Theories Of Punishment Understanding Deviance

Theories Of Punishment Understanding Deviance The classical school represented by the works of Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria assumes that the rational decision is always the decision that will maximise gain and minimise pain for each individual: the felicitation principle that lies behind the penal policy of deterrence. Hence, if the actor is rational, the state can influence any given decision by ensuring that the system of investigating criminal activity will swiftly detect the person responsible and the system of law enforcement through courts will dispense sufficient pain to each offender so that there will be both specific deterrence (i.e. that a particular offender will never choose to break the law again), and general deterrence (other potential criminals, observing the punishment of the one offender, will be deterred from following in his or her footsteps.  [1]  ) The Neoclassical School continues to adopt the traditional view that the punishment imposed by the state for the crime should reflect deterrence. However, they depart from the original theory by increasing the severity of sentences and limiting judicial discretion. This emphasises the social value of punishment rather than seeing punishment as an offenders just deserts in a system of retributive justice. It uses the offender as a symbol through which to send a message to society, rather than as a human being who should be judged on his or her own merits. It abandons the idea of proportionality between severity of punishment with the gravity of offence committed by the offender. This view has certain moral implications and high costs in maintaining a prison system for an increased number of prisoners. (Something which a third world country like ours could not certainly afford). Research has consistently shown that certainty of arrest rather than severity of punishment is the major det errent. According to Clarke crime is a purposive behaviour designed to meet the offenders common place needs for such things as money, status, sex, excitement, and that meeting these needs involves the making of (sometimes quite rudimentary) decisions and choices, constrained as they are by limits of time and ability and the availability of relevant information. i.e. offenders make decisions that appear rational to themselves, and they can be persuaded not to engage in crime. Through Rational Choice Theory, Cornish and Clarke  [2]  describe crime as an event that occurs when an offender decides to take risk by breaking the law after considering his or her own need for money, personal values or learning experiences and how well a target is protected, how affluent the neighbourhood is or how efficient the local police are. Before committing a crime, the reasoning criminal weighs the chances of getting caught, the severity of the expected penalty, the values to be gained by committing the act, and his or her immediate need for that value. The intention is to increase the perceived risks of apprehension, or reduce the anticipated rewards for a crime, or remove the excuses to compliance with the law. The intention would be to design out crime, i.e. to make the disincentives to the commission of crime consistently outweigh the potential benefits. This would involve concerted efforts by the manufacturers of standard equipment less prone to theft, to design b etter security systems so that stolen goods cannot be used without a PIN or can be otherwise tracked. It also involves the adoption of surveillance technology to tag goods in stores electronically, install camera systems to monitor behaviour, improve street lighting, have more police officers on patrol, assist householders to improve their home security, etc. A co-ordinated strategy would potentially prevent more crime and so be more cost effective than imprisoning the few offenders that are currently apprehended. This theory is predicated on the assumption that humans have set of hierarchically ordered preferences, or utilities. By reducing the opportunities for the commission of crimes and target hardening, i.e. making it more difficult to break into houses or to steal from shops, and encouraging more authority figures to assume responsibility, potential offenders will be deterred. There is, however, some criticism that better protecting one area will simply displace crime into a less protected area but the evidence is yet equivocal on whether such displacement does occur. The main problem, still remains in re-ordering the political priorities away from a penal-orientation and in favour of a prevention strategy. At present many states have invested heavily in the former and see no immediate need to change their policies. To further understand the concept of deviance, the differential association theory is probably the best known Interactionist theory of deviance. This theory focuses on how people learn to be criminals, but does not concern itself with why they become criminals. Sutherland was following the tradition of Gabriel Tarde who argued that criminals were ordinary people who learned criminal behaviour through imitation of those with whom they interacted. Sutherland refined this proposition by requiring that the interaction occur in intimate groups, where the level of communication is more personal. They learn how to commit the crime; they learn motives, drives, rationalisations, and attitudes. George Herbert Mead had developed the idea of the self as a social construct, i.e. a persons self-image is continuously being constructed and reconstructed in interaction with other people. People define their lives by reference to their experiences, and then generalize those definitions to provide a framework of reference for deciding on future action. From a researchers perspective, a subject might view the world very differently if employed rather than unemployed, if in a supportive family or abused by parents. Hence, individual might respond differently to the same situation depending on how their experience predisposes them to define their current surroundings. A wallet might be found on the street. One individual might see an opportunity for altruism, returning missing property to its owner. The other might see an opportunity for self-enrichment. Differential association predicts that an individual will choose the criminal path when the balance of definitions for law-breaking exceeds those for law-abiding. This tendency will be reinforced if social association provides role models of significance to the actor. This does not deny that there may be practical motives for crime. If a person is hungry but has no money, there is a temptation to steal. However, needs and values are equivocal. To a greater or lesser extent, both non-criminal and criminal are motivated by the need for money and social status. Frustration and boredom may be felt by all. Edward Sutherland and his students, Donald Cressey in particular, became the tenacious champions of the arguments that deviance is a way of life passed from generation to generation. First advanced in 1924, his theory of differential association attempted to make systematic the thesis that crime and deviation are culturally transmitted in social groups. It holds that criminal behaviour is learned in interaction with other people, especially in personal intimate settings, in a process of communication. Learning is held to embrace techniques of committing the crime and the direction of drives, motives, attitudes, and definitions of law. It was argued that a person will become criminal if he or she is exposed to an excess of definitions favourable to the violation of law over definitions unfavourable to violation of law, the process itself being described as differential association. Such differential association will be affected by variations in frequency, duration, priority, and inten sity. Sutherland supposed the learning of criminal behaviour to involve all the social and psychological mechanisms at work in other learning. Finally he claimed that although criminal behaviour is an expression of general needs and values, it is not explained by those general needs and values because non-criminal behaviour is also an expression of those same needs and values.  [3]   Finally the social disorganization theory(Chicago school) will clear the whole concept of deviance and delinquencies. Anthropology, the science of man has been mainly concerned with the study of primitive peoples. But civilized man is quite as interesting an object of investigation, and at the same time his life is more open to observation and study. Urban life and culture are more varied, subtle and complicated, but the fundamental motives are in both instances the same. Most sociology departments are inattentive to the physical and social contexts in which they exist. But the Chicago sociology was to become the sociology of Chicago itself, a detailed anthropological mapping of the social territories that made the city.  [4]  Urban life resembled a phantasmagoria, a welter of shifting scenes and identities; where everything is in a state of agitation everything seems to be undergoing a change. Society is, apparently, not much more than a congeries and constellation of social at oms. They maintained that knowledge resided neither in properties of the world alone nor in properties of the observer alone. Facts, it was held, not self-evident. They are selected and interpreted by the mind that surveys them. People with different perspectives and different problems will not see exactly the same phenomena. Thus the meaning of food will not be identical for the chef, the waiter, and the guest at meal. It will shift in response to the peculiar dealings which one has with the object. But that shift is not wholly dependent on the whim of the contemplating intelligence. The imagination is not free to create anything which it may choose to devise. It is constrained by the capacity of the world to answer back and impose itself upon thought.  [5]  Hence it came about that pragmatism placed effective knowledge in a transaction between the observer and the environment which he observed: the knowledge was no longer defined as a state or as a condition but as a process, an action. It proceeded from experiences in the world. Experience was to become elevated to a pre-eminent position: it was a guarantee of valid knowledge. Formal speculation was regarded as a pallid and misleading substitute for personal acquaintance with phenomena. It is the personal experience of those best qualified in our circle of knowledge to have experience, to tell us what is. Now what does thinking about the experience of those persons come to, compared to directly and personally feeling it as they feel it? The philosophers are dealing in shades, while those who live and feel know truth.  [6]  The real world was the experience of actual man and women and not abbreviated and shorthand descriptions of it that we call knowledge. The business of research is to understand the social world, and the social world is itself manufactured by the practical experience of those who live in it. Practical experiences themselves are responses to situations and problems, and they change as those problems change. Sociology is not devoted to the study of states but of process, of things and people in change. It must be so organized that it can observe and report processes over time. It must also be so organized that it can reach those processes practically and not by surmise and logic alone. The most effective research strategy is one that requires sociologists to participate personally in the world which they would analyse. Without such participation, knowledge is not experience but an uncertain commentary on experience. City life and urbanization were analysed by a collection of master forms which had been borrowed from biology. They were represented as the workings of an ecological order. Ecology is an emphasis on the patterns and organized changes which are produced by different species living together in the same physical territory. Whatever else men are, they are also animals, and as such they exhibit the effects of physical aggregation and of their habitat.  [7]  People are quite capable of detaching themselves from their own territories; they display rational behaviour; they can organise themselves into institutions which impose a distinct order; their works are modified by an elaborate technology; their activities are shaped by conscious planning; and they are governed by a symbolism which interprets and changes what they do. The city is not merely an artefact, but an organism. Its growth is, fundamentally and as a whole, natural, i.e. uncontrolled and un-designed. The forms it tends to a ssume are those which represent and correspond to the functions it is called upon to perform. The emergence of Chicago itself was explained by what came to be known as the zonal hypothesis, the contention that cities evolve in a series of concentric zones of activity and life. At the very centre is the business district which is typified by a small residential population and high property values. About it is a zone of transition whose population is fluid and poor, whose housing is deteriorating and whose stability is threatened by the encroaching business district. About that zone, in turn, are areas of working-class housing, middle-class housing, and, on the fringes, suburbia. Each zone is itself composed of diverse natural areas which abut on one another. They are natural because they are not entirely intended, because they manifest a rough correspondence to the territorial division of species in nature. It was found that there was massive concentration of pathological behaviour in the zone in transition. Partly because of its great visibility, such behaviour appeared to be confined to a limited territorial belt. Within that belt there was a piling-up of all those phenomena that are conventionally identified as social problems: mental disorder, prostitution, suicide, alcoholism, infant mortality, juvenile delinquency, crime, disease and poverty. The incidence of pathology could be plotted with data collected from court records, census reports, and special surveys. Deviance may have been present elsewhere but it was hugely conspicuous in the transitional zone. The Zone in transition was taken to be unruly. It housed people who were unaccustomed to one another, to city life, and to America. Lacking substantial resources and deserting much that had been familiar, they were required to establish a way of life in a difficult and shifting environment. One of the prime problems which they faced was the sheer array of different worlds around them. When the inner composition and external relations of those worlds appeared unstable, the whole invited the descri ption of social disorganisation. Disorganization was a face of moral dissensus: the degree to which the members of a society lose their common understandings, i.e. the degree to which consensus is undermined, is the measure of a societys state of disorganization.  [8]  Disorganization also characterized the fragmented, the fluid, and the anonymous elements of urban life: contacts are extended, heterogeneous groups mingle, neighbourhoods disappear, and people, deprived of local and family ties, are forced to live under loose, transient and impersonal relations.  [9]   Integral to the conception of disorganization was the companion idea of weak social control. Those who stressed internal disorder could cite numerous obstructions to social control. Moral habits could not be properly implanted. People were neither effectively curbed, nor could they curb one another. They did not know each other well, formed few commitments to the area or to its population, were confused by moral diversity, and were loath to intervene in the affairs of their fellows. Morality could not be taken for granted. It became relativistic and circumstantial, readily adapted for selfish purposes, permitted the evolution of extenuating accounts. More particularly, its influence could not extend very far. Those entitled to exercise moral claims were confined to the family and immediate neighbours, all other becoming moral strangers.  [10]  Their lives had been punctuated by cultural discontinuities which became especially taxing for the second generation. Morally displaced, e conomically and politically peripheral, they might innovate new modes of social organization. Most typically they created a social order which corresponded to neither the old world nor the new but was a shifting amalgam of both.  [11]  They also improvised new styles of behaviour and morality which could well embrace delinquency as a possible solution to the dilemmas of exclusion and impotence.  [12]  Crime and delinquency were, thus, explained principally by the effects of the isolation of certain natural areas. They became a kind of surrogate social order, an alternative pattern, which replaced the workings of conventional institutions.  [13]  Their forms were themselves explained as a functional response to deprivation, to the social and moral structures imported by immigrants, and to the experience of growing up in the inner city. Deprived of political control and economic resources, first and second generation immigrants produced their own shadow politics and shadow economy. Children raised in the crowded zone in transition led an intensely public life, playing with others on the street, forming into small groups which eventually crystallized into gangs. Such exposure placed the child under constant surveillance from others. From an early age he was awarded a communal identity and reputation. In an insecure social environment, the preservation of reputation acquired strategic importance. What is significant is the persistence of tradition in the zone in transition. Ideas of conduct are passed on from generation to generation of boys living the public lives of the street; traditions of delinquency are preserved and transmitted through the medium of social contact with the unsupervised play group and the more highly organized delinquent and criminal gangs.  [14]   Theories of punishment Each society has its own way of social control for which it frames certain laws and also mentions the sanctions with them. These sanctions are nothing but the punishments. In primitive society punishment was left to the individuals wronged or their families, and was vindictive or retributive: in quantity and quality it would bear no special relation to the character or gravity of the offence. Ordinarily there would arise the idea of proportionate punishment, of which the characteristic type is an eye for an eye. The second stage was punishment by individuals under the control of the state, or community; in the third stage, with the growth of law, the state took over the primitive function and provided itself with the machinery of justice for the maintenance of public order. Henceforward crimes are against the state, and the exaction of punishment by the wronged individual is illegal (compared to the earlier lynch law). Even at this stage the vindictive or retributive character of punishment remains, but gradually, and especially after the humanist government under thinkers like Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, new theories began to emerge. Two chief trains of thought have combined in the condemnation of primitive theory and practice. On the one hand the retributive principle itself has been very largely superseded by the protective and the reformative; on the other punishment s involving bodily pain have become objectional to the general sense of society. Consequently corporal and even capital punishment occupy a far less prominent position, and tend everywhere to disappear. It began to be recognized also that stereotyped punishments, such as belonging to penal codes, fail to take due account of the particular condition of an offence and the character and circumstances of the offender. A fixed fine, for example, operates very unequally on rich and poor. With new criminological developments, particularly in the field of penology, it has been generally accepted that punishment must be in proportion to the gravity of the offence. It has been further suggested that reformation of criminal rather than his expulsion from society is more purposeful for his rehabilitation. With this aim in view, the modern penologists have focused their attention on individualization of offender through treatment methods. Today, old barbarous methods of punishment such as mutilation, branding, hanging, burning, stoning, flogging, amputation, starving the criminal to death or subjecting him to pillory or poetic punishment, etc. are completely abandoned  [15]  . Pillory was a method of corporal punishment under which the offender was subjected to public ridicule by exposing him to punishment in public places. Different poetic punishments were provided for different crimes. For example, cutting off hands for theft, taking off tongue for the offence of perjury, emasculation for rape, shaving off the head of a woman in case she committed a sex-crime or whipping her in public street and similar other modes were common forms of poetic punishment during the middle ages. Modern penologists have substituted new forms of penal sanctions for the old methods of sentencing. The present modes of punishment commonly include imposition of monetary fines, segregation of the offender temporarily or permanently through imprisonment or externment or compensation by way of damages from the wrong-doer in case of civil injury. The credit for introducing these penological changes goes to eminent criminologists, like Beccaria, Garofalo, Ferri, Tarde, Bentham, and o thers who formulated sound principles of punishment and made all out efforts to ensure rehabilitation of offenders so as to make them useful member of society once again. Garofalo strongly recommended transportation or banishment of certain types of offenders who had to be segregated from society. Modern penal systems, however, limit the punishment of transportation within the homeland so that potentiality of prisoners is utilized within the country itself. Of late, open jails, parole or probation are being intensively used for long-termers so that they can earn their livelihood while in the institution.  [16]   Though opinions have differed, as regards punishment of offenders varying from age-old traditionalism to recent modernism, broadly speaking four types of views can be distinctly found to prevail. Modern penologists prefer to call them theories of punishment, which are, The Deterrent theory; The Retributive theory; The Reformative theory; and The Preventive theory. Off late however, there has been the re-emergence of the Retributive theory in a diluted form and this is called as the Expiatory theory which was mainly in vogue in Ancient India and erstwhile Europe. Deterrent theory Earlier modes of punishment were, deterrent in nature. This kind of punishment presupposes infliction of severe penalties on offenders with a view to deterring them from committing crime. The founder of this theory, Jeremy Bentham, based his theory of determine on the principle of hedonism which said that a man would be deterred from committing a crime if the punishment applied was swift, certain and severe. This theory considers punishment as an evil, but is necessary to maintain order in the society. The deterrent theory also seeks to create some kind of fear in the mind of others by providing adequate penalty and exemplary punishment to offenders which keeps them away from criminality. Thus the rigor of penal discipline acts as a sufficient warning to offenders as also others. Therefore, deterrence is undoubtedly one of the effective policies which almost every penal system accepts despite the fact that it invariably fails in its practical application. Deterrence, as a measure of punishment particularly fails in case hardened criminals because the severity of punishment hardly has any effect on them. It also fails to deter ordinary criminals because many crimes are committed on the spur of the moment without any prior intention or design. The futility of deterrent punishment is evinced from the fact that quite a large number of hardened criminals return to prison soon after their release. They prefer to remain in prison rather than leading a free life in society. Thus the object underlying deterrent punishment is unquestionably defeated. This view finds support from the fact that when capital punishment was being publicly awarded by hanging the person to death in public places, many persons committed crimes of pick-pocketing, theft, assault or even murder in those men-packed gatherings despite the ghastly scene. Suffice it to say that the doctrine concerning deterrent punishment has been closely associated with the primitive theories of crime and criminal responsibility. In earlier times, crime was attributed to the influence of evil spirit or free-will of the offender. So the society preferred severe and deterrent punishment for the offender for his act of voluntary perversity which was believed to be a challenge to God or religion.  [17]   The punishment ought to be a terror to evil-doers and an awful warning to all others who might be tempted to imitate them. This contention finds support in Benthams observation, who said:- General prevention ought to be the chief end of punishment. An unpunished crime leaves the path of crime open, not only to the same delinquent but also to all those who may have some motives and opportunities for entering upon ità ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ we perceive that punishment inflicted on the individual becomes source of security for allà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Punishment is not to be regarded as an act of wrath or vengeance against a guilty individual who has given way to mischievous inclinations, but as an indispensable sacrifice to the society. Bentham, however, believed that offenders must be provided an opportunity for reformation by the process of rehabilitation. From this point of view, his theory may be considered forward looking as it was more concerned with the consequences of punishment rather than the wrong done, which being a post, cannot be altered.  [18]   Retributive Theory Retribution is the practice of getting even with a wrongdoer-the suffering of the wrongdoer is seen as good in itself, even if it has no other benefits. One reason for societies to include this judicial element is to diminish the perceived need for street justice, blood revenge and vigilantism. Retribution sets an important standard on punishment the transgressor must get what he deserves, but no more. Therefore, a thief put to death is not retribution; a murderer put to death is. In old times when a man injured another, it was considered to be the right of the injured person to take revenge on the person causing injury. Since the formulation of the Hammurabis Code, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth has been accepted by the general public that is the criminal deserves to suffer. Later this stance changed, Adam Smith, who is credited as the father of Welfare Economics, wrote extensively about punishment. In his view, an important reason for punishment is not only deterrence, b ut also satisfying the resentment of the victim. Moreover, in the case of the death penalty, the retribution goes to the dead victim, not his family. One great difficulty of this approach is that of judging exactly what it is that the transgressor deserves. For instance, it may be retribution to put a thief to death if he steals a familys only means of livelihood; conversely, mitigating circumstances may lead to the conclusion that the execution of a murderer is not retribution. The adherents of retributive theory, that punishment satisfies the feeling of revenge, are few in number. As has been observed by Lee, An act which is described as a crime today was looked upon as a private wrong previously. The wronged party and not the State or that which stood for the State brought suit. Professor Gillin  [19]  quotes many illustrations of the working of private vengeance. Citing an instance of punishment for adultery in ancient Germany he observers: Its punishment is instant and at the pleasure of the husband. He cuts off the hair of the offender, strips her and in the presence of her relations expels her from the house and pursues her with strips though the whole village. Salmond as regards the theory observes: Conception of retributive justice still retains a prominent place in popular thought. It flourishes also in the writings of the theologians and of those imbued with theological modes of thought and even among the philosophers it does not lack advocates. Kant, for example, expresses the opinion that punishment cannot rightly be inflicted for the sake or any benefit to be derived from it either by the criminal himself or by the society and that the sole and sufficient reasons and justification of it lies in the fact that evil has been done to him who suffers it. The death sentence has been used as an effective weapon of retributive justice for centuries. The justification advanced is that it is lawful to forfeit the life of a person who takes away anothers life. A person who kills another must be eliminated from the society and, therefore, fully merits his execution.  [20]  On the same lines, in the case of the Chopra children murder case where the Honble Supreme Court while upholding the death sentence observed as follows: The survival of an orderly society demands the extinction of the life of persons like Ranga and Billa who are a menace to social order and security. They are professional murderers and deserve no sympathy even in terms of the evolving standards of decency of a maturing soc

Barley: The Versatile Crop :: Botany

Barley: The Versatile Crop Barley is a very important grain in the world today. It is very versatile in every way. It has been well adapted through its evolution. It has a very mysterious and much debated beginning. Now however, barely has become well known and so have its many uses. Barley, which is of the genus Hordeum, is a cereal that belongs to the grass family Poaceae. Barley has many different varieties. The most common is Hordeum vulgare, which is a six-rowed type of barley that has a spike notched on opposite sides with three spikelets on each notch. At each notch there is a flower or floret that later develops into a kernel. Hordeum distichum is a two-rowed type of barley that has central florets producing kernels and it has lateral florets that are sterile. Lastly there is Hordeum irregulare which has fertile central florets and different arrangements of sterile and fertile lateral florets. This is the least cultivated species of the three main forms (2). Barley is very adaptable to various environments. In fact, it is the most adaptable of the cereals. Barley is an annual grass that has two growing seasons, winter and spring. It does best in the spring in a temperate zone with a 90 day growing season, it can also be found growing in sub-arctic regions, like in Alaska or in Norway, with very short growing seasons (1). Barley also has a very good resistance to dry heat compared to other small grains. This feature allows it to grow near desert areas such as North Africa (2). Barley has a very debatable origin. There are two different thoughts as to where barley was originally cultivated. J.R Hardin says that barley cultivation originated in Egypt. There is evidence of barley grains found in pits and pyramids of Egypt over 5000 years ago. There has also been ancient glyphs or pictorials showing barley dating back to 3000 BC. There have also been references to barley and beer making in ancient Egyptian and Sumerian writings. (4). The other thought is that barley was originally cultivated in China around 1500-2000 BC. This is evident by ancient pottery found depicting the end of the famine by having barley fall out of the sky (2). Barley cultivation also seems to have been evident in other parts of the world at later times. For example northwestern Europe is estimated to have civilizations cultivating barley around 3000 BC.

Case Study on Japan Sales Force Essay -- Business Analysis Japanese Sa

Case Study on Japan Sales Force The main issue in case study 4-7 focuses on what the Japan company Nippon Cash Machines and their recent US merger National Office Machines should do to their Japanese sales force who has always followed a salary based payment plan and lifetime job security because they are quickly loosing market share in a highly competitive market. Therefore, the main statement for the case is as follows:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Should a merged company such as who Nippon/American Business Machines Corporation, who is facing strong competition and loosing market share, change the Japan sales force payment plan and go against traditional Japan values in order to remain competitive in their market?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  I think that NABMC should definitely begin to change their sales force payment plan. If NABMC can initiate change within their company, and do it quickly and effectively, it will make the company that much more competitive against other companies in the same market. This also may be the company?s only choice now because they have lost so much market share. By implementing a sales plan where part of the payment comes from salary and some comes from commission, then it will increase incentive for creating and sustaining sales and become a catalyst for NABMC to begin to regain lost market share in the Japanese market. I believe that NABMC should initiate a half salary/half commission incentive payment plan. This will allow the company to see increased incentives for sal...

