This book examines the impact of modern technologies, from Artificial Intelligence to the Dark Web, that have revolutionized the recruitment and exploitation of vulnerable individuals, with particular focus on the protection of minors.

Part I-'The digital frontier' maps the evolving landscape of online trafficking, exposing how social media and emerging tech are weaponized by criminal networks. Part II-'A dual response' provides a unique comparative analysis that bridges the gap between rigorous international legal frameworks and the moral imperatives of Catholic Social Teaching. Part III-'An architecture of care' moves beyond theory to offer concrete doctrinal, institutional, pastoral, and technical recommendations designed to dismantle the infrastructure of online exploitation.

An incisive analysis is made possible by the researcher's unique expertise in this critical field. It is the result of a singular professional trajectory, where experience accumulated at the Holy See and within major international fora has now borne fruit in this substantial monograph. By providing concrete measures to navigate the legal and ethical complexities of the digital age, this book serves as both an academic landmark and an operational framework for preventing and eradicating human trafficking online.

The book explores the revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics on business education. It provides educators, students, and business professionals with essential knowledge and practical tools to effectively integrate these technologies into business learning and practice. As the business landscape becomes increasingly data-driven, understanding and utilizing AI and data analytics is crucial for staying competitive. This book delves into the fundamentals of AI and data, explaining their roles in modern business and education. Through detailed explanations, real-world examples, and case studies, readers will learn how to apply these technologies to enhance decision-making, strategy formulation, and operational efficiency.

Designed for business educators, students, and professionals, this book offers valuable insights into creating a future-ready workforce equipped with the skills needed for the digital age. It highlights best practices, innovative teaching methods, and the latest trends in AI and data analytics, ensuring readers are well-prepared to harness the full potential of these transformative technologies in the realm of business education.

Foundations of Education introduces the major topics and debates in contemporary American education, including teaching as a profession, school governance, social class, gender, and disabilities.

The 2nd edition includes two new chapters on race and ethnicity, and immigration and language, and each of the other chapters have been thoroughly updated to respond to the latest research and events. The book introduces ways that pre-and in-service teachers can address these topics using a foundations approach, that is, to look at the problems from historical, philosophical, and sociological perspectives and bringing together relevant findings from those disciplines to analyze and illuminate educational issues. The book includes exercises, discussion questions, international case studies for comparative purposes, and is supported by a companion website with additional reading suggestions, links to relevant websites, videos, and podcasts. This is a text that responds to current developments, changes, and trends in teacher education and society more broadly, from discussion of climate change, to culturally responsive pedagogy to critical race theory. Foundations of Education will prepare a new generation of educators for a globalized and technology-driven society that needs to be aware of its best educational traditions, its current problems and its future possibilities.

A hands-on guide for building leadership teams and cultures that ignite business transformation.

In The Catalyst CEO: Why CEOs Can't Lead Transformation Alone-And What the Best Do Instead, veteran leadership advisor Constantine G. Alexandrakis delivers an insider's guide to leading systemic change across complex organizations. Drawing on decades of experience advising world-leading companies, he challenges the cult of the hero CEO and offers a powerful new paradigm on what it truly takes to make business transformation happen-and stick.

Through real-world stories of CEOs globally who have successfully transformed their organizations, Alexandrakis reveals why even brilliant visions and strategies fail if they're not owned, led, and executed by the right teams.

You'll learn how to turn your board, executive team, and leaders into force multipliers-creating the conditions required for transformation to scale and endure.

Inside the book:

• A complete blueprint for establishing a clear and compelling case for transformation, creating urgency that people understand, believe, and act on.
• Specific strategies to catalyze boards and senior leadership teams as active partners in transformation, aligning them around priorities, decision-making, and shared accountability.
• How to build and lead a senior leadership team capable of executing transformation, balancing capability, trust, and constructive challenge, so change is sustained at scale.
• Real-world insights into how CEOs recognize and respond to organizational resistance, course-correct when plans go off track, and keep teams engaged under pressure.

Perfect for aspiring and practicing executives alike, The Catalyst CEO is a must-read guide for leaders who want to move beyond vision alone-and build teams capable of carrying transformation forward, long after the initial spark is lit.

