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Joint Meetings of the Australian Parliament

 A joint meeting of the Australian Parliament is a convening of members of the Senate and House of Representatives sitting together as a single legislative body. Australia has a bicameral federal Parliament, consisting of the Senate and House of Representatives. Subject to the Constitution of Australia, each House has its own rules, standing orders and procedures, its own presiding officer, and meets separately, at dates and times it alone decides. However, there are some occasions when the two Houses have come together as a single body. Unlike the Opening of Parliament which is officially made by the Governor-General at the Senate premises, the joint sessions are held at the House of Representatives chamber. The reasons of joint meetings have included: To resolve deadlocks between the Houses following the trigger of a double dissolution To fill casual vacancies in the representation of the territories in the Senate A special commemorative joint sitting to Celebrate the Centenary o...

Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage

 Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage or the Virgin of Antipolo is a seventeenth century Roman Catholic wooden image of the Blessed Virgin Mary as venerated in the Philippines. This Black Madonna is enshrined in Antipolo Cathedral in the Sierra Madre mountains east of Metro Manila. The image was brought to the country by Governor-General Juan Niño de Tabora from Mexico via the galleon El Almirante  in 1626. His safe voyage across the Pacific Ocean was attributed to the image, which was then given the title "Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage." It was substantiated later by six other successful voyages of the Manila-Acapulco Galleons witb the image aboard as its patroness. Pope Pius XI issued a Pontifical decree to crown the image in 1925. The statue is one of the most celebrated Marian images in the Philippines, having mentioned by national martyr Jose Rizal in his writings. From May to July each year, the image attracts millions of pilgrims from all over the country and abroad. ...

Ecology

 Ecology is the study of the relationships among living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps with the closely related sciences of biogeograohy, evolutionary biology, genetics, ethology, and natural history. Ecology is the branch of biology, and is the study of abundance, biomass, and distribution of organisms in the context of the environment. It encompasses life processes, interactions and adaptations; movement of materials and energy through living communities; successional development of ecosystems; cooperation, competition, and predation with and between species; and patterns of biodiversity and its effect on ecosystem processes. Ecology has practical applications in conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource management (agroecology, agriculture, forestry, agroforestry, fisheries, mining, tourism), urban planning (urban e...

Educational Measurement

 Educational measurement refers to the use of educational assessments and the analysis of such data such as scores obtained from educational tests to infer the abilities and proficiencies of students. The approaches overlap with those in psychometrics. Educational measurement is the assigning of numerals to traits such as achievement, interest, attitudes, aptitudes, intelligence, and performance. The aim of theory and practice in educational measurement is typically to measure abilities and levels of attainment by students in areas such as reading, writing, science, mathematics and so forth. Traditionally, attention focuses on whether assessments are reliable and valid. In practice, educational assessment is largely concerned with the analysis of data from educational assessments or tests. Typically, this means using total scores in assessments, whether they are multiple choice or open-ended and marked using marking rubics or guides. In technical terms, the pattern of scores by ind...

House of Lords

 The House of Lords is the upper-chamber of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the lower house, the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster in London, England. One of the oldest institutions in the world, its origins lie in the early 11th century and the emergence of bicameralism in the 13th crntury. In contrast to the House of Commons, membership of the Lords is not generally acquired by election. Most members are appointed for life, on either political or non-political basis. Hereditary membership was abolished in 1999, save for 92 excepted hereditary peers; 90 elected through internal by-election, plus the Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain as members ex officio. No members directly inherit their seats any longer. The House of Lords also includes up to 26 archbishops and bishops of the Church of England, known as Lords Spiritual. Since 2014, membership may be voluntarily relinquished or terminated upon expulsion. As the upper house of Parliament, the...

Crusades

 The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Christian Latin Church in the medieval period. The best known of these military expeditions are those to the Holy Land in the period between 1095 and 1291 that were intended to conquer Jerusalem and its surrounding areas from Muslim rule. Beginning with the First Crusade, which resulted in the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, dozens of military campaigns were organized, providing a focal point of European history for centuries. Crusading declined rapidly after the 15th century. In 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed the first expedition at the Council of Clermont. He encouraged military support for Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos and called for an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Across all social strata in western Europe there was an enthusiastic response. Participants came from all over Europe and had a variety of motivations, including religious salvation, satisfying feudal obligations,...

Legal Medicine

 Medical jurisprudence or legal medicine is the branch of science and medicine involving the study and application of scientific and medical knowledge to legal problems, such as inquests, and in the field of law. As modern medicine is a legal creation, regulated by the state, and medicolegal cases involvimg death, rape, paternity, etc. require a medical practitioner to produce evidence and appear as an expert witness, these two fields have traditionally been interdependent. Forensic medicine, which includes forensic pathology, is a narrower frontline field which involves the collection, documentation, analysis and presentation of objective information (medical evidence) for use in the legal system. When investigatimg a death, forensic pathologists: perform autopsies when required may be appointed as coroners to investigate cases of suspicious death determine the cause of death and all other factors that relate to the body directly may attend crime scenes frequently testify in court...

