Topic Review
White Flag
Flag White flags have had different meanings throughout history and depending on the locale.
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  • 02 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Welfare Indicators in Free-Roaming Horses
Animal welfare assessment is an essential tool for maintaining positive animal wellbeing. Validated welfare assessment protocols have been developed for farm, laboratory, zoo, and companion animals, including horses in managed care. However, wild and free-roaming equines have received relatively little attention, despite populations being found worldwide. In the UK, free-roaming ponies inhabit areas of Exmoor, Dartmoor, and New Forest, England, and Snowdonia National Park in Wales, amongst others. Visitors and local members of the public who encounter free-roaming ponies occasionally raise concerns about their welfare, as they are not provided with additional food, water, or shelter. In this study, we evaluated the feasibility, reliability, and repeatability of welfare indicators that can be applied to a population of free-roaming Carneddau Mountain ponies to address such concerns. Our findings indicate that many of the trialed indicators were successfully repeated and had good levels of inter-assessor reliability. Reliable and repeatable welfare indicators for free-roaming and semi free-roaming ponies will enable population managers and conservation grazing schemes to manage the welfare of free-roaming horses and ponies.
  • 418
  • 07 Jan 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
Washington Area Secular Humanists
The Washington Area Secular Humanists (WASH) is an all volunteer, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization incorporated in Maryland, USA. It serves the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area and the surrounding areas of Maryland and Virginia. The founders of WASH chartered its purpose to promote scientific literacy and critical thinking, to provide a forum for humanists and like minded individuals to explore humanist principles, to discuss and explore how humanist principles relate to all aspects of the human experience, and to study the significance of humanism throughout history. Most of its members self identify as secular humanists, atheists, agnostics, skeptics, and freethinkers. WASH was one of the first groups in the Washington D.C. Metro area for atheists, agnostics, freethinkers and other secular-minded people. It has since gone on to be the co-founder or a major participant in several historical events at the local and national level.
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  • 04 Nov 2022
Topic Review
War on Women
War on Women is a slogan in United States politics used to describe certain Republican Party policies and legislation as a wide-scale effort to restrict women's rights, especially reproductive rights. Prominent Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer, as well as feminists, have used the phrase to criticize proponents of these laws as trying to force their social views on women through legislation. The slogan has been used to describe Republican policies in areas such as access to reproductive health services, particularly birth control and abortion services; the prosecution of criminal violence against women; the definition of rape for the purpose of the public funding of abortion; and workplace discrimination against women. While used in other contexts, and prior to 2010, it became a common slogan in American political discourse after the 2010 congressional elections. The term is often used to describe opposition to the contraceptive mandate in Obamacare and policies to defund women's health organizations that perform abortions, such as Planned Parenthood. The concept again gained attention in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when Republican nominee Donald Trump drew notice for a history of inflammatory statements and actions toward women. The phrase and the concept have been criticized by Republicans and some pro-life Democrats. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus described it as an over-simplified fiction advanced by Democrats and the media while other Republicans contended that such rhetoric was used as a distraction from President Barack Obama and the Democrats' handling of the economy. In August 2012, Todd Akin's controversial comments regarding pregnancy and rape sparked renewed media focus on the concept. Republicans have tried to turn the phrase against Democrats by using it to argue hypocrisy for not critiquing sex scandals of members within their Party who have cheated, sexted, and harassed women; and for not supporting bills to combat sex-selective abortion.
  • 865
  • 07 Nov 2022
Topic Review
War Office Selection Boards
War Office Selection Boards, or WOSBs, were a scheme devised by British Army psychiatrists during World War II to select potential officers for the British Army. They replaced an earlier method, the Command Interview Board, and were the precursors to today's Army Officer Selection Boards. The WOSBs were also later adapted to civilian purposes such as selecting civil servants and firemen.
  • 461
  • 08 Nov 2022
Topic Review
War Bride
War brides are women who married military personnel from other countries in times of war or during military occupations, a practice that occurred in great frequency during World War I and World War II. Among the largest and best documented examples of this were the marriages between American servicemen and German women which took place after World War II. By 1949, over 20,000 German war brides had emigrated to the United States. Furthermore, it is estimated that there are "... 15,000 Australian women who married American servicemen based in Australia during World War II and moved to the US to be with their husbands". Allied servicemen also married many women in other countries where they were stationed at the end of the war, including France , Italy, Luxembourg, the Philippines , Japan and China . This also occurred in Korea and Vietnam with the later wars in those countries involving U.S. troops and other anti-communist soldiers. As many as 70,000 GI war brides left the United Kingdom, 150,000 to 200,000 hailed from continental Europe, 15,500 from Australia and 1,500 from New Zealand, between the years 1942 and 1952. The reasons for women marrying foreign soldiers and leaving their homelands vary. Particularly after World War II, many women in devastated European and Asian countries saw marriage as a means of escaping their devastated countries.
