Selected passages from “Nuestros indios” (1904) by Manuel Gonzalez Prada (1844–1918).

During the first three years of life our brain develops exponentially, and synaptic connections are formed faster than at any other period of our lives. The organisation of its processes is directly affected by early life experiences. It is therefore vitally important that families, healthcare providers and early intervention professionals understand early brain infant development so that they can fully support infants on to achieving their full potential. This chapter provides an insight into the typical development of core occupations and sensory systems by age, in the first year of life, highlighting the essential role that parents, carers and health professionals have at each stage. Sections on sensory deprivation and carers’ mental health issues are included.

This chapter begins with elementary results concerning Euclidean division and the Euclidean algorithm. We show that the algorithm’s complexity, measured in division steps, has logarithmic growth.

Gently introducing the reader to analytic methods in number theory, we present a proof of the divergence of the Euler series that sums the reciprocals of prime numbers. This not only provides an elegant analytic proof of the infinitude of primes but also offers insight into their distribution.

We then turn to classical arithmetic functions and derive recursive formulas for the partition function, culminating in a complete proof of Euler’s pentagonal number theorem.

This chapter also includes the first of three proofs in this book of Gauss’s theorema fundamentale, the law of quadratic reciprocity, which reveals a remarkable symmetry in the solvability of quadratic congruences modulo two distinct odd primes.

These theoretical foundations underpin practical applications, including the Miller–Rabin primality test – a probabilistic method for identifying prime numbers – and RSA encryption, a cornerstone of modern cryptography that relies on the computational difficulty of factoring large integers.

Female physicians in Japan face significant career barriers due to societal expectations surrounding childcare and family responsibilities. Traditional gender roles, exacerbated by long working hours and limited childcare options, hinder their ability to challenge stereotypes. In this chapter, we initially elucidate the challenges Japan encounters, as derived from literature reviews, and subsequently delve into specific instances.

The four authors in this chapter are from different stages of their medical careers in Japan. Dr. Watari has a Masters degree in Healthcare Quality and Safety from Harvard Medical School (USA) and has worked clinically in Japan, Thailand, and the USA. He has been actively researching gender bias in Japan’s medical field, aiming to promote gender equality among physicians. Dr Kono is a senior resident in surgery at Tokai University Hospital, and has published an article on gender inequality in Japanese academic medicine. Dr Yasuhisa is a junior resident at Shonan Kamakura hospital, with a background in pharmacy and engineering. Ms Mizuno is a medical student at Shimane University, with a background in French and linguistics. The case they present is a conglomerate of several interviews they have recorded during work on sexual harassment and discrimination in Japan.

This chapter introduces mental space theory and the theory of mental space blending. It then introduces the concept of real space and conceptual blends with real space that result from conceptually blending entities in real space with entities within another mental space. In these blends, physical things represent something other than what they are. Examples include the diagram of a soccer field, where lines on a piece of paper represent the soccer field, and the placement of tableware in which a coffee cup depicts a house. From there, the chapter illustrates depictions created by signers in which the extended thumb and fingers of buoys (handshapes with lexically determined forms and meanings) physically embody the depicted entities. Signers not only refer to these embodied depictions by directing indicating signs toward them; they also gaze at them, touch them, gesture toward them, and even manipulate them. These examples demonstrate that both signers and speakers utilize depictions as a normal part of everyday discourse.

This chapter gives a basic introduction to the topic of erasure coding.

This chapter examines the rise of intergovernmentalism in the European Communities and its impact on the development of a constitutional practice of European law. While a constitutional interpretation of European law was developed by an alliance of the European Commission and the European Court of Justice, the increasing saliency of intergovernmental decision-making – above all else, the strengthened role of national governments in the Council - was an equally critical and possibly more influential pillar of European integration, which effectively constrained supranational governance. Pivotal moments include the Empty Chair Crisis (1965–66) and the Luxembourg Compromise (1966). The development of the member state veto and the suppression of majority voting were powerful instances of member states asserting their control over the course of European integration. The chapter concludes that intergovernmental governance, while never coherent or unanimous enough to outright curtail the Court’s doctrines, significantly shaped the trajectory of European legal integration.

