Chapter 11 reviews an important third argument in support of the Innateness Hypothesis, which is based on another aspect of the maturational nature of language acquisition. Like the argument from stages, this argument directly relates to the process of language acquisition. The crucial point involves the claim, which we will refer to as the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH), that language acquisition can only be successful if human beings are exposed to language input during a certain (early) period in their life span. The key claim is that language acquisition has to take place within a so-called critical (or sensitive) period, which, for human language, has been suggested to end around puberty. The evidence comes from cases of extreme deprivation, removal of brain tissue in operations or accidents, or from the fact that second language acquisition appears to be much harder after puberty than before it. We discuss various types of evidence that modify the beginning and end of the critical period and also ask why there would be such a period to begin with. We discuss in considerable detail a well-known case of language deprivation involving a girl named Genie.

Chapter 2 first discusses the fact that humans form one of the many millions of animal species that, along with non-animal species, all occupy a place in the big “tree of life,” followed by two responses which aim to single out humans as fundamentally different, especially in terms of their mental capacities. Given our focus of attention on the mind, we discuss the notions mind–body dualism and modularity. The remainder of this chapter offers a preview of many issues that will be discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters. We review the central question how people come to know what they know in some detail, which allows us to be more precise about what we mean by “nature” and “nurture.” We then focus on Noam Chomsky’s Innateness Hypothesis for language, considering its impact in all fields that study human behavior. We preview what this hypothesis entails about how children acquire their language and the predictions it makes about general, universal properties that all languages share. We discuss why Chomsky’s Innateness Hypothesis is controversial and conclude the chapter with some genetic and neurological aspects of the innateness claim.

We begin our examination of managing across cultures by exploring four key topics aimed at laying the foundation for developing global management skills: the changing world of business and what it means for managers; how global organizations are changing to adapt to the new business environment; how the new global realities are facilitating an evolution from managers to global managers; and career paths for global managers

This chapter explores three important topics related to management skills for global work and expatriate assignments: intercultural competence; a Skills Development Model for developing intercultural competence and global management skills; and a look at how global companies develop global management skills.

Mining and energy projects have different socio-economic impacts upon economies compared with the agricultural, manufacturing and service sectors. Among the many reasons for this is their unusually large economies of scale and their considerable profits, which in turn attract significant investment. The economics of a mining project will depend on the way in which revenue is generated. In a public resource framework such as Australia, mining royalties contribute extensively to the revenue generated by states and territories. This inevitably means that those states and territories with a significant fossil fuel infrastructure have been slower to transition to renewable energy. For example, under the 2021 National Gas Infrastructure plan, many existing gas projects in New South Wales and Queensland will be expanded, which will generate a significant increase in royalty income. This goes against international trends, where it is clear that the expansion of fossil fuel projects undermines climate imperatives and needs to be wound down despite the royalty income it generates.

This chapter explores how national cultures can influence the relationship between stakeholders and strategies around the world; how the relationship between strategy and organization structure can be influenced by local regional differences; how national and regional cultures can influence decision-making process in organizations; and how corporate cultures are created and reinforced by cultural, organizational, and situational factors.

Chapter 9 focuses on the claim that the language input that children are exposed to is not rich enough to explain how they can construct a mental grammar. This leads to the poverty of the stimulus argument in support of the Innateness Hypothesis, which holds that if the input is insufficient, children must be born with an innate system that bridges the gap between the poor input and the richness of their knowledge of language. We will examine in detail in which ways the input could be called poor. We then turn to Chomsky’s Principles and Parameters model of language acquisition, paying attention to certain developments in this model that reduced the role of innate knowledge. Along the way we also introduce two additional arguments. The argument from convergence is based on the fact that all learners that grow up in the same speech community end up with (essentially) the same mental grammar despite having received different input. We also mention the argument from speed of acquisition, which is based on the fact that language acquisition is “fast,” no matter how you measure it. We then review alternative, more empiricist, approaches to language acquisition.

If risk is lack of information about the future, and measurement is the act of determining a quantity with precision, then the phrase risk measurement is at war with itself. It is only possible to measure Knightian Risk, where all the outcomes and all their probabilities are known a priori. Thus a casino can measure the risk that a lucky bettor will win a million dollars at roulette.

The imperatives of climate change have accelerated the importance of technologies focused on the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been recognised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as an essential part of cost-effectively reducing the GHG emissions connected with fossil fuel energy production. Captured carbon is transported, by ship or pipeline, to its storage location deep underground within naturally occurring geological formations. Domestically, CCS has gained increasing support. Currently, the only commercial CCS facility in Australia is the Gorgon Project in Western Australia. More are expected to follow after the implementation of the Climate Change Act 2022 (Cth), entered into between Australia and the United States with the aim of promoting the joint development of low-emissions technology solutions such as CCS via collaboration with industry and the private sector.

The primary goal of Chapter 3 is to introduce some of the important themes that have come up when philosophers think about the (human) mind, where it comes from and how it relates to the body and to the surrounding world. To this end, we visit a division of philosophy called the philosophy of mind, which will involve a review of a variety of “-isms” (such as rationalism, empiricism, mind–body dualism, monism, materialism, idealism, behaviorism, physicalism, associationism, and so on). We also meet a number of important philosophers who have developed various and often opposing views on the nature–nurture issue. We conclude with a discussion of what philosophers of mind call “the hard problem,” how to explain the notion of consciousness.

While the pricing formula (3.2) is generic enough to cover just about any financial arrangement, it is most useful for fixed-income instruments where the planned cash flows are highly likely. As the times and amounts in (3.2) become less and less certain, the value of enumerating possible but not probable cash flows gets lower and lower.

We introduce the task of key distribution, whose goal is to allow two mutually trusting users, Alice and Bob, to generate a random shared key that is unknown to any eavesdropper in the protocol. We start by precisely defining this task and our model for adversaries. We then show how to realize it in a simple toy scenario, which will help us demonstrate the key ideas. Finally we introduce information reconciliation, which is an important building block in the protocols that we will study in subsequent chapters.