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Natural and Legal Rights
Natural and legal rights are two types of rights. Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal and inalienable (they cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws). Legal rights are those bestowed onto a person by a given legal system (they can be modified, repealed, and restrained by human laws). The concept of natural law is related to the concept of natural rights. Natural law first appeared in ancient Greek philosophy, and was referred to by Roman philosopher Cicero. It was subsequently alluded to in the Bible, and then developed in the Middle Ages by Catholic philosophers such as Albert the Great and his pupil Thomas Aquinas. During the Age of Enlightenment, the concept of natural laws was used to challenge the divine right of kings, and became an alternative justification for the establishment of a social contract, positive law, and government – and thus legal rights – in the form of classical republicanism. Conversely, the concept of natural rights is used by others to challenge the legitimacy of all such establishments. The idea of human rights is also closely related to that of natural rights: some acknowledge no difference between the two, regarding them as synonymous, while others choose to keep the terms separate to eliminate association with some features traditionally associated with natural rights. Natural rights, in particular, are considered beyond the authority of any government or international body to dismiss. The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an important legal instrument enshrining one conception of natural rights into international soft law. Natural rights were traditionally viewed as exclusively negative rights, whereas human rights also comprise positive rights. Even on a natural rights conception of human rights, the two terms may not be synonymous. The proposition that animals have natural rights is one that gained the interest of philosophers and legal scholars in the 20th century and into the 21st.
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  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
VDM-1
The Processor Technology VDM-1, for Video Display Module, was the first video card for S-100 bus computers. Created in 1975, it allows an S-100 machine to produce its own display, and when paired with a keyboard and their 3P+S card, it eliminates the need for a separate video terminal. Using a 7 x 9 dot matrix and ASCII characters, it produces a 64-column by 16-row text display. The VDM-1 is a complex card and was soon replaced by an increasing number of similar products from other companies. An early competitor was the Solid State Music VB-1, which offers an identical display from a much simpler card. Later cards using LSI chips have enough room to include the keyboard controller as well.
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  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Law of War
The law of war is the component of international law that regulates the conditions for initiating war (jus ad bellum) and the conduct of warring parties (jus in bello). Laws of war define sovereignty and nationhood, states and territories, occupation, and other critical terms of international law. Among other issues, modern laws of war address the declarations of war, acceptance of surrender and the treatment of prisoners of war; military necessity, along with distinction and proportionality; and the prohibition of certain weapons that may cause unnecessary suffering. The law of war is considered distinct from other bodies of law—such as the domestic law of a particular belligerent to a conflict—which may provide additional legal limits to the conduct or justification of war.
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  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Kuni-yuzuri
The kuni-yuzuri (国譲り) "Transfer of the land" was a mythological event in Japanese prehistory, related in sources such as the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki. It relates the story of how the rulership of Japan passed from the earthly kami (kunitsukami) to the kami of Heaven (amatsukami) and their eventual descendants, the Imperial House of Japan.
  • 2.1K
  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
List of Minerals N (Complete)
This list includes those recognised minerals beginning with the letter N. The International Mineralogical Association is the international group that recognises new minerals and new mineral names, however minerals discovered before 1959 did not go through the official naming procedure, although some minerals published previously have been either confirmed or discredited since that date. This list contains a mixture of mineral names that have been approved since 1959 and those mineral names believed to still refer to valid mineral species (these are called "grandfathered" species). The list is divided into groups: The data was exported from mindat.org on 29 April 2005; updated up to 'IMA2018'. The minerals are sorted by name, followed by the structural group (rruff.info/ima and ima-cnmnc by mineralienatlas.de, mainly) or chemical class (mindat.org and basics), the year of publication (if it's before of an IMA approval procedure), the IMA approval and the Nickel–Strunz code.
