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Following the triumph of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis in the 1940s and 1950s, natural selection became viewed by most anglophone evolutionary biologists as the primary or even the only instrument of evolutionary change. Under the “hardened” version of the Synthesis as it was absorbed into paleoanthropology after 1950, generation-by-generation change under selection’s guiding hand became not only a necessary but a sufficient vehicle for explaining the unilinear pattern of human evolution that was perceived under the allied notion that the human “niche” was too broad to admit the existence of more than one hominid species at any one point in time. Subsequent additions to the hominid fossil record, as well as a better understanding of evolutionary process itself, have in contrast revealed a pattern of hominid diversity over time much better explained by sorting propelled by drift and external environmental change than by species-intrinsic natural selection as classically envisaged. Indeed, selection—a mathematical certainty in any population in which more individuals are born than reproduced—very plausibly acted among extinct hominids much more as a crucial homeostatic mechanism (“stabilizing selection”), than as an agent of change.

Lego is one of the most successful toys in the world. Being able to scan, analyse and reconstruct Lego models has many applications, for example studying creativity. In this paper, from a set of 2D input images, we create a monolithic mesh, representing a physical 3D Lego model as input, and split it in to its known components such that the output of the program can be used to completely reconstruct the input model, brick for brick. We present a novel, fully automatic pipeline to reconstruct Lego models in 3D from 2D images; A-DBSCAN, an angular variant of DBSCAN, useful for grouping both parallel and anti-parallel vectors; and a method for reducing the problem of non-Manhattan reconstruction to that of Manhattan reconstruction. We evaluate the presented approach both qualitatively and quantitatively on a set of Lego duck models from a public data set, and show that the algorithm is able to identify and reconstruct the Lego models successfully.

The following chapter considers the challenges facing international investment law and investor–State arbitration within the European Union. Particular attention is paid to two aspects, firstly the Court of Justice of the European Union’s decision in the case of Achmea which held that investor–State arbitration clauses contained within bilateral investment treaties are contrary to EU law and therefore invalid; and secondly the decisions of the European Commission in which it held that awards paid out by States to investors constitute a form of illegal State aid under EU law with the result that all of the sums along with interest must be recovered from the investor. These developments, when taken together, have broad ramifications for the sustainability of international investment law within the European Union and create wider concerns both for States and investors situated outside of the EU but who have a business presence within Europe or who may look to enforce arbitral awards within the domestic courts of Member States. The majority of the developments in this area have occurred over the course of the past 18 months in 2018 and 2019, the chapter therefore compiles and analyses all of the relevant investment awards, domestic court decisions, judgments and opinions of the European Union, along with proclamations and statements made by the Member States and the European Commission in order to provide timely analysis on contemporary issues facing practitioners acting on behalf of States and investors.

Healthcare professionals (HCP) frequently report that communicating with adolescents and young adults (AYA) is problematic. They often attribute the difficulties to the AYA themselves, while AYA report that the responsibility to facilitate communication effectively with young people lies with the adult. Young people (YP) repeatedly express the value of engagement in their own healthcare and their struggle to ensure their voices are heard. These difficulties are multifactorial but are likely to stem from lack of training on the part of healthcare professionals, neurobiological development of young people, the development of identity/autonomy, parental style/support and the structure of healthcare consultations. This chapter reviews the factors affecting successful engagement with young people and offers suggestions for improving communication in clinical consultations.

Founded in 1869, Girton College, Cambridge was Britain’s first residential college for women to offer an education at degree level. At the end of the nineteenth century, women’s colleges such as Girton played a significant role in improving girls’ education. In its early years, women often came to Girton underprepared for university studies, particularly in mathematics. Determined to prove their merit, women at Girton found creative ways to hone their mathematical skills, an essential undertaking especially for those women preparing for the formidable Mathematical Tripos exam. Along with British and international mathematicians, several Girton students contributed to the mathematics department of The Educational Times and Journal of the College of Preceptors. During the first half of the twentieth century, as research mathematics flourished and the preparation of its students improved, Girton continued to provide support and encouragement for women pursuing mathematical and scientific studies through its research fellowships. We detail the accomplishments of several women who, influenced by Girton’s commitment to academic excellence, went on to play prominent roles in private and public sectors.

Nowhere in the entire fossil record of life do we find more dramatically accelerated accumulation of evolutionary novelty than we do in the genus Homo . Quite simply, and by whatever criteria you measure it, our species Homo sapiens is more different from its own precursors of two million years ago than is any other species living in the world today. What might account for this unusually rapid rate of evolution? A major influence was almost certainly material culture, though not in the gene-culture co-evolutionary context envisaged by the evolutionary psychologists. Rather, material culture enhances the ability of hominid populations to disperse at times when conditions are favorable for expansion, while incompletely insulating the resulting enlarged populations from environmental stress when circumstances deteriorate. In other words, by facilitating expansion beyond normal physiological limits in good times, culture makes populations more vulnerable to fragmentation in bad ones. Over the course of the Pleistocene, short-term but large-scale local environmental changes became increasingly frequent over large tracts of the Old World, further amplifying the stress-and-response cycle. Since the fixation probabilities of evolutionary novelties of all kinds (as well as of local extinctions) are promoted by population fragmentation and consequent small effective population sizes, we see in the synergy between environmental effects and material culture a sort of ratchet effect which would have acted to leverage rates of accumulating change. This interaction explains the extraordinarily fast tempo of evolution within the genus Homo by invoking perfectly routine evolutionary processes; and it eliminates any need for special pleading in the hominid case, at least in terms of mechanism. Apparent recent diminution in human brain size may result from greater algorithmic efficiency.

On-line haemodiafiltration differs from other forms of haemodialysis in that up to 20 L/h of dialysis fluid can be infused directly into the bloodstream during each treatment. That infused fluid must be free of chemical contaminants, sterile and pyrogen-free. Compliance with that requirement cannot be demonstrated by testing at the time of infusion. Instead, the infused fluid must be prepared using equipment that has been validated to produce sterile and pyrogen-free fluid when operated in accordance with the machine manufacturer’s instructions. It is the responsibility of the user of the machine to ensure those instructions are followed, including providing the dialysis machine with water and concentrates that meet the specifications set forth by the machine manufacturer. Properly designed systems for water treatment and distribution and concentrate preparation are central to achieving that goal. In addition, those systems must be subject to rigorous quality control that includes maintenance practices designed to prevent contamination of the dialysis and infusion fluids, coupled to monitoring that verifies the adequacy of the system design and maintenance program.

Modern human communication is dominated by language, an extremely unusual mode that appears to be intimately tied to our equally unusual symbolic form of thought as well as to our unique speech apparatus. Some view language as gradually acquired under natural selection, others as a sudden and recent acquisition. The disagreement arises because language leaves no direct traces in the material record, and anatomical proxies for speech such as cranial base or hyoid architecture have proven equivocal. Similarly, even sophisticated Paleolithic stone tools cannot be taken as proxies for symbolic thought, as cognitively complex as their makers may have been. Unequivocal evidence for symbolic thought—and by extension, for language—is only found in overtly symbolic objects, which first occur significantly after the appearance of Homo sapiens. This suggests that the biological substrate for symbolic thought resulted from the major developmental reorganization that gave rise to our anatomically distinctive species, but that the new potential was not exploited until it was exaptively released by a cultural stimulus, plausibly the invention of language. By this time, the vocal apparatus necessary for speech was already in place.