bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The canonical ensemble
Authors: Tuckerman Mark E.
Published: October 2023

Chapter 4 comprises a detailed presentation of the classical canonical ensemble and its generation via thermostatted molecular dynamics simulations. The chapter begins with a discussion of the basic thermodynamics of the ensemble, and the distribution is derived, first, by coupling a system to a thermal reservoir and, second, maximizing an entropy functional of the distribution. Both yield the expected Boltzmann distribution expressing that the ensemble consists of all microstates having specified temperature T, particle number N, and volume V. The ideal gas law is derived in the canonical ensemble, and, following this, a detailed discussion of liquid structure and spatial distribution functions is given. The chapter then explores the generation of a canonical ensemble using thermostatted equations of motion and provides algorithms for numerically integrating these equations. The theoretical framework for analyzing non-Hamiltonian systems is presented, and an isokinetic algorithm for achieving very large time steps in canonical molecular dynamics is discussed
The isobaric ensembles
Authors: Tuckerman Mark E.
Published: October 2023

Chapter 5 comprises a detailed presentation of the classical isobaric ensembles and their generation using barostats and thermostats synergistically in molecular dynamics simulations. The chapter begins with a discussion of the basic thermodynamics of the ensemble, and the distribution is derived, first, coupling a system to a thermal reservoir and a piston and, second, by maximizing an entropy functional of the distribution. Both yield the expected distribution expressing that the ensemble consists of all microstates having specified temperature T or enthalpy H, particle number N, and pressure P. Formulations of the ensemble for both isotropic and anisotropic volume fluctuations are provided. The chapter then explores the generation of isobaric ensembles using equations of motion involving thermostats and barostats together, and algorithms for numerically integrating these equations are presented. The use of atomic and molecular virials in these equations is also discussed, and algorithms for treating holonomic constraints within isobaric ensembles are presented
The grand canonical ensemble
Authors: Tuckerman Mark E.
Published: October 2023

Chapter 6 comprises a detailed presentation of the classical grand canonical ensemble. The chapter begins with a discussion of the basic thermodynamics of the ensemble, including Euler’s theorem and its implications. The distribution is derived, first, by coupling a system to thermal and particle reservoirs and, second, by maximizing an entropy functional of the distribution. Both yield the expected distribution expressing that the ensemble consists of all microstates having specified temperature T, chemical potential μ, and volume V. It is shown how to derive equations of state in the grand canonical ensemble, and the ideal gas is used as an example. The chapter then proceeds to examine particle-number fluctuations, following which the potential distribution theorem is proved and shown to yield the excess chemical potential of a solution. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how to perform molecular dynamics simulations with fluctuating particle number using adaptive resolution simulations
Monte Carlo
Authors: Tuckerman Mark E.
Published: October 2023

Chapter 7 introduces the Monte Carlo approach to sampling probability distributions, and it is shown how to Monte Carlo methods to generate canonical, isothermal-isobaric, and grand canonical distributions introduced in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, respectively. After establishing the Central Limit Theorem, the chapter discusses the general problem of sampling distributions. Basic techniques include importance sampling and rejection techniques. The challenge of sampling rare events is discussed, and advanced sampling techniques, which directly address the rare-event problem and include replica-exchange Monte Carlo and Wang-Landau sampling, are covered. The chapter concludes by introducing the notion of trajectory ensembles, and an approach known as transition path sampling, designed to generate events that bridge one basin to another through a barrier region is described. This ensemble is known as the transition-path ensemble. Efficient techniques for sampling such transition paths are discussed
Quantum ideal gases: Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein statistics
Authors: Tuckerman Mark E.
Published: October 2023

Chapter 11 presents a statistical mechanical treatment of the quantum ideal gases, i.e., the ideal Boltzmann, fermion, and boson gases. The discussion begins with the microscopic description and the solution of the eigenvalue problem for a quantum ideal gas. It is argued that calculating the partition function is most readily accomplished in the grand canonical ensemble using a second-quantized formulation. When the particles are distinguishable, the equation of state is identical to that of a classical ideal gas. For fermions and bosons, however, the problem of computing thermodynamic properties is significantly more complex and can only be solved exactly in certain limits. Away from these limits approximations are needed and are discussed in detail. The relevant distributions - the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein distributions are derived. The local density approximation of density functional theory is derived for the ideal electron gas. For the ideal boson gas, the phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation is discussed
Classical time-dependent statistical mechanics
Authors: Tuckerman Mark E.
Published: October 2023

