We review the fundamentals of linear optical propagation and Fourier optics. We start from the wave equation and introduce the propagator. We detail the effects of a lens on a light beam and the far field.

There are a wide range of sexual desires and intensities. What kind of motivational system could generate this? Appetitive and consummatory behaviour are distinct. There are on-line and off-line contributions. Hormones sensitize sexual motivation. There are organizational and activational phases of hormone action. People offer 237 reasons why they have sex. Wanting and liking are distinct. Sexual desire and sexual arousal are distinct but interactive. Excitation transfer is discussed. There are three levels of inhibition. The chapter discusses different brain regions and neurochemicals. The chapter describes ‘sexual priors’, the Coolidge Effect and the relevance of ‘life-history theory’. Sexual fantasy is rooted in part in incentive motivation. The complexities of sexual orientation are discussed, in terms of the incentive motivation model. Sexual desire often does not exist in isolation. Rather, it can interact with attachment, anger/aggression, and certain drugs (i.e. stimulants). The chapter then considers a number of paraphilias.

This chapter examines what the designs of coins may tell us about the communities that commissioned them. Religious designs featured predominantly, often the presiding deity of a city or a design which referred to it. Mythology and topography also played an important role, often rooting coinages in their localities, and there were references to events or contemporary personalities. Comparisons can be made in relation to artistic work in other fields, such as gems, with a special reference to those who were involved in their creation – the engravers of the dies from which the coins were struck. The engraving of coin dies appears to have been regarded as an artistic exercise, and the appearance of signatures on coins offers a window onto part of the chaîne opératoire of coin production.

Cultural safety requires nurses to critically reflect upon on their personal values, beliefs, attitudes, biases and cultural identity, as the experience of mental distress is often associated with stigmatising attitudes, prejudice and discrimination. The first section of this chapter outlines the historical, social and political factors that shaped attitudes, the provision of mental health care and mental health nursing. These factors have seen care transition from a biomedical and punitive approach to one focused on recovery and wellbeing. Cultural safety is discussed, including how the concept recognises the impact of colonisation on Māori mental health, systemic racism and discrimination. The social determinants of mental health are examined, followed by a discussion of mental health legislation, under which mental health services operate. Stigma associated with mental distress is examined. A central tenet of cultural safety is to be regardful of difference and to treat people as individuals, particularly when acknowledging the impact of trauma. An overview of trauma-informed care is provided, with an example from clinical practice which analyses application of cultural safety.

We derive the diffusion equation for light propagation in random media by starting from the radiative transfer equation and exploiting the Eddington approximation. The photon current, Fick law, and extrapolation length are described. Dynamic light diffusion and the modal expansion are also illustrated.

This chapter presents a first pass at parametrizing an economic model. The goal is to understand how a calibration exercise yields reasonable estimates for parameters, and how these parameters are consistent with a set of real-world targets that the user gets to choose.

This book has uncovered the role of multinational enterprises in the making of the Single European market by uncovering both firm strategies in the new business environment of an internal market as well as firm mobilization against to various dimensions of market governance. Together, the business cases covered in this book add a new, granular perspective to European political economy, not focused on the theoretical framework of capitalism, but on business strategy that constitutes its praxis. They also demonstrated the very different ways multinationals approached market integration and the Commission’s efforts to establish market regulations for the benefit of consumers and workers, with automakers most enthusiastic about the industrial focus of the market’s design, banks more interested in the new opportunities of market enlargement and its regulation than in deeper market integration, and commerce mobilizing against the threats of producer consolidation and the social dimensions of the Single Market.

This chapter shows how an infinite-horizon economy works almost like a finite-horizon economy -- with some minor differences. The goal of the chapter is to introduce the notion of the steady state, which is a dynamic equilibrium of the economy. Steady states are important for two reasons: first, because most economies (and all economies in the book) converge to them -- and remain in the steady state unless a shock moves the economy away from it. Second, because the solution techniques offered in the book rely on approximations around the steady state.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ complex role as a prophetic figure in American literature, tracing how he simultaneously embraces and subverts this identity. Drawing upon Puritan and Romantic traditions of the poet-prophet, the chapter situates Burroughs alongside figures like Walt Whitman, yet distinguishes him through his irreverent and often satirical stance. Burroughs’ prophetic persona was partly constructed by contemporaries such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and is shaped by his fascination with Hassan Sabbah, a mystical figure whose image he reclaims in opposition to American control systems. The chapter examines how Burroughs’ predictions – ranging from pandemics to terrorism – reflect both visionary insight and societal anxieties. Furthermore, his cut-up technique, developed with Brion Gysin, is interpreted as a form of literary sorcery akin to cleromancy, blending satire with shamanic prophecy. Ultimately, Burroughs emerges as a prophet who deconstructs prophecy, offering a self-aware critique of authority, language, and cultural mythmaking.

