This chapter tackles two additional activities of the pollster as fortune teller. The first is the assessment and prediction of government approval ratings. As we have already seen in Chapter 8, approval ratings are extremely important in predicting elections. There is both an art and science to the analysis of such measures. Here, we want to lay out an analytical framework which will allow pollsters to assess both structural and policy factors related to approval ratings and then how to utilize multiple methods to triangulate future outcomes. We will focus on the Biden administration circa August 2022. Ultimately, a fairly large component of a pollster’s workload is the continual assessment of government initiatives and their convergence (or not) with what people want.

The second is a discussion of more context-based analysis. The pollster has an important role in helping decision-makers understand the bigger picture. Here, broader demographic and social trends help gird such analysis.

The HLVC project applies consistent methods of data collection, analysis, and interpretation to a range of languages and dependent variables. This is meant to mitigate the pattern of diverse findings from diverse studies that may partially result from diverse methods. This chapter therefore describes how the corpus is constructed, focusing on the cross-linguistic, cross-generational, and multi-method design, and gives details about recruiting, recording, and transcription of the sociolinguistic interview, the ethnic orientation questionnaire, the picture description task, and the consent procedure. It then describes the workflow for data processing and metadata construction, describing both how the corpus is organized (to be useful to additional researchers) and how we have analyzed variation of a number of variables to date. These include prodrop, case-marking, VOT, and (r) across multiple languages, apocope and differential object marking in Italian, and tone mergers, classifiers, motion-even marking, denasalization (an element of so-called lazy pronunciation, 懶音 laan5 jam1), and vowel space in Cantonese. It details the methods of analyzing ethnic orientation and several proxies for fluency (speech rate, vocabulary size, language-switching measures). Finally, it describes the methods used for constructing and comparing mixed-effects models for cross-variety comparisons in order to distinguish contact-induced change, internal change, and identity-marking variation.

The law should be ‘computable’, in order to make retrieval and analysis easier. Computable law takes aspects of law, which are implicit in legal texts, and aims to model them as data, rules, or forms which are amenable to computer processes. Laws should be labelled with computable structural data to permit advanced computational processing and legal analysis.

Some readers of the Tractatus claim that, for Wittgenstein, the correct philosophical method is “a method of logical analysis in terms of a symbolic logical notation, whereby the logical, syntactical or formal properties of logically unclear expressions are clarified by translating them into a logically perspicuous notation” (Kuusela 2019, p. 85). This chapter aims at refuting this view, maintaining that Wittgenstein distinguishes between logical analysis and philosophical clarification. More precisely, I would like to establish that, drawing on certain features of Russellian logical practice (as illustrated for instance in On Denoting), Wittgenstein makes a distinction between logically ordered language and completely analyzed language. For him, philosophical clarification does not consist in an analysis of ordinary language but in the visible manifestation (at the level of signs) of the logical ordering of its symbols.

This chapter focuses on quantitative EEG processing, also known as EEG trend analysis. These types of algorithms process raw EEG data in a quantitative way, and display the data in more compressed forms that may be easier for the amateur EEG reader to interpret. Specific QEEG algorithms described in this chapter include amplitude integrated EEG, FFT spectrogram, rhythmicity spectrogram, asymmetry indices, and seizure detectors. Specific roles for QEEG covered include seizure detection and detection of focal cerebral ischemia.

Scholars of nineteenth-century music often use the term “long nineteenth century” to refer to the 125-year period between the beginnings of the French Revolution and the First World War. If the nineteenth century was long, however, it was also deep, containing vast numbers of musical scores that extend well beyond the canonical works that have dominated scholarly journals, recital halls, and course syllabi. My chapter focuses on a composer from the deepest regions of the Lied genre—Marie Franz—who wrote inventive and affecting songs that raise important questions about the analysis and performance of nineteenth-century song. Franz’s songs suggest that as much as we should attend to the activities that women musicians engaged in during this period, we should also attend to the pieces that they wrote, no matter how small in size or few in number. They prove that even in the most private spaces women were composing songs of bracing originality, and that discovering the full scope of that originality often requires digging deeply for unpublished repertoire. And they show that to fully illuminate the astonishing, extensive, and little-studied songs from this century, we need the commitment not just of scholars, but also of performers.

This chapter focuses on the interplay of health policy and politics at a national level, and:

• explores the process by which health policy is created and the context in which it is developed and influenced;

• considers the interplay between policy and its implementation; and

• offers a narrative of the evolution of national health policy and politics in England over the last 30 years.