Chapter 13 covers the statistical mechanics of classically driven systems and the non-equilibrium ensembles associated with these systems. The chapter begins by comparing the equilibrium of ensembles of simple systems and the ensembles that result when these same systems are driven out of equilibrium. The general theory of linear responses to driving forces is presented, and from the linear-response theory, it is shown how to connect nonequilibrium ensemble averages to equilibrium time correlation functions via perturbative solution of the classical Liouville equation. This connection is established through the Green-Kubo theory, and several examples employing Green-Kubo theory are discussed. Numerical algorithms for computing time correlation functions are presented. The chapter then concludes with a discussion of non-equilibrium molecular dynamics as a method to perform simulations of classical systems subject to particular types of driving forces. Examples of different types of strains on the system are described along with the flow profiles they produce
The Langevin and generalized Langevin equations
Authors: Tuckerman Mark E.
Published: October 2023

In Chapter 15, stochastic equations of motion, specifically the Langevin and generalized Langevin equations, are discussed as a means of generating classical ensemble distributions and generating dynamical quantities of systems coupled to harmonic baths. The chapter begins with a derivation of the Caldeira-Leggett Hamiltonian, which is then used to derive the generalized Langevin equation and the Langevin equation as a special case. The physical meaning of the different terms in the generalized Langevin equation are discussed, and a series of increasingly complex analytically solvable examples is presented. Numerical algorithms for integrating the Langevin and overdamped Langevin equations are presented. Following this, the incorporation of stochastic dynamics into multiple time-stepping approaches as a means of eliminating resonances is presented. The chapter then shows how to tailor memory kernels to mimic specific desired bath effects in classical systems. The chapter concludes with discussions of sampling stochastic transition paths and Mori-Zwanzig projection-operator theory for deriving generalized Langevin equations
Discrete models and critical phenomena
Authors: Tuckerman Mark E.
Published: October 2023

Chapter 16 explores the statistical mechanics of discrete lattice models and their use in describing critical phenomena. The chapter begins with a review of phase diagrams, coexistence curves, crititical points, and the behavior of certain thermodynamic quantities in the neighborhood of a critical point. The notion of universality classes is introduced. To set up the class of lattice models, magnetic systems are described; simplifications are made to these models to yield the so-called Ising model. Solution of this model is demonstrated within the mean-field theory approximation, which is shown to yield a qualitative description of critical behavior. Exact solutions are derived in one and two dimensions, and predictions of critical exponents from them are obtained. Following this, the renormalization group is introduced, and approaches for understanding critical behavior and universality from renormalization group transformations are discussed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the use of discrete models in areas ranging from molecular crystals to tissue morphogenesis
Introduction to machine learning in statistical mechanics
Authors: Tuckerman Mark E.
Published: October 2023

Chapter 17 provides an introduction to the world of machine learning and its application to problems in statistical mechanics. After an overview of machine learning concepts, two key distributions needed to construct loss functions are introduced. The discussion of machine learning models begins with kernel methods, starting from linear regression and progressing to kernel-ridge regression and support vector machines. Following this, a detailed description of neural networks, including feed-forward and convolution neural networks, is provided for both regression and classification tasks. Finally, weighted neighbor methods, including k-nearest neighbors and random forests, are discussed. The performance of these machine learning models is compared for the problem of representing high-dimensional free energy surfaces from limited sampling data. A second demonstration of a solid-solid phase transition is also presented. The chapter concludes with discussions of clustering techniques and intrinsic dimension of a data manifold.
What Emergency?
Authors: Muldoon Paul
Published: October 2023

This chapter investigates the emergence of trauma as a matter of state and healing as a reason of state. Drawing upon some pioneering works of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, the chapter develops an understanding of damaged life as that from which something of profound psychic importance has been lost; something so significant and so unrecoverable that the process of mourning, of letting go, remains incomplete or unfinished. It explores the way in which this incomplete mourning process is deemed to afflict victims and perpetrators alike, locking them into a mutually constitutive pathology from which it is hard to escape. It goes on to discuss how resistance to mourning exceeds conventional (psychic and legal) forms of repair, turning it into a latent threat to life—the emergency yet to come—and how this latent threat elicits those exceptional, biopolitical measures of healing, commonly conceived as acts of repentance: memorials, apologies, commissions.
New Life
Authors: Muldoon Paul
Published: October 2023

This chapter investigates the impact of the new discourse of trauma on institutions of political renewal, of healing and reconciliation, in the wake of civil discord. The chapter compares the ‘institutions of exception’ used by the ancients and the moderns in their treatment of ‘civil wounds’ as a way of exposing a dramatic shift in the way politics addresses itself to, and tries to take control of, life. While the ancients took recourse to the institution of amnesty (commanded forgetting) in order to bring mourning to a full stop, we moderns have resorted to a range of new exceptional institutions—public memorials, political apologies, truth commissions—in which societal grieving is actively stimulated. The chapter argues that this transformation has less to do with the ethical objections to forgetting that arose after the Shoah than with our newfound confidence in directing, rather than simply containing, biological processes through institutionalized truth telling.
The Monumentalization of Shame
Authors: Muldoon Paul
Published: October 2023

