Prognostication in patients with acute neuromuscular disorders presenting to the intensive care unit (ICU) can be challenging, even for experienced providers. The various neuromuscular conditions that result in severe limb and respiratory weakness are heterogeneous with regard to their pathophysiology, natural history, and response to therapy. Furthermore, many patients with respiratory weakness require ventilatory support and can have relatively protracted ICU and hospital stays where systemic complications, such as delirium, hospital-acquired infections (particularly in immunosuppressed patients), deep venous thromboses and thromboembolism, sedation requirements, pre-existing diagnoses, affective disorders, and immobilization may all confound the ability to predict long-term recovery. Yet, outcome data on some of the most common etiologies of neuromuscular weakness in the ICU, including myasthenia gravis (MG), Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS), ICU-acquired weakness (ICUAW), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is available and can aid tremendously in guiding prognostication when taken in the context of the individual patient’s unique clinical condition.

This chapter addresses symmetry’s implications for separation of powers and federalism. It suggests that some major structural questions, such as the long-running debate over the president’s authority to fire or “remove” executive officers, hold an intensity out of step with their current political stakes. By contrast, other recent decisions, particularly those limiting agency authority over “major” policy questions and intensively reviewing the reasoned justification for certain policies, threaten to enable selective judicial disapproval of policies favored by progressives rather than conservatives. A preference for symmetry should support limiting or reconsidering these decisions. With respect to federalism, symmetry should likewise encourage the development of doctrines that grant parallel opportunities and protections to rival “red” and “blue” states dominated by either the Democratic or Republican Party.

The chapter begins with a description of the multiple discriminatory legislation against the Jews enacted soon after the Nazi takeover in 1933. It then considers the ambivalent situation of the Jews in the following years, as told in the autobiography of the historian Peter Gay (Fröhlich), by then a high-school pupil in Berlin. While he and his family were only marginally affected by the Nazi acts of discrimination, most other Jews greatly suffered under this policy, as well as from the social exclusion associated with it and finally from the general economic hardship at the time. In fact, by the November (1938) Pogrom, Jews could no longer be seen as Germans. Could they still reflect German history – as they did throughout previous periods, according to this book? The chapter tries to handle this question by first briefly describing the history of the Holocaust and then dealing more fully with the historiography of this period, written since the end of the war till today.

We give the proof of Witten’s positive energy theorem in general relativity and make the connection to supergravity.

This chapter begins by tracing the consequences of the subsuming in modernity of mythos under the auspices of logos, namely the reduction of God to the status of the ‘biggest’ of all beings. The consequences of this for mythopoiesis are many, but chief among them is the foreclosure of the further distancing of plainly theological (that is, mythopoieic) discourse from the realm of the reasonable. By re-examining the relationship between the natural and the supernatural, however, the chapter concludes by pointing towards a way of understanding not only the work of theologians and people of faith as pointing towards the divine, but that all of our mythopoiesis is, in some sense, a making towards God.

This chapter outlines the challenges that current political polarization presents for constitutional law and judicial authority. Over the past fifty years, US politics have polarized, producing close political competition between two ideologically defined national parties that view each other with fear and distrust. This polarization has encouraged political actors in Congress and the federal executive branch to take legally aggressive positions and prioritize substantive policy achievements over adherence to good-governance norms or even constitutional restraints. At the same time, polarization has generated rival constitutional visions, and aligned slates of judges, that aim to advance partisan goals through constitutional interpretation. This environment poses risks for both judicial authority and constitutional law, because the public may lose trust in courts as neutral arbiters of constitutional disputes if it perceives them as wholly political institutions.

Many midcentury continental philosophers, most notably Martin Heidegger (1889--1976), were skeptical about and critical of using technology to mediate human activities. Telephones and computers not only simplify communication, they transform communication (and humans along with it). Postphenomenology is an emerging qualitative research group that examines the transformation of humans by technology. Led by the American philosopher Don Idhe, postphenomenologists maintain that this change is neither bad nor good. Martin Heidegger, however, around whom new and exciting healthcare research is being done, would disagree. There is no discovery without a simultaneous covering. The authors examine whether something of importance is, indeed, covered up when qualitative researchers rely on technology. A three-year international qualitative study on PTSD with active-duty military, which relied heavily on technology, is used to examine the strengths and weaknesses of combining technology with phenomenological healthcare research.

The pupil allows light to enter the human body. Without the pupil, the human brain would not have an accurate representation of the world. The structure of the eye next to and behind the pupil is described in this chapter. It will emphasize that the pupil is not actually an anatomical structure, but is formed by the arrangement of two muscle groups that embryologically are part of the brain.

This chapter summarizes the main points of the book and reflects on possible ways ahead for experimental sociology.

In the aftermath of the self-proclaimed Green Revolution, donors, diplomats, and agricultural scientists met for a series of meetings, Bellagio I through VII. There they discussed and diverged over the assessment of recent agricultural transformations and their social impacts, as well as the next steps to be taken. By centering on discussions that led to the creation of the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in 1972 in Hyderabad, India and ICRISAT’s groundnut (peanut) research program, this chapter shows how agricultural experts reimagined strategies of international agricultural research to suit a different mode of development that took shape in the 1970s and fully emerged in the 1980s. Although the conference participants worried about “second-generation development problems” related to the unequal economic fallout of the Green Revolution, they also wanted to expand the Green Revolution to populations in areas of rainfed agriculture. ICRISAT was the scientific answer to both concerns. This chapter shows how development strategies remained stable while their meanings shifted for a world of free trade and competition.