Foundation’s Edge CHAPTER FIVE SPEAKER

SPEAKER Trantor! For eight thousand years, it was the capital of a large and mighty political entity that spanned an ever-growing union of planetary systems. For twelve thousand years after that, it was the capital of a political entity that spanned the entire Galaxy. It was the center, the heart, the epitome of the Galactic Empire. It was impossible to think of the Empire without thinking of Trantor. Trantor did not reach its physical peak until the Empire was far gone in decay. In fact, no one noticed that the Empire had lost its drive, its forward look, because Trantor gleamed in shining metal. Its growth had peaked at the point where it was a planet-girdling city. Its population was stabilized (by law) at forty-five billion and the only surface greenery was at the Imperial Palace and the Galactic University/Library complex. Trantor's land surface was metal-coated. Its deserts and its fertile areas were alike engulfed and made into warrens of humanity, administrative jungles, computerized elaborations, vast storehouses of food and replacement parts. its mountain ranges were beaten down; its chasms filled in. The city's endless corridors burrowed under the continental shelves and the oceans were turned into huge underground aquacultural cisterns – the only (and insufficient native source of food and minerals. The connections with the Outer Worlds, from which Trantor obtained the resources it required, depended upon its thousand spaceports, its ten thousand warships, its hundred thousand merchant ships, its million space freighters. No city so vast was ever recycled so tightly. No planet in the Galaxy had ever made so much use of solar power or went to such extremes to rid itself of waste heat. Glittering radiators stretched up into the thin upper atmosphere upon the nightside and were withdrawn into the metal city on the dayside. As the planet turned, the radiators rose as night progressively fell around the world and sank as day progressively broke. So Trantor always had an artificial asymmetry that was almost its symbol. At this peak, Trantor ran the Empire? It ran it poorly, but nothing could have run the Empire well. The Empire was too large to be run from a single world – even under the most dynamic of Emperors. How could Trantor have helped but run it poorly when, in the ages of decay, the Imperial crown was traded back and forth by sly politicians and foolish incompetents and the bureaucracy had become a subculture of corruptibles? But even at its worst, there was some self-propelled worth to the machinery. The Galactic Empire could not have been run without Trantor. The Empire crumbled steadily, but as long as Trantor remained Trantor, a core of the Empire remained and it retained an air of pride, of millennia, of tradition and power and – exaltation. Only when the unthinkable happened – when Trantor finally fell and was sacked; when its citizens were killed by the millions and left to starve by the billions; when its mighty metal coating was scarred and punctured and fused by the attack of the â€Å"barbarian† fleet – only then was the Empire considered to have fallen. The surviving remnants on the once-great world undid further what had been left and, in a generation, Trantor was transformed from the greatest planet the human race had ever seen to an inconceivable tangle of ruins. That had been nearly two and a half centuries ago. In the rest of the Galaxy, Trantor-as-it-had-been still was not forgotten. It would live forever as the favored site of historical novels, the favored symbol and memory of the past, the favored word for sayings such as â€Å"All starships land on Trantor,† â€Å"Like looking for a person in Trantor,† and â€Å"No more alike than this and Trantor.† In all the rest of the Galaxy – But that was not true on Trantor itself! Here the old Trantor was forgotten. The surface metal seas gone, almost everywhere. Trantor was now a sparsely settled world of self-sufficient farmers, a place where trading ships rarely came and were not particularly welcome when they did come. The very word â€Å"Trantor,† though still in official use, had dropped out of popular speech. By present-day Trantorians, it was called â€Å"Hame,† which in their dialect was what would be called â€Å"Home† in Galactic Standard. Quindor Shandess thought of all this and much more as he sat quietly in a welcome state of half-drowse, in which he could allow his mind to run along a self-propelled and unorganized stream of thought. He had been First Speaker of the Second Foundation for eighteen years, and he might well bold on for ten or twelve years more if his mind remained reasonably vigorous and if he could continue to fight the political wars. He was the analog, the mirror image, of the Mayor of Terminus, who ruled over the First Foundation, but how different they were in every respect. The Mayor of Terminus was known to all the Galaxy and the First Foundation was therefore simply â€Å"the Foundation† to all the worlds. The First Speaker of the Second Foundation was known only to his associates. And yet it was the Second Foundation, under himself and his predecessors, who held the real power. The First Foundation was supreme in the realm of physical power, of technology, of war weapons. The Second Foundation was supreme in the realm of mental power, of the mind, of the ability to control. In any conflict between the two, what would it matter how many ships and weapons the First Foundation disposed of, if the Second Foundation could control the minds of those who controlled the ships and weapons? But how long could he revel in this realization of secret power? He was the twenty-fifth First Speaker and his incumbency was already a shade longer than average. Ought he, perhaps, not be too keen on holding on and keeping out the younger aspirants? There was Speaker Gendibal, the keenest and newest at the Table. Tonight they would spend time together and Shandess looked forward to it. Ought he look forward also to Gendibal's possible accession some day? The answer to the question was that Shandess had no real thought of leaving his post. He enjoyed it too much. He sat there, in his old age, still perfectly capable of performing his duties. His hair was gray, but it had always been light in color and he wore it cut an inch long so that the color scarcely mattered. His eyes were a faded blue and his clothing conformed to the drab styling of the Trantorian farmers. The First Speaker could, if he wished, pass among the Hamish people as one of them, but his hidden power nevertheless existed. He could choose to focus his eyes and mind at any time and they would then act according to his will and recall nothing about it afterward. It rarely happened. Almost never. The Golden Rule of the Second Foundation was, â€Å"Do nothing unless you must, and when you must act – hesitate.† The First Speaker sighed softly. Living in the old University, with the brooding grandeur of the ruins of the Imperial Palace not too far distant, made one wonder on occasion how Golden the Rule might be. In the days of the Great Sack, the Golden Rule had been strained to the breaking point. There was no way of saving Trantor without sacrificing the Seldon Plan for establishing a Second Empire. It would have been humane to spare the forty-five billion, but they could not have been spared without retention of the core of the First Empire and that would have only delayed the reckoning. If would have led to a greater destruction some centuries later and perhaps no Second Empire ever The early First Speakers had worked over the clearly foreseen Sack for decades but had found no solution – no way of assuring both the salvation of Trantor and the eventual establishment of the Second Empire. The lesser evil had to be chosen and Trantor had died! The Second Foundatianers of the time had managed – by the narrowest of margins – to save the University/Library complex and there had been guilt forever after because of that, too. Though no one had ever demonstrated that saving the complex had led to the of the Mule, there was always the intuition that there was a connection. How nearly that had wrecked everything! Yet following the decades of the Sack acrd the Mule came the Golden Age of the Second Foundation. Prior to that, for over two and a half centuries after Seldon's death, the Second Foundation had burrowed like moles into the Library, intent only on staying out of the way of the Imperials. They served as librarians in a decaying society that cared less and less for the ever-more-misnamed Galactic Library, which fell into the desuetude that best suited the purpose of the Second Foundationers. It was an ignoble life. They merely conserved the Plan, while out at the end of the Galaxy, the First Foundation fought for its life against always greater enemies with neither help from the Second Foundation nor any real knowledge of it. It was the Great Sack that liberated the Second Foundation – another reason (young Gendibal – who had courage – had recently said that it was the chief reason) why the Sack was allowed to proceed. After the Great Sack, the Empire was gone and, in all the later times, the Trantorian survivors never trespassed on Second Foundation territory uninvited. The Second Foundationers saw to it that the University/Library complex which had survived the Sack also survived the Great Renewal. The ruins of the Palace were preserved, too. The metal was gone over almost all the rest of the world. The great and endless corridors were covered up, filled in, twisted, destroyed, ignored; all under rock and soil – all except here, where metal still surrounded the ancient open places. It might be viewed as a grand memorial of greatness, the sepulcher of Empire, but to the Trantorians – the Hamish people – these were haunted places, filled with ghosts, not to be stirred. Only the Second Foundationers ever set foot in the ancient corridors or touched the titanium gleam. And even so, all had nearly come to nothing because of the Mule. The Mule had actually been on Trantor. What if he had found out the nature of the world he had been standing on? His physical weapons were far greater than those at the disposal of the Second Foundation, his mental weapons almost as great. The Second Foundation would have been hampered always by the necessity of doing nothing but what they must, and by the knowledge that almost any hope of tinning the immediate fight might portend a greater eventual loss. Had it not been for Banta Darell and her swift moment of action. And that, too, had been without the help of the Second Foundation? And then – the Golden age, when somehow the First Speakers of the time found ways of becoming active, stopping the Mule in his career of conquest, controlling his mind at last; and then stopping the First Foundation itself when it grew wary and overcurious concerning the nature and identity of the Second Foundation. There was Preem Palver, nineteenth First Speaker and greatest of them all, who had managed to put an end to all danger – not without terrible sacrifice – and who had rescued the Seldon Plan. Now, for a hundred and twenty years, the Second Foundation was again as it once had been, hiding in a haunted portion of Trantor. They were hiding no longer from the Imperials, but from the First Foundation still – a First Foundation almost as large as the Galactic Empire had been and even greater in technological expertise. The First Speaker's eyes closed in the pleasant warmth and he passed into that never-never state of relaxing hallucinatory experiences that were not quite dreams and not quite conscious thought. Enough of gloom. All would be well. Trantor was still capital of the Galaxy, for the Second Foundation was here and it was mightier and more in control than ever