The period of the crusades and the Latin settlement of the eastern Mediterranean was an important one for medieval historical writing. Indeed, it has been recently suggested that the chroniclers of the First Crusade (1095–99), faced with the need to couch events in a more overtly exegetical register, ‘pioneered a new way of writing about the recent past’. Whether or not one accepts the notion that such writers adopted a fundamentally new mode of composition, there can be little doubt that this initial expedition left a significant imprint on medieval literary cultures. For a start, the vast number of extant narratives is unusual by medieval standards. More than this, though, the enterprise is renowned for popularising the medieval monograph format, with many writers electing to compose standalone histories characterised by a narrow focus on the crusade. As the crusading movement progressed, some embedded crusade accounts into works with wider chronological and geographical scopes, but the free-standing ‘crusade’ history was an outcome of nearly all subsequent expeditions (or at least the major ‘numbered’ ones). It is perhaps a by-product of this textual tradition – among other factors, such as modern historians’ propensity to compartmentalise evidence to facilitate historical analysis and the hangover of nineteenth-century scholarly conventions – that crusading expeditions are often treated in isolation: a discrete series of holy wars related to, but somehow distinct from, the Latin Christian settlements established in the wake of the First Crusade, known collectively as the crusader states, the Latin East or, when viewed from the West, Outremer (‘the land across the sea’). One need only cast an eye over the many modern general histories of the crusades to appreciate that most devote comparatively little space to the crusader states. Instead, the history of those polities on the fringes of Latin Christendom has usually been detailed separately, so much so that even the validity of the long-standing descriptor ‘crusader states’ has been disputed.

Consequently, the historiography of the crusades and the crusader states has developed along slightly different contours. For the purposes of this volume, the most significant difference, to be discussed in greater detail below, is that whereas texts – especially historical narratives – pertaining to the crusades have been subjected to an unparalleled degree of literary scrutiny in recent years, the textual evidence for the Latin East has less frequently been examined through the same interpretative lens.

This chapter explores the integrated potential of future technological and social innovations enabling sharing in future energy systems. Energy systems around the world are undergoing a transformation toward more distributed, renewable-based configurations where new mechanisms for “sharing” are evolving. Future energy systems are likely to integrate a regionally appropriate mix of electricity generation that is dispatched, stored, and distributed through sophisticated platforms that enable sharing of electricity at multiple scales. Sharing in future energy systems has the potential to radically disrupt relationships governing utilities, energy consumers, and distributed electricity generation at the individual and household levels, at the community and organizational levels, and at the regional, state, national, and even international levels. Innovations may allow formerly passive consumers to become actively engaged in producing and managing electricity which could shift the locus of organizational decision making and control away from traditional utilities. Prosumers who can “share” their electricity may be empowered to change the rules that have governed their relationships with utilities for the past century. We consider a potential “death spiral of utilities’ business model” as new sharing platforms, including community-level energy cooperatives, emerge to replace the conventional approach to managing and distributing energy. This chapter also explores how future energy sharing might connect with the concept of energy democracy.

FIVE CENTRAL FEATURES OF THE THEORY

Working memory is a system consisting of those long-term memory traces active above threshold, the procedures and skills necessary to achieve and maintain that activation, and limited-capacity, controlled attention. The specific features of our model include:

1. (1) Domain-free, limited-capacity controlled attention.

2. (2) Domain-specific codes and maintenance (phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad are two examples but the potential number of such codes is large).

3. (3) Individual differences in both 1 and 2, but individual differences in capacity for controlled processing are general and possibly the mechanism for general fluid intelligence. Although people can, with practice and expertise, circumvent the abiding limitations of controlled attention in quite specific situations, the limitations reemerge in novel situations and even in the domain of expertise if the situation calls for controlled processing.

4. (4) Limited-capacity, controlled processing is required for maintaining temporary goals in the face of distraction and interference and for blocking, gating, and/or suppressing distracting events.

5. (5) The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and associated structures mediate the controlled processing functions of working memory. We also argue that individual differences in controlled processing represent differences in functioning of the PFC.

A number of intellectual influences have served to shape our thinking about working memory (WM) and its evolution as a construct separate from that of short-term memory (STM).