This chapter outlines the design and application of cohort studies, which follow groups of individuals over time to examine associations between exposures and outcomes. Cohort studies may be prospective, tracking participants into the future, or retrospective, using historical records. The measure of association most frequently derived from these designs is the relative risk, which quantifies the likelihood of disease in exposed compared to unexposed individuals. Advantages of cohort studies include their ability to establish temporal sequence, study multiple outcomes from a single exposure, and calculate incidence rates. They are particularly useful for investigating common exposures and outcomes with moderate frequency. Limitations include high cost, long follow-up periods, and vulnerability to loss to follow-up and confounding. Practical examples, such as studies linking smoking to lung cancer or occupational exposures to chronic disease, highlight their contribution to public health evidence. Strategies for minimising bias, including careful selection of cohorts, use of standardised data collection, and adjustment for confounders, are discussed. By combining methodological explanation with illustrative examples, the chapter positions cohort studies as powerful tools in epidemiology. This chapter maps to syllabus section 3.2.4, which requires knowledge of cohort designs, measures of risk, and confounding control.

Welcoming new teachers to the profession provides an important opportunity to build the foundations for professional growth, satisfaction, and positive impacts on students’ lives. Creating a meaningful dialogue and orientation helps new educators transition into their roles with confidence while developing a reflective, adaptive, and student-centred practice.

Consumed by thoughts of a blue flower, Heinrich leaves his cold homeland and travels south until he meets Mathilde, who opens his eyes to the world’s mysteries. Then a tragic event reveals the secret power of poetry …

Heinrich von Ofterdingen, left unfinished at the time of the author’s death, is a masterpiece of philosophical fiction and a classic of German literature. This highly detailed and original interpretation is the most comprehensive and systematic study of the novel ever written. Developing fresh insights into the philosophical ideas of the novel while also attending to its symbolic, literary, and creative qualities, Owen Ware explores how Novalis probes the core problem of modern life – fragmentation, and our sense of alienation from the world. Ultimately, he shows us, this novel is a timeless expression of the Romantics’ idea that only the imagination, guided by love, can bring us back to our spiritual home.

This chapter directly examines whether social context influences crime on street segments by building statistical models that examine the relationship between social context and crime, while taking into account key elements of opportunities for crime at place. Our findings reinforce the importance of including social context and informal social control in understanding crime rates at micro geographic places, while also confirming that opportunities for crime are important underlying causes of crime at the micro geographic level.

There are numerous factors which influence how inclusive an early childhood service is. While you can address curriculum considerations and environmental adaptations, for example, one crucial component that is often overlooked is self-reflection. Considering our own lens ensures we can reflect on our own personal philosophy and the factors that have contributed to it. Attitudes of educators cannot be underestimated, as they lay a foundation for practice. A literature review conducted in 2020 revealed research which found that attitudes held by educators has an impact on inclusive practices. When individuals see challenges as opportunities to grow and learn, the outcome for everyone is very different to when challenges are perceived as barriers that are insurmountable.

This chapter explores the human causes of famine, and its consequences. It starts with definitions, an examination of the epidemiology of starvation, and the way it is measured (i.e., stunting, food insecurity, etc.). The next part delves into the evolutionary history of human starvation and the evidence for its current impacts on our biology. In the contemporary era two famines stand out, and the history and causes of each are described. The first is the Irish potato famine of 1845–1849, which had such a devastating impact that even now Ireland's population is less than it was before the famine struck. The second is the catastrophic Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961, which was wholly 'man-made' and killed between 36 and 45 million people. The latter part of the chapter looks at the psychobiology of acute and chronic starvation, especially in children (the protein-energy malnourishment spectrum), and its remediation (and the ineffectiveness of diet alone). Finally, the relationship between overabundance of food in some countries and food insecurity in others is examined.

Chapter 8: Byzantion, Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul. In this chapter I introduce three of the city’s main public spaces, the Hippodrome, the Forum of Constantine, and the Baths of Zeuxippos, all of them decorated with classical Greek statues collected by Constantine in the fourth century AD. Many of them were bronze and had once adorned public places in Greece and Asia Minor; they served to preserve the classical tradition in the emperor’s new eastern capital, his Deutera Roma. The Bronze Athena brought from the Akropolis of Athens was destroyed in 1304 because her Classical gesture seemed to be summoning support from the Western world. The Serpent Column, imported from Delphi and still standing today, might be seen as a protector or as a threat. In AD 500 Christodoros raved about the Greek statues in the Baths of Zeuxippos, but they are all gone, and we can identify only a few classical types, even fewer of the Trojan heroes.

The end of the war followed by the final crisis of Unionism forced the minorities to undergo profound changes. They first lived through a time of mourning – for the famed ‘blood sacrifice’ of a generation in the war, but also for the passing of the Union. Then they experienced the need to adapt rapidly to the new political system which was emerging from a revolution which they had not supported. For the Jewish people, much more important than the 1916 Proclamation was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, whose importance is discussed in the third section of this chapter. The latter also introduces Christian Zionism, a well-represented view among southern Protestants. Between the end of the First World War and the 1921 Treaty, Irish Protestants and Jews were similar not only in their relation to the new order, where their priority was safeguarding their continued existence as distinctive communities, but also in the way they behaved when they found themselves in a position of power – as Protestants did in Northern Ireland and Jews in the Zionist settlements in Palestine.

State intervention can spur development, but only when executed with competence and accountability. This chapter explores when, how, and why state action works. It surveys successful industrial policies and failed ones, identifying the institutional conditions that distinguish them. Rather than demonize or glorify the state, it argues for adaptive, evidence-based strategies that blend public purpose with market discipline.

Chapter 3 examines Kant’s account of aesthetic ideas and genius to address how works of genius can be judged. While Chapter 2 showed that judgments of perfection mediate between nonaesthetic properties and aesthetic evaluations, this applies only to works that are good examples of their kind. Works of genius resist this model because they transform or repudiate existing categories, so attempts to apply judgments of perfection are necessarily frustrated. These failures reveal the limits of existing concepts and the originality of the work, prompting a new approach. Current solutions either subsume such works under existing kinds, which undermines originality, or abstract from kinds entirely, which erases the contrast that makes originality intelligible. The chapter proposes two alternatives, concept expansion and concept repudiation, which preserve historical awareness while honoring innovation. Here, judgments of perfection play an indirect, heuristic role. Building on this insight, the chapter develops the notion of informed pure judgments of taste, which retain the concept-free character of aesthetic judgment while being enriched by historical and critical awareness.

In several previous chapters, we have been primarily concerned with providing upper bounds on the worst-case risk of specific procedures. Here, we seek instead lower bounds on the worst-case risk of any procedure. Such minimax lower bounds provide a benchmark against which we can measure the performance of proposed methods. The three main types of minimax lower bound we consider arise from Le Cam's two-point lemma, Assouad's lemma and Fano's lemma, and we will see several examples of how these results can be applied. Finally, we establish tools for controlling minimax quantiles, in an attempt to avoid the loss of information in reducing the (random) loss to its expectation (risk). In many cases, it is possible to characterise the dependence of minimax quantiles on the quantile level, thereby providing a finer-grained understanding of the difficulty of a statistical problem.