This chapter explores William Burroughs’ lifelong preoccupation with time as a philosophical and compositional problem, tracing its evolution from early influences such as Oswald Spengler to the yagé-induced revelations of “space-time travel” and the radical temporality of the cut-up method. Tomasz Stompor argues that Burroughs’ literary experiments – from epistolary montage to newspaper-formatted layouts – challenge the linear, regulated time of modernity and propose alternative, nonlinear temporal regimes. Drawing on the Composite City vision from The Yage Letters, Spenglerian cyclical history, and Burroughs’ self-constructed calendar inspired by Mayan systems, the chapter demonstrates how Burroughs’ formal innovations enact temporal disruption. Through analysis of his cut-up trilogy, contributions to little magazines like My Own Mag, and the spatial logic of montage, Stompor positions Burroughs as a literary time-traveler whose work seeks to liberate the reader from linguistic and chronological control.

In this chapter, we review the Berger–Coburn–Lebow (BCL) and the Bercovici–Douglas–Foias (BDF) approaches and obtain new results on how one can map a BCL-model commuting isometric pair to a unitarily equivalent BDF-model commuting isometric pair and vice versa. We also present a more complete systematic account of the BDF-model, which fleshes out various scattered results due to the trio. This in-depth study leads to the introduction of what we call a refined BDF-model for a commuting isometric pair, the analysis of which gives a new proof of a Wold-type decomposition result of Gaşper and Gaşper. Here we also make contact with some ideas from discrete-time input/state/output linear systems (e.g., realization of a contractive analytic function as the transfer function of a unitary system node), which are important for understanding how to go from a contractive analytic function (a key invariant for the BDF theory) to a 2 x 2-block unitary operator matrix (a key invariant for the BCL theory). However, it is the BCL-model theory that will be our main tool for obtaining functional models for Ando isometric lifts of a commuting contractive pair.

Duality is one of the most basic tools in the study of interacting particle systems. There exist two forms: pathwise and distributional duality, of which the first is the stronger. It is shown how pathwise dualities naturally follow from the basic Poisson construction of Chapter 4 by looking backward in time. The classical additive and cancellative dualities, which are pathwise dualities, are discussed in detail. As an example of dualities that are not pathwise, Lloyd–Sudbury duality is discussed. It is demonstrated how duality can be used to prove various results, such as clustering in the voter model, uniqueness of a homogeneous nontrivial invariant law for the contact process, and equality of the critical points for finite survival and for the existence of a nontrivial invariant law in a contact-voter model.

This chapter examines William Burroughs’ engagement with tape recording as an integral aspect of his cut-up project, situating his sonic explorations within the broader context of twentieth-century sound experimentation and its technological evolution. Tracing Burroughs’ early interest in voice and control, the chapter highlights the pivotal influence of Brion Gysin and the advent of portable tape recorders on the development of the cut-up method beyond textual manipulation. It analyzes Burroughs’ experimental recordings, distinguishing them from his commercial releases, and considers their potential psychological and political objectives, particularly in relation to sonic manipulation. The chapter also draws parallels between Burroughs’ tape techniques and contemporary DJ practices like sampling and remixing, while exploring his engagement with noise, prosody, and the disruptive potential of sound. Ultimately, it argues that Burroughs’ innovative use of tape extended the possibilities of the cut-up as a multisensory and potentially weaponized medium, prefiguring later developments in sound art and media manipulation.

This first substantive chapter introduces readers to Truth Commissions as an institution and their relationship with international law; the core problem examined in the book, and the overall argument; the main debates in scholarship and practice, which frame the book’s intervention; and the book’s methodological approach and contribution. The chapter begins with an overview of Truth Commissions, their contemporary role, and historical transformation. The discussion focuses on how the jurisprudential tradition of ‘jurisdictional thought’ offers a way of examining how Truth Commissions have ‘authorized’ their accounts of violent events as the truth by drawing on different dimensions of international law. The chapter explains how the book approaches the analysis of Truth Commissions through the study of their representations of truth and authority. This involves setting out the book’s theoretical orientation, which includes the jurisprudence of jurisdictional thought, law and humanities scholarship, and the theory and history of international law; and explaining the importance of the author’s in-country visits and archival research.

