We start from the Planck thermodynamic description of light that leads to black-body radiation. We discuss Einstein’s introduction to spontaneous emission and the first evidences leading to the realization of the laser. We detail the nonequilibrium descriptions of lasers as heat engines. We define random lasers and detail their introduction from Letokhov. We show their link with modern optical computing and the Ising and Hopfield models. This chapter illustrates the idea of complexity, the relation with replica symmetry breaking, and the role in optical computing and Ising machines.

Greek Japan. Placed side by side, these two words give the impression of something very strange, a sort of chimera – half-Apollo, half-samurai; half-Venus, half-geisha – set on a ground that is at once white and blue like the Cyclades, dark green and vermillion like Shintō shrines. How could two countries so distant from each other be joined together to form a coherent image, to give birth to a meaningful concept?

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the military responses that follow, stand as the defining events shaping war and society in twenty-first century U.S. culture. This chapter traces this history, beginning by placing the attacks and the events that followed in a broader historical context stretching back to the late 1970s before examining the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the evolution of military strategy, the impact of new technologies like drone warfare, the evolution of the all-volunteer force during prolonged conflict, and the physical and psychological consequences of war for servicemembers and their families. The chapter also addresses domestic responses to these conflicts, including the surveillance and detention of Arab and Muslim Americans, protest and resistance to the conflicts, and larger political shifts. This multidisciplinary approach to the past quarter century of domestic and foreign policy illuminates how the contours of American engagement with foreign policy, warfare, and the military have evolved and how the War on Terror remains the defining paradigm through which contemporary Americans contemplate the intersection of war and society.

American society is deeply intertwined with the materials, norms and metaphors of war, a process war and society scholars call militarization. Surprisingly, such militarization occurred most rapidly not during mass mobilizations like WWI and WWII but instead in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In 1973, Congress ended military conscription and shifted to a voluntary military peopled by recruits, thereby expanding the military’s influence over the nation. The choices military leaders and elected officials made about how the All-Volunteer Force would function increased the military’s impact on American popular culture, the state, the economy, and the globe and even further militarized the job of soldiering itself. Despite fewer people serving in the armed forces during a time without large mobilizations and no formal declarations of war, the military nevertheless ascended as the primary metaphor for the American polity and citizenship, as massive components of state activity, as the crucible for a new political economy, as a leading edge of American influence around the globe, and as an ultra-militarized space for those who served.

Since the implementation of cultural safety in Aotearoa New Zealand’s schools of nursing, midwifery, medicine and allied health, students have been introduced to concepts that were not as evident in most programs prior to the early 1990s. Topics such as culture and the dynamics of power are now commonplace within these programs. Similarly, with the movement towards doing with as opposed to doing for the client or patient, students are required to possess an awareness of their values, beliefs, biases and prejudices. The first step towards to cultural safety is for a person to have sufficient awareness of their own culture.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ lifelong engagement with anthropology, from his early academic studies at Harvard and Columbia to his immersive depictions of indigenous and subcultural worlds. David Stephen Calonne charts Burroughs’ fascination with shamanism, Mayan hieroglyphics, animal totems, and visionary experience, arguing that his literary project is rooted in an outsider anthropological impulse that spans both ancient cultures and modern subcultures. Burroughs’ friendship with figures like Hal Chase and his involvement with institutions such as the Sahagún Anthropology Club informed works like The Soft Machine, Ah Pook Is Here, and Junky, which often merge ethnographic observation with mystical speculation. The chapter situates Burroughs alongside figures like Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, and Carlos Castaneda, and highlights the influence of his writings on contemporary anthropologists such as Michael Taussig. Ultimately, Burroughs emerges as an amateur but radical anthropologist, reimagining the potentials of cultural knowledge and visionary consciousness outside the confines of academic orthodoxy.

Any research question or application relating to language variation and/or use can be approached from a corpus linguistic perspective. The goals of The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) are to survey the breadth of these research questions and applications in relation to the linguistic study of English. The handbook addresses a range of topics, including chapters on lexical variation, grammatical variation, historical change, online language and social media, multimodal corpora, the linguistic description of dialects and registers, and applications to language teaching and translation. In each chapter, authors assess what we have learned from corpus-based investigations to date and provide detailed case studies that illustrate how corpus analyses can be employed for empirical descriptions, documenting surprising patterns of language use that are often unanticipated previously. By bringing together diverse perspectives and cutting-edge research, this volume serves as a comprehensive resource for researchers seeking to understand and apply a corpus-based approach to the study of English.

This chapter extends all the features of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias model theory to the bivariate setting. We introduce the notion of a characteristic triple. The characteristic triple for a commuting contractive pair consists of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias characteristic function for the product of the components of the given commuting contractive pair, the fundamental-operator pair introduced in Chapter 7, and the canonical commuting unitary pair introduced in Chapter 4. The characteristic triple for a commuting contractive pair is shown to be a complete unitary invariant for the commuting contractive pair. Thus the characteristic triple serves as the analogue of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias characteristic function for the univariate case. This chapter also introduces the notion of admissible triples, which is equipped with a natural equivalence relation called "coincidence" inspired by the Sz.-Nagy–Foias notion of coincidence between two contractive analytic functions. It is shown that an admissible triple gives rise to a commuting contractive pair on a functional model space, whose characteristic triple coincides with the prespecified admissible triple. Joint invariant subspaces are characterized.

Chapter 3 takes a critical look at the notion of needs and drives, and links this to the central topic of motivation. Needs are classified into two types: (i) organic needs that have an identifiable basis in the physiology of the body (e.g. those for vitamins and ions) and (ii) psychological needs, which, at least as yet, have no identifiable basis in the physiology of the body and the meeting of which is not necessary for physiological survival (e.g. a need for stimulation to overcome boredom). It is argued that the notion of drive has a limited explanatory value and can cause confusion. Finally, the topic of arousal is discussed and related to needs, drives, and motivation.

This chapter examines how commercial firms like the Belgian grocer Delhaize did not initially respond to the Single Market Program in the mid-1980s, but they did mobilize swiftly in the late 1980s to prepare for the "threat" of the new business and regulatory environment of an integrated regional market governed by social and environmental protections. Together with other food retailers, Delhaize formed sectoral clubs and associations to defend its interests: Buying clubs collectivized price negotiating power against producer consolidation and protected profit margins, while interest associations brought distributors and retailers together to influence European policymaking. At the same time, Delhaize and other commercial firms saw in the opening of Eastern Europe a profitable business opportunity, and they expanded quickly into the markets of Poland, Hungary, and the new Czech Republic in the early 1990s. As a result, the case of Delhaize gives us purchase on the complexity of business responses to market integration and demonstrates the diverse paths to regionalization for and against the Single Market.

Cultural safety aims to create environments that are safe for all people, acknowledging the myriad of contexts that can be present for individuals and communities. This is particularly essential in health care.

Cultural safety in Aotearoa New Zealand offers an encompassing look into theoretical and practice-based perspectives on cultural safety through the lens of Aotearoa New Zealand and Pacific contexts in health care. This new edition features significant updates and new chapters on topics including Māori models of health, gender identity, mental health and Pacific health.

Chapters contain key terms with definitions, practice examples and reflections, and end-of-chapter questions to help consolidate the reader’s understanding of the content. The chapters all link back to the six pou of the standards of competence for registered nurses.

Drawing on the diverse expertise of the contributing authors, the new edition of Cultural safety in Aotearoa New Zealand is an essential resource for those involved in the delivery of health care.