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Topic Review
Social Structure
Social structure refers to the patterned arrangements of social relationships, institutions, and norms that shape and guide human behavior within a society. It encompasses both formal institutions, such as government and education, and informal norms, roles, and values that govern social interactions. Social structure provides a framework for understanding the organization and functioning of societies, influencing individuals' opportunities, behaviors, and relationships within social contexts.
  • 1.5K
  • 02 Feb 2024
Topic Review
The Impact of Airbnb Brand on Consumer Involvement
Airbnb is one of the leading businesses in the hospitality industry, and is one of the fastest growing corporations in sharing economy services. The brand operates on a marketplace platform, and connects travelers with hosts all over the world. Trust is essential for purchase intentions, particularly online, and the degree of involvement determines whether or not the brand is committed to its promises. In the context of Airbnb, users pay for their services online, and are allowed to present reviews for future travelers. Unlike other business models, Airbnb has to preserve its image by providing innovative and quality services for travelers, especially in the hospitality industry, where the product attributes only differ slightly. With Airbnb’s rapid growth, the aspects of brand personality become critical when establishing a positive brand image and positioning the company as a platform that provides unique experiences to its users and possesses a distinct identity.
  • 1.5K
  • 20 Jul 2022
Topic Review
Commonwealth
A commonwealth is a traditional English term for a political community founded for the common good. Historically it has sometimes been synonymous with "republic". The noun "commonwealth", meaning "public welfare general good or advantage", dates from the 15th century. Originally a phrase (the common-wealth or the common wealth – echoed in the modern synonym "public wealth") it comes from the old meaning of "wealth", which is "well-being", and is itself a loose translation of the Latin res publica (republic). The term literally meant "common well-being". In the 17th century, the definition of "commonwealth" expanded from its original sense of "public welfare" or "commonweal" to mean "a state in which the supreme power is vested in the people; a republic or democratic state". The term evolved to become a title to a number of political entities. Three countries – Australia , the Bahamas, and Dominica – have the official title "Commonwealth", as do four U.S. states and two U.S. territories. Since the early 20th century, the term has been used to name some fraternal associations of nations, most notably the Commonwealth of Nations, an organization primarily of former territories of the British Empire, which is often referred to as simply "the Commonwealth".
  • 1.5K
  • 10 Nov 2022
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
Protests Against SOPA and PIPA
On January 18, 2012, a series of coordinated protests occurred against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These followed smaller protests in late 2011. Protests were based on concerns that the bills, intended to provide more robust responses to copyright infringement (also known as piracy) arising outside the United States, contained measures that could possibly infringe online freedom of speech, websites, and Internet communities. Protesters also argued that there were insufficient safeguards in place to protect sites based upon user-generated content. The move to a formal protest was initiated when Fight for the Future organized thousands of the most popular websites in the world, including the English Wikipedia, to temporarily close or interrupt their content and redirect users to a message opposing the proposed legislation. Websites such as Google, Reddit, Mozilla, and Flickr soon featured protests against the acts. Some shut down completely, while others kept some or all of their content accessible. According to Fight for the Future, more than 115,000 websites joined the Internet protest. In addition to the online protests, there were simultaneous physical demonstrations in several U.S. cities, including New York City, San Francisco and Seattle, and separately during December 2011 a mass boycott of then–supporter GoDaddy. The protests were reported globally. The January protest, initially planned to coincide with the first SOPA hearing of the year, drew publicity and reaction. Days prior to the action, the White House issued a statement that it would "not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet." On January 18, 2012 itself, more than 8 million people looked up their representative on Wikipedia, 3 million people emailed Congress to express opposition to the bills, more than 1 million messages were sent to Congress through the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a petition at Google recorded over 4.5 million signatures, Twitter recorded at least 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets, and lawmakers collected "more than 14 million names—more than 10 million of them voters—who contacted them to protest" the bills. During and after the January protest, a number of politicians who had previously supported the bills expressed concerns with the proposals in their existing form, while others withdrew their support entirely. Internationally, "scathing" criticism of the bills was voiced from World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, as well as the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda. Some observers were critical of the tactics used; the Boston Herald described the service withdrawals as evidence of "how very powerful these cyber-bullies can be." Motion Picture Association of America Chairman Chris Dodd stated that the coordinated shutdown was "an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today." Others such as The New York Times saw the protests as "a political coming of age for the tech industry." By January 20, 2012, the political environment regarding both bills had shifted significantly. The bills were removed from further voting, ostensibly to be revised to take into consideration the issues raised, but according to The New York Times probably "shelved" following a "flight away from the bill". Opposers noted the bills had been "indefinitely postponed" but cautioned they were "not dead" and "[would] return."
  • 1.5K
  • 10 Oct 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
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.
  • 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
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
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