Chapter 5 focuses on the metrical foot in its role in lexical stress assignment in monomorphemes. The chapter provides an extensive review of the distribution of lexical stress in di- and trisyllabic words with quantified data. It also contains a review of previous approaches, followed by a detailed OT analysis, both for regular patterns of lexical stress locations, and for three irregular stress patterns.

People may believe sleep to be simply a static state that is the direct opposite of wakefulness; however, this is not the case. Rather, it is a complex and dynamic process, and throughout sleep we progress through multiple stages that can be measured discretely across behavioural, physiological, and cognitive domains. This chapter describes the differences and features of these different stages and how they can be measured. Also described is the fact that sleep and wakefulness are not mutually exclusive, and that there are times when the lines between sleep and wake can be blurred, and this is notably true in insomnia. Finally, the chapter explains how sleep is regulated through interacting homeostatic and circadian processes, and the neuroscientific underpinnings of the sleep and circadian system.

This chapter establishes what it means to do discourse analysis. This is done by defining discourse analysis and providing examples of discourse. The chapter offers a practical overview of how the discourse in discourse analysis fits within the research process. The examples of discourse that are introduced in this chapter are grammar, actions and practices, identities, places and spaces, stories, ideologies, and social structures. After reading the chapter, readers will know what discourse analysis is; understand that there are many types of discourse; know that discourse is an object of study; and understand how an object of study fits within a research project.

Most of this chapter documents the prevalence of incredible certitude. Section 2.1 calls attention to the core role that certitude has played in major streams of religion and philosophy. Section 2.2 describes conventional certitude in official economic statistics reported by federal statistical agencies in the United States. Section 2.3 discusses dueling certitudes in research on criminal justice. Section 2.4 documents wishful extrapolation from medical research to patient care. Section 2.5 remarks on the complementary practice of sacrificing relevance for certitude, again using medical research to illustrate.

The closing part of chapter poses and assesses arguments that seek to explain incredible certitude. Section 2.6 discusses psychological arguments asserting that expression of incredible certitude in policy analysis is necessary because the public is unable to cope with uncertainty. Section 2.7 considers arguments asserting that incredible certitude is useful or necessary as a device to simplify collective decision making.

“Casting About: Thomas De Quincey in the World” begins with one of the author’s portraits of Wordsworth from his ‘The Society of the Lakes’ series for Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. Like much of his writing, the essay is dominated by digressions, in particular his recollections of the many coach journeys he undertook with his wife Margaret along the road between Ambleside and Grasmere. Collectively, these reminiscences constitute a form of mourning for Peggy who had died the previous summer. The chapter then turns to De Quincey’s hectic, occasionally desperate, life as a debtor in 1830s Edinburgh. He wrote to support himself and his family, often from the confines of the debtor’s sanctuary in Holyrood Park. His variety and scale of output demonstrate genius and financial desperation in equal measure. The chapter concludes with readings of his canonical works Suspiria de Profundis and The English Mail-Coach. Written in a newly secure environment of managed debt, he produced complex accounts of temporality and consciousness.

Chapter 4 is an extensive study of runaway slave advertisements that mention that a slave speaks Dutch. For this chapter, I have compiled a database of 487 enslaved persons, coded by year of flight, name, age, Dutch language ability, name of master, county, and original source. I demonstrate that runaway slave advertisements in New York City and environs plateaued in the period 1760–1800, but peaked later in the Hudson Valley, with exceptional growth in the 1790s and 1800s. The data provide evidence for the persistence of the Dutch language in New York and New Jersey and contribute to a picture of Dutch-speaking slaves presenting a sharp economic challenge to the institution of slavery. By the 1790s, Dutch-speaking slaves were running away at a rate of at least 1 per 500 per year. For Dutch slave owners, this meant a significant loss of capital and, moreover, a risk on their remaining slave capital. Runaway slaves tended to be prime working-age males, and the loss of the best field workers frustrated New York Dutch farmers. The pressure of runaway activity also lowered the value of retained slaves and made New York slavery more costly in general. Runaways put pressure on slaveholders to manumit their slaves, extracting the most labor possible from them before agreeing to let them go.

In August 1955, Isaac Asimov published his well-known short story ‘Franchise’ in If: Worlds of Science Fiction magazine. ‘Franchise’ depicts a futuristic US that has earned the distinction of being the world's first ‘electronic democracy’ because a supercomputer named Multivac has displaced mass franchise as the technique of electing the American president. During every election cycle, Multivac selects a single voter who is adjudged to be the most ‘representative’ citizen and then subjects them to hours of rigorous questioning to learn about the mood and preferences of the wider electorate. While Multivac's inception was driven by the hope that it would ‘end partisan politics’ and reduce ‘voter's money [being] wasted on campaigns’, we are told that by the election year of 2008, there was ‘more campaigning than ever’ before. In the story, the mantle of ‘Voter of the Year’ is conferred on a man named Norman Muller, a humble shopkeeper from the state of Indiana. Asimov's choice to foreground the figure of the diffident Muller was arguably strategic. Although voting may have disappeared in this electronic democracy, Asimov did not seem to envisage that technological innovations would result in either a pure technocracy led by scientists or a model of sortition led by a computerised lottery. Ordinary Joes like Muller had a role to play—they were, after all, the crucial repositories of ‘data’ for Multivac. Thus, this was a world where electoral verdicts were still predicated on collective public opinion. However, they were mediated by the science of probability distributions, the logic of sampling and the sentience of computers that could parse large tranches of data and deconstruct subjective human emotions. In other words, for Asimov, technology would not entirely obviate political citizenship, but certainly truncate its role.

Although the year 1984 carries an obvious Orwellian resonance, for members of the INC, this was the year when Asimov's foresight seemed to be vindicated over George Orwell’s. Rajiv Gandhi, a fourth-generation scion of the Nehru–Gandhi family, was busy rolling out an ambitious programme where he envisaged that political decision-making in the party would be managed through large-scale data collection and computerised analysis.

While in his major works – the Treatise, Enquiries, History of England, and writings on religion – Hume makes observations about ‘art’ and ‘the arts’ and refers to subjects that fall under the then nascent discipline of ‘aesthetics’, these appear tangentially, in the course of pursuing other matters; only in the Essays does he address these subjects directly and in sufficient detail to warrant his inclusion among figures who have made an original contribution to ‘philosophical aesthetics’ and its history. With these observations in mind, this chapter provides a systematic presentation of Hume’s views as he develops them in the ‘aesthetic essays’, where he engages in contemporary debates on various topics – ‘Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion’, ‘Of Eloquence’, ‘Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing’, ‘Of Tragedy’, and ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ – as well as in others where he either treats the arts historically (‘Of the Rise of the Arts and Sciences’) or as an element of political economy (‘Of Commerce’ and ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’). The discussion proceeds thematically, organizing his thought under the headings of ‘taste and its standard’, ‘literary style and artistic representation’, ‘the paradox of tragedy’, and, finally, ‘a history and political economy of the arts’.

Chapter 6 scrutinizes the restitution of Jewish property through litigation in court, petitioning to administrative offices, and other avenues. It shows that local Jews were successful at recuperating in court their “expropriated” residences but less successful when their tried to retrieve their “sold” homes and businesses. The administrative avenue was usually used for the restitution of communal property such as synagogues, cemeteries, schools, and other such buildings.