With rising incomes, population growth speeds up and then slows as incomes climb. This demographic change is driven by economic growth, not the reverse. That was the case in northwestern Europe in particular, and its precocious economic growth did not result from any other demographic advantages such as an unusual family structure. Northwestern Europe did benefit, though, from highly productive agriculture that allowed northwestern Europe’s peasant farmers to feed a larger urban population than in China. They could do this from roughly 1500 on because unlike peasants in eastern Europe they were free of serfdom and their property rights that were secure. They also enjoyed a favorable natural environment. With the food they produced, northwestern Europe early on developed clusters of cities that were unknown elsewhere in Eurasia and that proved crucial for economic growth. These urban clusters helped circulate new technologies and ideas. Such urban agglomeration effects were critical to the Industrial Revolution.

The development of new therapeutic methods for intervening in brain function has the potential to influence aspects of a person’s agency, including their autonomy and authenticity. To determine whether or not this is the case, we need an assay that can measure aspects of agency before and after neurointervention. This chapter introduces a framework for thinking about agency as a multidimensional construct, and describes a research project aimed at measuring agency. The authors develop an Agency Assessment Tool (AAT) using survey methods and present preliminary results from the project that shows that the AAT can characterize control and patient groups along several dimensions with a factor analysis; the results show some interesting patterns among putative conceptual dimensions with network analysis. Although the data do not go so far as to include interventions to help understand causal relations, the authors discuss the prospects for using data-driven tools to come up with ontologies of agency.

A 35-year-old woman presents to the neurology clinic with concern for tremor. She states she first noticed her right hand would start “shaking” when she was taking exams in college, or when she was particularly nervous, but would go away afterward. Over the next 10 years, the shaking slowly became more evident in her right hand and began involving her left hand, and she began having difficulty writing legibly and buttoning her shirt. Two years ago, she noticed the same “shakiness” in her head. Most recently she has noticed difficulty singing. She reports it is not worse with activity, and improves with rest. She claims she can get it to “calm down” with an evening glass of wine. Her husband says it is not present when she sleeps. She endorses having one alcoholic beverage per day, and states her father was also “shaky.”

In a thoughtful essay that follows, Peter Zachar interweaves several philosophical issues that relate to classification in general and psychiatric classifications specifically. I think it will be most useful to interested readers if, in this introduction, I steer away from a largely conceptual/philosophical critique of Zachar’s essay and rather comment from the perspective of a working clinician and psychiatric nosologist who has, for better or worse, spend several decades working on various versions of the DSM – the accepted nosology for American psychiatry.

A 25-year-old, otherwise healthy white man presents to outpatient neurology clinic, referred from podiatry with a chief complaint of bilateral foot pain. He says he has had slowly worsening numbness and weakness in his legs and feet since childhood. He was told by his father that “it runs in the family” and that his father had symptoms that started in his early teens and is now wheelchair bound with weakness in his hands and arms as well. A couple of years ago, he began to develop pain in his feet when walking, and his toes started to bend down, requiring special high-arched shoes and ankle-orthotics from podiatry. He denies trauma or periods of symptom resolution. He now has difficulty walking or standing for prolonged periods and is unable to run.

Why do we need another book on ethnic and racial discrimination? Why should scholars, parents, educators and policymakers care about the impact of discrimination on our young people? The answer is both simple and complicated. The simple answer is that discrimination matters for how young people grow up – how they see themselves when they look in the mirror, how they see themselves as members of society, and how they see the prospect of their futures. But it is not just how they see themselves. Discrimination also matters for how they engage with their peers, how they develop a sense of self, how their bodies grow, and how they experience age and time. The more complicated answer is that who perpetrates the discrimination (e.g., peers, adults, teachers, strangers), when in the life course young people experience discrimination, what sources of support are available, how many forms of discrimination young people are exposed to (e.g., racial, ethnic, weight, language, gender, sex, sexual identity, adoption), and how young people respond physiologically and emotionally also matter for the ultimate impact that discrimination has on how they grow.

The Prologue gives examples of various kinds of hiddenness, focusing especially on the way the artist or the author is both indicated by and hidden behind a work.

