Subject:
All Disciplines Arts & Humanities Biology & Life Sciences Business & Economics Chemistry & Materials Science Computer Science & Mathematics Engineering Environmental & Earth Sciences Medicine & Pharmacology Physical Sciences Public Health & Healthcare Social Sciences
Sort:
Hottest Latest Alphabetical (A-Z) Alphabetical (Z-A)
Type:
All Topic Review Biography
Topic Review
Boy Scouts of America Membership Controversies
The Boy Scouts of America (BSA), one of the largest private youth organizations in the United States, has policies which prohibit those who are not willing to subscribe to the BSA's Declaration of Religious Principle, which is usually interpreted as banning atheists, and, until January 2014, prohibited all "known or avowed homosexuals", from membership in its Scouting program. The ban on adults who are "open or avowed homosexuals" from leadership positions was lifted in July 2015. Prior to these policy changes, BSA had denied or revoked membership status or leadership positions for violation of these foundational principles. The BSA had contended that its policies were essential in its mission to instill in young people the values of the Scout Promise, or Oath, and Scout Law. The organization's legal right to have these policies was upheld by the United States Supreme Court. In Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed that as a private organization, the BSA can set its own membership standards. The BSA's policies have been legally challenged but have not been found to constitute illegal discrimination because as a private organization in the United States, the BSA has the right to freedom of association, as determined in the court case. In recent years, the policy disputes have led to litigation over the terms under which the BSA can access governmental resources, including public lands. These policies have led to various disputes and controversies. In 2012, both Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and then President Barack Obama stated that they opposed the ban on gay Scouts. On May 23, 2013, the BSA's National Council approved a resolution to remove the restriction denying membership to youth on the basis of sexual orientation alone effective January 1, 2014. The policy for adult leaders remained in place until July 27, 2015.
  • 452
  • 18 Oct 2022
Topic Review
2016 Hong Kong LegCo Candidates' Disqualification Controversy
A controversy arose during the 2016 Legislative Council election in Hong Kong as the Electoral Affairs Commission (EAC) banned six potential localist candidates from running for the Legislative Council of Hong Kong (LegCo). The EAC carried out a new election measure to require all candidates to sign an additional "confirmation form" in the nomination to declare their understanding of Hong Kong being an inalienable part of China as stipulated in the Article 1, Article 12 and Article 159(4) of the Basic Law of Hong Kong. Localist Hong Kong Indigenous's Edward Leung and pan-democrat League of Social Democrats (LSD) Avery Ng sought a judicial review but the court refused to immediately hear the judicial reviews. Leung subsequently signed the confirmation form but was asked by returning officers whether they would still advocate independence along with some other localist candidates including Civic Passion's Alvin Cheng and Hong Kong National Party's Chan Ho-tin. After the end of the nomination period, nominations of six localist candidates, Hong Kong National Party's Chan Ho-tin, Democratic Progressive Party's Yeung Ke-cheong, Nationalist Hong Kong's Nakade Hitsujiko, Conservative Party's Alice Lai Yee-man, Hong Kong Indigenous's Edward Leung and independent Chan Kwok-keung, were "invalidated"; Edward Leung's nomination was rejected by EAC returning officer Cora Ho Lai-sheung on the basis that she did not trust Leung had "genuinely changed his previous stance for independence."
  • 488
  • 18 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Socialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America (SPA) was a multi-tendency democratic socialist and social democratic political party in the United States formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party of America which had split from the main organization in 1899. In the first decades of the 20th century, it drew significant support from many different groups, including trade unionists, progressive social reformers, populist farmers and immigrants. However, it refused to form coalitions with other parties, or even to allow its members to vote for other parties. Eugene V. Debs twice won over 900,000 votes in presidential elections (1912 and 1920) while the party also elected two Representatives (Victor L. Berger and Meyer London), dozens of state legislators, more than a hundred mayors and countless lesser officials. The party's staunch opposition to American involvement in World War I, although welcomed by many, also led to prominent defections, official repression and vigilante persecution. The organization was further shattered by a factional war over how to respond to the October Revolution in Imperial Russia in 1917 and the establishment of the Communist International in 1919—many members left the party in favor of the Communist Party USA. After endorsing Robert M. La Follette's presidential campaign in 1924, the party returned to independent action at the presidential level. It had modest growth in the early 1930s behind presidential candidate Norman Thomas. The party's appeal was weakened by the popularity of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the organization and flexibility of the Communist Party under Earl Browder and the resurgent labor movement's desire to support sympathetic Democratic Party politicians. A divisive and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to broaden the party by admitting followers of Leon Trotsky and Jay Lovestone caused the traditional "Old Guard" to leave and form the Social Democratic Federation. While the party was always strongly anti-fascist as well as anti-Stalinist, its opposition to American entry in World War II cost it both internal and external support. The party stopped running presidential candidates after 1956, when its nominee Darlington Hoopes won fewer than 6,000 votes. In the party's last decades, its members, many of them prominent in the labor, peace, civil rights and civil liberties movements, fundamentally disagreed about the socialist movement's relationship to the labor movement and the Democratic Party and about how best to advance democracy abroad. In 1970–1973, these strategic differences had become so acute that the Socialist Party of America changed its name to Social Democrats, USA. Leaders of two of its caucuses formed separate socialist organizations, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the Socialist Party USA, the former of which became a precursor to the largest socialist organization in the United States in 2017, the Democratic Socialists of America.
