This chapter examines the legal and institutional framework on access and benefit sharing (ABS) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It examines the drivers and dimensions of access and benefit sharing risks in the MENA region, gaps in existing legal frameworks on ABS in the region, and innovative approaches for addressing such gaps. The chapter delves into the challenges of ABS in the MENA region. The Nagoya Protocol’s principles of access to genetic resources and benefit sharing are highlighted, underscoring their significance in the MENA context. Given the fragile nature of global biodiversity, it is crucial to support and innovatively implement these existing regulations, ensuring an effective and efficient approach to ABS.

This chapter starts by providing historical perspective on the evolution of the Polish regulatory framework for the protection of utility models. Interestingly, the draft IPL takes us to legislative solutions already tested in the past. One might even say nihil novi sub sole (there is nothing new under the sun). The chapter presents data about the functioning of the regime currently in force. This is followed by a more general discussion, drawing on experience from other jurisdictions, of how various aspects of the regulatory framework might affect the ability of the system to promote innovation. Then, the current legislative framework is presented against the backdrop of the solutions proposed in the draft IPL.

The extensive thermodynamic variables of a fluid are introduced as the internal energy, volume, and number of molecules. The entropy is defined and also shown to be extensive. Taking the total derivative of the internal energy produces the first law of thermodynamics and defines the intensive parameters of temperature, pressure, and chemical potential. Changing variables from extensive variables to intensive variables is accomplished with the Legendre transform and defines alternative energies such as the Helmholtz free energy, enthalpy, and Gibbs free energy. Thermodynamic equilibrium requires that each element of a system have the same temperature, pressure, and chemical potential. For equilibrium to be stable, the material properties of each element must satisfy certain derived constraints. First-order phase transition are treated for a single-species system. Multispecies systems are treated and a widely used expression for how the chemical potentials of each species depend on the concentration of the species is derived. Chemical reactions are treated as is osmosis. The thermodynamics of solid systems is addressed along with mineral solubility in liquid solutions.

This chapter explores how Estonia became Europe’s top performer on PISA, without that being the goal. It unpacks social and education policies and practices and interventions that have helped build a high-equity high-performing education system. These include policies and initiatives fostering equity, inclusion, learner autonomy, teacher and school principal professionalism, autonomy and responsibility. Stakeholder engagement has led to longstanding cross-party agreements on the purpose of education. Thanks to investments into evidence- and results-based planning those agreements have been generative-productive. Eighteen months of paid job-protected parental leave encourages early responsive parenting. High levels of investment into preschool education help give children a good start in life. There are national curricula, but schools reinterpret those, creating their own curricula. Stakeholders and government took bold decisions such as the digitalisation of education at a point when the idea seemed utopian. They invested in free school meals, support for students in difficulty and voluntary formative assessment systems. No less important was a shift to favouring school self-evaluation over external inspections. In addition, the system generates substantial easily accessible and user-friendly data, including perceptions of well-being, autonomy and connectedness, not just examination results. This builds internal and external accountability and contributes to stakeholder collective efficacy.

Chapter 5 focuses on four different aspects of economic and social inequality. There were historical differences in level of economic development across provinces and there is persistence. The Bombay Presidency was one of the richest parts of colonial India. Maharashtra and Gujarat today are among the richest provinces in India. The poorer regions in colonial India, such as the United Provinces and the Central Provinces rank among the poorer regions today. Income inequality was high in the 1930s and 1940s. The first decades after independence saw a decline in inequality following the policies of public sector led development. Since the economic reforms of 1980, income inequality has increased, but it is not as high as in the colonial period. There is continuity in caste inequality in many dimensions, but also changes. Upper castes were heather and more literate in colonial India. Today lower castes have better access to education and jobs due policies of affirmative action, big differences remain. Finally, one aspect of gender inequality that is specific to India is sons preference. The regional variation in male biased sex ratio continues today.

Australia’s botanical diversity has shaped its literature of the environment. Through a selection of novels, short stories, and poetry, this overview focuses on the literary depiction of native species such as the coolabah, paperbark, and wattle. Structured chronologically, the discussion begins with Indigenous Australian narratives of plants, arguably the world’s oldest literary representations of botanical life. In the narratives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, plants are wellsprings of material and spiritual sustenance. Between British settlement and Federation, non-Indigenous narratives of Australian flora begin to appear. In these decades, literature negotiates the strangeness of antipodean plants in comparison to familiar European species. In post-Federation literature, the relationship between flora and nation becomes more pronounced. During this period, writers increasingly foreground the clearance of forests in the post-colonial state. Contemporary literature reveals an expanded understanding of plant ecologies and conservation realities. The work of Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal during these years establishes a precedent for later literary activism. The Anthropocene literature of recent decades confronts humanity’s escalating impacts on plants especially in Australian regions. Literary works critique climate disturbance, habitat degradation, urban development, and related exigencies that continue to imperil the future of plants in Australia.

This chapter reviews the development and implementation of English school education policy following an exploratory report by the Department for Education and Skills on the future of primary school collaboration and three major Blair (Labour) government initiatives focused on inter-school collaboration: the New Labour Academies; the Secondary Leadership Incentive Grant programme; and the Networked Learning Communities programme (and their further evolution under Brown (Labour)) until 2010. It traces the dramatic intensification of these policies under the Conservative–Liberal Coalition including incentives to create new academies and Teaching Schools. The Conservative policy also revolutionised school administration and performance by removing the remaining state schools from local government control. The stated aim of a 2016 White Paper ‘Education Excellence Everywhere’ was that, by 2022, every English state school would be in a multi academy trust. It is now past 2022 and, while this goal has not been attained, there is no doubt that ten years of a combination of policy and austerity have transformed England’s state school systems.

In this chapter, we derive Sturm–Liouville theory that introduces a broad class of eigenfunctions that are convenient to use for representing functions. Sturm–Liouville theory provides the basis of the Fourier-series method of representing functions that is the main focus of the chapter and that also is the foundation of Fourier analysis. We show how to calculate Fourier series and to use Fourier series to obtain the solution of boundary-value problems posed in Cartesian coordinates. It is seen that the main advantage of an eigenfunction approach for solving boundary-value problems is that either the inhomogeneous source term in the differential equation or the boundary values may be time dependent, which they cannot be in the method of separation of variables.