This chapter investigates the complex role memorials play as expressions of public penance. It focuses on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, exploring how it functions as a form of political communication, a site of shared mourning, and a vehicle of trauma management. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas, the chapter defends the Memorial as the expression of an affirmative biopolitics in which the German state marks a decisive break from a collective life context that maintained itself by usurping and destroying the lives of others. I then explore how the Memorial responds to (and offers consolation for) the vicarious trauma of later-born Germans who tread a thin line between identifying with and identifying as the victims. I suggest this consoling work weakens the admonitory force of the Memorial and its capacity to provoke reflection on the friend–enemy distinction that founds the nation-state.
Preliminary Rulings on the Interpretation of Union Law
Authors: Lenaerts Koen , Gutman Kathleen , Nowak Janek Tomasz
Published: October 2023

This chapter discusses the procedure by which the Court of Justice delivers preliminary rulings on the interpretation of Union law, which constitutes an indirect route for ensuring the compatibility of acts of the Member States with Union law. It evaluates what rules may be interpreted by the Court of Justice, the limits placed on its jurisdiction, and the content and effects of such preliminary rulings.
The Action for Failure to Act
Authors: Lenaerts Koen , Gutman Kathleen , Nowak Janek Tomasz
Published: October 2023

This chapter tackles the action for failure to act, which forms part of the complete and coherent system of judicial protection, thereby covering both unlawful action and inaction of Union institutions, bodies, offices, and agencies. It explores the basic elements of this action and its relationship to the action for annulment, with particular regard to natural and legal persons.
Jurisdiction of the Court of Justice under Conventions Concluded by the Member States
Authors: Lenaerts Koen , Gutman Kathleen , Nowak Janek Tomasz
Published: October 2023

This chapter focuses on the Court of Justice’s jurisdiction under conventions concluded by the Member States, such as the Brussels Convention and the Rome Convention, along with conventions based on the EU Treaty in the version in force before the Lisbon Treaty. It mentions the different rules governing the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice to give preliminary rulings on the interpretation of the conventions and protocols.
Conclusion of the Procedure
Authors: Lenaerts Koen , Gutman Kathleen , Nowak Janek Tomasz
Published: October 2023

This chapter showcases the conclusion of the procedure before the Union Courts. It delves into key aspects of judgments and orders, judgments by default and applications to set them aside, the procedure when a case is referred back to the General Court, and costs. It also discusses exceptional procedures relating to judgments and orders, such as revision, rectification, failure to adjudicate, and third-party proceedings.
Introduction
Authors: Lyon Aidan
Published: October 2023

This introductory chapter gives a broad overview of the main themes of the book, introducing the reader to the general issues and philosophical method.
What Is Psychedelic Experience?
Authors: Lyon Aidan
Published: October 2023

This chapter introduces the book's central question: what is a psychedelic experience? Upon reviewing the exchanges between Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond concerning their introduction of the term 'psychedelic', the chapter proposes that we should understand the notion along the lines they intended. Their idea was that substances such as psilocybin and LSD induce experiences that reveal hidden parts or aspects of the mind and, therefore, should be called “psychedelics” or mind-revealers. This was a novel and profound insight into the nature of these substances. However, it is also an empirical hypothesis that may be false and, therefore, should be tested. The chapter argues that in order to do this, we first need to explicate the concept of psychedelic experience in more precise terms so that we can know what kind of evidence may be marshalled in support of – or against – the hypothesis.
Memory
Authors: Lyon Aidan
Published: October 2023

This chapter explores the idea that some memory recollections count as psychedelic experiences and that they can occur spontaneously, during and after meditation, and as a result of consuming psychedelic substances. The chapter also introduces the concept of mindfulness and unpacks the deep and important connection between mindfulness and memory. This analysis of mindfulness is then used for formulating a definition of mindfulness in terms of psychedelic space, as well as one in terms of mindfulness being the opposite of a psychecryptic (mind-concealing) state. The chapter then reviews the evidence that meditation and psychedelics can reveal hidden memories, arguing that while the evidence supports these hypotheses, the empirical research is not yet definitive. In particular, it is proposed that empirically verifying the accuracy of memories revealed during psychedelic-assisted therapy is a particularly salient way of testing the hypothesis that psychedelics are, indeed, psychedelic.
Hallucinations
Authors: Lyon Aidan
Published: October 2023

