Chapter 4 introduces the concept of a Black feminist toolkit to show that at the microlevel, Black women succeed at growing movement participation and solidarity by utilizing transnational Black feminist politics to convert experiences of pain into purpose. Here, I examine the processes through which affective and emotional bonds serve as political devices for mobilization in race-based social movements, utilizing and expanding the concept of collective emotional energy levels. Furthermore, I engage with Vilma Piedade’s concept of dororidade, a combination of the Portuguese words for pain, solidarity, and sisterhood, to illuminate why and how affective processes of mobilization are critical to Black women’s participation in Argentina’s feminist and Black social movements. I argue that Black women activists and artist-activists equip their constituency with what I name a Black feminist toolkit, which gives them a collectivized knowledge, language, and confidence to process the otherwise crippling forms of quotidian and institutional racism that they experience.

The term reaction time (RT) describes the interval between the initial appearance of a stimulus and an organism’s response to that stimulus. Because RT data are notorious for substantial individual differences and positive skew, the overarching goal of this chapter is to equip researchers with sufficient knowledge to design RT studies that enhance experimental control, thereby reducing unwanted error variability. To accomplish this goal, the chapter discusses five major themes: (1) an overview of the evolution of RT research; (2) a discussion of the state of RT knowledge today, with a focus on moderating variables that researchers could control; (3) a review of some of the most common RT measures employed by contemporary social and behavioral scientists; (4) a description of specific technological tools that can be used to administer those measures; and (5) a discussion of basic considerations for statistical analysis of RT data.

Histories of harbour development at Cochin have assumed that the Cochin Harbor Project was motivated by the colonial state’s economic interests and that it provides yet another illustration of the technological hubris associated with high modernism. Through a close analysis of the debates and discussions preceding the execution of the project however, this chapter shows that both of these assessments are inaccurate. Unlike what such accounts suggest, every stage of the Cochin Harbor Project was mired in doubt – with senior officials conceding that the project was likely to have an adverse impact on the port and its surroundings. Why then was this project executed despite such concerns? I argue that far from representing the colonial state’s confident mobilization of technology to meet its economic and strategic needs, as commonly assumed, the Cochin Harbor Project was in fact an uneasy compromise between the divergent and often competing political and economic interests of the colonial state and the princely states of Malabar. At a time of increasing environmental and political instability, a development project, this chapter shows, offered the best possibility of not only meeting the criterion of ‘productive works’ that was so central to colonial finance but also securing the cooperation of the princely states of Malabar that were becoming increasingly assertive.

A 35-year-old man complained about muscle stiffness and weakness, especially when initiating a movement. He had experienced these symptoms for as long as he could remember. They were present in his eyes, jaws, tongue, and limb muscles. He had noticed that cold weather had a negative influence. He was not able to run and did not participate in team sport activities. In spite of these symptoms, he experienced no limitations in activities of daily living. He was referred because he had been informed elsewhere about possible treatment. The family history revealed similar symptoms in a sister and a brother, but not in the parents. His father’s grandparents were cousins.

Marx summed up Europe’s many impacts on world history as showing “what human activity can bring about” – namely, the capacity to undo and remake the human world. Although we have become increasingly aware of the negative side of this release of human energies, in war, ecological destruction, and imperial domination, the positive one survives in the closer contact between peoples, modern industry’s potential to reduce poverty, and the expansion of practical knowledge and scientific understanding. Remaking the World argues that what put Europe at the center of these changes was first the division and fragmentation that persisted through much of its history and then the emergence of spheres of activity that were autonomous in the sense of regulating themselves by principles derived from the activities carried on within them, as opposed to “teleocratic” domains governed by norms that were generated outside themselves. Unlike other attempts to grasp European distinctiveness which focus chiefly on economics and industry, it gives equal attention to culture, science, and the politics of liberty, and makes comparisons based on substantial discussions of counterparts to these developments elsewhere.