the Emperor had been. The First Foundation would be contained and guided and would move correctly. However formidable their ships and weapons, they could do nothing as long as key leaders could be, at need, mentally controlled. And the Second Empire would come, but it would not be like the first. It would be a Federated Empire, with its parts possessing considerable self-rule, so that there would be none of the apparent strength and actual weakness of a unitary, centralized government. The new Empire would be looser, more pliant, more flexible, more capable of withstanding strain, and it would be guided always – always – by the hidden men and women of the Second Foundation. Trantor would then be still the capital, more powerful with its forty thousand psychohistorians than ever it had been with its forty-five billion – The First Speaker snapped awake. The sun was lower in the sky. Had he been mumbling? Had he said anything aloud? If the Second Foundation had to know much and say little, the ruling Speakers had to know mere and say less, and the First Speaker lead to know mist and say least. He smiled wryly. It was always so tempting to become a Trantorian patriot – to see the whole purpose of the Second Empire as that of bringing about Trantorian hegemony. Seldon had warned of it; he had foreseen even that, five centuries before it could come to pass. The First Speaker had not slept too long, however. It was not yet time for Gendibal's audience. Shandess was looking forward to that private meeting. Gendibal was young enough to look at the Plan with new eyes, and keen enough to see what others might not. And it was not beyond possibility that Shandess would learn from what the youngster had to say. No one would ever be certain how much Preem Palver – the great Palver himself – had profited from that day when the young Kol Benjoam, not yet thirty, came to talk to him about possible ways of handling the First Foundation. Benjoam, who was later recognized as the greatest theorist since Seldon, never spoke of that audience in later years, but eventually he became the twenty-first First Speaker. There were some who credited Benjoam, rather than Palver, for the great accomplishments of Palver's administration. Shandess amused himself with the thought of what Gendibal might say. It was traditional that keen youngsters, confronting the First Speaker alone for the first time, would place their entire thesis in the first sentence. And surely they would not ask for that precious first audience for something trivial – something that might ruin their entire subsequent career by convincing the First Speaker they were lightweights. Four hours later, Gendibal faced him. The young man showed no sign of nervousness. He waited calmly for Shandess to speak first. Shandess said, â€Å"You have asked for a private audience, Speaker, on a matter of importance. Could you please summarize the matter for me?† And Gendibal, speaking quietly, almost as though he were describing what he had just eaten at dinner, said, â€Å"First Speaker, the Seldon Plan is meaningless!† Stor Gendibal did not require the evidence of others to give him a sense of worth. He could not recall a time when he did not know himself to be unusual. He had been recruited for the Second Foundation when he was only a ten-year-old boy by an agent who had recognized the potentialities of his mind. He had then done remarkably well at his studies and had taken to psychohistory as a spaceship responds to a gravitational field. Psychohistory had pulled at him and he had curved toward it, reading Seldon's text on the fundamentals when others his age were merely trying to handle differential equations. When he was fifteen, he entered Trantor's Galactic University (as the University of Trantor had been officially renamed), after an interview during which, when asked what his ambitions were, he had answered firmly, â€Å"To be First Speaker before I am forty.† He had not bothered to aim for the First Speaker's chair without qualification. To gain it, one way or another, seemed to him to be a certainty. It was to do it in youth that seemed to him to be the goal. Even Preem Palver bad been forty-two on his accession. The interviewer's expression had flickered when Gendibal had said that, but the young man already had the feel of psycholanguage and could interpret that flicker. He knew, as certainly as though the interviewer had announced it, that a small notation would go on his records to the effect that he would be difficult to handle. Well, of course! Gendibal intended to be difficult to handle. He was thirty now. He would be thirty-one in a matter of two months and he was already a member of the Council of Speakers. He had nine years, at most, to become First Speaker and he knew he would make it. This audience with the present First Speaker was crucial to his plans and, laboring to present precisely the proper impression, he had. spared no effort to polish his command of psycholanguage. When two Speakers of the Second Foundation communicate with each other, the language is like no other in the Galaxy. It is as much a language of fleeting gestures as of words, as much a matter of detected mental – change patterns as anything else. An outsider would hear little or nothing, but in a short time, much in the way of thought would be exchanged and the communication would be unreportable in its literal form to anyone but still another Speaker. The language of Speakers had its advantage in speed and in infinite delicacy, but it had the disadvantage of making it almost impossible to mask true opinion. Gendibal knew his own opinion of the First Speaker. He felt the First Speaker to be a man past his mental prime. The First Speaker – in Gendibal's assessment – expected no crisis, was not trained to meet one, and lacked the sharpness to deal with one if it appeared. With all Shandess's goodwill and amiability, he was the stuff of which disaster was made. All of this Gendibal had to hide not merely from words, gestures, and facial expressions, but even from his thoughts. He knew no way of doing so efficiently enough to keep the First Speaker from catching a whiff of it. Nor could Gendibal avoid knowing something of the First Speaker's feeling toward him. Through bonhomie and goodwill – quite apparent and reasonably sincere – Gendibal could feel the distant edge of condescension and amusement, and tightened his own mental grip to avoid revealing any resentment in return – or as little as possible. The First Speaker smiled and leaned back in his chair. He did not actually lift his feet to the desk top, but he got across just the right mixture of self-assured ease and informal friendship – just enough of each to leave Gendibal uncertain as to the effect of his statement. Since Gendibal had not been invited to sit down, the actions and attitudes available to him that might be designed to minimize the uncertainty were limited. It was impossible that the First Speaker did not understand this. Shandess said, â€Å"The Seldon Plan is meaningless? What a remarkable statement! Have you looked at the Prime Radiant lately, Speaker Gendibal?† â€Å"I study it frequently, First Speaker. It is my duty to do so and my pleasure as well.† â€Å"Do you, by any chance, study only those portions of it that fall under your purview, now and then? Do you observe it in microfashion – an equation system here, an adjustment rivulet there? Highly important, of course, but I have always thought it an excellent occasional exercise to observe the whole course. Studying the Prime Radiant, acre by acre, has its uses – but observing it as a continent is inspirational. To tell you the truth, Speaker, I have not done it for a long time myself. Would you join me?† Gendibal dared not pause too long. It had to be done, and it must be done easily and pleasantly or it might as well not be done. â€Å"It would be an honor and a pleasure, First Speaker.† The First Speaker depressed a lever on the side of his desk. T here was one such in the office of every Speaker and the one in Gendibal's office was in no way inferior to that of the First Speaker. The Second Foundation was an equalitarian society in all its surface manifestations – the unimportant ones. In fact, the only official prerogative of the First Speaker was that which was explicit in his title he always spoke first. The room grew dark with the depression of the lever but, almost at once, the darkness lifted into a pearly dimness. Both long walls turned faintly creamy, then brighter and whiter, and finally there appeared neatly printed equations – so small that they could not be easily read. â€Å"If you have no objections,† said the First Speaker, making it quite clear that there would be none allowed, â€Å"we will reduce the magnification in order to see as much at one time as we can.† The neat printing shrank down into fine hairlines, faint black meanderings over the pearly background. The First Speaker touched the keys of the small console built into the arm of his chair. â€Å"We'll bring it back to the start – to the lifetime of Hari Seldon – and we'll adjust it to a small forward movement. We'll shutter it so that we can only see a decade of development at a time. It gives one a wonderful feeling of the flow of history, with no distractions by the details. I wonder if you have ever done this.† â€Å"Never exactly this way, First Speaker.† â€Å"You should. It's a marvelous feeling. Observe the sparseness of the black tracery at the start. There was not much chance for alternatives in the first few decades. The branch points, however, increase exponentially with time. Were it not for the fact that, as soon as a particular branch is taken, there is an extinction of a vast array of others in its future, all would soon become unmanageable. Of course, in dealing with the future, we must be careful what extinctions we rely upon.† â€Å"I know, First Speaker.† There was a touch of dryness in Gendibal's response that he could not quire remove. The First Speaker did not respond to it. â€Å"Notice the winding lines of symbols in red. There is a pattern to them. To all appearances, they should exist randomly, as even Speaker earns his place by adding refinements to Seldon's original Plan. It would seem there is no way, after all, of predicting where a refinement can be added easily or where a particular Speaker will find his interests or his ability tending, and yet I have long suspected that the admixture of Seldon Black and Speaker Red follows a strict law that is strongly dependent on time and on very little else.† Gendibal watched as the years passed and as the black and red hairlines made an almost hypnotic interlacing pattern. The pattern meant nothing in itself, of course. What counted were the symbols of which it was composed. Here and there a bright-blue rivulet made its appearance, bellying out; branching, and becoming prominent, then falling in upon itself and fading into the black or red. The First Speaker said, â€Å"Deviation Blue,† and the feeling of distaste, originating in each, filled the space between them. â€Å"We catch it over and over, and we'll be coming to the Century of Deviations eventually.† They did. One could tell precisely when the shattering phonemenon of the Mule momentarily filled the Galaxy, as the Prime Radiant suddenly grew thick with branching rivulets of blue – more starting than could be closed down – until the room itself seemed to turn blue as the lines thickened and marked the wall with brighter and brighter pollution. (It was the only word.) It reached its peak and then faded, thinned, and came together for a long century before it trickled to its end at last. When it was gone, and when the Plan had returned to black and red, it was clear that Preem Palver's hand had been there. Onward, onward â€Å"That's the present,† said the First Speaker comfortably. Onward, onward Then a narrowing into a veritable knot of close-knit black with little red in it. â€Å"That's the establishment of the Second Empire,† said the First Speaker. He shut off the Prime Radiant and the room was bathed in ordinary light. Gendibal said, â€Å"That was an emotional experience.