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.

Can works of art teach us something, perhaps about ourselves, about the world, or about what matters? This chapter addresses whether and how the arts contribute to learning by drawing on insights from epistemology – the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge. It considers how the arts contribute to the various ways of knowing that philosophers distinguish: propositional knowledge (also called “know-that”), experiential knowledge, understanding, and skill-based knowledge (also called “know-how”). With respect to each, there are promising ways of working out how art may contribute to our epistemic growth. At the same time, each candidate type of knowledge faces challenges and complications that limit its ability to be the singular answer regarding learning from and through the arts. Ultimately, this chapter suggests that “know-how” – or skill-based knowledge – is an especially fruitful concept for understanding how we become epistemically better off through engagement with the arts. This chapter thus suggests that becoming epistemically better off through engagement with the arts is not about acquiring knowledge of facts, but rather about developing ways of seeing, perceiving, interpreting, and responding to the world more skillfully.

Since the early 2000s, various methods for analysing speech data have emerged. While several publications offer strong overviews of methodological innovations, most of them reflect the state of research from over a decade ago. Recent advances in speech technology and statistics relevant to sociophonetic studies have rarely been addressed. This chapter aims to provide an up-to-date overview of three advanced methods for investigating sociophonetic variation, covering both data preparation and analysis, illustrated with a case study on spoken Scottish English. For data preparation, the chapter shows how OpenAI Whisper, an automatic speech recognition model, can transcribe speech and produce outputs compatible with linguistic software. It also discusses how speech annotation tasks can be improved via LaBB-CAT, a tool for corpus management and data mining. For data analysis, the chapter outlines how sociophonetic studies can benefit from advanced statistical methods, including regression and decision tree modelling as well as model evaluation. A key example is the PrInDT package, developed to optimise conditional inference trees as well as classification and regression tasks.

In their chapter, Roskies, Busch, and Walton present the first phase of a very ambitious project aiming at examination of the causal role of agency in mental disorders. The project is daunting because there are several unknowns. First, there is an issue of making a definition of agency and its variants. Next, it would be necessary to examine those variants across different clinical populations. Finally, there is a need to see whether modulating agency through brain stimulation leads to changes in the psychiatric condition. The authors frame their project within the model of interventionist approach. It is a complex project because this approach requires that all confounding and correlated influences and effects are kept under control. Moreover, it is not clear that the efficacy of deep brain stimulation, which is so successful in the treatment of chronic dystonia, Parkinson’s disease, and some forms of epilepsy, is equally effective in treating mental disorders such as depressive disorder, schizophrenia, or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

A concise introduction to theoretical description of quantum systems in general, and qubits in particular, in the presence of decoherence (equations of motion for quantum state vectors and density matrices, Lindblad formalism, Bloch vector and Bloch equations).

Over time, United Nations human rights treaty bodies (UNTBs) have developed an admissibility requirement that individuals’ allegations be ‘sufficiently substantiated’ or ‘not manifestly unfounded’. Explanations of these terms have varied, but States, treaty body members and scholars have equated them with a prima facie threshold. Among international tribunals, prima facie is commonly understood to require the complainant to make a plausible claim. However, review of UNTB decisions indicates that application of this requirement clashes with the accepted meaning of prima facie by: (1) often requiring the complainant to present convincing allegations; (2) taking into account – or giving greater weight to – the state’s arguments and evidence at the admissibility stage; and 3) sometimes requiring the complainant to pre-emptively overcome the state’s possible defences. This chapter seeks to identify relevant trends in order to both better understand current UNTB practice and illuminate paths to greater consistency and clarity in admissibility determinations.

This chapter covers control theory. Optimal control balances the performance and robustness of the closed-loop system with the cost of control. This results in an optimization problem constrained by the dynamics. This chapter begins with linear optimal control, including the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) and Kalman filter. These both involve the Riccati equation, which we will derive using Lagrange multipliers. We then explore nonlinear optimal control, deriving the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations. This involves reinforcement learning and dynamic programming, which are optimization frameworks to solve this nonlinear control problem. Next, we develop model predictive control (MPC) as an extension to optimal control for a broader class of control tasks. MPC is widely used in industrial control due to its flexibility, robustness, ease of implementation, and ability to respect constraints. MPC repeatedly solves an optimal control problem on a receding horizon, reinitializing the optimization problem as new sensor information is available. Finally, we discuss linear matrix inequalities, which allow us to reformulate many problems in control as convex optimization problems.

Critical Race Theory provides a lens through which we can examine and unpack the role of rest, self-care and community care in social work spaces. The Rest is Resistance movement, coined by Tricia Hersey of the @napministry encourages us to “disrupt and push back against capitalism and white supremacy by connecting to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming and naps as a foundation for healing and justice.” This chapter provides a counternarrative to traditional notions that burnout can be prevented by individual efforts of social workers and students to better care for themselves, positing that the professionalization of social work, by design, continues to perpetuate inequity and exploit emotional labor.

In his chapter, Ken Kendler set out to explore the prospects of evidential pluralism in a field that admittedly has not been explored in the literature so far: psychiatry. I find it thoroughly impressive how Kendler has engaged with the literature on evidential pluralism, and I fully agree with his words of caution and caveats about mechanisms. In this commentary, I will try to think along with Kendler and offer pointers to other places in this broad area of evidential pluralism that might be of help to those interested in psychiatry.