Optimize your brand visibility for AI-powered search engines and large language models

In The New Rules of AI Search: SEO for visibility in ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Generative Search, Crystal Carter delivers a practical guide to optimizing brand visibility across AI-powered platforms. As large language models transform how consumers discover products and services, traditional SEO strategies require fundamental updates to remain effective in this new search paradigm.

The New Rules of AI Search explores the technical and strategic dimensions of generative engine optimization. Crystal Carter examines how AI search platforms aggregate and present information differently than traditional search engines, providing actionable frameworks for ensuring your brand appears prominently when users query ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and similar platforms for recommendations and information.

Readers will also discover:

• Specific techniques for structuring content that AI systems can easily understand, cite, and recommend to users seeking information
• Strategies for building brand authority signals that large language models recognize and prioritize in their generated responses
• Methods for monitoring and measuring your brand's visibility across multiple AI search platforms and generative interfaces
• Practical approaches for adapting existing SEO infrastructure to meet the unique requirements of AI-powered discovery channels
• Frameworks for anticipating future developments in generative search and positioning your brand ahead of algorithmic changes

Essential for digital marketers, SEO professionals, brand managers, and business owners seeking to maintain competitive visibility, this guide provides the strategic foundation for succeeding as AI fundamentally transforms how consumers search for and discover information online.

"The veriest offscouring of the earth." That was how one Confederate soldier remembered the men of Wheat's Battalion, better known as the Louisiana Tigers. The Tigers were widely considered, by northerners and southerners alike, the wildest and wickedest unit in the South-a reputation that has long overshadowed the individual lives of the men who filled its ranks. In Louisiana's Tigers: The Men of Wheat's Confederate Battalion, Ross A. Brooks draws on unparalleled research and never-before-seen documents to look beyond battlefield myths, offering a definitive social history of these soldiers.

Louisiana's Tigers meticulously traces the lives and journeys of the battalion's members from the 1830s to their deaths. The men in the unit, products of a nation growing in wealth and size yet torn apart by slavery, were wanderers that fate brought together in New Orleans in 1861: a transient population of immigrants, native-born laborers, criminals, and opportunists. Their lives were as unfixed as that of Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat himself, the charismatic military adventurer who led them.

In his exploration of the unit's Civil War years, Brooks focuses on the battalion's strategic role under Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee but also moves beyond the battlefield, delving into the internal and surrounding tensions of this dysfunctional, constructed community and examining the frictions these men sparked among the civilians they encountered. The story continues long after the Confederate defeat, following the Tigers through Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. From building livelihoods, legal or otherwise, to founding and relying on early veterans' relief groups, many of the unit's members struggled to navigate their final years in the postwar South.

Louisiana's Tigers provides an essential look at the men in this singular battalion and the South that created them, unearthing new details of the Tigers' complex history.

Despite mantras such as 'evidence-based policy' and 'evidence-for-policy', many working in and with an interest in education remain unconvinced that policies are truly underpinned by, to draw on an oft-used proclamation, 'the best available evidence'. Thus, there have been growing calls for new ways of producing education policy. This book is intended to make headway and add fuel to this movement. A wide range of scholars have been assembled to make contributions to this book that are likely to be of interest to academics, politicians, civil servants, school staff, and other education professionals in the public, private, and voluntary sectors. The book's chapters reflect on opportunities and challenges for policy advice and policy making in education and, significantly, they put forward new possibilities for the future.

The conversations, debates, and further research that this book ignites could prove fruitful over time, ultimately leading to more optimal policies.

This book theorises how social work, as a theoretical and practical discipline, could be brought into a critical dialogue with the concept of democracy. The issue is particularly acute since anti-democratic forces are now democratically elected in several European nations, implying that social work institutions are increasingly steeped according to neoliberal and anti-democratic logic. The book elaborates on a response to this trend by showing how social work can avoid the traps of contemporary discourse by which democracy is to be protected with repressive means. In elaborating on democracy as inextricably related to justice, emancipation and equality, this book explores democracy as a liberating force much closer to the spirit and tradition of critical and radical social work. By endorsing a view of democracy as contradictory, paradoxical, and based on dissensus, this book frames social work as a democratic force in the struggle for justice and equality.