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  • 10 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Temporal Envelope and Fine Structure
Temporal envelope (ENV) and temporal fine structure (TFS) are changes in the amplitude and frequency of sound perceived by humans over time. These temporal changes are responsible for several aspects of auditory perception, including loudness, pitch and timbre perception and spatial hearing. Complex sounds such as speech or music are decomposed by the peripheral auditory system of humans into narrow frequency bands. The resulting narrow-band signals convey information at different time scales ranging from less than one millisecond to hundreds of milliseconds. A dichotomy between slow "temporal envelope" cues and faster "temporal fine structure" cues has been proposed to study several aspects of auditory perception (e.g., loudness, pitch and timbre perception, auditory scene analysis, sound localization) at two distinct time scales in each frequency band. Over the last decades, a wealth of psychophysical, electrophysiological and computational studies based on this envelope/fine-structure dichotomy have examined the role of these temporal cues in sound identification and communication, how these temporal cues are processed by the peripheral and central auditory system, and the effects of aging and cochlear damage on temporal auditory processing. Although the envelope/fine-structure dichotomy has been debated and questions remain as to how temporal fine structure cues are actually encoded in the auditory system, these studies have led to a range of applications in various fields including speech and audio processing, clinical audiology and rehabilitation of sensorineural hearing loss via hearing aids or cochlear implants.
  • 5.7K
  • 12 Oct 2022
Topic Review
IBM Hexadecimal Floating Point
IBM System/360 computers, and subsequent machines based on that architecture (mainframes), support a hexadecimal floating-point format (HFP). In comparison to IEEE 754 floating-point, the IBM floating-point format has a longer significand, and a shorter exponent. All IBM floating-point formats have 7 bits of exponent with a bias of 64. The normalized range of representable numbers is from 16−65 to 1663 (approx. 5.39761 × 10−79 to 7.237005 × 1075). The number is represented as the following formula: (−1)sign × 0.significand × 16exponent−64.
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  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Use of Force by States
The use of force by states is controlled by both customary international law and by treaty law. The UN Charter reads in article 2(4): This principle is now considered to be a part of customary international law, and has the effect of banning the use of armed force except for two situations authorized by the UN Charter. Firstly, the Security Council, under powers granted in articles 24 and 25, and Chapter VII of the Charter, may authorize collective action to maintain or enforce international peace and security. Secondly, Article 51 also states that: "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right to individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a state." There are also more controversial claims by some states of a right of humanitarian intervention, reprisals and the protection of nationals abroad.
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  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Old Age Security
The Old Age Security program (OAS) is a universal retirement pension available to most residents and citizens of Canada who have reached their 65th birthday. This pension is supplemented for seniors with lower incomes by the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) which is added to the monthly OAS payment. Some low-income spouses and survivors of OAS recipients are eligible to receive an income-tested Allowance while they are aged 60 to 64.
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  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Coastal Motor Boat
During the First World War, following a suggestion from three junior officers of the Harwich destroyer force that small motor boats carrying a torpedo might be capable of travelling over the protective minefields and attacking ships of the Imperial German Navy at anchor in their bases, the Admiralty gave tentative approval to the idea and, in the summer of 1915, produced a Staff Requirement requesting designs for a Coastal Motor Boat for service in the North Sea. These boats were expected to have a high speed, making use of the lightweight and powerful petrol engines then available. The speed of the boat when fully loaded was to be at least 30 knots (56 km/h) and sufficient fuel was to be carried to give a considerable radius of action. They were to be armed in a variety of ways, with torpedoes, depth charges or for laying mines. Secondary armament would have been provided by light machine guns, such as the Lewis gun. The weight of a fully loaded boat, complete with 18-inch (450 mm) torpedo, was to not exceed the weight of the 30-foot (9.1 m) long motor boat then carried in the davits of a light cruiser, i.e. 4.5 tons. The CMBs were designed by Thornycroft, who had experience in small fast boats. Engines were not proper maritime internal combustion engines (as these were in short supply) but adapted aircraft engines from firms such as Sunbeam and Napier.
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  • 10 Oct 2022
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