The need for differential geometry is explained by considering the construction of parallel straight lines running far from each other in Euclidean space. Generalisation of the notion of parallelism to curved surfaces is explained.

We here round off a book on biophysical foundations and computational modeling of electric and magnetic signals in the brain. We summarize some key insights from such modeling, and we clear up some common misconceptions about extracellular potentials. We address the main limitations with the standard modeling framework used to compute extracellular potentials, discussing the uncertainty in model parameters and its neglect of ephaptic interactions between active neurons. We identify what we believe are key areas of future applications and give an outlook for future modeling challenges.

This chapter presents an overview of the book and positions it in the context of the development of expertise and the pursuit of excellence. It presents the historical context of the development of expertise and the theoretical context of the study of expertise.

This chapter charts the evolution of social unrest in the streets of Prague from the war years to the end of 1920, a moment of heightened occupation of public space by crowds. Most of these protests resist clear-cut labels as socialist or nationalist. They must be considered in terms of the protesters’ relationship to the state, in the larger context of the Habsburg Empire’s collapse and the Czechoslovak republic’s difficult stabilization. Food supply deficiencies generated many riots, demonstrations, and strikes. The trajectories of protests, from suburban centers of local power to the city’s main squares, show declining trust in imperial institutions and increasing recourse to violence. Postwar demonstrations signal a shift in conceptions of citizenship and democracy, the streets becoming a forum for legitimate popular political participation. The housing crisis and evictions by crowds constitute a good case study of the willingness to resort to direct action to establish a new form of social justice.

Chapter 10 covers the random forests algorithm for classification. Presented are also the impurity metrics applicable to splitting nodes in classification trees (Gini, entropy, and misclassification impurity), as well as permutation-based and impurity-based variable importance measures.

Chapter 4 first reviews earlier studies of the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) regime and discusses the methodological challenges that they pose for the assessment of NEG documents. Earlier studies of NEG policy prescriptions flattened the semantic relationships between the different terms used in them and the power relations between the actors involved in their production. We therefore outline a novel research design that accounts for the links between the policy orientation of NEG prescriptions and the material interests of concrete social groups as well as the hierarchical ordering of NEG prescriptions in larger policy scripts unevenly deployed across countries, time, and policy areas. We address the first point in Chapter 4 and the second in Chapter 5. In 4.2, we identify commodification as the most relevant dimension for analysing the nexus between EU economic governance and labour politics. In 4.3, we operationalise the concepts of commodification and decommodification in employment relations and public services and outline the analytical framework against which we assess the policy orientation of the EU’s NEG prescriptions in the policy areas of employment relations and public services.

Aristotle’s De anima provides the foundation for a theoretically informed study of perishable life on the crucial assumption that the soul is that which distinguishes what is alive from what is not. It is because Aristotle and Theophrastus take animals and plants to be different kinds of perishable living beings that they are justified in approaching the study of perishable life through separate studies of animals and plants. The chapter offers a survey of the discourse on and around life before Aristotle and Theophrastus with a focus on Plato and the doxographical information on the Presocratic investigation of nature. It also considers the way in which the study of life is narrow down to the study of perishable life, that is animals and plants, as a result of the conceptual work done in Aristotle’s De anima.

Throughout the history of European colonization of the American continent, which continues today, European visitors and settlers have produced records of their encounters with Indigenous Peoples they regarded as nonheteronormative or queer. Native people have decried the ways such documentation lends itself to cultural misrepresentation and appropriation. In 1990, a group of LGBTIQ+ identified Native American and First Nations people coined the autonym Two-Spirit to insist on Indigenous Peoples’ sovereign rights of self-determination, self-definition, and self-naming. Contemporary Native communities use Two-Spirit as an umbrella term that references gender-expansive Indigenous traditions and identities that exceed colonial logics. This chapter focuses on Two-Spirit/queer Native authors who create literature by and for Two-Spirit people, thus representing the past, present, and imagined future of queer Indigeneity. Proposing that decolonization movements to reclaim queer(ed) Indigenous “gender” traditions and revitalize Indigenous languages are interrelated, this essay reads works by Two-Spirit authors who incorporate Indigenous languages into their writing.