This chapter addresses the question of whether psychedelic-induced hallucinations are evidence against the hypothesis that psychedelics reveal the mind. While, at first glance, this may appear to be the case, the chapter argues that some (but perhaps not all) hallucinations induced by psychedelics do involve mind-revelation. In particular, by analysing mathematical models of how the primary visual cortex generates low-level geometric hallucinations, the chapter argues that these hallucinations are revelations of the early stages of our perceptual processes. The chapter also discusses the possibility that other kinds of hallucinations may be mind-revealing in other ways (such as being vehicles for unconscious contents) and that some hallucinations are merely distortions of the mind (rather than revelations of it), perhaps arising as by-products of other effects that involve mind-revelation (such as revealing hidden memories).
Creativity
Authors: Lyon Aidan
Published: October 2023

This chapter addresses another potential objection to the hypothesis that psychedelics reveal the mind: if psychedelics induce creativity and the generation of novel ideas, then this suggests that they are mind-creating, rather than mind-revealing. The chapter argues that while some cases of psychedelic-induced creativity are instances of mind-creation, other cases are likely due to mind-revelation. After reviewing the science of human creativity and related unconscious processes, the chapter argues that psychedelics (and meditation) can enhance creativity by revealing unconscious ideas and creative processes. The chapter also reviews the empirical evidence that meditation and psychedelics tend to enhance creativity and assesses to what extent this evidence indicates that they do so via the revelation of the mind.
Mystical Experience
Authors: Lyon Aidan
Published: October 2023

This chapter tackles the issue of whether mystical experiences are psychedelic -- that is, whether they are mind-revealing. The chapter argues that to answer this question, we need to be able to define mystical experiences and that this cannot be done, given their ineffability. Nevertheless, the chapter demonstrates how we can deepen our understanding of mystical experiences and asks whether they are psychedelic by engaging with their ineffability seriously. As part of this demonstration, the chapter explores the parallels between the ineffability of mystical experiences and that of maximal uncertainty. It also highlights and discusses the significance of the emphasis that many mystical traditions place on subjective uncertainty and intellectual humility.
Global Trade and the Shaping of English Freedom
Authors: Pettigrew William A.
Published: October 2023

This book offers a new account of the connections between seventeenth-century English history and the history of the rest of the world. Eschewing nationalist narratives, it demonstrates how greater engagement with the world beyond Europe shaped signature aspects of the English experience. Early modern trading corporations are the central actors in the story. The book offers a profoundly altered reading of the practices of these entities. The companies were not monolithic entities pursuing narrow nationalist interests overseas. Nor were they inefficient monopolies doomed to commercial failure. In the seventeenth century, as this book shows, they were driven and transformed by the immediate and local interests of company agents and their foreign networks. Because the trading companies were the most important bridge between international contexts and English legal and political debates, they connect non-European power and preference to those debates. These unappreciated actors within the corporate sphere play leading roles in this book as the shapers of English debate about the meaning of English freedom and the futures of the trades they participated in overseas. The book offers a new perspective on the foreign actors who shaped English commercial and legal ideas and practices in the seventeenth century, as well as the Ottoman, Bantenese, Huedan, Siamese, and Mughal contributions to the ideological, institutional, and procedural underpinnings that would develop, slowly but surely, into the British Empire.
Abu al-Mafakhir Mahmud Abdulkadir, the Skinner brothers, and the Constitutional Right to Free Trade, 1650–1668
Authors: Pettigrew William A.
Published: October 2023

This chapter explores how, in the case of the East India Company, a joint stock company, the Company’s monopoly created more incentives for company members to defraud it. In Banten and Jambi, company officials learned that the cultivation of local political support would provide a route for personal enrichment and a legal and political means to dodge the Company’s enforcement privileges. This was especially true at a time when, as in the 1650s, the charter powers of the Company had been undermined at home. Merchants, such as the brothers Frederick and Thomas Skinner, expected to use their malfeasant gains in Jambi and Banten to pay for the instruction of legal counsel to protect them against the Company’s claims at home. The resulting legal disputes in England led to the formulation of new constitutional freedoms that would later prove crucial to the legal basis of trade deregulation. In the short term, however, the political influence of the East India Company helped them secure new enforcement powers for their monopoly which proved especially threatening to English freedom and therefore would become focal points for further anti-company action.
Prince Bibe of Ouidah and the Freeing of the English Slave Trade, 1679–1694
Authors: Pettigrew William A.
Published: October 2023

