broad and stable foundation, which the authors have built here through a canon of nearly seventy texts of reference. This book brings these different texts from different disciplines into conversation with each other, grouping them around central questions of private law and at the same time integrating them with the legal doctrinal analysis of example cases. This book will be accessible to both experienced and early career scholars working on private law.

We are out of the safe zone. Transformative Adaptation (TrAd) helps us to transform our civilization to be in readiness for the future and makes life worth living. Impacts beyond 1.5oC, the agreed maximum limit-target for global overheating, are already here. In this context, adaptation, preparedness and resilience-building are no longer optional. They become central, pivotal to whether we survive, let alone flourish. The struggle to define adaptation will be the defining struggle of the coming decade. TrAd is adaptation that works with, not against nature. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions in the same breath as it guards us against the impacts of those emissions. This book sets out TrAd as a theory and a practice, a community and an attitude. Creating a flourishing future even in the jaws of adversity requires us first to imagine it together. Thrutopias are TrAd boldly and concretely imagined. Thrutopian stories show how we can get through by adapting to what is coming at us by transforming our systems. This book unpacks the theory of thrutopias and offers existing practical examples. Transformative Adaptation is the quintessential idea whose time has come.

An interdisciplinary field, technology and culture, or social informatics, is part of a larger body of socio-economic, socio-psychological, and cultural research that examines the ways in which technology and groups within society are shaped by social forces within organizations, politics, economics, and culture. Given the popularity and increased usage of technology, it is imperative that educators, trainers, consultants, administrators, researchers, and professors monitor the current trends and issues relating to social side of technology in order to meet the needs and challenges of tomorrow.""Social Information Technology"" provides educators, trainers, consultants, administrators, researchers, and professors with a fundamental research source for definitions, antecedents, and consequences of social informatics and the cultural aspect of technology. This groundbreaking research work also addresses the major cultural/societal issues in social informatics technology and society such as the Digital Divide, the government and technology law, information security and privacy, cyber ethics, technology ethics, and the future of social informatics and technology, as well as concepts from technology in developing countries.

The Discussion is distorting today. Within schools, social movements, and firms, there has been an increasing tendency for teachers and facilitators to announce that there will be a discussion while the interaction which follows this announcement is not a discussion, but something else??likely a recitation and lecture. This distortion of discussion promises democracy, equality, and participation during a meeting or class, but delivers inequality, prohibition, and dominance. Now is the time to begin changing these practices which ultimately create and support a neoliberal society that promises democracy but practices oligarchy. One way to change this neoliberal social world is by intervening in the distortion of discussion, by facilitating interaction so that discussion's promise of equality and participation is fulfilled rather than negated. Elements of Discussion is a resource for this intervention. It is a political, poetic, and practical handbook for facilitating discussion. Discussions happen everywhere, and if society itself is composed of relationships between people then creating more participation and equality during discussions can help create the conditions for social change. Elements of Discussion therefore includes practical tips, techniques, and reflective questions through which it firmly and sensitively suggests to readers how to facilitate discussions across contexts. Beginning with the ways chairs and tables are set up, continuing through the kinds of questions a facilitator can ask, and including sample activities facilitators can use, the book expounds a philosophy of facilitating discussion, emphasizing the political and poetic significance of the tactics it recommends.

The extent to which modern social science continues to reflect the subjective traits of authors and the contexts in which they operate, rather than the objective facts or insights they claim to develop, remains one of the most striking features of social science research and writing. Kinloch and Mohan provide a multidisciplinary and worldwide examination of the ties between the subjective traits of social scientists, the contexts in which they affect research, and the kinds of knowledge they produce.

The essays fall into five general topic areas: major theoretical issues, research as ideology, the political context of ideology, major factors in the academic setting, and the relationship between personal biography and professional ideology. This book will be of greatest concern to scholars, students, and researchers involved with the sociology of knowledge, social theory and methods, comparative social science, and social problems.

Atlantic Communications examines the historical development of communications technology and its impact on German-American relations from the 17th to the 20th century. Chronologically organized, the book is divided into five parts, each scrutinizing one or two central themes connected to the specific time period and technology involved. The book starts with speech as a dominant medium of the 17th and 18th centuries, when cultural brokers played a significant role in producing and spreading knowledge about America. During the 19th century, the technological competition between the old and the new world became a driving force for the history of transatlantic relations. This competition developed new dimensions with the invention of the telegraph and the emergence of news agencies. Information became commercialized. technologically possible. Print media, daily journals and especially weekly magazines became the medium of a critical style of journalism. The Muckrakers, representatives of a political and intellectual elite, criticized the social and cultural consequences of technological progress, thereby highlighting the negative effects of modernization. During the 1920s and 1930s, radio developed as a new mass medium, the first one to be used widely for political purposes. Not only did Josef Goebbels recognize the political possibilities of reaching the people directly via radio, Franklin Roosevelt used the radio as well to transmit his political messages in the form of fireside chats. to communicate the past, especially the historical experience of the Holocaust. Specific cultures of memory developed in both America and Germany. The demand to tackle the psychological and social problems stemming from the experiences during the Third Reich, advocated especially by the student movement, was most successfully taken up by the media. The television miniseries Holocaust had a far more profound impact on the public than efforts taken by school teachers, history professors or the institutions for political education who were officially in charge of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung.

The southwest Virginia murder trials of a young schoolteacher named Edith Maxwell made her a cause celebre of the 1930s. No newspaper reader or radio listener could avoid hearing of her case in 1935 or 1936, and few magazines neglected to run at least one story on the case. In the media attention that it received, the Maxwell case rivaled the Scopes monkey trial of the 1920s, and for some it seemed to involve many of the same sociological issues--the conflict between modernism and tradition, between urban and rural values, between the sexes, and between generations. Feminist organizations like the National Women's Party and other women's business and professional organizations rallied to Edith's defense because women were not allowed on criminal juries in Virginia in the 1930s.

How and why the idea of wellness holds such rhetorical-and harmful-power. In Why Wellness Sells, Colleen Derkatch examines why the concept of wellness holds such rhetorical power in contemporary culture. Public interest in wellness is driven by two opposing philosophies of health that cycle into and amplify each other: restoration, where people use natural health products to restore themselves to prior states of wellness; and enhancement, where people strive for maximum wellness by optimizing their body's systems and functions. Why Wellness Sells tracks the tension between these two ideas of wellness across a variety of sources, including interviews, popular and social media, advertising, and online activism. Derkatch examines how wellness manifests across multiple domains, where being "well" means different things, ranging from a state of pre-illness to an empowered act of good consumer-citizenship, from physical or moral purification to sustenance and care, and from harm reduction to optimization. Along the way, Derkatch demonstrates that the idea of wellness may promise access to the good life, but it serves primarily as a strategy for coping with a devastating and overwhelming present. Drawing on scholarship in the rhetoric of health and medicine, the health and medical humanities, and related fields, Derkatch offers a nuanced account of how language, belief, behavior, experience, and persuasion collide to produce and promote wellness, one of the most compelling-and harmful-concepts that govern contemporary Western life. She explains that wellness has become so pervasive in the United States and Canada because it is an ever-moving, and thus unachievable, goal. The concept of wellness entrenches an individualist model of health as a personal responsibility, when collectivist approaches would more readily serve the health and well-being of whole populations.