Via an analysis of H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, this chapter explores how novels adapted to accommodate the metropolitan spaces of London, and it argues that Wells’s novel links the financialization of the British economy and the cultural turn toward London to the emergence of a new novelistic poetics and to the development of a new novelistic character. Tono-Bungay narrates the rise and fall of Teddy Ponderevo’s financial empire, but the source of drama in the novel is more often the narrator’s inability to reconcile classical novelistic poetics with the logic of value production under finance capitalism and with his experiences in London. The narrator longs for a new mode of representation that can account for the largely imaginary and highly volatile value produced by the financial empire, and he finds inspiration for that new mode of representation in the urban spaces of London.

In this chapter, we focus on some simple cases in which analytical treatments of the Rayleigh–Taylor (RT) and Richtmyer–Meshkov (RM) instabilities can be carried out. This requires neglecting many physical effects and assuming small amplitude perturbations of a single wavelength. The linear stage growth rates are loosely derived and explored. This treatment requires the introduction of the key fluid equations and the concepts of vorticity, species fractions, and diffusion. Comparison is made to experiments.

Communication and cognition are presented as deeply interrelated aspects of the mind, the means by which animals perceive, respond to, and understand each other as well as their world. This chapter reviews chemosensory, vibrational (acoustic and seismic), visual and tactile sense modalities, the various ways in which people have attempted to exploit these sensory channels to manage problematic behaviors, and the ways in which anthropogenic disturbances and pollutants can interfere with signaling. It then delves into domains such as self-awareness, personality, problem-solving, cooperation, social learning, and culture. The chapter considers intriguing adaptive hypotheses such as that of cognitive buffering, before provoking reflection on the downstream consequences of social disturbance and trauma. Drawing on experimental studies on elephants and a range of other species from honeybees to whales, the comparative perspective positions cognitive abilities within their broader ecological and evolutionary contexts, and highlights why it is crucial to account for phenomena such as social learning and culture in protecting and managing elephant populations.

Field research refers to research conducted with high degrees of naturalism. Compared with other research methodologies, field research can preserve the rigor of traditional laboratory research while augmenting the ecological validity and social impact of the research findings. The first part of this chapter provides a definition of field research and discusses its advantages and challenges. The second part of the chapter provides a brief overview of qualitative field methods and an in-depth overview of experimental field methods. It discusses different types of randomization schemes in field experiments, such as cluster randomization, block randomization, and waitlist designs. It further discusses the design and implementation concerns when conducting field experiments, including spillover, attrition, and non-compliance. The third part of the chapter provides an overview of some important considerations for conducting field research, including pilot testing, replicability and generalizability across contexts, and how geographical and technological advances impact field research.

A 27-year-old woman consulted the neurology clinic because of progressive muscle weakness in legs and arms. She noticed increasing difficulty in walking, with a maximum walking time of 15 minutes when there was a slight upwards slope, climbing stairs, and lifting heavy things. She had more and more frequent falls in which it felt like her legs suddenly could not bear her weight anymore. Once she fell, she wasn’t able to get up from the floor without help. At the time of referral, she also experienced problems rising from a sitting position. She also mentioned problems with repeated movements due to fatigability, for example, when she walked or was cleaning out the dishwasher.

In retrospect, she remembered that she had had a ‘typical’ walk from the age of five and had never been able to run. A subtle tremor of her fingers was already present in kindergarten. Her medical history was otherwise unremarkable. She had two healthy siblings.

Prolific is a website that offers researchers the ability to recruit and sample participants for online research. In contrast to earlier crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), it focuses primarily on academic and marketing research – typically done through online surveys and experiments. In this chapter, I aim to introduce this platform to researchers conducting online studies and to provide knowledge and practical advice on how to best use the platform for online research. The review includes explanations of how the site works, the composition of its pool of participants, the options available to researchers for sampling and recruiting participants online, how to achieve advanced abilities by connecting Prolific to research software (e.g., Qualtrics, Gorilla), and how to ensure high data quality when using Prolific. I then review the evidence on the current state of data quality on Prolific, suggesting that it can provide higher data quality than MTurk and also better than some commercial panels. I conclude with a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of using Prolific for online research and potential future developments in the platform that could promote more credible online research.