It is almost impossible today to imagine the study of written academic English without the contribution of corpus linguistics. Corpora provide textual information which represent a speaker’s experience of language in a particular domain and so offer evidence of typical patterning in academic texts. It is a method which focuses on community practices and the ways members of particular disciplines see and discuss the world. This chapter describes some key studies which contribute to a corpus-informed understanding of academic writing in English. These show that a range of features have been found to occur and behave in dissimilar ways in different disciplinary and genre environments, indicating that academic discourse is a myriad of texts differing across contexts than a single entity. This will cover a state-of-the-art overview and highlight four central papers in this area, identifying their research questions, describing their methods, summarizing the major findings, and discussing their importance. The chapter then describes a representative work in greater detail, focusing on one of the author’s own studies which explores whether the considerable pressures on academics to publish and gain visibility for their work has led authors to rhetorically ‘hype’ their studies.

The writing of this book, planning its structure, shaping its content, investigating details, have been an Odyssey for its author. The journey has been an exciting one, for it is always exciting and informative to investigate the beginnings and early development of any phenomenon, whether it be of material things or in the world of ideas, and coinage is no exception. The ‘little round things’ that we carry (still, just about) in our purses in some respects resemble their earliest ancestors, not least in their generally round shape and in the images they present to the user. But from the time of their first appearance, coins, and the ways they functioned in the societies in which they moved, have undergone a long history of development and change, and there are many questions posed by aspects of their origins and early use, starting from the fundamental ‘Why coins?’

To investigate the micro-level interdependence between technological advancements and institutional diversity in IPR within business corporations, this chapter integrates the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework with the Institutional Complementarities (IC) approach. The former recognizes the importance of informal rules and community characteristics in knowledge governance, while the latter reveals inefficiencies arising from the interdependent nature of knowledge ownership and creation. The combined GKC–IC framework reveals the interplay between the characteristics of knowledge as a shared resource and the formal and informal rules governing its production. This offers insights into how corporations can be understood as knowledge commons within today’s environment that is increasingly shaped by the extensive use of IPR in governing knowledge assets. The chapter shows that the interdependence dynamics between IPR and technology excludes knowledge workers from accessing and utilizing the knowledge they produce, leading to the gradual deterioration of their skills and expertise. This vicious cycle further erodes the institutional diversity of corporate knowledge governance in favour of IPR-based governance mechanisms.

This chapter reviews important developments in corpus-based research into World Englishes (WE). It provides an overview of types of WE and important resources for corpus-based research into WE. It also touches on the relationship between models of WE and corpus-based modeling of variation in WE. The case study investigates the choice between present perfect (PP) and simple aspect (SP) across a set of first- and second-language varieties of. The PP is of interest because it is an example of stable variation in British and American English and a number of studies have used it to model the relationship of different types of WE. This chapter is the first to use a mixed-model approach to the PP:SP alternation: It fits a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) tree to the data with verb lemma as a random effect. The results show that, in spoken language, there is a clear divide between the first- and second-language varieties investigated, with the latter showing a larger use of PPs. With respect to the random effect, the analysis shows that verbs of change are particularly attracted to the PP and stative verbs are attracted to the SP. Co-occurrence with adverbials is infrequent, overall.

Building on the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework, this chapter examines how processes of knowledge production, transmission, and utilization give rise to various collective action problems and how firms address these problems. Drawing on stakeholder theory in management studies, the chapter distinguishes three governance models – the hub-and-spoke model, the lead role governance model, and the shared governance model – each offering different solutions to these challenges. A case study of the famous Czech firm Bat’a Enterprises in the early twentieth century demonstrates the practical application of the lead role governance model, which grants employees high autonomy while maintaining management’s central role in strategic decisions. Through profit-sharing schemes, decentralized workshops, and internal education, Bat’a effectively aligned individual incentives with the firm’s goals, mitigating collective action problems and fostering innovation. By analyzing Bat’a’s success, this chapter contributes to the understanding of knowledge governance in firms and underscores the connections with the GKC framework and Ostrom’s design principles.

This chapter introduces a weaker type of lift, called a pseudo-commuting contractive lift, which paves the way for an appropriate parallel of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias model theory for the bivariate setting. Embedded inside a pseudo-commuting contractive lift of a commuting contractive pair is a minimal Sz.-Nagy–Foias isometric lift of the product of components of the commuting contractive pair. The uniqueness of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias isometric lift is then exploited to argue that any two pseudo-commuting contractive lifts are unitarily equivalent. Arguably, the pseudo-commuting contractive lifts for a commuting contractive pair provide a better parallel to the Sz.-Nagy–Foias isometric lifts for a single contraction operator.