As one of the few monographs available on the history of Chinese tomb murals, this book offers a comprehensive study.

Theoretically, the authors put forward rebirth belief and state explicitly that Chinese tomb murals gain their theoretical support from rebirth belief, which belongs to the Confucianism system. In terms of historical resources, they compile the first chronology of Chinese tomb murals including stone and brick reliefs, offer an area index for tomb murals, and conduct in-depth and systematic discussions on Chinese tomb murals. Furthermore, Chinese tomb murals are studied from an aesthetic perspective to highlight the unique value of Chinese tomb art for both Eastern and Western art history.

The rich archaeological materials covered here are carefully scrutinized, the arguments eloquently presented, and the style used makes for accessible and enjoyable reading.

This book primarily investigates the historical development, fundamental theories, and resource utilization of China's cultural industry, as well as the role of technological innovation in promoting the cultural industry's growth. It specifically covers the historical choices and experiences of cultural industry development strategies since China's reform and opening up, the achievements and future strategies of policies on cultural industry since the 18th National Congress, the core elements of cultural industry development and their relationships, characteristics of cultural consumption and its guidance, the integration of culture and tourism, the relationship between folk cultural resources and cultural industry development, etc. The book systematically studies the development of modern technological innovation in the cultural industry and its significant impact on contemporary cultural industry development, providing an in-depth analysis of the positive role that technological innovation plays in advancing the cultural industry. The research presented in this book elucidates the historical context, experiences, and issues of modern cultural industry development in China, expounds the fundamental relationships between cultural resources, technological innovation, and cultural industry development, and provides theoretical support and practical guidance for promoting the high-quality development of China's cultural industry.

This book offers an introduction to ancient Chinese characters, addressing the origin and development of ancient writing, the theoretical method of learning ancient Chinese characters, evolution of ancient Chinese characters, and analysis of character structure. Moreover, it integrates their physical appearance, pronunciation, and meaning to provide a comprehensive understanding of ancient Chinese characters. Respective chapters introduce readers to oracle-bone inscription, bronze Inscription, and inscription on seals, coins and pottery. Given its scope, this book represents an indispensable primer for those who are eager to understand ancient Chinese writing and culture.

Why does the problem of data privacy remain so intractable? Deep Dark Data explores how this contemporary problem begins with the ways we define and use personal data. Instead of debating how best to protect personal data, Alison Cool argues that we would be better off asking how data became personal in the first place. Drawing on years of ethnographic research in Sweden, the most datafied country in the world, Cool reveals that what we call personal data encapsulates a number of very different relations between data and persons, none of which are inherent in the data itself. This surprising and highly original book untangles these relations and traces their troubled histories, ultimately inviting us to understand privacy as a gendered and racialized politics of moral exclusion.

A user's guide to navigating the intricate, often contradictory relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence

Artificial intelligence will shape our future in unforeseen ways, and it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it could someday dictate the terms of our very existence. But the fact is, the more that AI can do, the more it underscores the irreplaceable qualities of human creativity, empathy, and moral reasoning. This is one of the eight paradoxes of AI that Virginia Dignum explores in this revelatory book. Drawing on her decades of experience in AI research and governance, Dignum cuts through the hype and sensationalism that often surround AI and reveals why the most profound questions it raises are not about technology but ourselves.

The AI Paradox is a guide to seeing complexity with clarity, questioning the seemingly inevitable, and using AI in ways that prioritize our collective values. Each paradox explored in this book illuminates a particular dimension of these emerging technologies while prompting us to reevaluate our most common preconceptions about them. Can they truly replicate human decision making or do they simply magnify our blind spots and biases? Is AI the ultimate problem-solving tool or does it introduce more problems? Is justice for all achievable when it comes to AI? Who does AI serve, big tech or the common good? How do we even define AI?