The new enforcement powers that the East India Company had secured in response to the case brought against it by the interloper, Thomas Skinner, would become a part of the design of a new joint stock trading company, the Royal African Company. In this chapter, attempts by the Company to deploy these powers were utterly undermined in one region of West Africa by a commercial strategy developed by the governors of Ouidah. This strategy prevented any single European company achieving commercial dominance in the region. Instead, the officials at Ouidah enticed Company agents and English interlopers to establish a precedent for independent trade. One state strategy cancelled the other out. This precedent would prompt and inspire a domestic English campaign against the Company to prevail in that celebrated free access to overseas trade as an intrinsic English benefit. A free trade in enslaved people was the product of an alliance between pamphleteers in London and the commercial vision of the rulers of the West African coast.
Itimad Khan and the Statute to Suppress Piracy, 1694–1700
Authors: Pettigrew William A.
Published: October 2023

This chapter shows how the Mughal state changed the way the English state intercepted and punished pirates in both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. It did not distinguish between the state-sanctioned authority of the Company and the English pirates who infested their shipping lanes. The Company had to use state power to prove that there was a distinction. The Mughals forced the East India Company to lobby the English state to secure these changes. Having been outmaneuvered by the White brothers, the East India Company learned to work alongside the English state. This relationship helped pave the way for the endurance of this Company while the Levant Company and Royal African Companies lost commercial primacy. The Company learned how to harness the cross-cultural alliance that was forced on it by the Mughal state in ways that helped ensure its survival and restrict the number of pirates in circulation. In this way, the Company implemented the Mughal Empire’s insistence that limits be placed on the operation of English freedom overseas.
Conclusion
Authors: Pettigrew William A.
Published: October 2023

The final chapter provides three snapshots from the middle of the eighteenth century in areas similar to those discussed in the main chapters of this volume—Southeast Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and West Africa—to show how the cross-cultural alliances operated in ways that differed from the earlier cases in the seventeenth century. The English corporate officials in each did not feel compelled to respond to the non-European actors pressurising them. The chapter suggests that this change marks the beginning of British Empire. The chapter offers a summary of the argument of the book.
Introduction to the Legal Framework for Corporate Finance
Authors: Ferran Eilís , Howell Elizabeth , Steffek Felix
Published: October 2023

This chapter anchors the book by identifying the private company limited by shares as the most popular organizational form for modern businesses of economic significance and outlining its advantages as an organizational form through which to limit financial risks and to raise large amounts of finance from investors whilst keeping the day-to-day running of the business concentrated in the hands of a relatively small group of managers. The chapter explains how corporate finance law and regulation draw on company law, capital markets law, commercial law, and insolvency law, and outlines the interrelationship between law, regulation, and market practice. The chapter also provides a roadmap through the principal sources of law and regulation relating to corporate finance practice in the UK, including post-Brexit adaptations.
Formation of Share Capital
Authors: Ferran Eilís , Howell Elizabeth , Steffek Felix
Published: October 2023

This chapter deals with legal capital ‘pay in’ rules. These are the requirements that regulate the amount of share capital that is put into a company and the forms of consideration that a company can accept in return for its shares. This is a highly technical, rule-based area of the law. The chapter offers critical perspectives on the legal complexities and highlights ways in which practice has evolved to ensure that rigid rules do not get in the way of companies’ legitimate needs for capital. Topics covered include: the decline of minimum capital requirements, pricing of shares on allotment, valuation of non-cash consideration for shares in public companies, and merger relief and cashbox placings.
International Equity Offerings and Listings
Authors: Ferran Eilís , Howell Elizabeth , Steffek Felix
Published: October 2023

Chapter 15 is about international equity offerings and listings. Topics discussed include strategies for developing a regulatory framework for international offerings (including convergence, mutual recognition, equivalence, substituted compliance, regulatory competition, and private placement exemptions) and the application of such concepts in practical settings. This includes the practical application of international standards and an examination of the EU’s equivalence regime for third countries, particularly with a consideration of the post-Brexit landscape. It covers the EU regulatory framework for cross-border offers and listings of securities, UK listing requirements and concessions for foreign issuers, and the UK listing reforms that are relevant to international activity.
Introduction
Authors: Hood Christopher , King Maia , McLean Iain , Piotrowska Barbara Maria
Published: October 2023

Starting with a vignette about a serious and unexpected overspend by a key department (the Department of Health) in the mid-2000s, this chapter sketches out some features of the UK’s public expenditure profile under three governments over two decades (the early 1990s to the mid-2010s). It introduces the ‘fiscal constitution’ as the book’s main analytic focus, shows how that analysis relates to four varieties of literature about public spending control and what the study adds to a long line of earlier writing on that subject. It then sets out three overarching questions (how much changed over the period; what was the main direction of change; and what developments took place at the interface between formal and informal practice and between ‘political’ and ‘bureaucratic’ behaviour) and explains the plan of the book.
Devolved Administrations and Local Government
Authors: Hood Christopher , King Maia , McLean Iain , Piotrowska Barbara Maria
Published: October 2023

