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Topic Review
Buddhology
Buddhology is the study of the Buddha or Buddhahood. The term is also used as a synonym for Buddhist Studies, contemporary academic investigation of Buddhism. There are varied and nuanced understandings of the precise nature of a Buddha expressed in the different Buddhist traditions and movements.
  • 843
  • 02 Dec 2022
Topic Review
Christian State
A Christian state is a country that recognizes a form of Christianity as its official religion and often has a state church (also called an established church), which is a Christian denomination that supports the government and is supported by the government. Historically, the nations of Armenia, Aksum, Georgia, as well as the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire declared themselves as Christian states. In the Middle Ages, the idea to establish a Pan-Christian state by uniting the countries within Christendom, became popular, along with the goal to recover territory in which Christianity historically flourished, such as the Middle East and North Africa. Today, several nations officially identify themselves as Christian states or have state churches, including Argentina , Costa Rica, Denmark (incl. Greenland), Dominican Republic, El Salvador, England , Faroe Islands, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, Norway , Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vatican City, and Zambia. A Christian state stands in contrast to a secular state, an atheist state, or another religious state, such as a Jewish state, or an Islamic state.
  • 841
  • 29 Sep 2022
Topic Review
Duality (Mathematics)
In mathematics, a duality translates concepts, theorems or mathematical structures into other concepts, theorems or structures, in a one-to-one fashion, often (but not always) by means of an involution operation: if the dual of A is B, then the dual of B is A. Such involutions sometimes have fixed points, so that the dual of A is A itself. For example, Desargues' theorem is self-dual in this sense under the standard duality in projective geometry. In mathematical contexts, duality has numerous meanings. It has been described as "a very pervasive and important concept in (modern) mathematics" and "an important general theme that has manifestations in almost every area of mathematics". Many mathematical dualities between objects of two types correspond to pairings, bilinear functions from an object of one type and another object of the second type to some family of scalars. For instance, linear algebra duality corresponds in this way to bilinear maps from pairs of vector spaces to scalars, the duality between distributions and the associated test functions corresponds to the pairing in which one integrates a distribution against a test function, and Poincaré duality corresponds similarly to intersection number, viewed as a pairing between submanifolds of a given manifold. From a category theory viewpoint, duality can also be seen as a functor, at least in the realm of vector spaces. This functor assigns to each space its dual space, and the pullback construction assigns to each arrow f: V → W its dual f∗: W∗ → V∗.
  • 840
  • 06 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Paleoparasitology
Paleoparasitology aims to study the natural history of parasitic organisms through the recovery of their preserved remains in archaeological, paleontological, paleoecological, and medical contexts. 
  • 835
  • 29 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Desert Island Discs
Desert Island Discs is a radio programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It was first broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme on 29 January 1942. Each week a guest, called a 'castaway' during the programme, is asked to choose eight recordings (usually, but not always, music), a book and a luxury item that they would take if they were to be cast away on a desert island, whilst discussing their lives and the reasons for their choices. It was devised and originally presented by Roy Plomley. Since 2006, the programme has been presented by Kirsty Young. More than 3,000 episodes have been recorded, with some guests having appeared more than once and some episodes featuring more than one guest. An example of a guest who falls into both categories is Bob Monkhouse, who appeared with his co-writer Denis Goodwin on 12 December 1955 and in his own right on 20 December 1998.
  • 835
  • 01 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Ganapati Atharvashirsa
The Ganapati Atharvashirsa (Sanskrit: गणपत्यथर्वशीर्ष, Gaṇapatyatharvaśīrṣa) is a Sanskrit text and a minor Upanishad of Hinduism. It is a late Upanishadic text dedicated to Ganesha, the deity representing intellect and learning. It asserts that Ganesha is same as the eternal underlying reality, Brahman. The text is attached to the Atharvaveda, and is also referred to as the Sri Ganapati Atharva Sirsha, the Ganapati Atharvashirsha, the Ganapati Atharvasirsa, or the Ganapati Upanishad. The text exists in several variants, but with the same message. Ganesha is described to be same as other Hindu gods, as ultimate truth and reality (Brahman), as satcitananda, as the soul in oneself (Atman) and in every living being, as Om.
  • 834
  • 17 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Proto-Algonquian
Proto-Algonquian (commonly abbreviated PA) is the proto-language from which the various Algonquian languages are descended. It is generally estimated to have been spoken around 2,500 to 3,000 years ago, but on the question of where it was spoken, there is less agreement. The Algonquian family, which is a branch of the larger Algic language family, is usually divided into three subgroups: Eastern Algonquian, which is a genetic subgroup, and Central Algonquian and Plains Algonquian, both of which are areal groupings. In the historical linguistics of North America, Proto-Algonquian is one of the best studied, most thoroughly reconstructed proto-languages. It is descended from Proto-Algic.