More so functions as a degree modifier with a comparative/resultative complement; it means ‘to a greater extent’. Two usage errors noted are the misspelling moreso and instances where so is pleonastic. The OED records the moreso spelling, but does not condemn it. Two (mis)usages not recorded in standard sources are the function of more so/moreso as a conjunctive adverb meaning ‘furthermore’, as in You can blame the weather. Moreso, you should blame the funding, and its use as an adverb meaning ‘especially’, as in His stubbornness and, more so, his weight assuaged Sister’s anger. This chapter explores how and when such usages arose. The degree modifier originates as (the) more in Middle English, with anaphoric so added later. The adverbial usage and single-word spelling both date from Early Modern English. However, the conjunctive adverb (even) more so/moreso dates from the start of the twenty-first century. Both the adverb and conjunctive adverb undergo lexicalisation. A construction-based approach, where conjunctive even so and even more belong to a schematic network with, and provide models for, the development of conjunctive (even) more so, is compatible with a lexicalisation analysis.

This chapter explores methods for nonsmooth (i.e., gradient-free) and nonconvex optimization. First, we develop the proximal gradient method, which extends gradient descent to nonsmooth problems where the gradient may not exist. Many optimization problems have a smooth objective, such as the least squares error function, and a nonsmooth regularizer, as in LASSO regression. The proximal gradient is an approach to handle these situations. Next, we explore two algorithms that assume very little structure in the optimization problem: the Nelder-Mead downhill simplex method and simulated annealing. The downhill simplex method uses a simplex (i.e., a polytope) to sample the objective function and take steps that deform the simplex towards better objectives. Simulated annealing replicates the process of annealing, or cooling, to create strong metal alloys. In simulated annealing, the optimization algorithm begins “hot”, exploring the objective function, and gradually “cools” to begin exploiting favorable local minima. We then introduce evolutionary algorithms, including genetic algorithms and genetic programming. Finally, we cover particle swarm optimization and ant colony optimization.

Australia’s continuous growth in migration has enriched the linguistic diversity of our society. How our linguistic ecology has shifted relative to the presence of migrant languages is an important phenomenon to capture. Using publicly available data published by Coles magazine across nine years from 2014 to 2022, this chapter investigates the kinds of lexical items present and their influence on English in Australia, particularly in the food domain. Findings indicate lexicosemantic items from twenty-four migrant languages in this domain. In addition, these items from these migrant languages mirror many migrant languages spoken at home based on the 2016 and 2021 Censuses. At the same time, their presence reflects more the consumption interests of the wider population. Recognising these lexical items from these migrant languages and examining whether their presence signals the communicative need of the relevant migrant groups enable us to understand how language contact plays out in this sociolinguistic ecology and helps us to document the way in which our increasing linguistic diversity impacts and shapes English in Australia.

A 54-year-old man with type-2 diabetes and hypertension presents to the emergency department (ED) via ambulance with left arm, leg, and facial weakness. His wife states he seemed well last night but this morning was unable to move his left side. She reports his speech is slurred and he doesn’t seem to notice that his left side is weak.

As we have seen in Chapter 1, the discovery of Kepler’s laws is a long and troubled story. Kepler was fully aware of the importance of his discovery, as we can guess while reading the few quotations of his books in these pages. Only later were his laws synthesized into the short and elegant statements that we may find in every book on Mechanics or Celestial Mechanics.

Introduction. The Introduction sets out the aims of the book. No attempt has previously been made to investigate the detailed operations of any major figure as evidenced by his or her day-to-day practice. This is an effort to fill that gap by exploring the career of Edmund Curll, and to go beyond the mainly biographic treatment he has received so far. It describes how the succeeding pages seek to consider various aspects of Curll’s publications in the context of the London publishing industry as it then operated. An account is given of the content of various chapters, as this will be given in the abstracts below. Among topics briefly outlined are the range of Curll’s lists, his dealings with the law, his connections with contemporary authors (major and minor), with a review the most important scholarship on the condition of publishers in the eighteenth century.