† â€Å"Yes,† smiled the First Speaker, â€Å"and you are careful not to identify the emotion, as far as you can manage to fail to identify it. It doesn't matter. Let me make the points I wish to make. â€Å"You will notice, first, the all-but-complete absence of Deviation Blue after the time of Preem Palver – over the last twelve decades, in other words. You will notice that there are no reasonable probabilities of Deviations above the fifth-class over the next five centuries. You will notice, too, that we have begun extending the refinements of psychohistory beyond the establishment of the Second Empire. As you undoubtedly know, Hari Seldon – although a transcendent genius – is not, and could not, be all-knowing. We have improved on him. We know more about psychohistory than he could possibly have known. â€Å"Seldon ended his calculations with the Second Empire and we have continued beyond it. Indeed, if I may say so without offense, the new Hyper-Plan that goes past the establishment of the Second Empire is very largely my doing and has earned me my present post. â€Å"I tell you all this so that you can spare me unnecessary talk. With all this, how do you manage to conclude that the Seldon Plan is meaningless? It is without flaw. The mere fact that it survived the Century of Deviations – with all due respect to Palver's genius – is the best evidence we have that it is without flaw. Where is its weakness, young man, that you should brand the Plan as meaningless?† Gendibal stood stiffly upright. â€Å"You are right, First Speaker. The Seldon Plan has no flaw.† â€Å"You withdraw your remark, then?† â€Å"No, First Speaker. Its lack of flaw is its flaw. Its flawlessness is fatal!† The First Speaker regarded Gendibal with equanimity. He had learned to control his expressions and it amused him to watch Gendibal's ineptness in this respect. At every exchange, the young man did his best to hide his feelings, but each time, he exposed them completely. Shandess studied him dispassionately. He was a thin young man, not much above the middle height, with thin lips and bony, restless hands. He had dark, humorless eyes that tended to smolder. He would be, the First Speaker knew, a hard person to talk out of his convictions. â€Å"You speak in paradoxes, Speaker,† he said. â€Å"It sounds like a paradox, First Speaker, because there is so much about Seldon's Plan that we take for granted and accept in so unquestioning a manner.† â€Å"And what is it you question, then?† â€Å"The Plan's very basis. We all know that the Plan will not work if its nature – or even its existence – is known to too many of those whose behavior it is designed to predict.† â€Å"I believe Hari Seldon understood that. I even believe he made it one of his two fundamental axioms of psychohistory.† â€Å"He did not anticipate the Mule, First Speaker, and therefore he could not anticipate the extent to which the Second Foundation would become an obsession with the people of the First Foundation, once they had been shown its importance by the Mule.† â€Å"Hari Seldon†¦Ã¢â‚¬  and for one moment, the First Speaker shuddered and fell silent. Hari Seldon's physical appearance was known to all the members of the Second Foundation. Reproductions of him in two and in three dimensions, photographic and holographic, in bas-relief and in the round, sitting and standing, were ubiquitous. They all represented him in the last few years of his life. All were of an old and benign man, face wrinkled with the wisdom of the aged, symbolizing the quintessence of well-ripened genius. But the First Speaker now recalled seeing a photograph reputed to be Seldon as a young man. The photograph was neglected, since the thought of a young Seldon was almost a contradiction in terms. Yet Shandess had seen it, and the thought had suddenly come to him that Stor Gendibal looked remarkably like the young Seldon. Ridiculous? It was the sort of superstition that afflicted everyone, now and then, however rational they might be. He was deceived by a fugitive similarity. If he had the photograph before him, he would see at once that the similarity was an illusion. Yet why should that silly thought have occurred to him now? He recovered. It had been a momentary quaver – a transient derailment of thought – too brief to be noticed by anyone but a Speaker. Gendibal might interpret it as he pleased. â€Å"Hari Seldon,† he said very firmly the second time, â€Å"knew well that there were an infinite number of possibilities he could not foresee, and it was for that reason that he set up the Second Foundation. We did not foresee the Mule either, but tie recognized him once he was upon us and we stopped him. We did not foresee the subsequent obsession of the First Foundation with ourselves, but we saw it when it came and we stopped it. What is it about this that you can possibly find fault with?† â€Å"For one thing,† said Gendibal, â€Å"the obsession of the First Foundation with us is not yet over.† There was a distinct ebb in the deference with which Gendibal had been speaking. He had noted the quaver in the First Speaker's voice (Shandess decided) and had interpreted it as uncertainty. That had to be countered. The First Speaker said briskly, â€Å"Let me anticipate. There would be people on the First Foundation, who – comparing the hectic difficulties of the first nearly four centuries of existence with the placidity of the last twelve decades – will come to the conclusion that this cannot be unless the Second Foundation is taking good care of the Plan – and, of course, they will be right in so concluding. They will decide that the Second Foundation may not have been destroyed after all – and, of course, they will be right in so deciding. In fact, we've received reports that there is a young man on the First Foundation's capital world of Terminus, an official of their government, who is quite convinced of all this. – I forget his name†¦Ã¢â‚¬  â€Å"Golan Trevize,† said Gendibal softly. â€Å"It was I who first noted the matter in the reports, and it was I who directed the matter to your office.† â€Å"Oh?† said the First Speaker with exaggerated politeness. â€Å"And how did your attention come to be focused on him?† â€Å"One of our agents on Terminus sent in a tedious report on the newly elected members of their Council – a perfectly routine matter usually sent to and ignored by all Speakers. This one caught my eye because of the nature of the description of one new Councilman, Golan Trevize. From the description, he seemed unusually self-assured and combative.† â€Å"You recognized a kindred spirit, did you?† â€Å"Not at all,† said Gendibal, stiffly. â€Å"He seemed a reckless person who enjoyed doing ridiculous things, a description which does not apply to me. In any case, I directed an in-depth study. It did not take long for me to decide that he would have made good material for us if he had been recruited at an early age.† â€Å"Perhaps,† said the First Speaker, â€Å"but you know that we do not recruit on Terminus.† â€Å"I know that well. In any case, even without our training, he has an unusual intuition. It is, of course, thoroughly undisciplined. I was, therefore. Not particularly surprised that he ad grasped the fact that the Second Foundation still exists. I felt it important enough, however, to direct a memo on the matter to your office.† â€Å"And I take it from your manner that there is a new development?† â€Å"Having grasped the fact that we still exist, thanks to his highly developed intuitive abilities, he then used it in a characteristically undisciplined fashion and has, as a result, been exiled from Terminus.† The First Speaker lifted his eyebrows. â€Å"You stop suddenly. You want me to interpret the significance. Without using my computer, let me mentally apply a rough approximation of Seldon's equations and guess that a shrewd Mayor, capable of suspecting that the Second Foundation exists, prefers not to have an undisciplined individual shout it to the Galaxy and thus alert said Second Foundation to the danger. I take it Branno the Bronze decided that Terminus is safer with Trevize off the planet.† â€Å"She might have imprisoned Trevize or had him quietly assassinated.† â€Å"The equations are not reliable when applied to individuals, as you well know. They deal only with humanity in mass. Individual behavior is therefore unpredictable and it is possible to assume that the Mayor is a humane individual who feels imprisonment, let alone assassination, is unmerciful.† Gendibal said nothing for a while. It was an eloquent nothing, and he maintained it just long enough for the First Speaker to grow uncertain of himself but not so long as to induce a defensive anger. He timed it to the second and then he said, â€Å"That is not my interpretation. I believe that Trevize, at this moment, represents the cutting edge of the greatest threat to the Second Foundation in its history – a greater danger even than the Mule!† Gendibal was satisfied. The force of the statement had worked well. The First Speaker had not expected it and was caught off-balance. From this moment, the whip hard was Gendibal's. If he had any doubt of that at all, it vanished with Shandess's next remark. â€Å"Does this have anything to do with your contention that Seldon's Plan is meaningless?† Gendibal gambled on complete certainty, driving in with a didacticism that would not allow the First Speaker to recover. He said, â€Å"First Speaker, it is an article of faith that it was Preem Palver who restored the Plan to its course after the wild aberrance of the Century of Deviations. Study the Prime Radiant and you will see that the Deviations did not disappear till two decades after Palver's death and that not one Deviation has appeared since. The credit might rest with the First Speakers since Palver, but that is improb – â€Å"Improbable? Granted none of us have been Palvers, but – why â€Å"Will you allow me to demonstrate, First Speaker? Using the mathematics of psychohistory, I can clearly show that the chances of total disappearance of Deviation are too microscopically small to have taken place through anything the Second Foundation can do. You need not allow me if you lack the time or the desire for the demonstration, which will take half an hour of close attention. I can, as an alternative, call for a full meeting of the Speaker's Table and demonstrate it there. But that would mean a loss of time for me and unnecessary controversy.† â€Å"Yes, and a possible loss of face for me. – Demonstrate the matter to me now. But a word of warning.† The First Speaker was making a heroic effort to recover. â€Å"If what you show me is worthless, I will not forget that.† â€Å"If it proves worthless,† said Gendibal with an effortless pride that overrode the other, â€Å"you will have my resignation on the spot.† It took, actually, considerably more than half an hour, for the First Speaker questioned the mathematics with near-savage intensity. Gendibal made up some of the time by his smooth use of his MicroRadiant. The device – which could locate any portion of the vast Plan holographically and with required n either wall nor desk sized console – had come into use only a decade ago and the First Speaker had never learned the knack of handling it. Gendibal was aware of that. The First Speaker knew that he was. Gendibal hooked it over his rigth thumb and manipulated it with his four fingers, using his hand deliberately as though it were a musical instrument. (Indeed, he had written a small paper on the analogies.) The equations Gendibal produced (and found with sure ease) moved back and forth snakily to accompany his commentary. He could obtain definitions, if necessary; set up axioms; and produce graphics, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional (to say nothing of projections of multidimensional relationships). Gendibal's commentary was clear and incisive and the First Speaker abandoned the game. He was won over and said, â€Å"I do not recall having seen an analysis of this nature. Whose work is it?