Starting with a vignette about a scheme to incentivize firms in Northern Ireland to switch to renewable fuel sources (The Renewable Heat Initiative), this chapter explores spending by local authorities and devolved governments, the ‘vertical fiscal gap’ between spending and taxation and efforts to redistribute spending by ‘horizontal fiscal equalization’. It shows that the vertical fiscal gap changed little and argues that the biggest constitutional change for centuries in the position of the component countries of the UK—devolved parliaments and governments in Scotland and Wales and new governing arrangements in Northern Ireland—did not seriously threaten the UK government’s ability to control overall public expenditure. Inertia politics meant that the ‘Barnett Formula’ survived for distributing public expenditure around the UK. And the size factor (the small size of the devolved countries relative to England) limited the risk that devolution could undermine the Treasury’s control of overall UK public expenditure.
Letting Sleeping Dogs Lie
Authors: Hood Christopher , King Maia , McLean Iain , Piotrowska Barbara Maria
Published: October 2023

Starting with a vignette describing a Treasury review of ‘administration costs’ (in the early 2000s), this chapter explores how a central input control (over running or administration costs, originally introduced in the 1980s but widely acknowledged to be seriously flawed as a measure of efficiency), survived with modifications over the whole period covered by the book. By contrast, output target controls linking measurable ‘deliverables’ to budget allocations (often claimed to be a major advance in the control of public expenditure) came and went. This chapter shows how administration cost control survived as a ‘valence’ issue in politics. By contrast, after a period in which both of the two main political parties embraced output controls to show determination to deliver public services effectively, output target controls came to be a ‘position’ issue dividing the two main political parties from the mid-2000s, and became less politically appetizing as public spending was squeezed.
The People, the Rules, and the Numbers
Authors: Hood Christopher , King Maia , McLean Iain , Piotrowska Barbara Maria
Published: October 2023

Starting with a vignette about how a move to a new accounting regime in the 2000s created an opportunity for a major department (Defence) to increase its cash spending that caught its Treasury spending team unawares, this chapter begins by briefly describing the official rules and categories concerning public spending control numbers and some of the ways in which those rules and numbers changed over our period. Then it looks at how the rules were applied, exploring who saw what as problematic gaming of the numbers and what measures or mechanisms were adopted to keep such gaming in check. The Treasury’s efforts to limit ‘gaming’ by departments often involved efforts to get closer to departmental counterparts, but some major efforts to limit gaming by the Treasury itself went in the opposite direction, by changes in the formal organization designed to increase the social distance between the Treasury and other players.
Latin
Authors: Korenjak Martin
Published: October 2023

In this chapter, the role of Latin in early modern science is discussed. There is a short sketch of the history of the language from antiquity to the early modern period in general. Next, the development of Latin into a language of science and its predominance in this function in the early modern period is explained and documented with some statistics. The relationship of Latin to other classical languages of learning, notably Greek and Arabic, and to contemporary European vernaculars is described. The rise of these and the concomitant demise of Latin as a language of science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are discussed. Finally, the peculiar character of scientific Latin, which lies mainly in its rich technical vocabulary, is described.
Philosophizing the Obvious?
Authors: Nili Shmuel
Published: October 2023

This introduction motivates and explains the book’s focus on unreasonable political views, and on the patently-indefensible policies they underlie. Patently-indefensible policies—by definition—feature no real moral puzzle, given their obvious wrongness. Such policies therefore seem like a much more natural cause for political activism than for political theory. The introduction starts to make the case that political theorists nonetheless can and should strive to make a distinctive contribution to the social effort to grapple with such policies. That contribution—labeled “strategic political theory”—starts with understanding what qualifies a view as “unreasonable” and a policy as “patently indefensible.” The introduction’s main task is to provide those basic building blocks, while providing an overview of their implications for each of the book’s chapters.
Strategic Environmentalism
Authors: Nili Shmuel
Published: October 2023

Continuing the strategic argumentation of chapter 5, this final chapter focuses on the fossil fuel industry’s ties with dictatorships. Linking oil and gas trade with dictators to environmental reform, the chapter suggests that the nonconsequentialist presumption against commercial ties with dictators can yield a distinctive argument for the development of green energy. More specifically, recognizing the unfortunate public salience of climate change skepticism in the United States, the chapter constructs an argument for the development of green energy that can appeal to Americans moderately skeptical of climate change and swayed by various forms of corporate rhetoric about environmental issues. Accepting—arguendo and in a qualified way—key empirical and normative assumptions of American environmental skeptics, the chapter proceeds in two stages. First, while environmentalists have often justified the development of green energy through references to future generations, the chapter tries to show that they need a present-oriented argument focused on negative duties to respect rights, in order to justify prioritizing the development of green energy to environmental skeptics in the United States. Second, the chapter constructs such an argument, calling on affluent democracies to develop green energy in order to be able to stop their complicity, through oil and gas trade, in dictators’ violation of their peoples’ property rights.
Introduction
Authors: Nicosia Marissa
Published: October 2023

