It is humbling to be human. Humilitatem and humanitas have always been connected. So, Shakespeare’s characters know when they are "not gentle, not humble" [Love’s, 5,2,617]. But living in an age of service, their creator was also conscious of the fine line between humility and humiliation. Persistently, his plays therefore stage the "Cinderella" scenario of a "proud humility" [All’s Well, 1,1,172], as if he had internalized the self-abjection by which power abases itself in "the gown of humility" [Coriolanus, 2,3,36]. Almost all of Shakespeare’s references to humility describe it as an act. Hence, "I have sounded the very base-string of humility" [1Henry IV, 2,5,5], reports his most winning king. In staging his own "abject position," as a professional "waiter" on the mighty, "our humble author" [2Henry IV, Epi, 23] thereby seems to anticipate modern skepticism towards the false modesty of the "humbled visaged" [Love’s, 2,,34], the "meekness and humility" that is "cramm’d" with "arrogancy, spleen and pride" [Henry VIII, 2,4107-108]. This chapter on humility argues that Shakespeare’s dramatization of the supposed virtue has never been more relevant than in our own populist times, when the clown prince dives into our hearts, "with humble and familiar" smiles [Richard II, 1,4,25-27].

Transforming our food systems will require changing our innovation systems, in which organisations on agricultural research and innovation can play a crucial role. Key success factors for change can be organised into three dimensions: designing and managing transformative innovations, culture and structures of innovation organisations, and their engagement with the wider innovation ecosystem. Failures are crucial elements of innovation processes. Rapidly testing, sharing, building on, and learning from successful, and failed, innovations are key. This connects to the paradigm ‘Open Innovation 2.0’, which is widely applied in the private sector but not yet applied and evaluated for research and innovation organisations in the public sector or tertiary education. Four key principles emerge, namely big-picture action-oriented thinking, entrepreneurial organisational culture, close attention to partnerships and contexts, and diverse investment portfolios, with different levels of risk. These also imply—and require—the upstream transformation of funding and incentive systems.

While Wittgenstein has become recognized as the most overt philosophical influence in Wallace’s writing, he was by no means the only one. Wallace was heavily indebted to numerous philosophical schools, and was particularly influenced by the linguistic turn, and the post-philosophical ideas of Rorty and Cavell. Wallace attended classes with Stanley Cavell at Harvard University, and his influence on Wallace has been traced in recent scholarship by Adam Kelly and others. This chapter offers guidance on reading Wallace through the lens of what Cavell referred to as “moral perfectionism” – the drive toward constant moral improvement, an endless iterative repetition of self-discovery, “a process of moving to, and from, nexts” – which Wallace explored and embodied in different ways throughout the work. The recurrent theme of heroic attention as a virtuous struggle arguably owes a debt to Cavell’s concept of acknowledging the other as a moral good, and the anti-teleological drive of Wallace’s oeuvre fits neatly with Cavell’s imaginary of unending toil toward the good. Using the Pop Quiz structure of “Octet” as a point of departure and focusing more broadly on the dialogic imperative of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men as a whole, this chapter argues that Wallace’s work, with its sense of repeating shapes, themes and patterns, and especially the persistent figurations of failure and regrouping, is best read as a series of iterations of perfectionism, a career-long fantasy of searching for the good in the knowledge that it will not be attained.

The introduction lays out the major aims of the book.

A very different picture of the redistribution of metal density and stress, caused by electric stressing, can be expected in multibranch interconnect structures formed by connected metal lines within the same metal layer. The absence of diffusion barriers in line junctions allows atoms to freely migrate between lines along the trajectories of the current carriers. When a multibranch structure includes metal lines that are connected in parallel, the creation of a void in one of the parallel branches does not necessarily result in a failure, which contrasts with what happens in a single line segment, because current can continue to flow in the unvoided parallel lines. The on-chip power/ground (p/g) grid is an example of such electrically redundant multibranch structures. In this chapter, we review a recently developed assessment methodology of the p/g grid MTTF and describe a novel experimental technique that could validate the proposed methodology. EM assessment performed on the grids with tens of millions of nodes has shown that the formation of the first void alone didn’t cause a grid failure. A failure criterion of 10% voltage drop increase was met due to cumulative effect of nucleation of several voids and their growth in the failed branches.

At first sight The Secret Agent is a novel where content and form seamlessly overlap, and where unorthodox narrative proportions echo its ideological paradoxes in anarchist aesthetics. But the structure is at odds with the theme – somewhat like an abstract painting within a classic, ornate frame. Rather than invoking fragmentation, the nonchronological chapters in The Secret Agent allow for unity and consistency: a way to display control. The novel is knitted in an overlapping pattern of interweaving sequences and temporal criss-crossings, where scattered and eclectic details add structure to disorganized characters, chapters and circumstances. The Secret Agent is not a sustained discussion of one topic, but a manifesto of marginality or manifest marginality: a novel written in the margins.

Chapter 9, “Home Army on the Offensive: Violence in 1943-1944,” dissects mature intelligentsia military resistance. As the tide of war turned and the Germans endured their first battlefield defeats against the Soviet Union, the consolidated Home Army grew aggressive. Its most effective move was a 1943 assassination campaign targeting Wehrmacht officers, Nazi police, and German administration personnel called Operation Heads. Heads intimidated the Germans and shifted occupation policy. The Home Army’s perceived success and the advance of the Eastern Front toward Warsaw in 1944 convinced underground military leaders that they were facing their last opportunity to launch a city-wide insurrection. Their rebellion, now known as the Warsaw Uprising, failed. Remaining German personnel in the city were reinforced and crushed the insurrection, slaughtered civilians, and destroyed the city. This chapter argues that military conspiracy, like Catholic resistance, had its successes but was ultimately dependent on the international situation and could not secure the practical support of the Grand Alliance in the face of both German and Soviet opposition.