Transform yourself from a trusted strategic advisor to a trusted strategic influencer. Become the advisor/influencer leaders rely on for strategic clarity and trusted counsel.

Executives face relentless pressure, ambiguity, and isolation, requiring advisors who deliver actionable counsel. In Influencing Leaders, James E. Lukaszewski and Helio Fred Garcia provide the proven framework for becoming a trusted strategic influencer partner that leaders turn to when facing critical decisions.

The book presents seven essential disciplines: establishing trustworthiness, mastering verbal influence, developing management perspective, thinking strategically, recognizing patterns, structuring constructive advice, and teaching leaders to apply counsel effectively. Practical tools include the Three-Minute Drill, Five Imperatives for Advisors/Influencers, Pattern Recognition techniques, and assessments for developing capabilities.

Readers will also find:

• The five components of trust and ten ways advisors commonly lose it, providing a clear roadmap for building and maintaining credibility with executives
• Frameworks for structuring advice that's clear, actionable, and strategically relevant
• Pattern recognition techniques that enable advisors and influencers to forecast future challenges by identifying recurring organizational and market dynamics
• Methods for developing a management perspective that allows advisors and influencers to see the world through the leader's eyes and understand executive priorities
• Communication strategies for delivering counsel with the clarity, brevity, and impact that time-pressured executives require

Influencing Leaders: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor is perfect for mid-career professionals, external consultants, and anyone aspiring to influence organizational leaders. Influencing Leaders demonstrates that true influence is about mastering the disciplines of foresight, strategic thinking, and trust that make trusted strategic advisors and influencers essential to leaders making their most challenging decisions.

Becoming a trusted strategic advisor and influencer is a personal journey that requires discipline, self-reflection, and a commitment to serving leaders effectively. By mastering the seven disciplines and adopting a strategic mindset, advisors and influencers can achieve the six aspirations common among all trusted strategic advisors and influencers: acceptance, access, impact, inclusion, influence, and respect, all crucial to the leaders they serve.

Ultimately, the strategic influencer brings integrity based on truth and trust to everything they do.

How can research move from observation to transformation without sacrificing rigor? This volume brings together cultural, feminist, decolonial, and community-engaged approaches that make voices too often silenced in mainstream psychology both audible and authoritative. Across 2 volumes, spanning gender equity, mental health, education, and community development, contributors from Latin America and Spain present grounded research designs, dialogic analyses, and creative artefacts that reconfigure who speaks and what counts as knowledge. The collection is a call to humanize academia and broaden the methodological horizons of the social sciences, proposing an ethical framework that redistributes epistemic authority.

In this first volume, focusing on feminist and gender-sensitive research and mental health, chapters interrogate diagnosis and discourse through phenomenology and psychoanalysis, co-produce knowledge with survivors and caregivers, and pilot arts-based, participatory designs that support recovery. Grounded in concrete field projects, the book offers a tested methodological toolkit. Its contributions foreground the agency and subjectivity of research participants, and scholar-practitioners with "one foot on the street and one in the university."

Read alongside Volume 2, which extends this into research on education and community development, the two-volume set traces how participatory methodologies travel across contexts while remaining locally situated. By centring the research subject, the book challenges dominant assumptions and prevailing power structures, opening new avenues for intervention and inquiry. It will be essential reading for students and scholars in critical psychology, mental health, medical anthropology, Latin American and Hispanic studies, and public policy.

This book states that inequality has become one of central policy issues across the world. We study trends of inequality in earnings, income, and wealth across households in Japan, using the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure (NSFIE) from 1984 to 2014. Inequality in earnings, income, and wealth all increased during the last three decades. Changes in earnings and income inequality were mostly driven by demographic aging and a shift of the population to the elderly, who tend to have higher inequality. The wealth inequality rose not only in the aggregate but also among the young, and this is due to a major increase in the fraction of households who own zero or very low wealth across all age groups, rather than an increase in the concentration of wealth in the top as in some other countries such as the USA. Critical factors in understanding inequality trends in Japan that we identified are aging demographics, changes in the household structure, and macroeconomic trends of the past decades including the financial bubble period and a decades-long slow-down thereafter.