With thought-provoking examples and paradoxical insights, this powerful little book challenges us to reimagine the role of these technologies in our lives, advocating for a collaborative, transparent, and inclusive approach that keeps humanity at the core of AI innovation.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

The practice of history in premodern Java was profoundly influenced by precarious conditions of textual production and preservation: fragile manuscripts perished in the tropical environment, archival records were scattered far afield, and historical memories faded over many generations. In this book, Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan examines how Javanese societies between the fifth and fifteenth centuries CE responded with distinctive strategies to record and transmit knowledge of the past.

Drawing on sources in Javanese, Sanskrit, Malay, and related languages from the Indonesian archipelago, Sastrawan provides a detailed account of diverse forms of history making in premodern Java, reconstructing a dynamic culture in which written and nonwritten modes of transmission coexisted and intersected. By situating these practices within broader discussions of global historiography, this book challenges modern assumptions about what counts as "history" and illuminates how societies have developed different ways of preserving and remembering the past.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Ganja is the popular name in Hindustani, Bengali, and other South Asian languages for intoxicating substances produced from the plant species Cannabis sativa L. Starting in the eighteenth century, British India's colonial administrators sought ways to systematically tax and govern how ganja circulated from the farms of peasant families in rural Bengal to pipes, plates, and cups elsewhere in the subcontinent. Ganja Matters follows the perpetual incongruity between regulatory efforts to pursue the plant through botanical observation, colonial reportage, and excise statistics and the leisurely, devotional, and creative ganja pursuits among people. Utathya Chattopadhyaya offers a social history of ganja in a multispecies framework that reveals how the cannabis plant co-constituted histories of empire, gender, subalternity, and labor under British rule. Against the weight of the criminalization and "drug-ness" of cannabis, Chattopadhyaya puts the multidirectional and polysemic history of ganja as plant matter at the center of analysis.

Ten millennia in the Mono Lake Basin, showing how this complex ecosystem came to be what it is today.

Nestled at the base of the Sierra Nevada in eastern California sits a stunning landscape overlooking a saline lake with picturesque tufa towers and flocks of phalarope birds. This is the Mono Lake Basin.

In this sweeping history, Robert B. Marks examines the forces that have shaped the Mono Lake Basin's rich ecosystem. The story starts with the region's Indigenous peoples. It then traces the mid-nineteenth-century arrival of Euro-American settlers and the dispossession of the Kootzaduka'a people of their land. A struggle for control over water led to hydroelectric development and the sale of land and water rights to Los Angeles, diverting nearly all fresh water out of the basin and precipitating an ecological crisis by the 1970s. The ecological restoration movement has, for now, successfully preserved the Mono Lake Basin.

As Marks shows, the basin reveals a larger story of how human actions and natural forces shape the environment. A dramatic and ultimately hopeful environmental history, Deep Time in the Mono Lake Basin explores a beloved region to illuminate questions of water, power, and our relationship with the natural world that echo far beyond the American West.

What goes wrong when emotions get turned into digital data to be measured, monitored and managed

Data from facial emotion recognition, brain-computer interfaces, virtual reality, global emotion surveys and sentiment analysis offer an extraordinary new terrain for scientific exploration. Emotion sensing promises to decode and even to augment and control the very essence of human experience. But what if the science and technology of emotion measurement get emotions wrong? In Governing Global Emotions, Jessica Pykett argues that we must shift our thinking on digital emotional governance and calls for a radical reassessment of the fundamental claims of emotion science.

Pykett offers a groundbreaking account of how emotions are defined, used and governed through emerging digital technologies, arguing that emotions, senses and feelings have become a crucial new arena for political, economic and cultural struggles. She describes how technologies create emotional data, how smart cities use sensors to monitor residents' feelings and how global economies measure happiness. Drawing on twenty years of interdisciplinary social science, Pykett documents how emotion science continues to delve deeper, as researchers look for evolutionary continuity, biological certainty and neuroscientific consensus. What she finds instead is a divided field vulnerable to significant criticism. Pykett concludes that standardised, universal and instrumentalised scientific accounts of emotions are machinic, and when divorced from context, they can never be global.