To conclude, I turn to Tessa, a test veteran widow, and her uneasy reflections on the claim-making process. Recognizing the double-edged nature of seeking justice, its enlivening and injurious potential, she asks that we take seriously the enduring challenges of injury claims, that we continue to interrogate how and why contemporary institutions turn justice making into pathways for ongoing harm. An exploration of the injurious nature of law is, I argue, crucial for understanding both the political origins of injury, and possible meaningful political responses to injury. This in turn reveals the necessity of reimagining injury in ways that can account for the historical, political, social, and institutional harms that accrue from our very systems of redress. That nuclear injuries have proven so difficult to respond to without enacting further harm must inform our current approaches to nuclear risk and disarmament, and necessitates a reimagining of injury law. Such a reckoning offers us possibilities to prioritize new modes of collective responsibility, care, and justice in the aftermath of radiation exposure and other invisible environmental harms.

In this chapter, we explore an unsupervised learning problem: estimating a distribution function from two-dimensional data. Although there is no response variable, the workflow mirrors that of supervised learning. We select the best-fitting function within a family by maximising the sum of the log of the distribution's values at the observed data points. As in supervised learning, excessive flexibility leads to overfitting, while insufficient flexibility leads to underfitting. We use cross-validation to identify a function family that achieves a happy medium.

The aim of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) is the uncovering, in the discourse type under study, of what we call nonobvious meaning, that is, meaning which might not be readily available to naked-eye perusal. By combining the quantitative approach, that is, statistical overviews of large amounts of the discourse in question with the more qualitative approach typical of discourse analysis, that is, the close analysis of particular stretches of discourse, it may be possible to access such nonobvious meanings. This chapter describes a set of CADS case studies into the facework performed during media and political interaction, from early work on White House press briefings to contrastive examinations of the facework typical of the US State Department and Chinese Foreign Ministry briefings which envisage not just the study of interpersonal im/politeness but also the performance of ‘national facework’. The facework involved in all these settings is multifaceted and complex. Firstly it is not always collaborative, indeed it is often downright competitive, and impoliteness is not uncommon, and it also comprises a mixture of personal, group and vicarious facework. The corpora employed in these studies are also multimedia in that videos of the briefings are also mostly available alongside the transcripts.

This chapter examines the libertarian and reactionary elements in William Burroughs’ life and work, placing them in dialogue with the twenty-first-century alt-right’s attempts to reclaim him as a prophetic figure. Florian Zappe interrogates the paradox of Burroughs as both icon of the countercultural avant-garde and a card-carrying NRA member who espoused conspiratorial, anti-statist, and sometimes openly bigoted views. The chapter traces how alt-right figures – from internet provocateurs to fringe ideologues – have co-opted Burroughs’ anti-establishment ethos and aesthetic of transgression, often through decontextualized misreadings that ignore his literary complexity and formal irony. Zappe explores Burroughs’ ambivalence toward political systems, his rejection of ideological coherence, and his commitment to aesthetic resistance rather than activism. Ultimately, the chapter argues that while Burroughs’ work harbors troubling reactionary tropes, it defies fascist instrumentalization by resisting ideological fixity and embracing an anarchic pluralism that places him far outside the alt-right’s monolithic vision of power.

Chapter 5 recounts interviews conducted with Cuban lawyers and law students regarding how they understand law, legal reasoning, and social change. It identifies key differences in the assumptions of the interviewees and the interviewers.

Chapter 1 attends to the historical context of British bomb testing through an exploration of contrasting accounts of nuclear risk. It juxtaposes archival and official narratives of military risk management with test veterans’ own memories of hazardous events. This reveals the jarring mismatch that test veterans experienced when encountering official records detailing moments their younger selves experienced first-hand. I explore how radiation measurement technologies, material infrastructures, and a military culture of hierarchical trust negated the perception of risk, yet still left room for servicemen to experience doubt and fear. This chapter also places the harms to service personnel in the wider colonial context of racial hierarchies and the theft of lands, revealing how stories of Indigenous injury became uncertain undercurrents within test veterans’ own narratives.