This chapter analyses constitutional intolerance on the basis of the Hungarian Church Law of 2011, which deregistered hundreds of religious organisations, attached special conditions to re-registration, and privileged a number of politically favoured religious organisations in return for their political legitimation and support. These micro-legal actions are analysed within the context of the notion of the “System of National Cooperation” and “constitutional identity”. Constitutional intolerance in Hungary appears to stem from a traditionalist commitment to protect traditional values: on the one hand, by strengthening the position of the main Hungarian churches, and on the other hand, by championing anti-liberal policies on gender and sexuality, including the prohibition from exposing minors to “gay propaganda”. But the varnish of Christianity is relatively thin: Hungarian society is thoroughly secularised with low numbers of church attendance, with language and ethnicity taking precedence over religion in their importance to national identity.

Quantum Hall states are the first examples of topological insulators that demonstrate completely contrasting electronic behavior between the bulk and the edges of the sample. The bulk of the system is insulating, while there exists conducting states at the edges. Moreover, the Hall conductivity is quantized in units of a universal constant, e2/h. It became clear later on that the quantization is actually related to a topological invariant known as the Chern number. The geometric interpretation of this invariant is provided by the Gauss–Bonnet theorem, which relates the integral of the Gaussian curvature over a closed surface to a constant that simply counts the number of ‘genus’ (or holes) of the object. In solid state physics, the closed surface is the Brillouin zone, and the Gaussian curvature is analogous to a quantity known as the Berry curvature, integral of which over the Brillouin zone yields the quantization of the Hall conductivity.

In Chapter 1, we begin with a historical overview of the quantum Hall effect. The experiment and the physical systems are described with an emphasis on the two-dimensional (2D) nature of the ‘dirty’ electronic system in the presence of a strong perpendicular magnetic field at low temperature. The Hall resistivity as a function of the field shows quantized plateaus in unit of h/e2 with an accuracy of one part in more than a billion. Very surprisingly, the longitudinal resistivity synergetically vanishes at the positions of the plateaus for the Hall resistivity. This indicates the emergence of a phase with an inherent ambiguousness of being a perfect conductor and a perfect insulator at the same time. However, such an ambiguity can only be reconciled for an electron gas confined in a plane in the presence of a magnetic field.

Quite intriguingly, the presence of the perpendicular magnetic field introduces ‘another’ quantization, which replaces the band structure (energy as a function of the wavevector) of the electronic system. This quantization was shown via solving the Schrödinger equation in the presence of a Landau gauge. The resultant energy levels of this problem are the infinitely degenerate Landau levels, which slightly broaden due to the presence of impurity and disorder but still remain distinct and cause quantization of the Hall conductivity as the magnetic field is ramped up gradually.

This book is the fruit of a research project on the nature and value of worship that held two workshops at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. One of the key motivations for the project was just how neglected the study of worship has been in the philosophy of religion.

Dynamic discrete choice models, such as dynamic logit, are used extensively in industrial organization. This chapter exposits various classes of these models and studies their properties.

Chapter 4 explores how a range of popular spy guides published in the second half of the eighteenth century both shape and reflect a sense of the city as home to fraud and deception. It situates these surveys of urban life alongside earlier precursors like Ned Ward’s The London Spy and mid-century writing about the city, including the novel, that presented the city as home to various cheats and frauds. The repetitive works, in which a new arrival is taken on a tour through the city by one versed in its ways, highlight various tensions in the representation of the metropolis in the period, including between claims to novelty and the repetition of familiar scenes and between an understanding of the city as a space of false appearances and an insistence that these performances can be read and understood.

This urban ethnography of violence in intimate relationships in Sierra Leone reveals its multifaceted nature, gender dynamics, and the complex interplay of domestic, community, and state interventions. It challenges victim–perpetrator narratives by highlighting relationship violence’s complexities, such as its use for expressing love or punishment. The study contextualises violence within Sierra Leone’s historical and geopolitical framework, emphasising the interaction of structural violence with local contexts. It examines women’s agency in relation to violence and the co-existence of love and violence in the society’s moral economy. Gendered aspects of violence show differences in how men and women perceive and enact violence. The study analyses community and family mediations of violence and discusses how especially men face barriers towards state reporting. State laws greatly impact sexual relationships involving minors, shaping young people’s lives, household formation, education, and social relations. In challenging conventional perspectives, the book provides valuable insights for policy-makers and scholars.

Chapter 3 considers a set of arguments, presented by Richard Swinburne and William Lane Craig, claiming that General Relativity can save the A-theory by substantiating objective passage via cosmic time. This argument is assessed and found wanting.

This chapter treats the marketing of transatlantic passenger shipping companies from the post-Famine period to the emergence of amphibious aviation at the end of the Free State era. It explores the use of evolving advertising, marketing and public relations techniques, collectively commercial propaganda, in the USA on the transatlantic passenger shipping trade. It compares and contrasts the commercial propaganda of American shipping lines with that of their British and Irish counterparts to determine the degree to which American marketing techniques influenced domestic marketing, shaped consumer tastes and stimulated desire for an American life experience that was grounded in participatory civic consumerism. The chapter suggests that the reverse flow of knowledge and practices, stimulated by temporary and permanent reverse migration, and correspondence with Irish-America, led to the post-Famine modernisation of commercial promotional activity, with attractive communications from America copied by shipping lines and agents in the Irish market to create a domestic, Americanised form of marketing, more sophisticated and polished than previously seen.