Revolutionary ideas about temporality and politics thrived in early modern England. This introduction argues that chronicle plays that were written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars provide unique insights into these temporal and political revolutions. Although standard critical narratives in literary studies assert that plays retelling narratives from chronicle history faded from popularity around the turn of the seventeenth century, scholars working in the fields of theater history and book history have long challenged this view and demonstrated that chronicle plays were distinctly popular in print and profitable in repertory. The introduction builds on these studies using the methods of historical formalism and critical bibliography to reveal the metaphoric and material ways that chronicle plays continued to make claims on the future as well as the past.
Almanac Time
Authors: Nicosia Marissa
Published: October 2023

Chapter 1 considers the similarities between chronicle plays and almanacs as material texts used for imagining time and as performative, interactive documents. Almanacs are a timekeeping tool that not only allows their user to locate the present day on the calendar, but also to consider their position in time in relation to past and future events because these almanacs include political prognostications, weather predictions, regnal tables, and historical chronologies, as well as a calendar for the year. Through readings of a range of almanacs, the chapter shows that the quotidian and chronicling functions of marking time in an almanac are saturated with political meaning. The chapter then turns to moments when physical or metaphorical almanacs appear in William Shakespeare’s 1 & 2 Henry IV and Sir John Oldcastle to argue that almanacs structure monarchical time through anachronism and temporal layering.
Genes Are Tools of Intelligent Cells
Authors: Reber Arthur S. , Baluška František , Miller William B.
Published: October 2023

In our biological system, self-referential cognitive competent cells assess imperfect information individually and collectively to solve cell-centred problems. Accordingly, the conscious cell is the epicentre of biological activity. The cellular measurement of environmental cues depends on a cell-wide senomic apparatus and a highly refined information management system. The real-time assessment of ambiguous environmental cues drives evolution as a cellular informational interactome by which cells can make productive cell-based predictions from environmental cues. In the 20th century, the neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis dominated the evolutionary narrative, whose cardinal assumptions were that evolution resulted from random genetic mutations and natural selection. In that construct, genes were viewed as the evolutionary driver. Twenty-first-century biology recognizes that genes are tools of intelligent measuring cells. Decades of contemporary research reveal that the central genome represents one among many contributors to the retrievable and deployable memory systems of cells. Consequently, genes are participants in complex cell-wide information-based activities as a crucial archive of successful viral–cellular solutions to cellular problems. The central genome and a large body of contributory cellular sources of genetic code continuously assist in a greater narrative of the cellular assimilation of the external environment.
The N-Space Episenome
Authors: Reber Arthur S. , Baluška František , Miller William B.
Published: October 2023

Biological order depends on information simply because the maintenance of internal cellular integrity requires its self-referential measurement. That internal assessment, as noted in several places in earlier chapters, depends on the reception of environmental information through the cellular plasma membrane. A critical aspect of information management is the cellular attachment to an information ‘space’, an integrated pervasive information field (PIF). This field represents a partitioning of the universal information field, enabling a cell to internally coordinate environmental sensory inputs and connecting the vital cellular senome to its genome, epigenome, cytoskeleton, and endomembranes. In multicellular organisms, individual PIFs aggregate into a higher-order information space: a multicellular N-space Episenome. This collective information field is necessary for the functional sharing of information among the wide variety of highly differentiated cells and the obligate microbial fraction of holobionts. This same N-space Episenome further functions as a collective information architectural matrix which operates as a heritable, transferable, and adaptive morphogenetic template for multicellular biological development. Accordingly, the N-space Episenome is conceived as a whole cell read–write informational matrix that assists in every aspect of multicellular life and is fundamental to conscious self-reference.
Anaesthetics and Their Cellular Targets
Authors: Reber Arthur S. , Baluška František , Miller William B.
Published: October 2023

Since the discovery of ether anaesthesia by William Morton in 1846, numerous studies about the effects of anaesthetics have been published and several theories trying to explain this phenomenon have been proposed. Despite being accepted as one of the greatest discoveries in the history of medicine, anaesthesia remains a mystery. One of the most remarkable features of anaesthetics is that they induce anaesthesia in animals as different on an evolutionary basis as humans and nematodes. In 1876, Claude Bernard demonstrated that ether-induced anaesthesia in plants and animals have the same features. He concluded that the sensitivity to anaesthetics represents a basic living feature and general property of life. His view was later confirmed not only in all multicellular organisms but also in unicellular organisms including prokaryotic ones. This chapter analyses the cellular targets of anaesthetics and concludes that lipids of cell membranes, the cytoskeleton, and diverse proteins with hydrophobic pockets represent the primary targets of anaesthetics. Importantly, the reversal of anaesthesia by imposed pressure suggests a fundamentally biophysical nature of anaesthesia. Further, endogenous anaesthetics are induced in all organisms under stressful situations and help them to adapt and survive.
Conservation on the Urban Fringe
Authors: Pejchar Liba , Reed Sarah E.
Published: October 2023

