Topic Review
Russia under Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin has served three terms and is currently in a fourth as President of Russia (2000–2004, 2004–2008, 2012–2018 and May 2018 to present) and was Acting President from 1999 to 2000, succeeding Boris Yeltsin after Yeltsin's resignation. Putin was also Prime Minister for three months in 1999 and served a full term from 2008 to 2012. During Putin's presidency, he has been a member of the Unity party and the United Russia party. He is also affiliated with the People’s Front, a group of supporters that Putin organized in 2011 to help improve the public's perception of United Russia. His political ideology, priorities and policies are sometimes referred to as Putinism (Russian: путинизм). Putin has enjoyed very high domestic approval ratings and in 2007 was Time magazine's Person of the Year. In 2015, he was designated No. 1 in Time 100, Time magazine's list of the top 100 most influential people in the world. In 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016, he was designated No. 1 on the Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People. The Russian economy and standard of living grew rapidly during the early period of Putin's regime, fueled largely by a boom in the oil industry. However, lower oil prices and sanctions for Russia's annexation of Crimea led to recession and stagnation in 2015 that has persisted into the present day.. Political freedoms have been sharply curtailed, leading to widespread condemmnation from human rights groups.
  • 1.4K
  • 27 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Criticisms of Electoral Politics
This article discusses criticisms of political systems, specifically representative democracy and direct democracy, that use elections as a tool for selecting representatives and/or deciding policy through a formal voting process as well as the act of voting itself. While representative democracy (and electoral systems in general) have become the modern civics global-standard, many of the below criticisms describe alternatives that existed before and/or independently of electoral systems. This includes but is not limited to the actions and political movements that stem from anti-electoralism, which describes activism around encouraging people not to vote for ethical or ideological reasons. It is also important to differentiate between criticisms of representative government and elections. Several of the following criticisms can be applied to both; however, the election of representatives and the consequences of the process on accountability of elected officials are the main focuses. This article does not address criticisms of neither "electoralism", the term coined by Terry Karl nor voter suppression, which is the act of discouraging or preventing people from voting in order to influence the outcome of an election in your favor. Criticisms of electoral politics range from cons of specific electoral mechanisms such as legislating by elected officials, initiative, referendum and recall to theoretical opposition to voting. These criticisms are relevant to discussions around electoral reform in both democratizing countries in the less developed world as well as most developed countries that espouse some form of electoral democracy.
  • 1.0K
  • 27 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Substantive Due Process
Substantive due process, in United States constitutional law, is a principle allowing courts to protect certain fundamental rights from government interference, even if procedural protections are present or the rights are not specifically mentioned elsewhere in the US Constitution. Courts have identified the basis for such protection from the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which prohibit the federal and state governments, respectively, from depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Substantive due process demarcates the line between the acts that courts hold that are subject to government regulation or legislation and the acts that courts place beyond the reach of governmental interference. Whether the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendments were intended to serve that function continues to be a matter of scholarly as well as judicial discussion and dissent. Substantive due process is to be distinguished from procedural due process. The distinction arises from the words "of law" in the phrase "due process of law." Procedural due process protects individuals from the coercive power of government by ensuring that adjudication processes, under valid laws, are fair and impartial. Such protections, for example, include sufficient and timely notice on why a party is required to appear before a court or other administrative body, the right to an impartial trier of fact and trier of law, and the right to give testimony and present relevant evidence at hearings. In contrast, substantive due process protects individuals against majoritarian policy enactments that exceed the limits of governmental authority: courts may find that a majority's enactment is not law and cannot be enforced as such, regardless of whether the processes of enactment and enforcement were actually fair. The term was first used explicitly in 1930s legal casebooks as a categorical distinction of selected due process cases, and by 1952, it had been mentioned twice in Supreme Court opinions. The term "substantive due process" itself is commonly used in two ways: to identify a particular line of case law and to signify a particular political attitude toward judicial review under the two due process clauses. Much substantive due process litigation involves legal challenges about unenumerated rights that seek particular outcomes instead of merely contesting procedures and their effects. In successful cases, the Supreme Court recognizes a constitutionally based liberty that considers laws that seek to limit that liberty to be unenforceable or limited in scope. Critics of substantive due process decisions usually assert that there is no textual basis in the Constitution for such protection and that such liberties should be left under the purview of the more politically accountable branches of government.
  • 582
  • 27 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Non-Hispanic or Latino Whites
Non-Hispanic whites or Non-Latino whites are European Americans, Middle Eastern Americans, and North African Americans as defined by the United States Census Bureau. Americans of European ancestry represent ethnic groups and more than half of the white population are German, Irish, English, Italian and Polish Americans. In the United States , this population was first derived from English (and, to a lesser degree, French) settlement of the Americas, as well as settlement by other Europeans such as the Germans and Dutch that began in the 17th century (see History of the United States). Continued growth since the early 19th century is attributed to sustained very high birth rates alongside relatively low death rates among settlers and natives alike as well as periodically massive immigration from European countries, especially Germany, Ireland, England, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, France and Wales, as well as Poland, Russia, and many more countries. It typically refers to an English-speaking American in distinction to Spanish speakers in Mexico and the Southwestern states. In some parts of the country, the term Anglo-American is used to refer to non-Hispanic white English speakers as distinct from Spanish speakers although the term is more frequently used to refer to people of British or English descent and might include white people of Hispanic descent who no longer speak Spanish.
