Sextant

A sextant is a doubly reflecting navigation instrument used to measure the angle between any two visible objects. The principle of the instrument was first implemented around 1730 by John Hadley (1682–1744) and Thomas Godfrey (1704–1749) but it was also found later in the unpublished writings of Isaac Newton (1643–1727). The history of these and related instruments, and their forerunners, may be found in the article on reflecting instruments.

The primary use of a sextant is to determine the angle between an astronomical object and the horizon for the purposes of celestial navigation. The determination of this angle, the altitude, is known as sighting (or shooting) the object, or taking a sight. The angle, and the time when it was measured, can be used to calculate a position line on a nautical or aeronautical chart. Common uses of the sextant include sighting the sun at solar noon or Polaris at night (in the Northern Hemisphere) to determine latitude. Sighting the height of a landmark can give a measure of distance off and, held horizontally, a sextant can measure angles between objects for a position on a chart. A sextant can also be used to measure the lunar distance between the moon and another celestial object (such as a star or planet) in order to determine Greenwich Mean Time and hence longitude.

Sextant (disambiguation)

Sextant may refer to:

See also

Transformation

Transformation may refer to:

Mathematics

Linear algebra

Geometry

Statistics

Combinatorics

Other

Physics

Chemistry

Biology and medicine

Computing

Fiction

Machine-or-transformation test

In United States patent law, the machine-or-transformation test is a test of patent eligibility under which a claim to a process qualifies for consideration if it (1) is implemented by a particular machine in a non-conventional and non-trivial manner or (2) transforms an article from one state to another.

The test was first articulated under its present form in the government's brief in Gottschalk v. Benson, In its reply brief on the merits in that case, the government said that “we submit that the cases follow such a rule––implicitly or explicitly––and that they cannot be rationalized otherwise.”. The court declined to adopt the proposed rule as categorical and as an exclusive test. It opined that future cases might present fact patterns calling for a different rule from that applicable to past cases, and therefore the machine-or-transformation test was just a "clue" to eligibility for a patent.

The test has been recently articulated in Bilski, but dates back to the nineteenth century. The test is articulated also in the patent-eligibility trilogy—Gottschalk v. Benson,Parker v. Flook, and Diamond v. Diehr. In the wake of the Supreme Court's opinion in Bilski v. Kappos, rejecting machine-or-transformation as the sole test of patent eligibility, and confirming that it is only a "useful clue," it is now clear that this test is only a way to measure whether the patent claim in issue preempts substantially all applications of the underlying idea or principle on which a patent is based—such preemption being a far more basic and general test of patent eligibility or ineligibility.

Transformation (law)

In United States copyright law, transformation is a possible justification that use of a copyrighted work may qualify as fair use, i.e., that a certain use of a work does not infringe its holder's copyright due to the public interest in the usage. Transformation is an important issue in deciding whether a use meets the first factor of the fair-use test, and is generally critical for determining whether a use is in fact fair, although no one factor is dispositive.

In United States patent law the term also refers to the test set in In re Bilski: that a patent-eligible invention must “transform a particular article into a different state or thing.”

Basis

Like most of the modern fair use doctrine, the doctrine of transformation was heavily influenced by the 1841 circuit court case Folsom v. Marsh. In that case, Justice Story ruled that

The standard of "supersed[ing] the use of the original work" would be widely cited as a standard for the degree to which a work was transformative when fair use had become more clearly fixed as a legal principle.