Chapter 7 discusses the short-term timescale of artistic activity, which includes both the creation and experience of art and shows how the creation or the experience of a painting or installation is a dynamic system with typical features of complexity. The creation of a work of art is described as a process in an attractor landscape, with self-organizing attractors as emergent types of creative activity. Existing linear models of creation are compared to a complexity model. An example is given of how a very short-term activity, namely, a single brushstroke, is a complex system in itself, interacting with higher and lower timescales. The discussion of the experience of art begins with existing sequential models and shows how they can be reinterpreted as non-linear, complex, metastable processes occurring on interacting timescales.

Chapter 5 presents a comprehensive conclusion, revisiting the theory of vested interests in the context of education policy. It summarises the key findings of the analysis and examines the extent to which group politics can explain both change and stability in European education systems. The chapter highlights the growing tensions between interest groups – particularly the dominant teachers’ unions, which have a strong stake in maintaining the status quo – and governments striving to improve underperforming education systems, provide better support for the most vulnerable students, and raise academic standards for all. Ultimately, the chapter argues that for governments to achieve meaningful educational reform, they must first redefine their relationship with powerful interest groups, particularly the unions, to overcome entrenched resistance and drive lasting change.

The story of urea stibamine is itself worthy of recording as a dramatic medical break-through which may be related…. A Bengali worker Dr U. N. Brahmachari, himself a chemist, was producing various products which he was testing on kala-azar cases. The Government Director of research programmes under the aegis of the Indian Research Fund Association, Colonel G. D. W. Greig IMS, asked him to send these to me to test at my special kala-azar hospital in Shillong, the capital of Assam. Among others, he sent me a product he called ‘urea stibamine’ which he had tried and merely passed over with a formal favourable comment. When I tested it I found it was so effective that cases could be treated and cured by about eight doses instead of taking many weeks or even months and then with unpredictable results.

To begin with, the question as to who Upendra Nath Brahmachari was can be addressed by referring to the remarks of Nilratan Sircar, an outstanding medico of Bengal. While presiding over a meeting of the Calcutta Medical Club, held on 20 September 1923, he said,

Brahmachari (see Figure 7.1) was one of the medical superstars, and an unsung hero, in the fight against one of the dangerous enemies of public health in the British Empire in India. The process of defeating this disease may be said to have been started with the introduction of tartar emetic by Leonard Rogers, and it reached a height of success with the availability of Brahmachari's brainchild, urea stibamine.

The present chapter concentrates on some useful families of n-polygraphs based on familiar shapes: cylinders, cubes, and simplices. These families are crucial in the development of a homotopy theory of ω-categories. Two methods for generating these families are explained. The first one is based on a direct definition of the cylinder polygraph of a polygraph. The second is based on Steiner’s theory of augmented directed complexes, which is a very powerful tool to build polygraphs using chain complexes. In particular, it allows to define a tensor product for polygraphs (or even ω-categories) from which the cylinder polygraph, as well as a join operation, can be recovered.

This chapter presents rewriting techniques for associative algebras. Here, algorithms are sought to turn a given presentation by generators and relations into a rewriting system by orienting the latter, thereby producing linear bases of the presented algebra. In particular, this approach applies to various fundamental decision problems, such as the word problem, ideal membership, or to compute quadratic bases, e.g., Poincaré-Birkhoff-Witt bases, Hilbert series, syzygies of presentations, homology groups, and Poincaré series. However, if rewriting rules are required to be compatible with the linear structure, an immediate problem arises: no rewriting system can be terminating. In order to fix this problem, the structure of linear polygraph with an appropriate notion of reduction can be considered. Linear polygraphs are introduced as a framework for linear rewriting, their confluence properties are studied, and Gröbner bases and Poincaré-Birkhoff-Witt bases are expressed in the setting of linear polygraphs.

Taking its lead from Darren Aronofsky’s film ‘Noah’, the Epilogue shows how the legend of Noah and the flood has greater relevance in the present moment than any other legend in Western thought.

This lab presents two devices, both partially digital, that have in common the use of feedback to generate an output related in a useful way to an input signal. The first circuit, an analog-to-digital converter, uses feedback to generate the digital equivalent to an analog input voltage.

This introduction assesses a range of popular and scholarly attitudes toward the current state of American democracy, identifying in them a dominant theme of modern democratic theory, namely, an aversion to conflict. Just as John Rawls believed democratic societies to be perennially threatened by a “mortal conflict” between comprehensive doctrines and their “transcendent elements not admitting of compromise,” and so proposed a theory of liberal order aimed at preempting, containing, and resolving these conflicts, so contemporary critics perceive the intractable disagreements and polarizations of American political culture to be only corrosive and destabilizing. They propose strategies for achieving social cohesion grounded in a sense of national unity, shared history, or common identity more fundamental to difference. Many religious persons and traditions exhibit a similar aversion to conflict, believing it to indicate some form of sin, injustice, or moral error. I question this presumption that conflict is inherently vicious, ruinous, or violent, and begin to sketch an alternative view of conflict as basic to human creaturehood and potentially generative for social life.

Perhaps the most pressing threat to agonistic democracy, indeed to any form of participatory democracy, in contemporary life is neoliberalism. I conclude the book, then, by considering how neoliberalism undermines the material conditions, citizen capacities, and forms of life necessary to practice radical democracy, and then imagine how local experiments in grassroots democracy can contest neoliberalism and renew the civic life of persons and communities. One such example is participatory budgeting initiatives, wherein portions of municipalities’ public funds are made subject to the deliberation, determinations, and authority of citizen assemblies. I analyze one particular instantiation of this democratic practice in Cascais, Portugal, showing how it has served to re-engage ordinary persons in the democratic system, develop their capacities for self-governance, and make constructive use of conflict-negotiation for democratic ends. I conclude by suggesting that grassroots democratic practices like these provide contexts in which citizens can cultivate the kinds of democratic virtues necessary for sustaining an agonistic politics.

Available at https://LAoE.link/LAoE_Chapter_17O.pdf.

This chapter establishes 3-polygraphs as a notion of presentation for 2-categories. As expected, those consist in generators for 0-, 1- and 2-dimensional cells, together with relations between freely generated 2-cells, which are represented by generating 3-cells. Any 3-polygraph induces an abstract rewriting system, so that all associated general rewriting concepts make sense in this setting: confluence, termination, etc. However, more specific tools have to be adapted to this context: the notion of critical branching is defined here for 3-polygraphs, along with the proof that confluence of critical branchings implies the local confluence of the polygraph. In the case where the polygraph is terminating, local confluence implies confluence, providing a systematic method to show the convergence of a 3-polygraph. When this is the case, normal forms give canonical representatives for 2-cells modulo the congruence generated by 3-cells, and it is explained how to exploit this to show that a given 3-polygraph is a presentation of a given 2-category.