6.1 Introduction The international level can be viewed as an arena of politics in its own right and not just as a context for states and other actors. If we think of the international world in this way, how should relations between states, and other actors on the international stage, be constructed? To what extent should those relations be regulated? We can ask whether relations between states, and states' policy making, should be dictated by allegedly universally shared human rights principles, or by other o
3.2 What are rights? The modern discourse of universal human rights has a number of features. The idea that everyone, everywhere has rights refers to the concept that there are certain entitlements justifiably owed to all individuals by virtue of certain features that all human beings have in common. As the nineteenth-century French politician and historian Alexis de Tocqueville put it, the idea of rights ‘removes from any request its supplicant character, and places the one who claims it on the same level as t
1 International human rights: an introduction There are many examples of claims for rights in the international sphere. One example was reported in September 2002. The British government was asked to make efforts to have a British man held by the Americans at Guantanamo Bay deported to Britain to face charges of terrorism there in connection with the attacks on 11 September 2001. Concerns were expressed about the denial of this man's human rights at Guantanamo Bay. Are alleged terrorists entitled to human rights? Can the denial of
3.2 Migrations of life As biologist and pioneer environmentalist Rachel Carson once wrote: ‘the stocking of the islands has been accomplished by the strangest migration in earth's history – a migration that began long before man appeared on earth and is still continuing’ (Carson, 1953, p. 66). Austronesian voyagers may have been the first people to venture far into open water, but many other species, as Carson suggests, have also found ways of negotiating passages across the ocean. Arriving at pockets of land
1 Dividing the planet A good globe can set you back quite a lot of money. Of course, I don't mean the little moulded plastic planets or the globes you can blow up as if the world were a beach ball, but the decent sized ones that sit solidly on turned wooden bases and quietly emanate authority from the corner of a room. Yet these days, it hardly seems worthwhile making such an investment. Countries appear to change their colour, their shape or their name with remarkable rapidity. It has become a cliché to po
1.2 Developing countries Which countries in the world are classified as ‘developing countries’? There are various definitions of ‘developing countries’, none entirely satisfactory. The WTO allows members to class
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2.2 The purpose of this activity For these short video extracts we have chosen to focus on two main viewpoints. Try not to look beyond the outline of the debate, for we are not expecting you to come to a conclusion about who is right and who is wrong – the issues are far too intricate for that. All you need to do is to recognise what the issues are and to be able to identify what arguments each side puts forward in support of its case. The key skill being developed is identifying the arguments used by various individ
References 1.3 Activities In Activity 3A, you will be exploring your ‘personal ecology’ – the relationship between t Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: relate the temperature of a solid to the mean kinetic energy of its atoms; use models for thermally induced effects that involve linear, exponential and step changes; use exponentials, logarithms and graphical methods to interpret data from a thermally activated process in terms of Arrhenius's law; identify the changes of phase taking place in a variety of critical phenomena; 3.2.2 Group size Another significant feature of a work group is its size. To be effective it should be neither too large nor too small. As membership increases there is a trade-off between increased collective expertise and decreased involvement and satisfaction of individual members. A very small group may not have the range of skills it requires to function well. The optimum size depends partly on the group's purpose. A group for information sharing or decision making may need to be larger than one for prob 2.3 Types of teams Different organisations or organisational settings lead to different types of team. The type of team affects how that team is managed, what the communication needs of the team are and, where appropriate, what aspects of the project the project manager needs to emphasise. A work group or team may be permanent, forming part of the organisation's structure, such as a top management team, or temporary, such as a task force assembled to see through a particular project. Members may work as a group Acknowledgements Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this block: 4.3.3 Termination and transfer There are basically three ways in which chains terminate. The first is known as coupling and occurs when two free radicals join together. This can be represented by the general equation Such a mechanism significantly increases molecular mass, if it results in 3.2.1 Thermal cracking The bulk of the major monomer and intermediate, ethylene (C2H4), is still produced in the UK by steam cracking without the use of catalysts. Paraffinic feedstocks are best for optimising ethylene yields, and the severity of cracking is specified by the rate of disappearance of a marker compound, usually n-pentane. The severity of the reaction can then be defined as follows: 3.1 Primary sources of synthetic polymers The most important primary sources of synthetic polymers are crude oil, natural gas and, to a minor extent, coal. Because all are primarily fuels rather than sources of materials, the manufacture of polymers is susceptible to changes in price or supply. However, this is also true of other materials, since fuel costs are an important component of metal, ceramic and glass manufacture where very high reaction temperatures are needed for reduction of ore to metal and/or smelting. Where polymer ma 2.3.1 Structural isomerism In the saturated hydrocarbons, whose structural formulae are shown in Figure 16, it is not possible to form distinct isomers with just three or less carbon atoms linked together. There is only one way in which one carbon and four hydrogen atoms can be linked together, the single compound being methane, CH4. A simila 1.3.2 Human/product interaction The balance of properties needed in a particular product varies enormously, depending on the exact duty that product will perform in service, the environment in which it will operate, and the way it will interact with the user or consumer. The last factor has assumed much greater influence in product design as competition between different manufacturers sharpens the perception of quality in users’ eyes. The study of human-product interactions is variously known as human factors or 2.4 Models as part of systems work Thinking systemically involves identifying systems relevant to some situation, and models are invariably used as part of this process. An example of this forms part of Checklands' Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) (Checkland, 1981). One aspect of this methodology concerns the formulation of a root definition of some system that is relevant to the situation of interest and the construction of a conceptual model of this system. The root definition is a concise, verbal description of what a 4.1 Beginnings Systems engineering has its roots in three linked strands of thinking: the concepts of systems science, engineering and public policy problem resolution. The first of these can be traced back to the work of von Bertalanffy (1968, pp. 8–15, 96–98) and others during the 1920s and 1930s but received a significant impetus when, in 1954, the Society for General Systems Theory was established at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The society later cha
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