Until recently, our inner mental lives have enjoyed a considerable degree of natural protection from others’ gaze and influence. Third parties are sometimes able to attribute particular mental states to us on the basis of our behaviour, particularly if they know us well. These parties are also often able to influence our mental states by means of rational persuasion or manipulation. But our thoughts, desires and emotions have typically had some defence against others’ access and influence by virtue of the fact that these mental phenomena play out in our brains, shielded by a solid skull.

This chapter introduces the basic parts of a standard empirical paper – introduction, literature review, theory & hypotheses, analysis, and conclusions. We then home in on the first one that most people write, the literature review. The literature review is a unique genre of writing with its own conventions and expectations. Good literature reviews are multi-stage processes that show evidence of redrafting and that place literature in a context that allows the reader to not only understand the shape of the forest – the entire body of literature – but to locate the author’s claims within in that literature.

This foundational chapter asks a counter-intuitive question: Must individuals pay taxes somewhere? Can taxpayers be blamed for accepting offers from sovereign states to reduce or even wipe out their personal tax burden? And should anyone be to blame, given the intrinsic and often confirmed value of fiscal autonomy as a central feature of statehood? It is found that – as long as there is no global tax organisation providing global public goods or global redistribution and as long as no state (neither the state of origin nor the state of destination) has a clear prerogative and obligation to tax those individuals – individuals are not morally obliged to submit to meaningful taxation in ‘some’ state.

A dispute arose among hospital staff members regarding the ongoing use of ECMO (over several months) for a young woman with lung failure following stem cell transplantation and the development of multiple lung infections, as well as pulmonary hemorrhage. The patient was not a candidate for lung transplantation, and few believed her lungs could recover to allow separation from the circuit. Some staff members felt that continued use of the scarce resources associated with ECMO (machinery and highly specialized personnel) could not be justified. The patient and family repeatedly indicated a desire to prolong life as long as possible. The case prompted three separate requests for ethics consultation and raised multiple issues surrounding resource allocation, management of tense patient-family-staff relationships, and the institutional status of the ethics consultation process. The reasoning and recommendations of the ethics consultants challenged established power and authority within the institution, making the situation uncomfortable for all.

The most immediate and tangible musical influence that can be attributed to Robert and Clara Schumann is that which flowed between themselves, in terms of published compositions (Op. 37/Op. 12), compositional critique, and performance. Next in significance is Brahms, whose relationship with Clara continued for four decades after Robert’s death. Robert’s Piano Quintet, Op. 44, emerges as particularly influential, in terms both of its scoring and employment of ‘cyclic’ thematic devices: these are pursued in later works by Saint-Saens and de Castillon, as well as in d’Indy’s composition treatise. The French reception of Robert’s Lieder is considered, as is the broader question of how and whether ‘influence’ may be reliably discerned in given contexts. Finally, and ironically, one must acknowledge the negative influence of Clara on her husband’s legacy as reflected in her suppression of late works such as the Violin Concerto.

This chapter uses the first Italian bibliography – Anton Francesco Doni’s La libraria (1550) – to reflect on the process of compiling literary history, and analyse approaches and attitudes to poets and poetry in the Cinquecento. It considers the degree to which current critical interest in the concept of social communities in poetry, especially in relation to Petrarchism, correspond to Cinquecento concerns. Petrarchism is ubiquitous in Doni’s work, and especially visible in praise for Tuscan and eminent models like Pietro Bembo, Iacopo Sannazaro and Vittoria Colonna, but it co-exists alongside poets who overtly reject the Tuscan model and/or satirise the obsessive fascination with a narrow set of rules for writing lyrics. Listing authors by name rather than genre emphasises the extent to which most Cinquecento writers composed in a variety of modes and reveals a more expansive conceptualisation of authorship not yet constrained by Romantic notions of individual genius.

