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In the 1950s, a combination of technological and scientific advancement, political competition, and changes in popular opinion about spaceflight generated public policy in favor of an aggressive space program. This and that of 1960s moved forward with a Moon landing and the necessary budgets. Space exploration reached equilibrium in the 1970s, sustained through to the present. The twenty-first-century progresses signals that support for human space exploration is waning and may even begin declining in the coming years. This chapter reviews this history and analyzes five rationales suggested in support of continued human spaceflight: discovery and understanding, national defense, economic competitiveness, human destiny, and geopolitics.

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework and explore ways UDL decreases potential barriers for diverse students while increasing opportunities to learn. The sociocultural theory of Lev Vygotsky (1978) serves as a theoretical framework for UDL. Vygotsky (1978) placed much emphasis on the role of the social interaction in the development of cognition stating, “Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 57). Additionally, he focused considerable attention on language and private speech. The ability to express oneself in any environment, particularly the classroom, is critical to intellectual development. Another pivotal concept is that of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which reflects the point between what a child has previously learned and can complete independently and that which they cannot do, even with supports. Our intent was to use student examples, or case studies, of typical diversity in the classroom, to demonstrate the application of UDL principles. Specifically, we provide ways planning for representation of material, expression of material, and engagement in material, which can benefit all learners. The case study examples demonstrate ways effective planning can benefit learners in many areas. The case studies presented in this chapter reflect a small portion of the diverse population in classrooms across the nation. Yet the case studies demonstrate ways planning can incorporate students “in the margin” while at the same time benefitting all students in the classroom. Addressing diversity through the UDL lens helps teachers accommodate individual differences through intentional instructional design, while at the same time providing resources for all students in the classroom.

We investigate the reasons why income inequality is so high in Spain in the EU context. We first show that the differential in inequality with Germany and other countries is driven by inequality among households who participate in the labor market. Then, we conduct an analysis of different household income aggregates. We also decompose the inter-country gap in inequality into characteristics and coefficients effects using regressions of the Recentered Influence Function for the Gini index. Our results show that the higher inequality observed in Spain is largely associated with lower employment rates, higher incidence of self-employment, lower attained education, as well as the recent increase in the immigration of economically active households. However, the prevalence of extended families in Spain contributes to reducing inequality by diversifying income sources, with retirement pensions playing an important role. Finally, by comparing the situations in 2008 and 2012, we separate the direct effects of the Great Recession on employment and unemployment benefits, from other more permanent factors (such as the weak redistributive effect of taxes and family or housing allowances, or the roles of education and the extended family).

Working to improve organizations is the mainstay of organization development (OD) practice and includes figuring out the sources of workplace disruptions and dysfunctions. Casting aside the focus of most change-management initiatives, the organization, organizing intelligence (OQ) relies on paying attention to what people actually do, making meaning of complex, messy human-social organizing activities, in the interests of fostering productive workplaces. Resting on dialog with and among participants “feeling their way” as they organize their work, OQ is an exercise in synthesis rather than analysis. A holistic understanding of organizing activities is helped by exploring the roles of a triad of closely interwoven factors – organizing structures, work-practices, and relationships – in how people get things done, while understanding how these are interconnected. This chapter examines why the capacity for OQ matters, why and how OQ differs from widely practiced, technically framed, organizational analysis, and what distinguishes people with OQ from those with a more conventional interest in organizational change. A case study of the Dutch home-nursing organization, Buurtzorg, illustrates OQ in practice. With small groups of nurses who self-organize, this is a structure that changes both the way people work and their relationships, to the benefit of nurses and the quality of life and care of their patients, while reducing costs; clearly an example of a more productive workplace.

The potential advantage of extreme value theory in modeling management phenomena is the central theme of this paper. The statistics of extremes have played only a very limited role in management studies despite the disproportionate emphasis on unusual events in the world of managers. An overview of this theory and related statistical models is presented, and illustrative empirical examples provided.

State leaders’ decision-making calculus is often attributed to external factors. The political arena, international community pressure and a country’s military stance all take centre stage in the analysis of national security decisions. Little weight is given to personal aspects of a leader’s psyche in explaining these decisions; this is true to the bulk of the research regarding this topic. This study theorizes and tests a positive link between Israeli leaders’ combat military experience and their propensity to enter into ‘peacemaking’ decisions namely, peace talks, cease fires and unilateral withdrawals. This research uses a new database comprising all peacemaking decision points in Israel’s history, looking at the pressure put on a leader from outside factors and his military experience to explain the decision taken. It finds a strong significant link between combat experience and the tendency to enter in a peacemaking decision with little regard to ideological affiliation, shedding a new light on Israeli politicians from both sides of the aisle.