Suburbs are some of the most land-intensive and fastest-growing forms of urbanization. They are also increasingly socially diverse and are ripe targets for biodiversity conservation. This work synthesizes the policies, tools, and strategies for conserving and managing biodiversity in suburbs and exurbs. It reviews suburban history and policy contexts, including how suburbs have expanded around cities over time to become a dominant land-use type in the US and around the world. It also describes the policies and practices that have shaped the current distribution of open space and biodiversity, human settlement and segregation, and which people have access to environmental benefits. This work synthesizes the science on the relationship between residential development patterns, land management practices, and distributions and persistence of biodiversity. In doing so, it introduces and examines a portfolio of policy tools and strategies for conserving and restoring suburban and exurban biodiversity and reviews the scientific evidence on the implementation of these tools, examines how they have achieved success in sustaining biodiversity, and considers their potential to either alleviate or exacerbate environmental injustices. Finally, it reflects on the ways in which conservation and equity goals (e.g., habitat conservation versus affordable housing construction) are often presented as mutually exclusive or conflicting goals for suburban and exurban communities. It moves beyond these perceived dichotomies to show how housing and open space can both sustain nature and engage people, to the benefit of biodiversity and human communities.
The Role of Urban Tree Canopies in Environmental Justice and Conserving Biodiversity
Authors: Locke Dexter H. , Grove J. Morgan , Pickett Steward T. A.
Published: October 2023

Urban trees generally form the base habitat for much of urban biodiversity. Trees in cities and suburbs are also probably the most common form of urban biodiversity that people see and interact with. Yet a long history of urban forestry work has demonstrated trees are inequitably distributed across urban areas. Specifically, neighborhoods that are wealthier and/or Whiter have more trees, a higher diversity of trees, and larger trees. Beyond biodiversity benefits, urban trees offer people a host of other environmental benefits such as shading and cooling, aesthetics, and improved health and well-being. The inequities in the distribution of the urban forest therefore undermine urban biodiversity conservation and perpetuate environmental injustices. If urban biodiversity conservation stands to bolster our broader conservation goals, there is an urgent need to develop climate-resilient and equitably distributed urban tree canopies across our cities and suburbs.
Making Nature’s City
Authors: Stanford Bronwen , Ikyanan Kelly , Grossinger Robin , Beller Erin , Benjamin Matthew , Grenier J. Letitia , Bazo Micaela , Heller Nicole , Aronson Myla , Felson Alexander , Groffman Peter , Spotswood Erica
Published: October 2023

Conserving urban biodiversity will rely on updating our planning paradigms. This work synthesizes urban ecological research and identifies seven elements—patch size, connections, matrix quality, habitat diversity, native vegetation, special resources, and stewardship and management—as key factors associated with urban biodiversity. It then distils these findings into a science-based framework for building urban biodiversity. Beyond providing a framework, it demonstrates how to use this approach to integrate conservation into urban planning and provides an example where this framework has been applied. Such a landscape ecological approach will provide a science-driven approach to advance urban biodiversity and promote equitable access to urban nature.
Firms of Note in 1922
Authors: Barry Frank
Published: October 2023

This chapter identifies and details the histories of the notable manufacturing firms in operation in 1922, many of which appear in the pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is set in the Dublin of 1904. Many of the company names survive as well-known brands to the present day. No more than eighty manufacturing firms employed 500 or more at any stage up to 1972. Firms of this size are tracked throughout the book. A glimpse of the subsequent histories of others that were well known in 1922 is also provided. Food, drink, and tobacco accounted for almost 50 per cent of manufacturing employment in 1926, the benchmark year for the first Free State Census of Industrial Production. Textiles, clothing, and footwear accounted for a further 20 per cent. The remainder were distributed across a range of other sectors. Major employers at the time included Guinness, biscuit company W. & R. Jacob, the Ford tractor plant in Cork, the railway engineering works at Inchicore and Dundalk, and the massive Condensed Milk Company of Ireland, which would collapse in the early 1920s and whose history serves as a microcosm of the economic and political conflicts of the era. The several dozen breweries and distilleries in operation at the establishment of the state are also identified.