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Topic Review
Drinking the Kool-Aid
"Drinking the Kool-Aid" is an expression used to refer to a person who believes in a possibly doomed or dangerous idea because of perceived potential high rewards. The phrase often carries a negative connotation. It can also be used ironically or humorously to refer to accepting an idea or changing a preference due to popularity, peer pressure, or persuasion. In recent years it has evolved further to mean extreme dedication to a cause or purpose, so extreme that one would "drink the Kool-Aid" and die for the cause. The phrase originates from events in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978, in which over 900 members of the Peoples Temple movement died. The movement's leader, Jim Jones, called a mass meeting at the Jonestown pavilion after the murder of U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan and others in nearby Port Kaituma. Jones proposed "revolutionary suicide" by way of ingesting a powdered drink mix lethally laced with cyanide and other drugs which had been prepared by his aides.
  • 50.0K
  • 23 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Confederation (Poland)
A konfederacja (Polish: [kɔ̃fɛdɛˈrat͡sja] (listen), "confederation") was an ad hoc association formed by Polish-Lithuanian szlachta (nobility), clergy, cities, or military forces in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for the attainment of stated aims. A konfederacja often took the form of an armed rebellion aimed at redressing perceived abuses or trespasses of some (e.g. royal) authority. Such "confederations" acted in lieu of state authority or to force their demands upon that authority. They could be seen as a primary expression of direct democracy and right of revolution in the Commonwealth, and as a way for the nobles to act on their grievances and against the state's central authority.
  • 624
  • 23 Nov 2022
Topic Review
England School Census
The School Census is a statutory data collection for all maintained (state-funded) schools in England . This includes nursery, primary, secondary, middle-deemed primary, middle-deemed secondary, local authority maintained special and non-maintained special schools, academies including free schools, studio schools and university technical colleges and city technology colleges. Service children's education schools also participate on a voluntary basis. Schools that are entirely privately funded are not included. It is a statutory obligation for schools to complete the census and schools must ask parents for information, tell parents and pupils where data are optional, and tell them what it will be used for before submitting it to Local Authorities or Department for Education. There is no obligation for parents or children to provide all of the data. The census dataset contains approximately eight million records per year and includes variables on the pupil's personal data, including name, home postcode, gender, age, ethnicity, special educational needs, free school meals eligibility, as well as educational history and attainment results. The census also sends sensitive data to the Department for Education, such as absence, exclusions and their reasons, indicators of armed forces or linked to indicators of children in care. The data collected on children from age 2-19, three times a year, creates a "lifetime school record" of characteristics, testing and tracking, to form a single longitudinal record over time. This single central view of a child's personal confidential data and their educational achievement, behaviours and personal characteristics, is core to the National Pupil Database, a linked database controlled by the Department for Education. The data collected for each individual pupil is listed in the National Pupil Database User Guide. Data is retained indefinitely and in December 2015, the National Pupil Database contained 19,807,973 individual pupil records on a named basis. It is "one of the richest education datasets in the world" according to the National Pupil Database (NPD) User Guide. Controversy surrounds the school census expansion in 2016 to collect nationality data, first reported on in June, 2016, in Schools Week.
  • 761
  • 23 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Absenteeism
Absenteeism is a habitual pattern of absence from a duty or obligation without good reason. Generally, absenteeism is unplanned absences. Absenteeism has been viewed as an indicator of poor individual performance, as well as a breach of an implicit contract between employee and employer. It is seen as a management problem, and framed in economic or quasi-economic terms. More recent scholarship seeks to understand absenteeism as an indicator of psychological, medical, or social adjustment to work.
