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Topic Review
Orthographic Ligature
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph. An example is the character æ as used in English, in which the letters a and e are joined. The common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters e and t (spelling et, from the Latin for "and") were combined.
  • 1.5K
  • 01 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism (Russian: Лысенковщина, romanized: Lysenkovshchina, [ɫɨˈsɛnkəfɕːʲɪnə], Ukrainian: лисенківщина, Template:IPA-uk) was a political campaign led by Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, as well as expanding upon the techniques of vernalization and grafting. In time, the term has come to be identified as any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable. More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the campaign to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko's mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned. Other countries of the Eastern Bloc including the People's Republic of Poland, the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic accepted Lysenkoism as the official "new biology", to varying degrees, as did the People's Republic of China for some years. The government of the USSR supported the campaign, and Joseph Stalin personally edited a speech by Lysenko in a way that reflected his support for what would come to be known as Lysenkoism, despite his skepticism toward Lysenko's assertion that all science is class-oriented in nature. Lysenko served as the director of the Soviet Union's Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
  • 1.5K
  • 02 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Denominational School Output Differences
Abstract In many education systems both public and private schools can be discerned. Differences pertain to the way they are governed and are financed, their pupil population, their curriculum and outcomes. Despite a high level of secularization in the Netherlands, most primary schools still are private denominational schools. One explanation for this paradox is that parents choose a denominational school because of its high quality and output in terms of academic achievement. This study aims at answering the question whether this argument holds true. Using large-scale data, a difference is made between gross outcomes (‘raw scores’) and net outcomes (after correcting for the schools’ ’input’ in terms of parental social and ethnic backgrounds). The study finds there to be hardly any net denominational differences. In so far as gross differences exist, these might be explained by the pupils’ social and ethnic backgrounds. In other words, there is a discrepancy between parental perceptions of gross outcomes and the reality of net scores that present a fairer indication of the actual performance of a school.
  • 1.5K
  • 03 Nov 2020
Topic Review
Physical Education and Sports Supported by IoT
The COVID-19 pandemic in recent years and the massive presence of information technology generate one of the biggest challenges facing humanity, namely the technological challenge. Educational technologies have a positive impact on the correct and effective teaching and learning of physical education and sports (PES), with a great positive impact on future sustainable higher education (HE). Various innovative techniques could be of interest, such as the use of social networks and fitness sites, e-learning platforms, computer games, and telephone applications involving video analysis and age-specific images of students and the skills taught. 
  • 1.5K
  • 16 May 2022
Topic Review
Weibo.com
Sina Weibo (NASDAQ: WB) (新浪微博) is a Chinese microblogging (weibo) website. Launched by Sina Corporation on 14 August 2009, it is one of the biggest social media platforms in China, with over 445 million monthly active users as of Q3 2018. The platform has been a huge financial success, with surging stocks, lucrative advertising sales and high revenue and total earnings per quarter. At the start of 2018, it surpassed the US$30 billion market valuation mark for the first time. In March 2014, Sina Corporation announced a spinoff of Weibo as a separate entity and filed an IPO under the symbol WB. Sina carved out 11% of Weibo in the IPO, with Alibaba owning 32% post-IPO. The company began trading publicly on 17 April 2014. In March 2017, Sina launched Sina Weibo International Version. This new version has a clean, concise user interface design, as well as an ad-free feature; while its volume is very small, only occupying one-fifth of the space of the original, it still performs all of the original's functions. In June 2018, Sina Weibo reached 413 million active users. In November 2018, Sina Weibo suspended its registration function for minors under the age of 14. In July 2019, Sina Weibo announced that it would launch a two-month campaign to clean up pornographic and vulgar information, named The Blue Plan. Sina Weibo has attracted criticism over censoring its users.
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  • 02 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Market Power
In economics, market power refers to the ability of a firm to influence the price at which it sells a product or service to increase economic profit. In other words, market power occurs if a firm does not face a perfectly elastic demand curve and can set its price (P) above marginal cost (MC) without losing sales. This indicates that the magnitude of market power is associated with the gap between P and MC at a firm's profit maximising level of output. Such propensities contradict perfectly competitive markets, where market participants have no market power, P = MC and firms earn zero economic profit. Market participants in perfectly competitive markets are consequently referred to as 'price takers', whereas market participants that exhibit market power are referred to as 'price makers' or 'price setters'. A firm with market power has the ability to individually affect either the total quantity or price in the market. This said, market power has been seen to exert more upward pressure on prices due to effects relating to Nash equilibria and profitable deviations that can be made by raising prices. Price makers face a downward-sloping demand curve and as a result, price increases lead to a lower quantity demanded. The decrease in supply creates an economic deadweight loss (DWL) and a decline in consumer surplus. This is viewed as socially undesirable and has implications for welfare and resource allocation as larger firms with high markups negatively effect labour markets by providing lower wages. Perfectly competitive markets do not exhibit such issues as firms set prices that reflect costs, which is to the benefit of the customer. As a result, many countries have antitrust or other legislation intended to limit the ability of firms to accrue market power. Such legislation often regulates mergers and sometimes introduces a judicial power to compel divestiture. Market power provides firms with the ability to engage in unilateral anti-competitive behavior. As a result, legislation recognises that firms with market power can, in some circumstances, damage the competitive process. In particular, firms with market power are accused of limit pricing, predatory pricing, holding excess capacity and strategic bundling. A firm usually has market power by having a high market share although this alone is not sufficient to establish the possession of significant market power. This is because highly concentrated markets may be contestable if there are no barriers to entry or exit. Invariably, this limits the incumbent firm's ability to raise its price above competitive levels. If no individual participant in the market has significant market power, anti-competitive conduct can only take place through collusion, or the exercise of a group of participants' collective market power. An example of which was seen in 2007, when British Airways was found to have colluded with Virgin Atlantic between 2004 and 2006, increasing their surcharges per ticket from £5 to £60. Regulators are able to assess the level of market power and dominance a firm has and measure competition through the use of several tools and indicators. Although market power is extremely difficult to measure, through the use of widely used analytical techniques such as concentration ratios, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index and the Lerner index, regulators are able to oversee and attempt to restore market competitiveness.