  • 834
  • 15 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is a global standard for the good governance of oil, gas and mineral resources. It seeks to address the key governance issues in the extractive sectors. The EITI Standard requires information along the extractive industry value chain from the point of extraction, to how the revenue makes its way through the government and its contribution to the economy. This includes how licenses and contracts are allocated and registered, who the beneficial owners of those operations are, what the fiscal and legal arrangements are, how much is produced, how much is paid, where the revenue is allocated, and its contributions to the economy, including employment. The EITI Standard is implemented in 52 countries around the world. Each of these countries is required to publish an annual EITI Report to disclosing information on: contracts and licenses, production, revenue collection, revenue allocation, and social and economic spending. Every country goes through a quality-assurance mechanism, called Validation, at least every three years. Validation serves to assess performance towards meeting the EITI Standard and promote dialogue and learning at the country level. It also safeguards the integrity of the EITI by holding all EITI implementing countries to the same global standard. Each implementing country has its own national secretariat and multi-stakeholder group made up of representatives from the country’s government, extractive companies and civil society. The multi-stakeholder group takes decisions on how the EITI process is carried out in the country. The EITI Standard is developed and overseen by an international multi-stakeholder Board, consisting of representatives from governments, extractives companies, civil society organisations, financial institutions and international organisations. The current Chair of the EITI is Fredrik Reinfeldt, former Prime Minister of Sweden. The previous chairs have been Clare Short (2011-2016), former UK Secretary of State for International Development and Peter Eigen (2009-2011). The EITI International Secretariat is located in Oslo, Norway and is headed by Eddie Rich.
  • 833
  • 31 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Zephaniah Kingsley
Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. (December 4, 1765 – September 14, 1843), a Quaker born in England who moved as a child with his family to South Carolina, became a planter, slave trader, and merchant who built several plantations in the Spanish colony of Florida in what is now Jacksonville, Florida. He served on the Florida Territorial Council after Florida was acquired by the United States in 1821. Kingsley Plantation, which he owned and where he lived for 25 years, has been preserved as part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, run by the United States National Park Service. Kingsley was a relatively lenient slaveholder, who allowed his slaves the opportunity to be hired out and earn their freedom. He took four enslaved African women as common-law wives, practicing polygamy. His first wife, Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley, was 13 years old when Kingsley purchased her in Havana. He said that he had married her, which he never said of his three other common-law wives. He emancipated Anna Jai when she turned 18, and trusted her with running his plantation when he was away on business. He had a total of nine mixed-race children with his wives. He educated his children to high standards and worked to ensure he could settle his estate on them and his wives. His interracial family and his business interests resulted in Kingsley being deeply invested in the Spanish system of slavery and society. As in the French colonies, certain rights were provided to a class of free people of color, and multiracial natural children were allowed to inherit property from white fathers. "In the Spanish Floridas free people of color ... enjoyed tremendously elevated status when compared to virtually any other person of African descent in North America.":61 Kingsley became involved in politics when control of the Florida colony passed in 1821 from Spain to the United States. He tried to persuade the new territorial government to maintain the special status of the population of free people of color, who were mostly multi-racial. He was unsuccessful in this effort, and in 1828 he published a pamphlet that defended a system of slavery that would allow slaves to purchase their freedom, and give rights to free blacks and free people of color. Faced with American laws that forbade interracial marriage, and discouraged "free people of color" (see Free black#Free negroes unwelcome) being allowed to stay or settle in the state, between 1835 and 1837, Kingsley relocated his large family to Haiti. (At that time it controlled part of what is today the Dominican Republic.) After his death, his estate in Florida was the subject of dispute between his widow Anna Jai and other members of Kingsley's family, but she was successful in gaining the estate he had bequeathed to her.
  • 832
  • 11 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Similarity
In philosophy, similarity or resemblance is a relation between objects that constitutes how much these objects are alike. Similarity comes in degrees: e.g. oranges are more similar to apples than to the moon. It is traditionally seen as an internal relation and analyzed in terms of shared properties: two things are similar because they have a property in common. The more properties they share, the more similar they are. They resemble each other exactly if they share all their properties. So an orange is similar to the moon because they both share the property of being round, but it is even more similar to an apple because additionally, they both share various other properties, like the property of being a fruit. On a formal level, similarity is usually considered to be a relation that is reflexive (everything resembles itself), symmetric (if a is similar to b then b is similar to a) and non-transitive (a need not resemble c despite a resembling b and b resembling c). Similarity comes in two forms: respective similarity, which is relative to one respect or feature, and overall similarity, which expresses the degree of resemblance between two objects all things considered. There is no general consensus whether similarity is an objective, mind-independent feature of reality, and, if so, whether it is a fundamental feature or reducible to other features. Resemblance is central to human cognition since it provides the basis for the categorization of entities into kinds and for various other cognitive processes like analogical reasoning. Similarity has played a central role in various philosophical theories, e.g. as a solution to the problem of universals through resemblance nominalism or in the analysis of counterfactuals in terms of similarity between possible worlds.
  • 831
  • 03 Nov 2022
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