Presenting a study of the Galli priests of the Roman cult of Cybele, the Great Mother goddess, this book examines the archaeological evidence to give a clearer picture of the priesthood. The Galli were priests renowned in Antiquity for their crossdressing, mendicant, ecstatic behaviour and their infamous act of self-castration. However, most of our understanding of the Galli comes from an incomplete, fragmentary and scathing literary record. This book aims to rectify this imbalance by re-assessing them in light of the material evidence, and by comparing them with subsequent cultural groups.

Through the use of three comparative case studies from Polynesia, India and North America, this book analyses the ancient social group with these three modern 'gender variant' counterparts to highlight the 'othered' identity and experience of the Galli. The study reveals shared similarities regarding gendered 'other' attire, religious associations and sexual relationships. This approach offers a remarkable insight into the Galli cult, and poses questions on how similar human social groups operate, irrespective of time and place.

Provides a comprehensive foundation for advancing social work practice in today's complex health care systems

Health social work stands at the intersection of healthcare delivery, social justice, and human well-being-fields that are increasingly interconnected as global health systems confront deep structural inequities. Handbook of Health Social Work, Fourth Edition, provides the theoretical grounding, practical tools, and cross-disciplinary insights needed to address these urgent challenges. Reflecting the latest developments in health policy, integrated care, and social determinants of health, the book offers a wellness-oriented, evidence-based framework for practice across a range of settings and populations.

Authored by leading experts, this fully updated edition expands on previous work to reflect the evolving realities of today's health landscape. New material explores the implications of technologies such as AI and machine learning for social work ethics and practice, health policy reforms, climate-related health impacts, and the role of social workers in responding to pandemics, political conflicts, and climate-related health crises. The Handbook also introduces critical updates on Medicaid expansion, the Child Tax Credit, and other key policy shifts, while offering fresh insights into transdisciplinary collaboration and the integration of genetic knowledge in client care.

The definitive guide to promoting health equity and improving outcomes through leadership and innovation, Handbook of Health Social Work:

• Explores social work's expanding role within transdisciplinary health care teams
• Emphasizes a wellness-based, strengths-oriented approach grounded in evidence-based models
• Discusses the interface between genetics, health, and social work practice
• Includes learning exercises, research recommendations, and life-course perspectives in every chapter

Supporting advanced study within social work, public health, and health policy programs, Handbook of Health Social Work, Fourth Edition, is ideal for master's and doctoral-level courses such as Social Work in Health and Mental Health, Clinical Practice in Illness & Healthcare, and Social Welfare Policy and Services. It is also an essential reference for social workers, clinicians, and cross-disciplinary health professionals engaged in direct practice, administration, or policy development.

The book analyses the legal conditions for the use of insurance in waste management. The main focus of the study is the regulations of the EU and selected European countries, supplemented by a comparison with the legal regulations in the USA. The choice of the EU as the main subject of the research is due to the concept of rational ecological waste management developed in EU law. However, national and international legal instruments regulating waste management are not precisely reflected in insurance concepts covering waste risks. It proves necessary to develop a conceptual apparatus related to the definition of insurance waste risks. It seems valuable to define the role of insurance in a comprehensive waste risk management system at local and regional level.

The book examines the legal conditions for the use of insurance as a method of waste risk management. Therefore, part of the book is devoted to the application of EU environmental and waste management rules to the interpretation of financial collateral requirements and the use of insurance as a financial instrument. A special place in the book is occupied by considerations devoted to a less well-known insurance activity than the insurance contract, namely the insurance guarantee. Its qualities are increasingly recognised in the insurance market. The book draws attention to the attractiveness of the insurance guarantee for solving problems arising from the financing of waste management. The book will be of interest to both lawyers and economists, academics and practitioners in the insurance and waste management industry.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the innovative technologies in Chinese language education. It showcases innovations such as virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience applications through case studies of pioneering programs, research centers, and products designed specifically for Chinese language learners. This book also features insider perspectives from exclusive interviews with over 20 leading developers, researchers, and educators who are driving these innovative technologies and integrating them into quality instruction. These firsthand accounts offer deep insights into the process of designing, validating, and applying new technologies to transform Chinese language learning. It serves as an essential guide for Chinese as a second language (CFL) teachers, teacher training providers, and Edtech companies specializing in solutions for Chinese learning.