To comprehend the underlying currents of the intra-Jewish conflict in Israel, which has been labeled differently throughout the years - First and Second Israel, center-periphery relations, Mizrahi-Ashkenazi relations, and in recent years again as First and Second Israel - one must thoroughly understand the nature of relationships between development towns and their neighboring kibbutzim. This book delves into the relations between Sderot and the kibbutzim of the Sha'ar HaNegev Regional Council, beginning in the 1950s, relationships that experienced various ups and downs over the years. These relations commenced with the establishment of the Sha'ar HaNegev Regional Council in 1950 and the establishment of the Gevim-Dorot transit camp in 1951, coinciding with the large-scale immigration of Jews from Islamic countries in the early 1950s and the population dispersal policy, particularly to development towns. This research examines the relationships between development towns and kibbutzim across seven decades through the case study of Sderot-Sha'ar HaNegev, and explores the markedly different social and political perspectives of both sides alongside their mutual antagonism. The significance of this research for understanding Israeli reality gained additional relevance following the October 7, 2023 massacre in Sderot and the Sha'ar HaNegev Regional Council, which are part of the Gaza envelope region.

Veiled in silence and oblivion, certain chapters of Israeli history conceal a submerged reality waiting to be uncovered. This work argues that just below the surface of national history, entire episodes remain hidden?so much so that we might affirm: in the field of Israeli history, there is not a stone that, if lifted, will not expose a reality different from the one imprinted in our collective memory. These cast-aside records provide essential insights into what we are, echoing E. H. Carr’s observation that "The best way to know the character of a society is to examine both the history it writes about itself and the history it does not write about."

This hermeneutic study traces the imprints of erased episodes in the body of the nation and confronts perplexing questions: What have we forgotten in our history? Which episodes of our past has the national discourse chosen to lock away in hidden drawers? For what is forgotten is not what is not remembered, but what people choose not to remember.

In the long and protracted process of decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa (1957?1994), three key moments in the transitions from colonial/white-ruled states to independent majority-ruled states can be identified: 1957?1965, 1974?1980, and 1988?1994. These transitional phases of decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa ? the beginnings of the process, a crucial turning-point in that process, and its endings ? are worthy of reappraisal and invite comparisons of various kinds. The existing literature does not consider the roles of communist actors in these transitions from a comparative perspective. This is the main focus of this volume, which will be an essential work for scholars of African decolonization and will interest anyone concerned with the history of communism and the external activities of the countries of the Soviet bloc and other communist actors.

The scramble for distant riches has featured centrally in the history of the Global South-from the first forays of European imperialists to the recent fascination with emerging markets. In the mid-nineteenth century, fortune hunters turned their attention to Argentina, transforming it into a front line of an expanding West. While accounts of this period often emphasize impersonal economic flows, Emerging El Dorado demonstrates that this chase for wealth has a far more multifaceted, dynamic, and human history. In Argentina, it encouraged explosive growth across several fronts-financial, commercial, demographic, and territorial. Capitalist routines of accumulation coexisted with get-rich-quick ventures, land grabs, and fraudulent schemes. Eduardo Elena's study profiles the promoters in Argentina and Europe who convinced others that this truly was a "rising country." At the same time, the book investigates the experiences of the groups who helped propel expansion, such as migrant families and overseas investors, and those like mixed-race paisanos/as and Indigenous peoples who were deemed obstacles. By exploring these overlapping social worlds, Emerging El Dorado sheds new light on the roots of our present-day growth dilemmas.

This book argues for a new direction of research, namely 'History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences' (HPSS). By adding a historical approach to the philosophy of the social sciences, the editor and authors show how fruitful HPSS is and simultaneously sheds new light on many central issues concerning the nature, development, and methodologies of the social sciences. This book revisits some classic works on the nature and methodology of the social sciences as well as offering a careful historical examination of the origins and development of a selection of social sciences and their distinctive methodologies. By reassessing the important debates in the philosophy of the social sciences as well as the methodological disputes between social scientists, the book provides a valuable resource to researchers and advanced students, but also to general readers.

