This chapter addresses the chronological paradox of customary international law (CIL). The paradox is that for a new customary rule to be created states must believe that the law already obligates the behaviour specified in that rule (opinio juris). However, the behaviour in question can only be legally required once that rule has been created. As a result, creating a new customary rule would be impossible, or at the very least an incoherent process. This chapter challenges this conclusion. In addressing the chronological paradox, it provides a coherent interpretation of the creation of new customary rules. It argues that the sense of legal obligation (opinio juris) emerges from the general principle of good faith. Good faith leads to legal obligations, which compel a subgroup of states to engage in specific behaviour. Then, as a result of this subgroup’s repeated behaviour, a new customary rule emerges, obligating the entire community of states to act accordingly. To explain the shift from good faith to legal obligations and from legal obligations to customary rules, the chapter draws on interpretivism, social ontology and contemporary research on constitutive rules.

Various hospitals in the US and around the world suffer from the well-known problem of emergency department (ED) overcrowding, which prevents them from serving patients effectively and efficiently. An important contributor to this problem, which became even more dire after the COVID-19 pandemic, is prolonged boarding of patients who are admitted to inpatient units through the ED. Patients admitted through the ED constitute about 50% of all nonobstetrical hospital admissions in the US, and they may be boarded in the ED for long hours with the hope of finding an available bed in their primary inpatient unit. This chapter sheds light on effective ways of reducing ED boarding times by considering the trade-off between keeping patients in the ED and assigning them to a secondary inpatient unit. Using simulation analyses calibrated with hospital data, they find that implementing this policy could significantly help hospitals to improve their patient safety by reducing boarding times while controlling the overflow of patients to secondary units. Using data analyses and various simulation experiments, they also help hospital administrators by generating insights into hospital conditions under which achievable improvements are significant.

This chapter demonstrates how a community of professional caregivers changes its view of a mealtime situation as a result of a communication intervention involving video guidance. We use data from a Finnish communication intervention model called OIVA, in which caregivers film everyday interactions and discuss these scenarios with a trained OIVA guide. In the 90-minute session investigated in this chapter, the community analyzes the interaction in a video where a caregiver spoon-feeds a resident living with dementia. This chapter focuses on how the OIVA guide uses practices such as hypothetical questions and reformulations of previous contributions to redirect the work community’s focus towards the interaction between the caregiver and the resident in the video. It is argued that, during the video guidance session, the caregivers begin to view the task of feeding as a social event and an opportunity to communicate with the resident.

This is a reprinting of Einstein, Podolsky and Tolman’s 1931 letter to the editor of Physical Review. In this letter, the authors demonstrate that the principles of quantum mechanics give rise to an uncertainty in the description of past events which is analogous to the uncertainty quantum mechanics assigns to the prediction of future events.

For this chapter, we examine everyday interactions involving a person diagnosed with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD; pseudonym Trudy). Drawing on the methods of conversation analysis, our specific research focus is placed on how knowledge is solicited, displayed and resisted in contexts of viewing family photos. Our data are taken from video recordings of Trudy at home in the presence of family, caregivers and two researchers. We found that looking at family photos comprised three different activities, each aiming to elicit a response from Trudy: ’Who are they?’; ’Who is that?’; ’Find X!’. Epistemic stances taken up by the participants were found to index Trudy’s ‘reduced’ epistemic domain with respect to her ability in recognizing family members in photos. On the other hand, it was also found that she was able to take up a position of epistemic authority when asserting who is not in the picture. To conclude, although Trudy was at times able to take up a position of epistemic authority to reveal her biographical knowledge, the conversational agenda mainly involved testing Trudy on what she knew, with the unfortunate result being that it was often made clear where she was lacking in knowledge.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Darwin articulated his theory of evolution and thereby crystallized growing scientific suspicions that the diversity of organic forms – including humans – was produced by natural processes. Although tensions between science and religion since the dawn of modernity had been forcing thinkers in both disciplines to reassess their view of the status and meaning of being human, this new theory made our biological origins and development yet another occasion for religious response. Particularly orthodox Christians had to ponder whether humble animal origins were consistent with the high view of humanity as made in God’s image – and indeed what it would mean for God to have become a human being in the Incarnation. Darwinian theory was a seismic shift in our concept of the living world, one that has been augmented and confirmed many times over by advances in science. These matters are the subject of this chapter.

Addressing the challenges associated with data movement within the memory hierarchy, this chapter explores solutions from both hardware and systems software perspectives. It places special emphasis on buffer management techniques aimed at optimizing data movement and reducing access latency. The chapter also delves into the significance of nonvolatile memory (NVM), particularly flash memory devices, and their role in mitigating access latency within the memory hierarchy. Readers gain insights into strategies employed to minimize data movement, enhancing overall memory performance, a critical aspect of efficient data management.

Chapter 9 looks comparatively within monarchies to assess whether the theory contributes to understanding why some monarchies survived and others were overthrown in the past two centuries. It begins by analyzing two datasets of ruling monarchies from the 1800s to the 1900s, showing that monarchies that shared more power with parliaments were less likely to fall to revolutions. It then uses case studies of the Iranian and Nepali monarchies to illustrate how centralizing monarchs made themselves vulnerable to blame and attracted mass opposition, ultimately leading to their downfalls. The chapter suggests that the theory has implications for understanding historical transitions from monarchy, and it underscores that kings who forego their delegation advantage and monopolize power are also vulnerable to being blamed and facing mass opposition when they govern poorly.

This is a reprinting of Schrödinger’s famous pair of papers delivered at the Cambridge Philosophical Society in late 1935 and 1936, wherein he first coins the term ‘entanglement’ to describe interacting quantum systems. The first paper (1935) is given here in full; section 4 of the second paper (1936) is reprinted as an appendix.

This chapter will guide a candidate in core paediatric topics that regularly appear in Section 1 of the FRCS(Tr&Orth) exam. The chapter deals with paediatric clinical questions based around high quality clinical scenarios. Detailed explanations of the SBA options with a clear logical approach to selecting the most appropriate option.

This chapter provides basic production theoretical underpinnings used in modeling and measuring performance in the healthcare realm, which covers a host of institutions, practitioners, regulators, insurers, and patients, among others. This is a difficult task given the complexity of the healthcare sector. In general, the authors seek some meaningful benchmarks to use in assessing performance that are rich enough to model these complex entities. They begin with introducing technology or sets, which include as elements the many inputs used to treat patients in clinics or hospitals, which are in turn employed to improve patient outcomes (outputs), which may be multidimensional as well. They introduce key axioms that are imposed on these sets. However, although key in determining the benchmark or best practice possibilities, these sets are not practical for determining the performance of individual entities relative to the benchmark. More practical are functional representations of these multidimensional sets that are easy to estimate, which include distance functions and their dual value functions. These functions inherit properties from their respective technology sets, which in turn require certain specifications of their functional form if they are to be estimated parametrically.