This chapter explores the reasonable person’s encounter with entities that possess artificial intelligence (AI). A discussion of this encounter is particularly important, since it has been argued that the advent of AI will lead to the demise of the reasonable person. The first section focuses on the ability of the reasonable person standard to assess the behaviour of machines or algorithms that act on behalf of humans and lack autonomous decision-making capacities. The second section considers proposals to replace the reasonable person standard with a reasonable robot or reasonable AI standard. The section also asks to what extent the reasonable person standard can be used to assess the behaviour of autonomous digital agents that act autonomously. The third section discusses contemporary proposals to subjectivise law through big data, in a manner that would dispense with the need for a reasonable person standard, since everyone would be measured with reference to their own personal standard.

This chapter argues that queering concepts of literary type provides an approach for cultivating queer readings in the field of early Asian American literature that do not rely on recourse to a search for timeless queer identities. The chapter provides a prospective inventory of queer types within the field of early Asian American literature through readings across five nation/diaspora formations: the Philippines, Korea, Japan, India, and China, with special and initial focus on queer types in the political novel.

This paper examines the economic and other social relations that emerged in the colonial landscape of the northern Aegean through a new approach to pottery production, exchange and consumption. Our analytical data about pottery origins allow a new reconstruction of the exchange networks between the northern and central Aegean. The chapter suggests that the gradual increase in non-local pottery use along the northern Aegean shores and certain changes in local pottery production cannot be taken as a result of any growing colonial agency. They are interpreted instead as the low residue of locally driven transformations in the economic organisation of the northern Aegean. The new analytical data support a recently expressed view that these advances represent a pull factor of migration from central Greece towards its so-called northern Aegean periphery.

The classical theory of multicomponent nucleation, including binary nucleation, ternary nucleation, etc., makes similar key assumptions as in CNT for single-component nucleation. Clusters are modeled as spherical liquid droplets consisting of an ideal multicomponent solution. The surface tension is assumed to equal that of a flat surface of liquid having the same composition, in equilibrium with its multicomponent vapor. The Gibbs free energy of cluster formation is a function of the cluster’s size and composition and of the gas-phase partial pressures of each component. The critical size and composition are found at a saddle point on the multidimensional free energy surface, where the free energy of cluster formation is a maximum in one direction and a minimum in all orthogonal directions. Several improvements have been proposed within the framework of classical theory. These include models of the cluster growth trajectory near the critical point; studies that account for composition-dependent surface tension; and models that consider the existence of surface-active layers that cause the chemical composition near the cluster surface to be different than in the core.

Chapter 6 shows that workers’ wages and employment relations were, until the 2008 crisis, shaped by horizontal market pressures rather than direct political vertical EU interventions in the labour policy area. That changed radically after the EU’s shift to its new economic governance (NEG) regime. We found that the EU’s NEG prescriptions on wage levels, collective bargaining, and hiring and firing mechanisms followed a consistent trajectory that furthered the commodification of labour in Italy, Ireland, and Romania, but less so in Germany. Instead, Germany received decommodifying NEG prescriptions on wage policy that were linked to a rebalance-the-EU-economy policy rationale. Although this policy rationale was still compatible with NEG’s overarching commodifying script, the diverging policy orientation of prescriptions in this area across countries made it hard for unions to challenge NEG transnationally.

Exponential growth can be a head-scratcher. Accounts and taxonomies that seem inviting near the start of a growth curve can seem like fool’s errands afterwards. And the story of queer—or gay and lesbian, or queer and trans, or LGBTQ+, or LGBTQIA+– poetics since the late 1960s is a story of exponents, of proliferation from stigmatized rarity to celebrated (but still endangered) ubiquity. Does Randall Mann share linguistic goals with Pat Parker? Chen Chen with Samuel Ace? Reginald Shepherd with Carmen Giménez Smith? A sampling offered by me (a white, prosperous, midcareer, polyamorous, Northeastern trans woman with kids) may be more likely to include poets who share my identities, as well as my tastes, and to overlook those who do not. But there is—at least in the arts—no view from nowhere: one informed view is better than none.

Theophrastus shares Aristotle’s methodological insight that the scientific inquiry unfolds in stages, and that the two main stages of any scientific inquiry are the collection of the relevant data followed by their explanation – the pre-explanatory and the explanatory stage of inquiry, respectively. This chapter shows that we should speak of two main stages of inquiry because the explanatory stage itself may unfold in various stages. In other words, the work that is required to arrive at an adequate (i.e., scientific) explanation may take place in steps and may require accomplishing different tasks. The chapter looks in some detail at how Theophrastus adopts this style of inquiry in his explanation of the various ways in which plants propagate.

The main CSFs used in the literature are reviewed and their basic properties are explored. Different CSFs yield different games and outcomes, so it is essential to understand the differences between what is embedded in each CSF. In some cases, a little extra effort wins the field, as in racing, while in others, no matter the expense, all contestants receive a positive probability of getting a positive share, as in voting with captive voters. In others, like soccer and some armed conflicts, the probability of winning is proportional to the relative expenses. This chapter also begins an analysis of the existence and properties of a Nash equilibrium in contest games, either with identical contestants or, in the context of a couple of CSFs, with two contestants.

In its capacity as the principal city on the east coast of the Mediterranean, Antioch was an important center of both minting and coin circulation during the fourth through seventh centuries. Moreover, as the launching site for military expeditions against the Persians and, eventually, the Arabs, Antioch served as the temporary capital for emperors and other military leaders stationed there and as a distribution point for soldiers’ salaries and other monetary activities.

This chapter looks at the establishment of farming communities in the east of southern Africa within the broader context of agropastoralist expansion south of the Equator and the spread of Bantu languages. Much of the literature on this topic depends heavily on analysis of ceramic design and arguments linking variation in this to variation in broad ethnolinguistic affiliations. The cultural-historical framework based on this is discussed, but alternative methods of ceramic classification are also explored, while the antiquity and utility of the Central Cattle Pattern settlement structure and its cognitive associations are critically assessed. In their dependence on a direct historical approach that is projected far back into the past both questions provide an agriculturalist counterpoint to the use of Bushman ethnography for understanding archaeological hunter-gatherer societies. Beyond these more theoretical concerns, Chapter 10 also emphasises the role of metallurgy, the social relations and subsistence base of early farming societies, the start of their engagement with Indian Ocean trade networks, and their interactions with pre-existing forager communities.

The iconic image of the knight on horseback represents just one facet of the horse’s imprint on legal, political, and social systems developing in medieval Iberian society. This chapter argues that historical and bodily relations with horses shaped the negotiation of social status and the administration of territory during the dynamic periods of peace, conflict, and negotiation among Iberian kingdoms in the tenth to fifteenth centuries. Defining the set of practices, ideals, and institutional hierarchies making up an Iberian "culture of the horse” brings to light a fundamental tension in which the horse served as both an agent of control and a means to disrupt power relations.

Jews were among the founders of Antioch and contributed greatly to the social and material evolution of the city. How they adjusted to the imperial agendas of Late Antiquity, as well as their characterization in the textual record are the main objects of inquiry.