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The purpose of this chapter is to review how well walking interventions have increased and sustained walking, and to provide suggestions for improving future walking interventions. A scoping review was conducted of walking interventions for adults that emphasised walking as a primary intervention strategy and/or included a walking outcome measure. Interventions conducted at the individual, community, and policy levels between 1990 and 2015 were included, with greater emphasis on recent interventions. Walking tends to increase early in interventions and then gradually declines. Results suggest that increased walking, and environmental-change activities to support walking are more likely to be sustained when they are immediately followed by greater economic benefits/time-savings, social approval, and/or physical/emotional well-being. Adaptive interventions that adjust intervention procedures to match dynamically changing environmental circumstances also hold promise for sustaining increased walking. Interventions that incorporate automated technology, durable built environment changes, and civic engagement, may increase cost-efficiency. Variations in outcome measures, study duration, seasons, participant characteristics, and possible measurement reactivity preclude causal inferences about the differential effectiveness of specific intervention procedures for increasing and sustaining walking. This review synthesises the effects of diverse walking interventions on increasing and sustaining walking over a 25-year period. Suggestions are provided to guide future development of more effective, sustainable walking interventions at the population level.

There are very few Black children in programs for gifted children when both historical and contemporary research indicate that such environments contain elements very similar to those described as advantageous for Black children. Presented here is an overview of the research regarding Black children’s learning styles, multiple intelligences, and cultural expectations around adult-child interactions and a comparison to characteristics of gifted (and potentially gifted) children. In addition, the evolution and refinement of the definition of giftedness is outlined along with the impact of those definitions on Black children. The identification, assessment, and testing processes used to place students in gifted programs are outlined along with policies (e.g., universal screening) and practices (e.g., more multicultural education and gifted education in teacher in-service and pre-service education) that can transform gifted programs into diverse and inclusive learning environments where gifted Black students learn, grow, and thrive. Finally, classroom practices that cultivate the genius and giftedness of Black children are presented – practices that give teachers an opportunity to add to their repertoire of strategies and pedagogy in order to increase their ability to create more inclusive learning environments that benefit all children in general and Black children in particular.

While it has been claimed in many empirical studies that the political futures market can forecast better than the polls, it is unclear upon which our forecast should be based. Standard practice seems to suggest the use of the closing price of the market, as a reflection of the continuous process of information revealing and aggregation, but we are unsure that this practice applies to thin markets. In this chapter, we propose a number of reconstructions of the price series and use the closing price based on these reconstructed series as the forecast. We then test these ideas by comparing their forecasting performance with the closing price of the original series. It is found that forecasting accuracy can be gained if we use the closing price based on the smoothing series rather than the original series. However, there is no clear advantage by either using more sophisticated smoothing techniques, such as wavelets, or using external information, such as trading volume and duration time. The results show that the median, the simplest smoothing technique, performs rather well when compared with all complications.

The purpose of this chapter is to review and synthesise the available evidence for the health benefits of walking. It follows a non-systematic evidence review and finds that the evidence base for the health benefits of walking is growing. Increasingly we are finding strong evidence for the beneficial effects of walking for both individuals and populations. More evidence is required on how to better understand the health outcomes associated with walking and how to promote long term increases in walking behaviour. Systematic reviews of specific health benefits remain rare. Walking should be promoted in all population groups regardless of age or sex. There are currently few existing integrative syntheses of the physical and mental health outcomes associated with walking and this chapter aims to help fill that gap.

This paper explores firms’ strategic options when their investments are subject to the threat of government expropriation. I develop a simple hold-up model of political risk. In the model, a firm decides whether to invest and then the government decides whether to expropriate the firm’s investment or to simply collect normal taxes on its profits. The government is motivated by revenue and a wide range of nonpecuniary factors: its reputation, electoral pressures, patronage opportunities, and pressure from external actors. In the model, the likelihood of expropriation depends on several factors: the firm’s profits, the amount of taxes it pays, the government’s ability to operate the firm’s assets, and the government’s political incentives. Effective management of political risk requires an integrated strategy, consisting not only of public and government relations efforts, but also financial, value chain, and human resources strategies designed to reduce the government’s incentives for expropriation.