  • 5.3K
  • 27 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Cooperative Learning
Cooperative learning is an educational approach which aims to organize classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences. . There is much more to cooperative learning than merely arranging students into groups, and it has been described as "structuring positive interdependence." Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively toward academic goals. Unlike individual learning, which can be competitive in nature, students learning cooperatively can capitalize on one another's resources and skills (asking one another for information, evaluating one another's ideas, monitoring one another's work, etc.). Furthermore, the teacher's role changes from giving information to facilitating students' learning. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds. Ross and Smyth (1995) describe successful cooperative learning tasks as intellectually demanding, creative, open-ended, and involve higher order thinking tasks. Cooperative learning has also been linked to increased levels of student satisfaction. Five essential elements are identified for the successful incorporation of cooperative learning in the classroom: According to Johnson and Johnson's meta-analysis, students in cooperative learning settings compared to those in individualistic or competitive learning settings, achieve more, reason better, gain higher self-esteem, like classmates and the learning tasks more and have more perceived social support.
  • 1.0K
  • 27 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Online Sales Promotions and Heritage Destination
Social media marketing communication is among the current strategies used to provide visibility to cultural heritage, sales promotions being especially relevant. When classifying heritage marketing, some doubts about its classification may be encountered from the perspective of the intention to make a profit. In this respect, it instead is classified as a form of non-profit marketing and it is argued that the primary motivation for its implementation should be the preservation or renewal of cultural and natural heritage. The production of profit in a commercial sense (expressed as a monetary benefit) is considered as a means to help achieve this goal. Social networks have become a key element in the promotion of heritage tourism destinations.
  • 460
  • 27 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Multiply (Website)
{{Multiple issues| Multiply was a social networking service with an emphasis on allowing users to share media – such as photos, videos and blog entries – with their "real-world" network. The website was launched in March 2004 and was privately held with backing by VantagePoint Venture Partners, Point Judith Capital, Transcosmos, and private investors. Multiply had over 11 million registered users. The company was headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida but moved to Jakarta, Indonesia early in 2012 and recently announced intentions to switch to e-commerce, dropping the social networking aspect entirely. Quantcast estimates Multiply had 2.47 million monthly U.S. unique visitors at their peak on July 30, 2012. On Multiply, a user's network was made up of their direct contacts, as well as others who are closely connected to them through their first-degree relationships. Additionally, users were encouraged to specify the nature of their relationship with one another, making it possible to share content with their entire network of closely related people, or subsets thereof including friends, family, professional contacts, and so on. May 31, 2013 officially marked the closing of their operations after more than 9 years and 2 months following its inability to make a profit and was later dissolved and have its assets redistributed after filing articles of dissolution due to financial difficulties whilst expressing the hope that the website might reorganize, retain Jakarta, Indonesia as headquarters, and reopen as a social networking service in the future. When business stabilized, the management began to re-open the site and to recovering hosted blogs, videos, photos and messaging.
  • 728
  • 26 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Experiential Education
Experiential education is a philosophy of education that describes the process that occurs between a teacher and student that infuses direct experience with the learning environment and content. The term is not interchangeable with experiential learning; however experiential learning is a sub-field and operates under the methodologies of experiential education. The Association for Experiential Education regards experiential education as "a philosophy that informs many methodologies in which educators purposefully engage with learners in direct experience and focused reflection in order to increase knowledge, develop skills, clarify values, and develop people's capacity to contribute to their communities". Experiential education is the term for the philosophy and educational progressivism is the movement which it informed.
  • 484
  • 26 Oct 2022
Topic Review
PAST Foundation
The PAST Foundation, Partnering Anthropology with Science and Technology. PAST is a federal 501(c)(3) non-profit educational and research team located in the United States that builds partnerships around compelling scientific and educational projects, making them accessible to students and the public through transdisciplinary program-based learning, experiential field schools, documentary film, and interactive websites.
  • 244
  • 26 Oct 2022
Topic Review
¡Democracia Real YA!
¡Democracia Real YA! (DRY, Spanish for Real Democracy NOW!), also known as Plataforma Democracia Real Ya! (Real Democracy NOW Platform!), is a grassroots citizens' organization that was started in March 2011 in Spain. It sparked the political movement of May 15, 2011 (15M) whose protests gained worldwide attention. The protests been compared to the May 1968 social movement in France. ¡Democracia Real YA! is associated with approximately 200 smaller organizations. ¡Democracia Real YA! states in its manifesto that it is a broad social movement, dedicated to nonviolent protest, and that maintains no affiliation with any political party or labor union. It has not appointed any single leader and is unwilling to join any of the existing political bodies. It is, however, not an entirely apolitical movement. ¡Democracia Real YA! considers the current political and economic system incapable of listening to and representing its citizens and therefore demands changes to the current social and economic policies, which have led many people into unemployment, loss of their homes, and poverty. The organization denounces the way big businesses and banks dominate the political and economic sphere and aims to propose a series of solutions to these problems through grassroots participatory democracy and direct democracy, which is based on people's assemblies and consensus decision making. The movement drew inspiration from the 2009 Icelandic financial crisis protests, the Arab Spring, the 2010–11 Greek protests and the 2010–11 revolutions in Tunisia. The protest movement gained momentum on May 15 with a camping occupation in Madrid's main square, the Puerta del Sol, spreading to squares in 57 other major and smaller cities in Spain, and then to Spanish embassies all around the world. In April 2012 some of the initiators of the movement, following an Extraordinary General Meeting of the Platform held in Leganes, the movement split announcing the creation of an organizational structure and rules as a partnership, taking the same name, Asociación Democracia Real Ya, which caused the rejection of part of the rest of the members of the movement. Thus, there are currently active platform Real Democracy Now! on the one hand, and the association DRY on the other hand.
  • 917
  • 26 Oct 2022
  • Page
  • of
  • 285
Video Production Service