In its final form, Op. 54’s first movement engenders an analytical paradox. In its original incarnation, it realised Schumann’s ambition, first voiced in 1836, to combine ‘the Allegro-Adagio-Rondo sequence in a single movement’, thereby instantiating the compression of the genre’s movement cycle into its first-movement form. To an extent, the full Concerto of 1845 undoes this ambition: those aspects of the Phantasie, which invoke the features of a slow movement and finale, recede into the first movement once the second movement is underway. The first movement is nevertheless distinctive for its rejection of both the classical and virtuoso sonata-ritornello form in favour of a unitary, symphonic sonata form. This chapter examines the Phantasie’s form and the processes from which it is constructed, exploring the implications of its inclusion within Op. 54 for the work’s three-movement design and clarifying its multiple but largely neglected debts to the virtuoso repertoire. Schumann retains the virtuoso concerto’s stylistic hallmarks, but rehouses them in a new formal context and makes them responsible to processes of thematic transformation and development.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Intermezzo and Finale respond to the challenge of balancing the first movement’s slow-movement and finale-like episodes with the movements of the overarching concerto cycle. The Intermezzo is a ternary-form lyric character piece, which invokes the epigrammatic style of Schumann’s early piano cycles, and which is elided with the Finale via an enigmatic reference to the first movement’s main theme. The Finale, in contrast, is an expansive sonata rondo, which, in a nod to the Beethovenian symphonic struggle–victory narrative, supplants A minor with the parallel major. Together, the two movements convey a productive dialectic of lyric concentration and symphonic expansion, which in combination radically rethink the bel canto and brillante stylistic hallmarks of Schumann’s virtuoso precedents.

The book opens with an odd fact of our time: we grow up having our writing corrected at every turn, and yet the actual writing most people do goes far beyond what is considered “correct English.” If we imagine a basic continuum of writing in English, it ranges from informal to formal, personal to impersonal, and interpersonal to informational writing. That range allows us to do all kinds of different things with writing. But only a small part of it is considered “correct,” because of what the book calls Language Regulation Mode. The introduction explains Language Regulation Mode, how it fixates on errors, and how it makes it hard to think about writing any other way. We learn to see writing only through the lens of writing myths, which tell us only some writing counts, and only some writers are smart and will succeed. Then, the introduction offers an alternative: Language Exploration Mode, which focuses on patterns instead of errors, and learning more about the diverse language of our world today--a continuum of informal digital writing, workplace writing, formal school writing, and otherwise, all correct for its purpose.

Narrative methods and analysis can take many forms. There are major disagreements in the literature. Here a straightforward approach is provided. One which will help the reader conduct their own analysis and also read and interpret the analyses of others. Narratives are often derived from narrative interviews and the data that emerges can be messy, partly because stories can be messy. A number of indicators of quality in narrative analysis is provided, from trustworthiness and the co-construction of meaning to the multi-layered nature of stories and contextuality. A straightforward guide to narrative analysis is provided, along with a consideration of narrative coherence, reliability and validity.

The life sciences and social sciences typically study “complex adaptive systems:” nonlinear, self-organizing, adaptive, multilevel, multicomponent systems in which dense interconnections between elements produce irreducible/emergent systems effects. Systems and their components are partially (in)separable: they can be fully understood neither solely in terms of their parts (some outcomes are emergent) nor solely in terms of the whole (the character of the parts is essential to the nature of the whole). Important implications of a complex adaptive systems perspective for IR include a new view of international systems and their structures; a distinctive understanding of social continuity and social change; new perspectives on levels, theory, and explanation; new tools for comparative analysis; renewed attention to hierarchy; and a distinctive understanding of globalization.

Until late in the twentieth century, formal analysis of Mozart’s operatic ensembles (chiefly those of the Da Ponte operas) was heavily skewed towards the invocation of instrumental models, and pre-eminently sonata form. Additionally, the pursuit of “absolute correspondence between the unfolding of music, text and stage-action” (Abbate and Parker) came to seem increasingly suspect. The Magic Flute is a Singspiel, rather than an opera buffa, and its ensembles are complicated by the existence of “ensemble characters” (the Three Ladies and Three Boys) who generally function collectively rather than individually. This chapter offers analyses of the Act 1 and 2 quintets and the Three Boys’ Act 2 terzetto, seeking to destabilize readings that appeal to models such as sonata rondo and reading tonal structures closely against libretto structure. Evidence from Mozart’s autograph informs the concluding discussion of vocal scoring in the Act 2 choruses and the final moments of the work.

This chapter examines suitable statistics questions for investigation by children of different ages, using a cycle of problem, plan, data, analysis and conclusion (PPDAC) (Wild & Pfannkuch 1999). The importance of variation in data and different types of variables and the difference between a population and a sample are investigated. Readers will explore different ways of displaying data to ‘tell a story’. The importance of drawing inferences from data and the uncertainty associated with these inferences are discussed. Readers will engage in activities that use technology to support the development of statistical understanding.

Following the theoretical rationale for a role of policy evaluation in polycentric climate governance, what can be said about its actual role in light of theoretical expectations? The empirical data show that the theoretical expectations play out insofar as the elements that were hypothesized do exist in the context of the EU, Germany and in the EU, namely that both self-organized and non-self organized evaluation exist. The collective action dilemmas that feature at the very core of polycentric governance theorizing also materialize through evaluation, pointing to a significant role of the state, while non-state actors also contribute. Lesson-drawing may thus emerge as a function of evaluation, but the full theoretical potential of evaluation has not yet been realised, given the various deficiencies that both state-funded as well as society-funded evaluations contain.