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Functionalism Versus Intentionalism
Functionalism versus intentionalism is a historiographical debate about the origins of the Holocaust as well as most aspects of the Third Reich, such as foreign policy. The debate on the origins of the Holocaust centres on essentially two questions: The terms were coined in a 1981 essay by the British Marxist historian Timothy Mason. Notable functionalists have included Timothy Mason, Raul Hilberg, Karl Schleunes, Christopher Browning, Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, Götz Aly, Yehuda Bauer and Zygmunt Bauman. Notable intentionalists have included Gerald Fleming, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Andreas Hillgruber, Klaus Hildebrand, Eberhard Jäckel, Gerhard Weinberg, Walter Laqueur, Saul Friedländer, Richard Breitman, Lucy Dawidowicz and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
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  • 24 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Kēlen
Kēlen (pronounced [ˈke:.len]) is a constructed language created by Sylvia Sotomayor. It is an attempt to create a truly alien language by violating a key linguistic universal—namely that all human languages have verbs. In Kēlen, relationships between the noun phrases making up the sentence are expressed by one of four relationals. According to Sotomayor, these relationals perform the functions of verbs but lack any of the semantic content. However, the semantic content found in common verbs, such as those that are semantic primes, can also be found in Kēlen's relationals, which calls into question whether Kēlen is technically verbless. Despite its distinctive grammar, Kēlen is an expressive and intelligible language; texts written in Kēlen have been translated into other languages by several people other than the creator of the language. In an interview, Sotomayor states that she aims for Kēlen to be naturalistic apart from its verblessness, and that to achieve this she employs the principle "change one thing and keep everything else the same".
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  • 24 Nov 2022
Topic Review
List of Proton Launches (1990–99)
This is a list of launches made by the Proton rocket between 1990 and 1999. All launches were conducted from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
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  • 24 Nov 2022
Topic Review
The NIST World Trade Center Disaster Investigation
The National Construction Safety Team Act (NCST Act), signed into law on October 1, 2002 by President George W. Bush, mandated the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to establish the likely technical cause or causes of the three building failures that occurred on September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center as a result of a terrorist attack. NIST issued its final report on the collapse of the World Trade Center Twin Towers in September 2005. It issued its final report on 7 World Trade Center in November 2008. NIST concluded that the collapse of each tower resulted from the combined effects of airplane impact damage, widespread fireproofing dislodgment, and the fires that ensued. The sequence of failures that NIST concluded initiated the collapse of both towers involved the heat-induced sagging of floor trusses pulling some of the exterior columns on one side of each tower inward until they buckled, after which instability rapidly spread and the upper sections then fell onto the floors below. World Trade Center Building 7 (7WTC), which was never directly hit by an airplane, collapsed as a result of thermal expansion of steel beams and girders that were heated by uncontrolled fires caused by the collapse of the North Tower and failure of the fire-resistive material.
  • 4.4K
  • 24 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Left-Libertarianism
Left-libertarianism (or left-wing libertarianism) names several related, but distinct approaches to political and social theory which stress both individual freedom and social equality. In its classical usage, left-libertarianism is a synonym for anti-authoritarian varieties of left-wing politics, e.g. libertarian socialism, which includes anarchism and libertarian Marxism among others. Left-libertarianism can also refer to political positions associated with academic philosophers Hillel Steiner, Philippe Van Parijs and Peter Vallentyne that combine self-ownership with an egalitarian approach to natural resources. While maintaining full respect for personal property, left-libertarians are skeptical of or fully against private ownership of natural resources, arguing that neither claiming nor mixing one's labor with natural resources is enough to generate full private property rights and maintain that natural resources (raw land, oil, gold, the electromagnetic spectrum, air-space, etc.) should be held in an egalitarian manner, either unowned or owned collectively. Those left-libertarians who support private property do so under the condition that recompense is offered to the local or even global community. On the other hand, left-wing market anarchism, which includes Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's mutualism and Samuel Edward Konkin III's agorism, appeals to left-wing concerns such as egalitarianism, gender and sexuality, class, immigration and environmentalism within the paradigm of a socialist free market. In the United States, the word "libertarian" has become associated with right-libertarianism after Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess reached out to the New Left in the 1960s. However, until then political usage of the word was associated exclusively with anti-capitalism and in most parts of the world such an association still predominates.