  • 1.5K
  • 19 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Cross-Cultural Psychology
Cross-cultural psychology is the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes, including both their variability and invariance, under diverse cultural conditions. Through expanding research methodologies to recognize cultural variance in behavior, language, and meaning it seeks to extend and develop psychology. Since psychology as an academic discipline was developed largely in North America and Europe, some psychologists became concerned that constructs accepted as universal were not as invariant as previously assumed, especially since many attempts to replicate notable experiments in other cultures had varying success. Since there are questions as to whether theories dealing with central themes, such as affect, cognition, conceptions of the self, and issues such as psychopathology, anxiety, and depression, may lack external validity when "exported" to other cultural contexts, cross-cultural psychology re-examines them using methodologies designed to factor in cultural differences so as to account for cultural variance. Some critics have pointed to methodological flaws in cross-cultural psychological research, and claim that serious shortcomings in the theoretical and methodological bases used impede, rather than help the scientific search for universal principles in psychology. Cross-cultural psychologists are turning more to the study of how differences (variance) occur, rather than searching for universals in the style of physics or chemistry. While cross-cultural psychology represented only a minor area of psychology prior to WWII, it began to grow in importance during the 1960s. In 1971, the interdisciplinary Society for Cross-Cultural Research (SCCR) was founded, and in 1972 the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) was established. Since then, this branch of psychology has continued to expand as there has been an increasing popularity of incorporating culture and diversity into studies of numerous psychological phenomena. Cross-cultural psychology is differentiated from cultural psychology, which refers to the branch of psychology that holds that human behavior is strongly influenced by cultural differences, meaning that psychological phenomena can only be compared with each other across cultures to a limited extent. In contrast, cross-cultural psychology includes a search for possible universals in behavior and mental processes. Cross-cultural psychology "can be thought of as a type [of] research methodology, rather than an entirely separate field within psychology". In addition, cross-cultural psychology can be distinguished from international psychology which centers around the global expansion of psychology especially during recent decades. Nevertheless, cross-cultural psychology, cultural psychology, and international psychology are united by a common concern for expanding psychology into a universal discipline capable of understanding psychological phenomena across cultures and in a global context.
  • 1.5K
  • 18 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Nations and Intelligence
The relationship between nations and intelligence is a controversial area of study concerning differences between nations in average intelligence test scores, their possible causes, and their correlation with measures of social well-being and economic prosperity. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen constructed IQ estimates for many countries using literature reviews, student assessment studies and other methodologies to create estimates, which have been widely criticized on theoretical and methodological grounds. Subsequent research by psychologists such as Earl B. Hunt, Jelte Wicherts and Heiner Rindermann has focused on identifying potential national differences in cognitive ability and causal factors, and determining the nature of the relationship of IQ to variables such as GDP, life expectancy, and governance.
  • 1.5K
  • 29 Sep 2022
Topic Review
Smart Tourism City
A smart tourism city is defined as an innovative and sustainable city that achieves economic and social values and enhances the city’s competitiveness by collecting, analyzing, visualizing, and modeling real-time big data generated throughout the city and sharing it with all stakeholders of the smart tourism ecosystem. By reviewing the estimation standards proposed by numerous organizations for assessing a smart tourism city, we can identify how a smart tourism city is perceived.
  • 1.5K
  • 17 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Learning Crisis
The learning crisis is the reality that while the majority of children around the world attend school, a large proportion of them are not learning. A World Bank study found that "53 percent of children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple story by the end of primary school." While schooling has increased rapidly over the last few decades, learning has not followed suit. Many education systems leave lots of children behind in learning as they progress in schooling. For example, in India, over half of Grade 5 students have not mastered Grade 2 literacy. In Nigeria, only about 1 in 10 women who completed Grade 6 can read a single sentence in their native language. Across seven low- and middle-income countries that participated in PISA for Development, only 12 percent of children who were tested met minimum proficiency levels for math, and just 23 percent for reading. While the skills of Brazilian 15-year-olds have improved in recent decades, at the current rate of improvement, students will not meet the average score of wealthy countries in math for 75 years. For reading, it will take more than 260 years. It is highly likely that the learning crisis will be further exacerbated with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the vast disruptions that this pandemic caused for education across the globe.
  • 1.5K
  • 08 Nov 2022
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