Threats to the ability of democratically elected governments to drive and preserve their citizens’ economic development and thus promote their human rights are threats to the confidence of their citizens in democracy itself. Threats to the cyber resilience of critical infrastructure assets — that enable and preserve economic development — are threats to that very confidence. This chapter positions the technical backbones for digital public infrastructure (DPI), which delivers digitally native essential services, as critical infrastructure assets. This chapter uses the approach to DPI of the world’s largest democracy as a case study. It explores how India’s DPI — built per an open standards-based paradigm, implemented by protocols and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that comprise the ‘India Stack’ – operates at the scale of the world’s largest population. It finds the cyber resilience of the technical backbones for India’s DPI vital to India’s democratic resilience. This chapter thus calls on India to prosecute systemic cyber risks to these backbones that stem from the critical software running on them. India must incentivise vendors of that software to invest in the security of their software development life cycles and mitigate software supply chain risks. India must also manage open source software risks to its DPI appropriately. This chapter concludes by putting forward how India can export its approach and the India Stack. Other democracies, especially India’s Global South partners, stand to gain from its experience, including by strengthening the trust and confidence of their citizens in democracy itself, as well as by implementing norms for responsible state conduct in cyberspace that were approved by the United Nations General Assembly. Such benefits will be reinforced by Indian advice on how to deploy DPI in a cyber-resilient manner, informed by the multilateral consensus on DPI, software security and cyber resilience, which India forged as G20 President in 2023.

To gain a fuller understanding of modern Mizrahi literature, it must be examined against the background of the literary systems in which Jews in the Arab, Muslim, and Ottoman world operated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the diverse paths via which these systems developed in the Middle East and North Africa, based on their various linguistic, cultural, and political relations and interactions with the Arab awakening (Al-Nahḍa), the Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah), the European enlightenment, French and British colonialism, local nationalism and Zionism, and modern Arab and Hebrew literatures. Under the decisive influence of the new world orders created by colonialism and nationalism, this period saw far-reaching changes in Jewish literature in the Arab, Muslim, and Ottoman world. It may be profitable to view all those connections as part of the process via which Mizrahi literature was formed. Due to its many areas of interaction with various literatures, it began or was created repeatedly, in different ways that reflect its diversity. Only by looking at the whole is it possible to avoid narrowing the narrative of modern Mizrahi literature to a single perspective or single process.

This chapter offers an in-depth discussion of various nanoelectronic and nanoionic synapses along with the operational mechanisms, capabilities and limitations, and directions for further advancements in this field. We begin with overarching mechanisms to design artificial synapses and learning characteristics for neuromorphic computing. Silicon-based synapses using digital CMOS platforms are described followed by emerging device technologies. Filamentary synapses that utilize nanoscale conducting pathways for forming and breaking current shunting routes within two-terminal devices are then discussed. This is followed by ferroelectric devices wherein polarization states of a switchable ferroelectric layer are responsible for synaptic plasticity and memory. Insulator–metal transition-based synapses are described wherein a sharp change in conductance of a layer due to external stimulus offers a route for compact synapse design. Organic materials, 2D van der Waals, and layered semiconductors are discussed. Ionic liquids and solid gate dielectrics for multistate memory and learning are presented. Photonic and spintronic synapses are then discussed in detail.

Remote working – strongly widespread during the covid-19 pandemic –is today one of the main forms of innovation in the world of work. As always, within innovation phenomena we have static elements, from the past, and dynamic elements, looking to change the status quo. Consequently, the evaluation of remote work may be either conservative or innovative. Remote work can be considered as a simple re-proposition of the Fordist-Taylorist Enterprise that does not actually change the characteristics of employment as a not democratic relationship involving the worker submission to the employer managerial, control and disciplinary power. On the other hand, remote work can be recognized as the symptom of a broader cultural, organizational and process change in the firm, allowing the worker to conquer new spaces of freedom and autonomy, which not only allow for a new balance in the relationship between work and life, but also redefine both the factual and juridical connotations of subordination. This chapter analyzes this second perspective and, on the basis of legislation and collective bargaining, tries to define the elements of change in the concept and morphology of subordination within the employment relationship.