This book explores innovative approaches to environmental education and sustainable development through diverse pedagogical experiences worldwide. It covers key themes such as teacher training in ecological values, environmental education competencies, the use of immersive technologies (virtual and augmented reality), green guidance, and family and community involvement. The chapters highlight the role of ethics, public policy, interdisciplinarity, higher education, and educational clubs in promoting eco-responsible behavior. Case studies and quantitative analyses enrich the volume, addressing current global challenges such as climate change, climate justice, and educational resilience.

A human perspective on the nature of friendship in the age of artificial intelligence

Is friendship with a chatbot as good as friendship with an actual person? Is there something about human friendships that eludes simulation? If so, what? And how much will the answers to questions like these change as AI develops and becomes more convincingly like us? Artificially Yours explains what friendship is and why it's valuable-and why there is no perfect substitute for human friends.

Blending insights from philosophy, psychology, and her own entertaining experiences with chatbots, Valerie Tiberius addresses a subject at the heart of our growing reliance on AI companions. She defines the ideal friendship as an enjoyable, close relationship built on shared activities between people who care about each other for their own sake. But few things in life are ever ideal, including friendship. Tiberius demonstrates how different kinds of friendships can be valuable in different ways: they can be pleasurable or useful, they can shape who we are and how we see ourselves, and the best ones are good for their own sakes. Using each of these values as her guide, Tiberius finds that relationships with chatbots do in fact exhibit some of the characteristics of friendship-but cautions that even future relationships with advanced AI are highly unlikely to be good in all the ways human friendships are.

A vital contribution to our ongoing conversation about human-AI relationships, Artificially Yours weighs the ethical risks before us as we look to a future with intelligent machines and affirms the value of human connections.

This book emphasizes sustainable water use through circular economy innovations, addressing the urgent need for efficient water management in various sectors. This approach integrates principles of reducing, reusing, and recycling water resources, fostering resilience against climate change and resource depletion. The Conceptual Water Efficiency Framework (CWEF) promotes circular water use in industries by implementing closed-water loops and digital tools, enhancing sustainability in sectors like chemicals and meat production (Karkou et al., 2024). The Water Circular Economy Index (WCEI) quantitatively assesses water management across 132 countries, identifying critical areas for improvement in sustainable practices (Peydayesh & Mezzenga, 2024). The Water in Circular Economy and Resilience (WICER) Framework outlines actions to deliver resilient water services while preserving natural systems, particularly in developing countries (Delgado et al., 2024). This book investigates how water sustainability and circular economy can solve the world's water problems. It offers a global approach that bridges environmental science, economics, policy, and technological advancement to provide practical recommendations for water consumption sustainability. The book provides practical advice, case studies, and future plans for researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and future plans for researchers, policymakers, practitioners and students. It would be an appropriate book to add to the discussion of water sustainability. With real-world issues, creative solutions, and a vision for the future, the book aims to empower policymakers and stakeholders to achieve a sustainable and water-secure world.

This book examines how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are related to mental health in South Asia. According to the World Health Organization, SDG 3 aims for "good health and well-being" which includes mental health. Just like physical health, mental well-being is important for individuals to thrive. Poor mental health can hinder progress in other areas like poverty reduction (SDG 1) or education (SDG 4). Mental illness can make it difficult to hold a job, stay in school, or manage daily life, increasing poverty and limiting opportunities. Hence, we can clearly understand the connection between good mental health and a sustainable future. The SDGs and their progress is one of the global priorities. However, no previous attempt has been made to discuss how the SDGs are related to mental health in South Asia which caters to a population of about 2 billion. This book is the first of its kind to do so.