Since the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, the High Jump has never been the same. That’s when Dick Fosbury accomplished the fabulous feat of sailing over the crossbar headfirst and backward to earn his coveted Gold Medal! Today, we take it for granted that Fosbury’s Flop has always been the “gold standard” style in the sport. But, it wasn’t. The “scissors” and the “straddle” jumps had been the two dominant styles. How did Fosbury develop this ungainly technique? Was it a stroke of genius? Did he experience a flash of insight – a so-called eureka moment? Was this revolutionary style his and his alone? How did Fosbury’s technique acquire its catchy alliterative moniker? The answers to these questions are quite surprising and force us to consider behavioral innovations such as Fosbury’s from an altogether different perspective – one that applies a natural science approach to both innovative and everyday behavior.

Despite the evidence advanced in this book, its main historiographical contributions will fail to be effective it we cannot rethink our understandings of intellectual vibrancy and engagement with the natural sciences, both of which continued beyond the seventeenth century into the eighteenth century.

This final chapter of the Cambridge Handbook of Health Research Regulation revisits the question posed in the introduction to the volume: What could a Learning Health Research Regulation System (LHRRS) look like? The discussion is set against the background of debates about the nature of an effective learning healthcare system, building on the frequently expressed view that any distinction between systems of healthcare and health research should be collapsed or at the very least minimised as far as possible. The analysis draws on many of the contributions in this volume about how health research regulation can be improved, and makes an argument that a framework can be developed around an LHRRS. Central to this argument is the view that successful implementation of an LHRRS requires full integration of insights from bioethics, law, social sciences and the humanities to complement and support the effective delivery of health and social value from advances in biomedicine.

Failure in health research regulation is nothing new. Indeed, the regulation of clinical trials was developed in response to the Thalidomide scandal, which occurred some 50 years ago. Yet, health research regulation is at the centre of recent failures. In this chapter, I use health research regulation for medical devices to look at the regulatory framing of harm through the language of technological risk, i.e. relating to safety. My overall argument is that reliance on this narrow discourse of technological risk in the regulatory framing of harm may marginalise stakeholder knowledges of harm to produce a limited knowledge base. The latter may underlie harm, and in turn lead to the construction of failure.

Most scholars regard Lin Yutang’s 1949 novel, Chinatown Family, as a failure. The novel did not sell many copies when it was published, and it failed to impress critics. Decades on, the novel has been largely dismissed as reactionary and crude by literary scholars, especially Asian Americanist critics. Readers then and now dismiss Lin’s attempts to create a definitive work of “Asian American literature” but this chapter carefully reconstructs the novel’s making in order to explore the potential affordances of Lin’s failure. What would it mean to take seriously the novel’s chief virtues, otherwise seen as limitations, such as “collaboration,” as the basis for rethinking the history of the Asian American novel, and where it might go today?

This chapter returns to the question of Steinbeck’s purported failures as a writer by arguing that his novel Of Mice and Men--a book often taught at the middle-school level--is an experimental work that offers a partial alternative to high modernism’s interest in characters with mental disabilities. The novel’s undeveloped themes, clunky characterization, brutal melodrama, sweeping determinism, and easy sentimentalism originate in a curious fact about the book’s genre: Steinbeck intended it as a “novel to be played”--performed as drama in the theater. The book has an uncanny duality, placing readers both in a novel and in a would-be stage performance, whereby characters are also actors, objects also props, spaces also stage sets. Like Lennie, the character with mental disabilities at the center, the novel is formally “disabled” and behaves in ways not unlike Samuel Beckett’s modernist plays, defined by a failure to signify and mean. Comparing the novel-as-play with the actual three-act play version that Steinbeck wrote later, we also see the limits of the argument for a “modernist” Steinbeck, as the book’s aesthetic failures create a novel that does not fully develop as a literary work.

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is a notoriously ambivalent book, seeming at once politically radical and conservative in its social vision. Rather than dismissing these contradictions, this chapter examines the work performed by literary vagueness as it relates to a crucial concept that runs through Steinbeck’s writing: the process of emergence, the formation of wholes from component parts, which we see in analyses of Steinbeck’s construction of character, his slow descriptions of people and things, and his metafictional self-consciousness of the act of writing. Turning to the social philosophy of the novel, the chapter relates its faltering quality of thought--its failed attempt to articulate its ideas--to a developing understanding of the public sphere defined by false opinions and vulnerable to propaganda. The novel’s vagueness, in which ideas are always emerging but never fully forming, explains the book’s appeal to different political viewpoints. The novel’s partial self-understanding also explains Steinbeck’s failure to imagine nonwhite laborers in the California fields, as well as the jarring quality of the book’s final scene, whose power to imagine a public relationship between strangers depends on its provocative incompletion.

Using error as a method of looking at initials and marginalia, this chapter considers how artists and scribes went against expected word and image play in the manuscript to reflect on the process of reading and recitation – and the confusions and misunderstandings that could potentially ensue. By focusing on several case studies, the reader is walked through the various interpretations that marginalia and initials deployed and how these (at times conflicting) understandings were generatively put into question and undone by subtle variations in color and placement. The goal of this chapter is to show how illuminators worked alongside the text to generate an illustrative program that was surprising and complex in ways that demanded the concerted attention and focus of readers as they chanted the Gospel text.