  • 22.4K
  • 24 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Panopticon
The Panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The scheme of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. Thus, they are effectively compelled to regulate their own behaviour. The name may also allude to the many-eyed giant Panoptes in Greek mythology, some of whose eyes were always awake, making him a highly effective watchman. The design consists of a circular structure with an "inspection house" at its centre, from which the manager or staff of the institution is able to watch the inmates. The inmates, who are stationed around the perimeter of the structure, are unable to see into the inspection house. Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison. It is his prison that is now most widely meant by the term "panopticon". Bentham described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example". Elsewhere, in a letter, he described the Panopticon prison as "a mill for grinding rogues honest".
  • 4.9K
  • 24 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Position and Momentum Space
In physics and geometry, there are two closely related vector spaces, usually three-dimensional but in general could be any finite number of dimensions. Position space (also real space or coordinate space) is the set of all position vectors r in space, and has dimensions of length. A position vector defines a point in space. If the position vector of a point particle varies with time it will trace out a path, the trajectory of a particle. Momentum space is the set of all momentum vectors p a physical system can have. The momentum vector of a particle corresponds to its motion, with units of [mass][length][time]−1. Mathematically, the duality between position and momentum is an example of Pontryagin duality. In particular, if a function is given in position space, f(r), then its Fourier transform obtains the function in momentum space, φ(p). Conversely, the inverse Fourier transform of a momentum space function is a position space function. These quantities and ideas transcend all of classical and quantum physics, and a physical system can be described using either the positions of the constituent particles, or their momenta, both formulations equivalently provide the same information about the system in consideration. Another quantity is useful to define in the context of waves. The wave vector k (or simply "k-vector") has dimensions of reciprocal length, making it an analogue of angular frequency ω which has dimensions of reciprocal time. The set of all wave vectors is k-space. Usually r is more intuitive and simpler than k, though the converse can also be true, such as in solid-state physics. Quantum mechanics provides two fundamental examples of the duality between position and momentum, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle ΔxΔp ≥ ħ/2 stating that position and momentum cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrary precision, and the de Broglie relation p = ħk which states the momentum and wavevector of a free particle are proportional to each other. In this context, when it is unambiguous, the terms "momentum" and "wavevector" are used interchangeably. However, the de Broglie relation is not true in a crystal.
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  • 24 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Global Climate Coalition
The Global Climate Coalition (GCC) (1989–2001) was an international lobbyist group of businesses that opposed action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and publicly challenged the science behind global warming. The GCC was the largest industry group active in climate policy and the most prominent industry advocate in international climate negotiations. The GCC was involved in opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, and played a role in blocking ratification by the United States. The coalition knew it could not deny the scientific consensus, but sought to sow doubt over the scientific consensus on climate change and create manufactured controversy. The GCC dissolved in 2001 after membership declined in the face of improved understanding of the role of greenhouse gases in climate change and of public criticism.
  • 1.8K
  • 24 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Poaching
Poaching has been defined as the illegal hunting or capturing of wild animals, usually associated with land use rights. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, poaching was performed by impoverished peasants for subsistence purposes and a supplement for meager diets. Poaching was as well set against the hunting privileges of nobility and territorial rulers. By contrast, stealing domestic animals (as in cattle raiding, for example) classifies as theft, not as poaching. Since the 1980s, the term "poaching" has also referred to the illegal harvesting of wild plant species. In agricultural terms, the term 'poaching' is also applied to the loss of soils or grass by the damaging action of feet of livestock which can affect availability of productive land, water pollution through increased runoff and welfare issues for cattle.
  • 3.7K
  • 24 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Long and Short Scale
The long and short scales are two of several naming systems for integer powers of ten which use some of the same terms for different magnitudes. For whole numbers smaller than 1,000,000,000 (109), such as one thousand or one million, the two scales are identical. For larger numbers, starting with 109, the two systems differ. For identical names, the long scale proceeds by powers of one million, whereas the short scale proceeds by powers of one thousand. For example, "one billion" means one thousand millions in the short scale, while it means one million millions in the long scale. The long scale system uses additional terms for the intervening values, typically replacing the word ending -ion with -iard.
  • 5.3K
  • 24 Nov 2022
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