Anthropologists consider interpersonal violence contingent on social and cultural contexts. Quantitative analysis of criminal violence involving English clergy shows that it often arose in communities where both victim and perpetrator lived, notably between parish clergy and parishioners. The reasons for this pattern largely related to clergy’s local position. It was one of power, especially as agents of church courts, e.g., summoning parishioners. This unpopular role exposed clergy to verbal abuse and physical violence, especially when parishioners were charged with sexual offences. This resentment arguably sprang from perceived failure of church courts to correct clergy’s own sexual deviance. This was a major cause of conflict between priests and parishioners, who might take the law into their own hands and even pursue raptus charges against incontinent clergy in royal courts. Clergy also provoked lay resentment for other deviance from the priestly ideal, including arms-bearing, quarrelling and violence. Clergy might be violent with each other, notably to put junior colleagues in their place. Some clergy thus behaved like laymen, especially in pursuing honour-driven violence.

Florentino González (1805–1875) was one of the “founders” of classical liberalism in nineteenth-century Colombia. His early life was marked by the experience of independence since his family was forced to move from their home by the loyalists when he was still a child. He completed his studies in jurisprudence in Bogota in 1825. As Gran Colombia tore apart, González participated in the plot to assassinate Bolívar in 1828, and subsequently suffered prison and exile. He was back in Bogota shortly after Bolívar’s death and became actively involved in politics and journalism for the next two decades, when he held a succession of important posts, including elected member of Congress and State Secretary of Finance. In 1840, he published Elementos de ciencia administrativa, a two-volume treatise about public administration, a subject he then taught at the university in Bogota. He authored a significant number of essays, some of them in the newspapers he edited. Appointed to a diplomatic mission that took him to Lima and Santiago de Chile, he resigned it in 1861 and remained in exile until the end of his life, first in Chile and later in Argentina.

We now study the total variation flow on bounded domains in metric measure spaces. In Section 6.1, we consider the Neumann problem; using the techniques developed in Chapters 4 and 5, we give a definition of weak solution to the Neumann problem for initial data in L2 based on the Gigli differential structure adapted to a bounded domain and prove their existence and uniqueness. We also introduce the notion of entropy solution for initial data in L1. In Section 6.2, we consider the Dirichlet problem for initial data in L2 and boundary data in L1. We prove lower semicontinuity of the associated functional, give a definition of weak solution, and prove their existence and uniqueness.

The epilogue examines the persistence of the term ‘achievements’ in Egyptian governmental media today, which is indicative of the concept’s resilience. This persistence raises an important question around the social and historical reasons undergirding the continuity of achievement praxis. Why are cultural and media institutions reproducing the achievement state in Egypt? The answer would seem to be that the current bureaucratic apparatus inherited, via institutional means, certain ways of thinking and working established after the 1952 revolution. This simple answer belies my ethnographic experience, because contemporary bureaucrats – with few exceptions – have a very faint sense of the history of the bureaucratic apparatus prior to their own entry into the workforce. A more likely answer, I suggest, is that the institutional context within which bureaucrats work did not change in some identifiable ways since 1952. The continuity of achievement praxis is tied to the institutional environment in which it thrives, rather than a conscious will among state officials transmitted across generations.

Theatrical presentation encompasses diverging perspectives on water ecologies, ecological divisions and extremes of wet and dry in tropical and desert climates. While twentieth-century drama points to how water sources in Australia have been divided up to restrict access through land proprietorship, polarising attitudes and racial injustice, innovative twenty-first century performance emphasises the interconnectedness of water flows, seepage and below ground storage. An appreciation of water flow is particularly evident in First Nations performance, which includes the influential work of Bangarra Dance Theatre. Performance explores values and practices that resist the way water is polluted and detrimentally reconfigured in binary divisions to restrict access and divert flows and highlights the need for water availability for all species in a climate change era. Australian theatrical performance points to emotional feelings and values that protect and preserve water and its river flows even as human impact on the climate means its patterns are no longer predictable.