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  • 14 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Vocabulary Development
Vocabulary development is a process by which people acquire words. Babbling shifts towards meaningful speech as infants grow and produce their first words around the age of one year. In early word learning, infants build their vocabulary slowly. By the age of 18 months, infants can typically produce about 50 words and begin to make word combinations. In order to build their vocabularies, infants must learn about the meanings that words carry. The mapping problem asks how infants correctly learn to attach words to referents. Constraints theories, domain-general views, social-pragmatic accounts, and an emergentist coalition model have been proposed to account for the mapping problem... From an early age, infants use language to communicate. Caregivers and other family members use language to teach children how to act in society. In their interactions with peers, children have the opportunity to learn about unique conversational roles. Through pragmatic directions, adults often offer children cues for understanding the meaning of words. Throughout their school years, children continue to build their vocabulary. In particular, children begin to learn abstract words. Beginning around age 3–5, word learning takes place both in conversation and through reading. Word learning often involves physical context, builds on prior knowledge, takes place in social context, and includes semantic support. The phonological loop and serial order short-term memory may both play an important role in vocabulary development.
  • 2.2K
  • 14 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Visual Rhetoric
Visual rhetoric is the art of effective communication through visual elements such as images, typography, and texts. Visual rhetoric encompasses the skill of visual literacy and the ability to analyze images for their form and meaning. Drawing on techniques from semiotics and rhetorical analysis, visual rhetoric expands on visual literacy as it examines the structure of an image with the focus on its persuasive effects on an audience. Although visual rhetoric also involves typography and other texts, it concentrates mainly on the use of images or visual texts. Using images is central to visual rhetoric because these visuals help in either forming the case an image alone wants to convey, or arguing the point that a writer formulates, in the case of a multimodal text which combines image and written text, for example. Visual rhetoric has gained more notoriety as more recent scholarly work started exploring alternative media forms that include graphics, screen design, and other hybrid visual representations that does not privilege print culture and conventions. Also, visual rhetoric involves how writers arrange segments of a visual text on the page. In addition to that, visual rhetoric involves the selection of different fonts, contrastive colors, and graphs, among other elements, to shape a visual rhetoric text. One vital component of visual rhetoric is analyzing the visual text. The interactional and commonly hybrid nature of cyber spaces that usually mixes print text and visual images unable some detachment of them as isolated constructs, and scholarship has claimed that especially in virtual spaces where print text and visuals are usually combined, there is no place either for emphasizing one mode over another. One way of analyzing a visual text is to look for its significant meaning. Simply put, the meaning should be deeper than the literal sense that a visual text holds. One way to analyze a visual text is to dissect it in order for the viewer to understand its tenor. Viewers can break the text into smaller parts and share perspectives to reach its meaning. In analyzing a text that includes an image of the bold eagle, as the main body of the visual text, questions of representation and connotation come into play. Analyzing a text that includes a photo, painting, or even cartoon of the bold eagle along with written words, would bring to mind the conceptions of strength and freedom, rather than the conception of merely a bird. This includes an understanding of the creative and rhetorical choices made with coloring, shaping, and object placement. The power of imagery, iconic photographs, for instance, can potentially generate actions in a global scale. Rhetorical choices carry great significance that surpass reinforcement of the written text.  Each choice, be font, color, layout, represents a different message that author wants to portray for the audience. Visual rhetoric emphasizes images as sensory expressions of cultural and contextual meaning, as opposed to purely aesthetic consideration. Analyzing visuals and their power to convey messages is central to incorporating visual rhetoric within the digital era as nuances of choices regarding audience, purpose and genre can be analyzed within a single frame and the rationale behind designers’ rhetorical choices can be revealed and analyzed by how the elements of visuals play out altogether. Visual rhetoric has been approached and applied in a variety of academic fields including art history, linguistics, semiotics, cultural studies, business and technical communication, speech communication, and classical rhetoric. Visual rhetoric seeks to develop rhetorical theory in a way that is more comprehensive and inclusive with regard to images and their interpretations.
  • 899
  • 17 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Visual Language
The visual language is a system of communication using visual elements. Speech as a means of communication cannot strictly be separated from the whole of human communicative activity which includes the visual and the term 'language' in relation to vision is an extension of its use to describe the perception, comprehension and production of visible signs.
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  • 30 Nov 2022
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