Topic Review
List of Socialist States
Several past and present states have declared themselves socialist states or in the process of building socialism. The majority of self-declared socialist countries have been Marxist–Leninist or inspired by it, following the model of the Soviet Union or some form of people's or national democracy. They share a common definition of socialism and they refer to themselves as socialist states on the road to communism with a leading vanguard party structure, hence they are often called communist states. Meanwhile, the countries in the non-Marxist–Leninist category represent a wide variety of different interpretations of the term socialism and in many cases the countries do not define what they mean by it. Modern uses of the term socialism are wide in meaning and interpretation. Because a sovereign state is a different entity from the political party that rules that state at any given time, a country may be ruled by a socialist party without the country itself claiming to be socialist or the socialist party being written into the constitution. This has occurred in both one-party and multi-party political systems. In particular, there are numerous cases of social democratic and democratic socialist parties winning elections in liberal democratic states and ruling for a number of terms until a different party wins the elections. While socialist parties have won many elections around the world and most elections in the Nordic countries, many of those countries have not adopted socialism as a state ideology or written the party into the constitution. Several countries with liberal democratic constitutions mention socialism. India is a liberal democracy that has been ruled by non-socialist parties on many occasions, but its constitution makes references to socialism. Certain other countries such as Croatia, Hungary, Myanmar, and Poland have constitutions that make references to their communist and socialist past by recognizing or condemning it, but without claiming to be socialist in the present.
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  • 22 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Courtship
Courtship is the period of development towards an intimate relationship wherein a couple get to know each other and decide if there will be an engagement, followed by a marriage. A courtship may be an informal and private matter between two people or may be a public affair, or a formal arrangement with family approval. Traditionally, in the case of a formal engagement, it is the role of a male to actively "court" or "woo" a female, thus encouraging her to understand him and her receptiveness to a marriage proposal.
  • 4.6K
  • 25 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Environmental Awareness and Individual’s Altruism
Environmental awareness is the level of how much people are interested in or care about environmental issues. Environmental awareness can be either local or global one depending on the type of environmental problem. Studies have argued that this awareness tends to be related to an individual’s altruism, which is one’s action that benefits others without expecting some kind of external reward. The connection between environmental awareness and altruism is getting attention from scholars since both concepts are prosocial ones but it is uncertain if people who are highly aware of environmental issues may not be always acting altruistically. However, it is likely that altruistic people are more likely to have high environmental awareness.
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  • 28 Oct 2020
Topic Review
Technology and Society
Technology society and life or technology and culture refers to the inter-dependency, co-dependence, co-influence, and co-production of technology and society upon one another. Evidence for this synergy has been found since humanity first started using simple tools. The inter-relationship has continued as modern technologies such as the printing press and computers have helped shape society. The first scientific approach to this relationship occurred with the development of tektology, the "science of organization", in early twentieth century Imperial Russia. In modern academia, the interdisciplinary study of the mutual impacts of science, technology, and society, is called science and technology studies. The simplest form of technology is the development and use of basic tools. The prehistoric discovery of how to control fire and the later Neolithic Revolution increased the available sources of food, and the invention of the wheel helped humans to travel in and control their environment. Developments in historic times have lessened physical barriers to communication and allowed humans to interact freely on a global scale, such as the printing press, telephone, and Internet. Technology has developed advanced economies, such as the modern global economy, and has led to the rise of a leisure class. Many technological processes produce by-products known as pollution, and deplete natural resources to the detriment of Earth's environment. Innovations influence the values of society and raise new questions in the ethics of technology. Examples include the rise of the notion of efficiency in terms of human productivity, and the challenges of bioethics. Philosophical debates have arisen over the use of technology, with disagreements over whether technology improves the human condition or worsens it. Neo-Luddism, anarcho-primitivism, and similar reactionary movements criticize the pervasiveness of technology, arguing that it harms the environment and alienates people. However, proponents of ideologies such as transhumanism and techno-progressivism view continued technological progress as beneficial to society and the human condition.
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  • 24 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Human Sex Ratio
In anthropology and demography, the human sex ratio is the ratio of males to females in a population. More data are available for humans than for any other species, and the human sex ratio is more studied than that of any other species, but interpreting these statistics can be difficult. Like most sexual species, the sex ratio in humans is close to 1:1. In humans, the natural ratio between males and females at birth is slightly biased towards the male sex, being estimated to be about 1.05 or 1.06 or within a narrow range from 1.03 to 1.06 males/per female born. Sex imbalance may arise as a consequence of various factors including natural factors, exposure to pesticides and environmental contaminants, war casualties, sex-selective abortions, infanticides, aging, gendercide and problems with birth registration. The sex ratio for the entire world population is 100 males to 100 females (2021 est.). Human sex ratios, either at birth or in the population as a whole, are reported in any of four ways: the ratio of males to females, the ratio of females to males, the proportion of males, or the proportion of females. If there are 108,000 males and 100,000 females the ratio of males to females is 1.080 and the proportion of males is 51.9%. Scientific literature often uses the proportion of males. This article uses the ratio of males to females, unless specified otherwise.
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  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Sustainability Green Industry 4.0
The Sustainability Green Industry (SGI) 4.0 framework captures the relations of Industry 4.0, green processes and sustainability in manufacturing. The framework is structured into three vertical levels: technological, process and development, integrated through the circular economy. The SGI 4.0 framework’s purpose is to explain how Industry 4.0 technologies create sustainability outcomes through green processes. The facilitating, enabling and supporting functions of green processes allow to understand how modern technologies can be linked to the concept of sustainability. In the literature we can find various concepts connecting Industry 4.0 and sustainability, however, the key role of green processes is not mentioned.
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  • 25 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Commune (Model of Government)
The commune, as a model of government, is generally advocated by some communists, revolutionary socialists, and anarchists. Communes are an organizational community with social cohesion derived from a shared culture. As a governing community, a commune often entails some degree of local governance, communal ownership, and cultural cohesion. However, models that do not include all three aspects may still be described as communes. At its core, a commune is just an organization which creates social conditions that prioritize the primacy of the collective over the individual. Many different forms of commune-based governments are possible, such as a local and sovereign community which is both a microstate and a nation-state, a federated commune which lacks a degree of sovereignty under the rule of a larger state, or a larger national community which focuses more on aspects of communal ownership rather than communal governance.
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  • 09 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Phenomenology
Phenomenology (from Greek φαινόμενον, phainómenon "that which appears" and λόγος, lógos "study") is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany . It then spread to France , the United States , and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work. Phenomenology is not a unified movement; rather, the works of different authors share a 'family resemblance' but with many significant differences. Gabriella Farina states:Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. Phenomenology can be clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another. Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticized and developed not only by him but also by students and colleagues such as Edith Stein, Max Scheler, Roman Ingarden, and Dietrich von Hildebrand, by existentialists such as Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, by hermeneutic philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur, by later French philosophers such as Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, by sociologists such as Alfred Schütz and Eric Voegelin, and by Christian philosophers, such as Dallas Willard.
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  • 28 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Philosophy of History
Philosophy of history is the philosophical study of history and the past. The term was coined by Voltaire.
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  • 19 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Algorithmic Journalism
A term that attempts to describe the procedures that have been brought about by recent technological changes in the field of journalism. Characterized by researchers as “the process of using software or algorithms to automatically generate news stories" (Graefe 2016) and “the combination of algorithms, data, and knowledge from the social sciences to supplement the accountability function of journalism” (Hamilton and Turner 2009).
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  • 03 Jun 2021
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