Chapter 3 examines the various uses of Bank notes based on the Lost Note Books and other archival sources. Besides being used to buy goods and services, the Bank note frequently appeared in specific monetary transactions, making it a form of ‘special purpose currency’. The high value of Bank notes made them more likely to be used for round sums, such as paying employees’ wages. Paying wages for seamen and navy employees had a significant impact on the spread of Bank notes, expanding their user base geographically and socially. Other notable uses of Bank of England notes include interregional payments, rent and tax payments, which demonstrate how Bank notes became a special currency in Britain’s diverse monetary landscape. This chapter also highlights the different modes of Bank note use, particularly through social endorsement. Although not legally significant as in the case of bills of exchange, note users widely endorsed Bank notes during the Bank Restriction period. This social form of endorsement represented a sense of communal currency and the belief that note users played a role in generating monetary value.

In this chapter, we propose a boundedness conjecture for the regional fundamental group of klt singularities. We prove that this boundedness conjecture, the Zariski closedness of the diminished base locus of KX , and an upper bound for minimal log discrepancies imply the termination of flips with scaling. We prove the boundedness conjecture in the case of toric singularities, quotient singularities, isolated three-fold singularities, and exceptional singularities.

Chapter 6 analyses narrative representations of local women, who feature throughout UN mediation texts as ‘the women’. This subject position is multifaceted and articulated differently according to different logics of UN mediation. Especially within the logic of UN mediation as a science, ‘the women’ are expected to play a legitimating, information-providing role to support the UN. This is an extractive, rather than an empowering, relationship. UN narratives position ‘the women’s’ labour as central to mediation effectiveness, but they also question their abilities and authenticity as representatives of their communities. Capacity-building training is one method that the UN, and particularly gender advisors, use to discipline women into appropriate forms of participation. The logic of UN mediation as an art has less use for 'the women' in its narratives and instead questions whether they are 'political enough' to be appropriate representatives in negotiations. In turn, local women resist and navigate the subject position of ‘the women’ through strategic essentialism, critique, or opting out.

In this chapter it is argued that language discretely combines lexical items into dependency structures rather than recursively embedding syntactic objects into phrase structures. This must be the case if language is to be able to manage discrete infinity and specifiers. In particular it is argued that the ubiquity of subordinators and other subordinating elements in the languages of the world and the fact that these are obligatory in many contexts clearly show that language is not recursive embedding. If language were recursive embedding, the subordinators would be completely redundant, since the subordinate clauses would automatically be embedded under the predicates. Other potential functions of universal subordinators such as Germanic that are discussed and refuted. The chapter will discuss several cases in English, Swedish and German where the universal subordinator is needed to embed the clause, and cases where it is not needed but where other subordination strategies are employed instead. Furthermore, it will be shown that in those cases where the subordinator is omitted and there is no other subordinating strategy, the clauses become desubordinated.

Epilepsy requiring ongoing medical treatment is the most common neurologic disorder in pregnancy [1]. Data from a number of population-based studies estimate that maternal epilepsy is present in 0.3–1% of all pregnancies [2–7], the vast majority representing women with preexisting epilepsy, and a minority (2–10%) representing women with new-onset epilepsy during pregnancy [8, 9]. The incidence of antiseizure medication (ASM) use is estimated at 0.3–0.4% of all pregnancies, which includes those who are maintained on ASMs for neuropsychiatric disorders such as bipolar and schizoaffective disorders, a practice that has become more common in the past two decades [3–5, 10, 11].

The chapter examines the political mobilization of women and its limits, and sectoral tensions among women’s associations.

Chapter 5 starts with the definitions of the note and the acoustics of sound production. Here, I first examine the acoustical underpinnings of the classical Greek writings on the subject and the impact they had on how the musical note was conceptualized. I then demonstrate that scholars of the medieval Islamic world approached their received wisdom with a skeptical eye and occasionally disagreed with their intellectual masters. These disagreements resulted in illuminating conversations about the nature of a musical note, how it should be differentiated from mere sound, and what role do acoustics of sound production play in these discussions.

The topic of this chapter is the deterministic (worst-case) theory of quantization. The main object of interest is the metric entropy of a set, which allows us to answer two key questions:

1. (1) covering number: the minimum number of points to cover a set up to a given accuracy;

2. (2) packing number: the maximal number of elements of a given set with a prescribed minimum pairwise distance.