The actors that are active in the financial world process vast amounts of information, starting from customer data and account movements over market trading data to credit underwriting or money-laundering checks. It is one thing to collect and store these data, yet another challenge to interpret and make sense of them. AI helps with both, for example, by checking databases or crawling the Internet in search of relevant information, by sorting it according to predefined categories or by finding its own sorting parameter. It is hence unsurprising that AI has started to fundamentally change many aspects of finance. This chapter takes AI scoring and creditworthiness assessments as an example for how AI is employed in financial services (Section 16.2), for the ethical challenges this raises (Section 16.3), and for the legal tools that attempt to adequately balance advantages and challenges of this technique (Section 16.4). It closes with a look at scoring beyond the credit situation (Section 16.5).

This chapter examines Kazakhstan’s efforts to reform its teacher compensation system and investigates whether the substantial salary increase for teachers in Kazakhstan between 2020 and 2023 has improved the quality of teaching and educational outcomes. The traditional “Stavka system” of teacher remuneration, where pay is based on teaching hours, is explored along with other limitations of the system, such as income instability and reduced motivation for non-teaching tasks. The reform aimed to address these issues by introducing a new wage system with a hierarchy of teacher qualifications, providing incentives for complex teaching, and acknowledging the role of special working conditions. However, this system faced challenges in incentivizing non-teaching tasks and addressing disparities in teachers’ workload. The reform’s impacts are then evaluated. Initial observations suggest a rise in the profession’s prestige and interest among school graduates, but issues remain. These include insufficient financial incentives for extra-lesson activities and the new system’s limited effect on young teachers’ pay. While salary increases are vital, they alone are insufficient to enhance educational outcomes. The need for nuanced policies, transparency, and professional consensus is emphasized to ensure that reforms effectively incentivize high-quality teaching.

This chapter delves into the crucial step of biomass pretreatment and its significance in a biorefinery. It begins by introducing a comprehensive definition of a biorefinery and the importance of pretreatment in biorefining. Various pretreatment methods, their advantages, disadvantages, and accompanying structural modifications to the biomass are explained. The general focus is on the impact of pretreatment on enzyme hydrolysis, an essential step in biomass conversion to renewable sugars for producing various bioproducts, including biofuels and biopolymers such as bioplastics. The chapter further discusses how pretreatments, if not balanced, could also contribute to downstream processing challenges, such as the generation of inhibitors. The chapter provides a comprehensive guide to grasping the necessity of pretreatment in biomass utilization for sustainable biorefining.

Becoming an adult involved lots of changes and challenges for young people with cognitive disability. Many services, and sometimes families, judged young people badly because they had a cognitive disability. Young people needed help to be independent, but this wasn’t always given to them. Some young people were lonely and found so-called friends who abused them. Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander young people and young people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds needed others to understand and respect their culture. LQBTIQA+ young people wanted love and acceptance as they became adults.

This chapter explores the policy framework within which utility model systems are constructed. The chapter suggests several policy arguments which may help developing and low-income countries adopt a utility model regime which suits their national development phase. It encourages pushing the flexibility boundaries of such rights in relation to the justification and nature of the right.

This chapter sets up our main research question, which is what effect, if any, did the arrival and proliferation of Fox News have on US politicians? It summarizes the history of Fox News and describes the natural experiment created by the haphazard rollout of Fox News. It goes on to summarize the scholarly literature on media effects and, specifically, how little of it focuses on the behavior of politicians. In turn, it summarizes the scholarly literature on members of Congress and how little of it focuses on the media. It then explains our open science approach.

Chapter 4 discusses the origins of India’s service sector advantage. Although modern industries developed in the colonial period and the policy of public sector led industrialization after independence led to the development of industries producing consumer, capital and intermediate goods, the share of the sector in employment has remained low. Industry in India did not place the same role in structural transformation as it did in the context of European industrializers and in China today. The service sector in India has been the most productive sector historically. Labour productivity in services in early twentieth century was higher than in industry. Labour productivity in industry grew faster until the 1980s, thereafter service sector has led productivity growth. The service sector today has a concentration of workers with secondary and tertiary education. But this was also the case historically. The education policies in colonial India prioritized secondary and tertiary education for a few at the cost of universal primary education. This continued after independence. The service sector led growth in India today has historical origins.

This chapter highlights the role media play in political accountability. If Fox News’ entry and presence can shape candidate and member perceptions about what districts want (as we saw in Chapters 3 and 4), can Fox News also shape how responsive representatives are to constituents’ policy preferences? This responsiveness to the district – also known as dyadic representation – is the subject of our examinations in Chapter 5. To test this question, we quantify the degree to which representatives’ voting behavior diverges from what it should be (if they were faithfully following district public opinion). Here we find, once again, that Fox News increases the tendency for Democratic members in marginal districts to “move rightward” in response to rising Fox News availability in the district. In this analysis, our measures reflect the tendency for Democrats in right leaning districts to err on the conservative side of the median voter in their district, and that tendency gets worse as district-level availability of Fox News increases.