† â€Å"First Speaker, it is my own. I have published the basic mathematics involved.† â€Å"Very clever, Speaker Gendibal. Something like this will put you in line for the First Speakership, should I die – or retire.† â€Å"I have given that matter no thought, First Speaker – but since there's no chance of your believing that, I withdraw the comment. I have given it thought and I hope I will be First Speaker, since whoever succeeds to the post must follow a procedure that only I see clearly.† â€Å"Yes,† said the First Speaker, â€Å"inappropriate modesty can be very dangerous. What procedure? Perhaps the present First Speaker may follow it, too. If I am too old to have made the creative leap you have, I am not so old that I cannot follow your direction.† It was a graceful surrender and Gendibal's heart warned, rather unexpectedly, toward the older man, even as he realized that this was precisely the First Speaker's intention. â€Å"Thank you, First Speaker, for I will need your help badly. I cannot expect to sway the Table without your enlightened leadership.† (Grace for grace.) â€Å"I assume, then, that you have already seen from what I have demonstrated that it is impossible for the Century of Deviations to have been corrected under our policies or for all Deviations to have ceased since then.† â€Å"This is clear to me,† said the First Speaker. â€Å"If your mathematics is correct, then in order for the Plan to have recovered as it did and to work as perfectly as it seems to be working, it would be necessary for us to be able to predict the reactions of small groups of people – even of individuals – with some degree of assurance.† â€Å"Quite so. Since the mathematics of psychohistory does not allow this, the Deviations should not have vanished and, even more so, should not have remained absent. You see, then, what I meant when I said earlier that the flaw in the Seldon Plan was its flawlessness.† The First Speaker said, â€Å"Either the Seldon Plan does possess Deviations, then, or there is something wrong in your mathematics. Since I must admit that the Seldon Plan has not shown Deviations in a century and more, it follows that there is something wrong with your mathematics – except that I detected no fallacies or missteps.† â€Å"You do wrong,† said Gendibal, â€Å"to exclude a third alternative. It is quite possible for the Seldon Plan to possess no Deviations and yet for there to be nothing wrong in my mathematics when it predicts that to be impossible.† â€Å"I fail to see the third alternative.† â€Å"Suppose the Seldon Plan is being controlled by means of a psychohistorical method so advanced that the reactions of small groups of people – even perhaps of individual persons – can be predicted, a method that we of the Second Foundation do not possess. Then, and only then, my mathematics would predict that the Seldon Plan should indeed experience no Deviations?† For a while (by Second Foundation standards) the First Speaker made no response. He said, â€Å"There is no such advanced psychohistorical method that is known to me or, I am certain from your manner, to you. If you and I know of none, the chance that any other Speaker, or any group of Speakers, has developed such a micropsychohistory – if I may call it that – and has kept it secret from the rest of the Table is infinitesimally small. Don't you agree?† â€Å"I agree.† â€Å"Then either your analysis is wrong or else micropsychohistory is in the hands of some group outside the Second Foundation.† â€Å"Exactly, First Speaker, the latter alternative must be correct.† â€Å"Can you demonstrate the truth of such a statement?† â€Å"I cannot, in any formal way; but consider. – Has there not already been a person who could affect the Seldon Plan by dealing with individual people?† â€Å"I presume you are referring to the Mule.† â€Å"Yes, certainly.† â€Å"The Mule could only disrupt. The problem here is that the Seldon Plan is working too well, considerably closer to perfection than your mathematics would allow. You would need an Anti-Mule – someone who is as capable of overriding the Plan as the Mule was, but who acts for the opposite motive – overriding not to disrupt but to perfect.† â€Å"Exactly, First Speaker. I wish I had thought of that expression. What was the Mule? A mutant. But where did he come from? How did he come to be? no one really knows. Might there not be more?† â€Å"Apparently not. The one thing that is best known about the Mule is that he was sterile. Hence his name. Or do you think that is a myth?† â€Å"I am not referring to descendants of the Mule. Might it not be that the Mule was an aberrant member of what is – or has now become – a sizable group of people with Mulish powers who – for some reason of their own – are not disrupting the Seldon Plan but supporting it?† â€Å"Why in the Galaxy should they support it?† â€Å"Why do we support it? We plan a Second Empire in which we – or, rather, our intellectual descendants – will be the decision makers. If, some other group is supporting the Plan even more efficiently than we are, they cannot be planning to leave the decision – making to us. They will make the decisions – but to what end? Ought we not try to find out what kind of a Second Empire they are sweeping us into?† â€Å"And how do you propose to find out?† â€Å"Well, why has the Mayor of Terminus exiled Golan Trevize? By doing so, she allows a possibly dangerous person to move freely about the Galaxy. That she does it out of motives of humanity, I cannot believe. Historically the rulers of the First Foundation have always acted realistically, which means, usually, without regard for ‘morality.' One of their heroes – Salvor Hardin – counseled against morality, in fact. No, I think the Mayor acted under compulsion from agents of the Anti-Mules, to use your phrase. I think Trevize has been recruited by them and I think he is the spearhead of danger to us. Deadly danger.† And the First Speaker said, â€Å"By Seldon, you may be right. But how will we ever convince the Table of this?† â€Å"First Speaker, you underestimate your eminence.†

Economic development Essay

Today, education is the most important tool for the development of society. There is a direct correlation between education and development of society. The countries that realize this fact, giving the required importance for their education system, have become highly developed. Education should be promoted since it is the most important factor for the development of a country. The promotion of the education is depended on the factors like literacy rate in a country, schooling rate in the primary, secondary and higher education, proliferation of training technologies, and the quality of the education. This promotion process should be considered as a necessary condition for economic, technological and social development for a nation. In other words, the process of a successful development depends on the fact of gibing the society a conscious of change which is highly connected to education. Fist of all, education enlightens people. The educated person is the person who improves oneself. A person increases her/his level of knowledge through education, so he/she has a better understanding and analyzing of daily matters and an agenda. That person can make logical deductions based on the knowledge he gains and refuses the traditional corrupted understanding. Individual’s ability of the interpretation of knowledge through one’s intelligence and skills is supported by education; accordingly, increasing the creativity and intellectual thinking. An individual can learn about different cultures, lifestyles and history from past to present; hence education provides universal perspective to an individual. The most important differential of uneducated person is having a narrow point of view. A person should be educated in order to learn taking objective decisions and being liberated from the social pressure. Besides, educated people respect the rights of others and they have a fair understanding of the concept of equality, right to life, and right to property. The reason why developed countries show highly respect to the individual rights is that the education level of the country is being fairly high. On the other hand, the reason why there are deep inequalities between women and men or rich and poor in under-developed countries is that the education level in there is being fairly low. Besides, there is also a lack of respect to the human rights in these under-developed countries due to low education level. Secondly, education affects the development of science and technology of a country. Technological developments increase by knowledge and research which is provided by education. It is the advancement and proliferation of technology that makes countries developing by the production of knowledge, schooling of creative minds leads countries develop economically, technologically and politically. Education, advancement of technology and development are in a circle movement which produces itself. Cakmak also says that as a result of the creation of science and technology, mobility of scientific knowledge, and nurturing of individuals with creative minds, countries have experienced important economic and political changes which lead to infinitive competition among them in the fields of education, development and innovation (Cakmak O. 2008). In addition, developed countries use technology as a part of their education system. Thus, every student can follow technology and learn about the newest advancements which lead them learn better and improve their intelligence. Finally, education leads knowledge turn into money that improves the economy of a country. Educated people knowing to learn how to invest, produce, expand the business adjusts and improves the economy causing the increase of gross domestic product per capita. Education also gives more job opportunities to people in the business sector. According to OECD, the effect of education to the economic development is proved in the researches of economic growth in 1960s. The researches show that contribution of education to the economic growths is really important and this percentage differs as %7 in England, %15 in USA, %14 in Belgium, %16 in Argentina, and %25 in Canada (OECD, 2005). Some may argue that education does not affect the economic development of a country. There are lots of uneducated but successful business men. People can learn how to run a business without an education. To illustrate, â€Å"Sak? p Sabanc? , who is the founder and chairman of the Sabanc? Holding due to the reason suffering from pneumonia three successive years, had to leave the high school and start to work in BOSSA Flour Factory in 1950 with a wage of 50 TL† (NTV Haber). Considering his life, it is obvious that one can learn how to run a business without education. Hence, it is not only education but also experience that makes one successful in business. All in all, economic, social and technologic development of a country is highly related to the education level of that country. Without education, a country can not develop. The only way of individual’s enlighten and learning to use knowledge, and increase of technology is education. Thus, education should be promoted since it is the most important factor for the development of a country. Oznur Sakar.