Obstruction of Justice

 Obstruction of justice, in United States jurisdictions, is an act that involves unduly influencing, impending, or otherwise interfering with the justice system, especially the legal and procedural tasks of prosecutors, investigators, or other government officials. Common law jurisdictions other than the United States tend to use wider offense of perverting the course of justice (an offense committed when a person prevents justice from being served on themselves or on another party). Obstruction is a broad crime that may include acts such as perjury, making false statements to officials, witness tampering, jury tampering, destruction of evidence, and many others. Obstruction also applies to overt coercion of court or government officials via the means of threats or actual physical harm, and also applying to deliberate sedition against a court official to undermine the appearance of legitimate authority. Obstruction of justice is sn umbrella term covering a variety of specific crime...

Gospel

 Gospel originally meant the Christian message ("the gospel") but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was reported. In thise sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words and deeds of Jesus, culminating in his trial and death and concluding with various reports of his post-resurrection appearances. Modern biblical scholars are cautious of relying on the gospels uncritically, but nevertheless, they provide a good idea of the public career of Jesus, and critical study can attempt to distinguish the original ideas of Jesus from those of the later Christian authors. The canonical gospels are the four which appear in the New Testament of the Bible. They were probably written between AD 66 to 110. All four were anonymous (with the modern names of the "four evangelists" added in the 2nd century), almost certainly none were eyewitnesses, and all are the end-products of long oral and written transmiss...

Apostolic Penitentiary

 The Apostolic Penitentiary, formerly called the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Penitentiary, is a dicastery of the Roman Curia and is one of the three ordinary tribunals of the Apostolic See. The Apostolic Penitentiary is chiefly a tribunal of mercy, responsible for issues relating to the forgiveness of sins in the Catholic Church. The Apostllic Penitentiary has jurisdiction only over matters in the internal forum (an act of governance made without publicity). Its work falls mainly into these categories: the absolution of excommunication latae sententiae (a latae sententiae penalty is a penalty that is inflicted ipso facto , automatically, by force of the law itself, at the very moment the law is contravened), reserved to the Holy See the dispensation of sacramental impediments reserved to the Holy See the issuance and governance of indulgences The head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Major Penitentiary , is one of the few Vatican officials who retain their positions sede v...

Historiography

 Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic by using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches. Scholars discuss historiography by topic--such as the historiography of the United Kingdom, that of WWII, the pre-Columbian Americas, early Islam, and China--and different approaches and genres, such as political history and social history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, with the develpment of academic history, there developed a body of historiographic literature. The extent to which historians are influenced by their own groups and loyalties--such as the nation state--remains a debated question. In the ancient world, chronological annals were produced in civilizations such as ancient Egypt and Ancient Near East. The discipline of historiography wa...

Political Economy

 Political economy is a branch of political science and economics studying economic systems (e.g. markets and national economies) and their governance by political systems (e.g. law, institutions and government). Widely studied phenomena within the discipline are systems like the labor markets and financial markets, as well as phenomena such as growth, distribution, inequality, and trade, and how these are shaped by institutions, laws, and government policy. Originating in the 16th century, it is the precursor to the modern discipline of economics. Political economy in its modern form is considered an interdisciplinary field, drawing on theory from both political science and modern economics. Political economy originated within 16th century western moral philosophy, with theoretical works exploring the administration of the states' wealth; "political" signifying the Greek word polity and "economy" signifying the Greek word oikonomos, or household management. Th...

Hermeneutics of Suspicion

 The hermeneutics of suspicion is a style of literary interpretation in which texts are read with skepticism in order to expose their purported repressed or hidden meanings. This mode of interpretation was conceptualized by Paul Ricoeur, inspired by the works of what he called the three "masters of suspicion" (French: maîtres du soupçon ): Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who, he believed, shared a similar view of consciousness as false. Ricoeur's term "school of suspicion" (French: ecole du soupçon ) refers to his association of his theory with the writings of the three, who themselves never used this term, and was coined in Freud and Philosophy (1965). This school is defined by a belief that the straightforward appearances of texts are deceptive or self-deceptive and that explicit content hides deeper meanings or implications. Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his 1960 magnus opus Truth and Method (German: Wahrheit und Methode ), offers perhaps the mos...

