The history of queer and trans Puerto Rican and Diasporican literature is complex. Its relationship to American literature is fraught with issues of colonialism and linguistic exclusion. Careful analysis of a wide-ranging corpus from the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1882), José de Diego Padró (1924), and Pedro Caballero (1931), reveals a longstanding interest in queer and trans experience in works written in Spanish in Puerto Rico and New York. The massive social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s led to the explosion of critical voices such as those of Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, and Luz María Umpierre. Their pioneering texts, and the complex writing of Nuyorican authors in English, opened the way for late 1990s and early 2000s authors such as Ángel Lozada and Mayra Santos-Febres, for the eventual creation of collectives such as Homoerótica in 2009, and for the widespread acclaim of writers such as Luis Negrón, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Justin Torres, and Raquel Salas Rivera. “Queerness,” as such, and its Spanish-language variant “cuir,” have been spaces of possibility for Boricua expression for more than one hundred forty years.

Chapter 6 explores the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal and Yukikaze’s role in the epic naval battle. Yukikaze was involved in a failed effort to save the battleship Hiei, which became the first Japanese battleship lost in the war. Eventually, Yukikaze and other destroyers evacuated Imperial Army troops from Guadalcanal, a turning point in the war.

It is widely believed that one of Charles Darwin’s most important accomplishments was to have banished teleology from biology. Darwin’s view of teleology was a much-debated question in the 19th century, when both advocates and opponents of teleology equated it with divine design (Asa Gray and Karl Ernst Von Baer, for example). Darwin himself, however, did not think he had done so, and didn’t think that teleology should be banished from biology. This chapter will challenge the myth of Darwin the anti-teleologist by looking at two distinct kinds of evidence. First, we will look at his correspondence with Harvard Botanist Asa Gray, who praised Darwin’s use of teleological explanation. While Gray and Darwin agree on the value of teleological thinking in biology, Darwin disagrees with Gray that this counts as evidence for divine design in nature. Then we will look at Darwin’s own biology, especially his botanical works written after the publication of On the Origin of Species, to better understand his use of teleological explanation in biology.

In 2015, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty Philip Alston stated that the World Bank treats “human rights more like an infectious disease than universal values and obligations” because of its understanding of what constitutes political interference. The World Bank’s interpretation, replicated by the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) in the development finance regime complex, has shaped how activists hold the Banks to account. This chapter examines how the international accountability norm emerged through contestation with the World Bank and spread to be taken as given for the MDBs, as distinct from international human rights and environmental elemental regimes. It then documents how activists seek to protect human and environmental rights through the banks’ international accountability mechanisms as quasi-legal processes with implications for the banks’ culpability. Although there is an increasing recognition of some rights such as free, prior and informed consent and labour, the banks continue to view these as internal standards not legal obligations. The chapter then examines the extent to which the norm needs to be backed by hard law to be enforced, with efforts by the banks to maintain their international organisation immunity given legal claims as to their implication in human and environmental rights abuses.

This chapter illustrates how the categories ‘migrant’, ‘repatriate’, and ‘refugee’ acquired meaning between diplomatic relations and physical displacement. It argues that departure and arrival reified the networks on which the Italian community had been founded in Egypt, as well as the categories of political membership that defined it. Between 1952 and 1956, the Italian government avoided repatriation out of fear that the displaced population would disrupt the postwar economy. The absence of state policy aimed to forestall the creation of a political community of ‘refugees’ or ‘repatriates’. State actors viewed intergovernmental institutions, instead, as opportunities to manage displaced Italians. When the pace of departures quickened after 1953, the Italian government housed ‘repatriates’ in temporary refugee camps and converted Emigration Centres. Seeking to locate themselves in this Cold War Mediterranean, Italians from Egypt institutionalised their associations in and around the camps and holding centres. Pressure from these groups culminated in the extension of refugee status to Italians from Egypt and the consolidation of a political community.

Chapter 15 starts with the identification of essential patterns by analyzing distributions of groups of variables (with similar patterns) among a large number of optimal-size biomarkers generated by parallel feature selection experiments. A similar approach leads to the identification of the essential variables of those essential patterns. As a result, the final multivariate biomarker identified via this method is most likely to represent a real population pattern associated with biological processes underlying changes in the investigated response variable. Furthermore, having the variables of the final biomarker associated with their respective essential patterns facilitates biological interpretation of the biomarker.

The metric tensor and the (pseudo-)Riemannian manifolds are defined. The results of the earlier chapters are specialised to this case, in particular the affine connection coefficients are shown to reduce to the Christoffel symbols. The signature of a metric, the timelike, null and spacelike vectors are defined and the notion of a light cone is introduced. It is shown that in two dimensions the notion of curvature agrees with intuition. It is also shown that geodesic lines extremise the interval (i.e. the ‘distance’). Mappings between Riemann spaces are discussed. Conformal curvature (= the Weyl tensor) is defined and it is shown that zero conformal curvature on a manifold of dimension >=4 implies that the metric is proportional to the flat one. Conformal flatness in three dimensions and the Cotton–York tensor are discussed. Embeddings of Riemannian manifolds in Riemannian manifolds of higher dimension are discussed and the Gauss–Codazzi equations derived. The Petrov classification of conformal curvature tensors in four dimensions with signature (+ - - -) is introduced at an elementary level.

In Chapter 12, the optimal properties of contests from a social perspective are outlined. It presents three main criteria for evaluating contests from a social welfare standpoint by considering the total effort, average effort, and effort of the contest winner. Additionally, the chapter delves into the discussion of how to organize different simultaneous contests and how free entry in several exclusive contests leads to social welfare maximization. Furthermore, the chapter examines the social optimality of aggregating local contests –limited to participants from specific areas, like EU countries – into a larger, open contest, such as one based in Brussels. Finally, the chapter provides a new perspective on two significant issues, compulsory education and affirmative action, by illustrating how active public policies can improve social welfare.