Thoreaus’ Campaign against Blind Obedience to the Government

Led by his disgust against the slavery and the war of the United States against Mexico, Henry David Thoreau (1848) called on men and women to stand up against a government that perpetuates injustices through his essay Resistance to Civil Government, also known as Civil Disobedience. The central tenet of this essay is his pronouncement that â€Å"that government is best, which governs least. † He expounded on the role of the government as being more harmful than helpful to the overall condition of the people in the society.He said that even democracy is not an answer to this, because democracy simply highlights the decision of the majority, which is not necessarily seasoned by wisdom. One of the important expressions of the will of the government is through its laws. Thoreau, however, favors the cultivation of respect towards what is right since the law does not make humans more just. In this essay, he also used the metaphor of the machine in depicting the kind of agency the go vernment is.Moreover, he referred to people who blindly follow the government as robots without conscience. Thoreau also raised his voice against paying taxes and even voting for justice since, according to him, these activities only contribute to the injustices committed by the government. He conceded, however, that he is willing to pay taxes which will directly contribute to the upholding of his neighbor’s good.In a bold statement, he also called for the breaking of the law if the law is unjust. Being put in jail is but another means to assert one man’s freedom since the government cannot really take away from him who he is. Simple living is another value exemplified by Thoreau in his essay. By being simple, he does not have great anxieties. Thoreau’s essay has had far-reaching consequences and influence on subsequent leaders who used civil disobedience. Reference Thoreau, H. D. (1848). On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Retrieved 19 July 2007 from http://www.panarchy.org/thoreau/disobedience.1848.html.

How Does Poverty Affect Worldwide Development Essay

How does poverty affect worldwide development and the use of the Millennium Development Goals? The Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) are a group of goals created by the U.N, set to be achieved globally by 2015. There are eight different goals ranging from Gender Equality to Environmental Sustainability. The first goal is ‘To eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger’ and more specifically, Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day. By 2005, the global poverty rate declined from 46% in 1990 to 27%. Also, the number of people in developing regions living on less than $1.25 (US) a day declined from 1.8 billion in 1990 to 1.4 billion in 2005. This was very encouraging to the U.N. but then, the financial crisis hit. The economic crises sparked large declines in exports and slowed trade worldwide. Thankfully, the overall poverty rate is still expected to fall to 15 per cent by 2015.This translates into around 920 million people living under the poverty line which is half the number in 1990. –Singapore Singapore is most certainly a developed country as it has a booming economy and has completed every MDG. When the Millennium Development Goals were created in 2000, Singapore was already a very developed country and one of the biggest powers in Asia. One of Singapore’s main trades is tourism, and in 2010, Singapore welcomed 11.6 million visitors, which generated 18.8 billion dollars. In the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report released by the World Economic Forum, Singapore emerged top in the Asia-Pacific region, and was ranked 10th out of 139 world economies for competitiveness of the tourism sector. This just goes to show that Singapore is a key player in the world tourism sector and is up the top with Switzerland, Germany, France and Canada. There is very little data about poverty in Singapore as it can only be found in a small number of cases rather than tens of thousands of people. That being said, Singapore does have many poor and homeless people. Sadly, they are usually the elderly trying to look after themselves by busking or selling items off the streets. The Singapore government has implemented different action plans to counter this problem and has welfare programs that can help people in desperate need. Currently however, there are only 3000 families qualify. The average household income was at S$7,214 in 2010, which is more than enough for a family to afford basic necessities. However this data may not be accurate at representing the situation. The number may have been lifted significantly by the wealthy locals and expats living here. What this does is cover the fact that there may be families living on much less that stated. –Cambodia Cambodia is recognised as a developing country and needs assistance in completing MDG number 1. Cambodia has a lack of natural resources and a primitive industrial base causing agriculture to be a key part in its economy. Rice provides the staple diet and was Cambodia’s major export before 1970. Cambodia’s current GDP is $30.13 Billion U.S and the average income is $2000 U.S. This statement does not do the situation in Cambodia any justice. The people of Cambodia (usually in rural areas) suffer from 31% of the population being under the poverty line. This means that they live on less than $1.25 U.S a day. From 2003, when the Government of Cambodia commenced the MDG’s, Cambodia has made good progress in some goals and very limited in others. While there has been a significant improvement in poverty rates in urban areas, the rates are still very high in rural areas. Implementing MDG number 1 would greatly improve the lives of the Cambodians. In 1990, it is estimated that 29% of Cambodia was below the ‘Dollar a Day’ rate before falling to 19% in 2004. Poverty has stalled the development of Cambodia as the priority of the government is focused on the people in poverty. To complete the MDG’s especially goal number 1, would be very beneficial for the Cambodians as the government could focus on developing the different trades and work on creating a safer, sustainable and productive future. Comparison Singapore and Cambodia are both located in South East Asia, but there are some major differences between them. For example, Singapore has completed all of the 8 development goals, while Cambodia has only completed just one to date. Singapore’s G.D.P is $292.4 (US) Billion compared to Cambodia’s $30.13 Billion (US). Singapore is ranked 41st for G.D.P in the world compared to Cambodia at 108th. In the Human Development Index, Singapore is ranked 27th compared to Cambodia’s 124th. The Human Development Index (HDI) is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide. There are many different methods of comparing the two countries and in nearly all of them, Singapore and the other developed countries will be higher ranked. That is why we must globally focus on helping the developing countries and the Millennium Development Goals are a great system for identifying and solving the issues that are faced. How we can help Poverty and Hunger can cause large problems in development and they need to approached globally. This does not mean though, that the only people that can help are governments, charities and large corporations. No, individuals are able to help in many ways. From simple things like donating money to a charity or raising awareness to organizing a full blown fund-raising event. Every thought and donation counts. Due to technological advances and increased popularity of social networks in recent years, a new window of opportunity for awareness and donation has been created. Facebook is an example. Currently, the website can boast the number of memberships is over 1 billion users. This is a massive target audience and provides easy methods of awareness. Simple ideas such as creating a group or a page providing information and awareness on a chosen M.D.G or charity, then inviting your friends who then pass it on. Another interesting website is http://www.freerice.com/. This website gives the user questions on a variety of topics and states that they will donate 10 grains of rice to the World Food Program whenever you answer the question correctly. This is possible through the use of sponsors on the page. This is a great idea and it allows users to have a sense of physically