  • 2.0K
  • 23 Nov 2022
Topic Review
People's Party of Canada
The People's Party of Canada (PPC; French: Parti populaire du Canada or simply People's Party) is a federal political party in Canada. The party was formed by Maxime Bernier in September 2018, shortly after his resignation from the Conservative Party of Canada. Bernier, the Member of Parliament for Beauce and a former cabinet minister, was the party's only MP from its founding in 2018 to his defeat in the 2019 Canadian federal election. Bernier had represented the Quebec riding in Parliament from 2006, when he was elected as a Conservative. The party has been referred to as conservative, libertarian, populist,, and classical liberal, while being seen on the right-wing to far-right of the traditional left-right political spectrum. The PPC formed electoral district associations (EDAs) in all of Canada's 338 ridings and ran a full slate of candidates in the 2019 federal election, but no candidate was elected under its banner and Bernier lost his bid for personal re-election in Beauce.
  • 2.9K
  • 22 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Gracchi
The Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius, were Romans who both served as tribunes of the plebs between 133 and 121 BC. They attempted to redistribute the occupation of the ager publicus— the public land hitherto controlled principally by aristocrats—to the urban poor and veterans, in addition to other social and constitutional reforms. After achieving some early success, both were assassinated by the Optimates, the conservative faction in the senate that opposed these reforms.
  • 1.3K
  • 22 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Cicisbeo
In 18th- and 19th-century Italy, the cicisbeo (Italian pronunciation: [tʃitʃizˈbɛːo]; plural: cicisbei), or cavalier servente (chevalier servant in French), was the professed gallant and perhaps lover in a sexual sense of a married woman, who attended her at public entertainments, to church and other occasions and had privileged access to his mistress. The arrangement is comparable to the Spain cortejo or estrecho and, to a lesser degree, to the France petit-maître. The exact etymology of the word is unknown; some evidence suggests it originally meant "in a whisper" (perhaps an onomatopeic word). Other accounts suggest it is an inversion of bel cece, which means "beautiful chick (pea)". According to OED, the first recorded usage of the term in English was found in a letter by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu dated 1718. The term appears in Italian in Giovanni Maria Muti's "Quaresimale Del Padre Maestro Fra Giovanni Maria Muti De Predicatori" of 1708 (p. 734).
  • 962
  • 22 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Cooperative Federalism (Economics)
Cooperative federalism is a school of thought in the field of cooperative economics. Historically, its proponents have included J.T.W. Mitchell, Charles Gide, Paul Lambert, and Beatrice Webb (who coined the term in her book The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain).
  • 279
  • 22 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Genealogical Bewilderment
Genealogical bewilderment is a term referring to potential identity problems that could be experienced by a child who was either fostered, adopted, or conceived via an assisted reproductive technology procedure such as surrogacy or gamete donation (egg or sperm donation). The concept was first introduced in a 1952 letter to the Journal of Mental Health by psychiatrist E. Wellisch. The term “genealogical bewilderment” was coined in 1964 by psychologist H. J. Sants, a colleague of Wellisch, referring to the plight of children who have uncertain, little, or no knowledge of one or both of their natural parents. Sants argued that genealogical bewilderment constituted a large part of the additional stress that adoptees experienced that is not experienced by children being raised by their natural parents. In the 1970s, researchers Sorosky, Pannor and Baran drew upon the work of Sants to explore the concept in a number of publications, including a book titled The Adoption Triangle, thus bringing "genealogical bewilderment" to a larger audience.
  • 355
  • 22 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Meaning (Philosophy of Language)
In the philosophy of language, meaning "is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they intend, express, or signify". The types of meanings vary according to the types of the thing that is being represented. Namely: There are the things in the world, which might have meaning; There are things in the world that are also signs of other things in the world, and so, are always meaningful (i.e., natural signs of the physical world and ideas within the mind); There are things that are always necessarily meaningful, such as words, and other nonverbal symbols. The major contemporary positions of meaning come under the following partial definitions of meaning: Psychological theories, involving notions of thought, intention, or understanding; Logical theories, involving notions such as intension, cognitive content, or sense, along with extension, reference, or denotation; Message, content, information, or communication; Truth conditions; Usage, and the instructions for usage; and Measurement, computation, or operation.
  • 1.5K
  • 22 Nov 2022
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