In this chapter, we discuss how the design and evolution of the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth elevated respect for the lived experience of queer youth in setting policies that impact their lives. Originally founded in 1992, the Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth was formed to respond to high suicide risk among gay and lesbian youth in the Commonwealth. That original Commission transformed in 2006 into an independent state agency established by law. Today, the Commission on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning (LGBTQ) Youth advises others in state government on effective policies, programs, and resources for LGBTQ youth and produces the Safe Schools Program with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. This chapter details the experience of artist and legal designer Alexander (Alex) Nally, who led agency and government relations on the Commission for five years, and focuses on how human-centered design approaches can improve policy interventions.

This chapter provides an introduction to the use of mobile sensing in social and personality psychology. It first looks at mobile sensing’s historical roots and discusses how, in the field, the method follows in the footsteps of other traditional approaches to the collection of behavioral data. It then covers research questions of the kind that mobile sensing lends itself to, and provides a high-level summary of the current literature on mobile sensing. In the third section, the chapter illustrates the very basic how-to of mobile sensing with respect to technical rationale, implementation in studies, and coverage of variables. The fourth and final section is a psychometric reflection on where mobile sensing currently stands and where it is or should be going. To this end, five predictions are evaluated that were made for mobile sensing research when it first emerged in the psychological research landscape about a decade ago.

This chapter introduces biological concepts that are important in the remainder of the book, particularly biochemical components of natural biological “nanomachines”. Biochemical structures such as proteins, DNA, RNA, lipid membranes, and vesicles are introduced, as well as an introduction to cells is given.

Generals Joseph W. Stilwell and Haydon L. Boatner shared extensive China experiences, starting from their tours in Tianjin to their roles as language students and US army attachés in Beijing in the 1920s to the 1930s. After Pearl Harbor, they returned to Asia to assume crucial positions in the China-Burma-India Theater (CBI). Chiang appointed Stilwell the commanding general and Boatner the chief of staff of the Chinese Army in India. However, American and Chinese officers clashed over command, in the training center in Ramgarh, India, and on the war front in north Burma. Boatner, often acting as Stilwell’s surrogate, became a lightning rod, drawing the ire of a number of Chinese officers. This chapter examines the contentious US-China relations as exemplified by Boatner’s conflict with his Chinese peers, especially during the Battles of the Hukawng Valley and Myitkyina. It cautions against interpreting Sino-American conflicts in moralizing, racializing, or orientalizing terms.

This chapter explores the knowledge creation aspect of contemporary tax reforms in Nigeria. It offers a historical perspective on this process which lets us see today’s reforms not only as the re-creation of long-retreated systems of state taxation-led ordering, but against the backdrop of what intervened in the meantime – a four-decade late-twentieth-century interregnum where revenue reliance on oil profits created a very different distributive system of government-as-knowledge. Today’s system of tax-and-knowledge is not just reform but an inversion of what came before.

In this chapter, I show how the current shift to digitalising tax administration in Kenya is connected to its colonial fiscal structures both in its design and implementation. Firstly, the idea that technology can help economic development in countries like Kenya has existed since colonial times and still features in current policies that endorse technology for economic development. Secondly, colonial structures are also present in the implementation strategies of a digital platform like the e-filing system central in this case study as they rely on colonial infrastructures for implementation. ITax, the e-filing system that is the focus of this chapter, was implemented quite rapidly and made mandatory within a short period. This chapter argues that the ‘promise’ of digitalisation as a driver of sustainability, modernisation, and economic growth is outweighed by the harm done by colonial history impacting its practice. I argue that colonial fiscal policies are still shaping Kenya’s tax practices. A closer look at Kenya’s colonial fiscal history is important for understanding how the current tax systems are shaped and informed by past practices.