Aristocracy (from the Greek meaning best rule) is a form of government in which the sovereign power is vested in a small number of citizens who are theoretically the best qualified to rule, as opposed to monarchy, in which the supreme authority is vested in one person, and to democracy, in which the ultimate authority is exercised by the entire body of citizens or their representatives. In an aristocracy, although the power of government is wielded by a few, theoretically the administration of government is carried on for the welfare of the many. Whenever the interests of the people as a whole are made subservient to the selfish interests of the rulers, aristocracy becomes a form of government known as oligarchy. Athens, before the period of the Persian wars of the 5th century BC, and Sparta, during practically its entirehistory, were aristocracies. The same was true of Rome during the period of the Republic, lasting from the 6th to the 1st century BC.
During the Middle Ages no true aristocracy existed, for although political power reposed in the hands of a few, each feudallord was sole master in his own domain. In England, the government from the accession of the house of Hanover in 1714 through the 19th century, although parliamentary in form, was in fact an aristocracy, since king and Parliament alike were under the control of a few great Whig families. Research Aristocracy
Heritable-Jurisdiction were grants of criminal jurisdiction formerly bestowed on great families by the Scottish crown, with a view to expedite the administration of justice. Possessors of these jurisdictions could within their domain fine, scourge, imprison, and even in some cases put to death without interference of the common law. They were abolished after the rebellion of 1745. Research Heritable-Jurisdiction
Abu-Abdullah Boabdil was the last Moorish king of Granada. He gained the throne in 1481 by expelling his father, Mulei Hassan; and became the vassal of Ferdinand of Aragon. By his tyranny he provoked the hostility of his own subjects, and Ferdinand, taking advantage of the dissensions which prevailed, laid siege to Granada. The Moors made a valiant defence, but Boabdil capitulated, and retired to a domain of the Alpujarras assigned him by the victor. He afterwards passed into Africa, and fell in battle while assisting the King of Fes in an attempt to dethrone the King of Morocco. Research Boabdil
Henry Chrales Ferdinand Marie Dieudonne Chambord (Comte de Chambord, Duke of Bordeaux), was the last representative of the elder branch of the French Bourbon dynasty. He was born in 1820 and died in 1883. He was called by his partisans Henry V of France. Charles X, after the revolutionary outbreak of 1830, abdicated in his favour; but the young count was compelled to leave the country with the royal title unrecognized by the nation. He lived successively in Scotland, Austria, Italy, and London, keeping a species of court, and occasionally issuing manifestoes. In 1846 he married the Princess Maria-Theresa, eldest daughter of the Duke of Modena; and in 1851 inherited the domain of Frohsdorf, near Vienna, where for the most part he subsequently resided. While abstaining from violent attempts to seize the crown, he let slip no opportunity of urging his claims, especially after Sedan;
but his belief in divine right, his devotion to the see of Rome, and his failure to recognize accomplished facts and modern tendencies, destroyed all chance of his succession. He died in 1883, leaving no heir. Research Henry Chambord
The Iquitos were a tribe of South American Indians who formerly occupied a wide domain about the rivers Tigre, Nanay, Napo and other affluents of the Upper Amazon. Research Iquitos
ATRAC is an abbreviation for Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding, and is the digital audio encoding method used in minidiscs. The algorithm divides the 16 bit 44.1 KHz digital signal it receives into 52 sub-bands in the frequency domain (after a Fast Fourier Transform). A psycho-acoustic transfer function that takes advantage of the masking effect and the absolute hearing threshold then removes enough information to reduce the data stream to 1/5th of the original size. Each channel receives that treatment separately (the Sony MZ-1 portable MDrecorder features one ATRAC encoder/decoder chip per channel). Earlier versions of ATRAC, prior to version 3.5 were noisy, adding noise to recordings which could be heard during silent or very quiet passages in the audio recording. Later versions, 3.5 and onwards, are comparable to CD quality when listened to by the humanear. The first version of ATRAC had a frequency response up to 15 kHz, by version 3.5 that had increased to 18 kHz and version 4.5 reached 20 kHz. Research ATRAC
The Funnel Web Analyzer by Quest Software is a freewarecomputer program for the Windows, MacOS X, Linux and Solaris operating systems that provides analysis of http server log files. The Funnel Web Analyzer provides details of visitor demographics including geographical data based upon domain name, search engine terms used to find the web site and similar reports which may be formatted in HTML, PDF and plain text formats. Funnel Web Analyzer supports incremental analysis so that subsequent analysis can be combined with earlier results and new combined reports produced. Research Funnel Web Analyzer
In audio engineering over-sampling is when the input analog signal is sampled at a much higher rate than the normal sampling rate. Using the high sample rate, the digital data may be processed with a very steep slope digital filter. As the filter is in the digital domain, unpleasant side-effects, such as phase effects are eliminated. Research Over-sampling
Parked domain monetization is the business of purchasing world wide web domain names and using them to display advertising on the home page so as to earn revenue from the traffic that accidentally results at the domain. The traffic to these web sites comes from a variety of sources, but is mainly from people miss-typing the name of a well known web site when attempting to access it. At the end of the 20th century, and the start of the 21st century when the world wide web became very popular, unscrupulous individuals realised they could intercept traffic intended for popular web sites by registering variations of the web site's name, and could then display advertising to the unwitting viewers of these web pages. This quickly resulted in many thousands of variations of popular web sites names being registered and directed to single pages containing nothing but advertising. Research Parked Domain Monetization
The Probert Encyclopaedia was designed, edited and programed by
Matt and Leela Probert
Abbreviations
Research Aristocracy