Hypostatic Union

 Hypostatic union (from the Greek word hypostasis , meaning "person, subsistence") is a technical term in Christian theology employed in mainstream Christology to describe the union of Christ's humanity and divinity in one hypostasis or individual personhood. The most basic explanation for the hypostatic union is Jesus Christ being both fully God and fully man. He is both perfectly divine and perfectly human and has two complete distinct nature at once. The Athanasian Creed recognized this doctrine and affirmed its importance by saying, "He is God from the essence of the Father, begotten before time; and he is human from the essence of his mother, born in time; completely God, completely human, with a rational soul and human flesh; equal to the Father as regards to divinity, less than the Father as regards humanity. Although he is God and human, yet Christ is not two, but one. He is one, however, not by his divinity being turned into human flesh, but by God's tak...

Botany

 Botany, also called plant science, plant biology, or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist, or phytologist is a scientist who specializes in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek botane meaning "pastures," "herbs," "grass," or "fodder;" botane  is in turn derived from boskein , "to feed" or "to graze." Traditionally, botany has also included the study of fungi and algae by mycologists and phycologists respectively, with the study of these three groups of organisms remaining within the sphere of interest of the International Botanical Congress. Nowadays, botanists (in the strictest sense) study approximately 410,000 species of land plants of which some 391,000 species are vascular plants (including approximately 369,000 species of flowering plants), and approximate 20,000 are bryophytes. Botany originated in prehistory as herbalism with effo...

Octet Rule

 The octet rule is a chemical rule of thumb that reflects the theory that main-group elements tend to bond in such a way that each atom has eight electrons in its valence shell, giving it the same electronic configuration as a noble gas. The rule is especially applicable to carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and the halogens, although more generally the rule is applicable for the s-block and the p-block of the periodic table. Other rules exist for other elements, such as the duplet rule for hydrogen and helium, or the 18-electron rule for transition metals. The valence electrons can be counted using a Lewis electron dot diagram as shown below for carbon dioxide: The electrons shared by the two atoms in a covalent bond are counted twice, once for each atom. In carbon dioxide, each atom shares four electrons with the central carbon, two (shown in red) from the oxygen itself, and two (shown in black) from the carbon. All four of these electrons are counted both in the carbon octet and the oxyg...

Solid-state Physics

 Solid-state physics is the study of rigid matter, or solids, through methods such as quantum mechanics, crystallography, electromagnetism, and metallurgy. It is the largest branch of condensed matter physics. Solid-state physics studies how the large-scale properties of solid materials result from their atomic-scale properties. Thus, solid-state physics form the theoretical basis of materials science. It also has direct applications, for example in the technology of transistors and semiconductors. Solid materials are formed from densely packed atoms, which interact intensely. These interactions produce the mechanical (e.g. hardness and elasticity), thermal, electrical, magnetic and optical properties of solids. Depending on the material involved and the conditions in which it was formed, the atoms may be arranged in a regular, geometric pattern (crystalline solids, which include metals and ordinary ice water) or irregularly (an amorphous solid such as common window glass). The bul...

Solubility

 In chemistry, solubility is the ability of a substance, the solute, to form a solution with another substance, the solvent. Insolubility is the opposite property, the inability of a solute to form such solution. The extent of the solubility of a substance in a specific solvent is generally measured as the concentration of the solute in a saturated solution, one in which no more solute can be dissolved. At this point, the two substances are said to be at solubility equilibrium. For some solutes and solvents, there may be no such limit, in which case the two substances are said to be "miscible in all proportions" (or just "miscible"). The solute can be a solid, or a liquid, or a gas, while the solvent is usually solid or liquid. Both may be pure substances, or may themselves be solutions. Gases are always miscible in all proportions, except in very extreme situations, and a solid and liquid can be "dissolved" in a gas only by passing into the gaseous state ...

Bioethics

 Bioethics is both a field of study and professional practice, interested in ethical issues related to health (primarily focused on the human, but also increasingly includes animal ethics), including those emerging from advances in biology, medicine, and technologies. It proposes the discussion about moral discernment in society (what decisions are "good" or "bad" and why) and it is often related to medical policy and practice, but also to broader questions as environment, well-being, and public health. Bioethics is concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, theology, and philosophy. It includes the study of values relating to primary care, other branches of medicine ("the ethics of the ordinary"), ethical education in science, animal, environmental ethics, and public health. The discipline of bioethics has addressed a wide swathe of human inquiry; ranging from debates o...

Ohm's Law

 Ohm's law states that the current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the voltage across the two points. Introducing the constant of proportionality, the resistance, one arrives at the usual mathematical equation that describes this relationship:  I = V / R where I is the current through the conductor, V is the voltage measured across the conductor, and R is the resistance of the conductor. More specifically, Ohm's law states that the R in this relation is constant, independent of the current. If the resistance is not constant, the previous equation cannot be called Ohm's law, but it can still be used as a definition of static / DC resistance. Ohm's law is an emperical relation which accurately describes the conductivity of the vast majority of electically conducive materials over many orders of magnitude of current. However, some materials do not obey Ohm's law; these are called non-ohmic. The law was named after the German physicist...