  • 1.2K
  • 18 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Obiter Dictum
Obiter dictum (usually used in the plural, obiter dicta) is Latin phrase meaning "by the way", that is, a remark in a judgment that is "said in passing". It is a concept derived from English common law, whereby a judgment comprises only two elements: ratio decidendi and obiter dicta. For the purposes of judicial precedent, ratio decidendi is binding, whereas obiter dicta are persuasive only.
  • 2.9K
  • 18 Oct 2022
Topic Review
The Politics of Hard/Soft Dichotomies
Hard and soft approaches to smart cities have been contributed to the compartmentalization of the smart city concept itself. The binary of the hard (technocratic) and soft (societal) is also often presented as a choice of pathways in the development of smart cities. This conceptualization has developed, however, with the original technocratic focus now increasingly reframed as “citizen-centric.”
  • 399
  • 17 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Air Warfare Centre
The Air Warfare Centre (AWC) is a Royal Air Force research and testing organisation based at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire. It has a training branch nearby as a lodger unit of RAF Cranwell and other branches elsewhere, including at RAF High Wycombe, RAF Brize Norton, MOD Boscombe Down, and RAF Odiham.
  • 420
  • 17 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Metacube – Gigacube
In communication, the term means to the plication in 3D of an informative 2D surface in order to obtain a compact disposition of information in digital devices. Some authors refer to this plication as the reiterated interlacement or multi- interlacement of an informative surface. An informative surface is the result of exposing the required information in an only one visual plane. The transit for the exposed information respects an orthogonal direction. That informative surface is defined in base on the informative unit of surface [math]\displaystyle{ a_{ij} }[/math] ( normally square ) whose amount of information is defined ad hoc.
  • 425
  • 17 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Storable Votes
Storable Votes (also storable voting) is a multiple-issue electoral system with the potential to promote minority rights relative to a simple majority system. More generally, it allows voters to express the relative intensities of their preferences over different issues, in addition to the direction of their preferences.
  • 214
  • 17 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Paleoconservatism
Paleoconservatism (sometimes shortened to paleocon) is a conservative political philosophy stressing tradition, limited Federal government and civil society, along with religious, regional, national and Western identity.[lower-alpha 1] According to the international relations scholar Michael Foley, "paleoconservatives press for restrictions on immigration, a rollback of multicultural programmes, the decentralization of federal policy, the restoration of controls upon free trade, a greater emphasis upon economic nationalism and non-interventionism in the conduct of American foreign policy, and a generally revanchist outlook upon a social order in need of recovering old lines of distinction and in particular the assignment of roles in accordance with traditional categories of gender, ethnicity, and race". Practitioners of this philosophy identify themselves as the legitimate heirs to the American conservative tradition. The nativist politician Pat Buchanan was strongly influenced by the Rockford Institute's Chronicles and helped create another paleoconservative publication, The American Conservative. Paleoconservativism's concerns overlap those of the Old Right that opposed the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s as well as American social conservatism of the late 20th century expressed, for example, in the book Single Issues by Joseph Sobran. The political theorist Paul Gottfried is credited with coining the term in the 1980s. He says the term originally referred to various Americans, such as conservative and traditionalist Catholics and agrarian Southerners, who turned to anti-communism during the Cold War.
  • 5.3K
  • 17 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Child Lying
Child lying refers to children displaying varying degrees of deceptive behavior in a social situation. Children have been observed lying as early as age 2 and their deceptive skills increase sharply as they mature into adolescence. Children who have advanced cognitive skills for their age have an increased tendency to begin lying at earlier ages. Children may lie for various reasons including, but not limited to, escaping punishment for not obeying a task (such as eating a cookie when told not to), through observation of their parents and peers, or lacking a comprehensive understanding of basic morality. Well known psychologists such as Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg placed particular importance on the cognitive development of children. Moral reasoning is a function of increased cognitive abilities in the brain in conjunction with socialization within the established moral codes of a culture and society. Children's cognitive abilities increase as the brain develops and as the child matures and gains more experience interacting with his surrounding environment. Research and experimentation has validated and expanded upon the premise of cognitive functioning maintaining a leading role as the mechanism that drives the fabric of human behavior.
  • 270
  • 17 Oct 2022
  • Page
  • of
  • 285
Featured Entry Collections
>>

Featured Books

>>
Encyclopedia of Social Sciences
Encyclopedia of COVID-19
Encyclopedia of Fungi
Encyclopedia of Digital Society, Industry 5.0 and Smart City
Video Production Service
Feedback