The Nature and Properties of Light

Scientific Laws / Properties / Terms / Theories

Plato's Five Stages of Government

Plato was a philosopher in Classical Greece. He wrote a book entitled The Republic in which he explains  his philosophy on subjects ranging from education to government. Plato constructed a model by which he proposed all governments evolve. He called it the Five Stages of Government.'The Republic' of Plato establishes a solid formation of the five types of government discovered by Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimentus. In 'The Republic' there is detailed discussion of five different kinds of government (and, by analogy, five different kinds of person), ranked in order from best to worst:The five types begin with aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and then ending with tyranny-anarchy. 

Aristocracy

In this form of government, the head of state is a king who is also a philosopher, a wise and just man who has a balanced soul and an experienced world view. This philosopher-king does not rule alone, but has three classes or categories of people below him, the ones that make up the remainder of his aristocratic state. The king is supported by the auxiliary class or the soldier class of people whose job it is to enforce law and order, and protect the state from military aggressors. The third class of people are the worker class, who have the right to produce goods and services and trade in them, own property and have the rights of citizens.

According to Plato, the aristocratic system of government is the highest form that man can attain as individuals living in a collective environment. Plato outlines the philosopher-king as a man who has been given the best education, his wisdom is tempered by worldly experience and he has a soul of gold, he rules by the virtue of his merit and ability and because he has transcended the bonds of petty politics. The second class of auxiliaries, or soldiers are also men of high learning and have souls of silver, while the working class have souls of iron, they work hard to provide for themselves and the nation. Plato is of the opinion that such aristocratic system works as a benevolent government, seeking out the traits of these different classes of people, and educating and training them in a way which is suitable for their future positions in life.

An aristocratic person is one whose rational, spirited, and appetitive souls work together properly. Such governments and people are the most genuine examples of true justice at the social and personal levels.

Timocracy

The second form of government described by Plato is the timocratic form, this is a notch below the high idealistic form of aristocracy and comes into existence chiefly due to the failure of the government to develop individuals who have souls of gold. This degeneration gives rise to a leader who has the ideals of an aristocrat but is also aware of the nature of power he has inherited. Plato theorizes that the Timocratic man is the son of the aristocratic philosopher king, having the education and learning of his father, but wanting to expand his power by way of war and conquest. It is a form of government in which ambition for honor, power and military glory motivates the rulers.

The ruling class and its auxiliaries in a timocracy are men of inferior nature, because they hold the values of honor and victory to be greater than the philosophical truths that govern life. The timocratic man will lead his armies in battle and conquer foreign lands, bringing back spoils of war to enrich his own empire. However, he is not by nature barbaric and respects his elders, the citizens of his country and takes measures to better their lives in whatever way he can.

A timocratic person is therefore someone who is more concerned with belligerently defending personal honor than with wisely choosing what is truly best.

Oligarchy

The oligarchic form of government is a further degeneration of the timocratic form. Here society is divided into two distinct classes, the rich and the poor. The rich have the reigns of administration in their hands and the poor are the ruled class. Although the aristocratic form of government as described by Plato expressly forbids the king from owning property (his needs are satisfied by the voluntary contributions of his people) the kings in a timocracy and oligarchy are allowed to do so. They accumulate wealth and spend it, often in excess, leading to a dependence on monetary policy and increase in the demand of wealth in the general population. The laws are therefore changed to enable only the ruling class to hold great wealth, thereby guaranteeing their supremacy over the worker class. This is how a timocracy turns into an oligarchy, where riches are concentrated in the hands of a few.

The rich men will consolidate power and wealth leaving the poor desperate for social emancipation, causing them to rebel against the oligarchs.
Also, the threat from foreign aggressors may be greater, as the governing class, due to their far lesser numbers will be unable to amass a huge army, they will be reluctant to arm the oppressed working class too, fearing a revolt.

By analogy, an oligarchic personality is someone whose every thought and action is devoted to the self-indulgent goal of amassing greater wealth.

Democracy

Plato relegates the democratic form of government near the bottom of his list. This is the further degeneration of oligarchy as the working class, pushed to the brink of poverty rebel against the oligarchs and establish a government based solely on the principle of freedom. Freedom is the only good worth having in a democracy and people do what they want, even breaking the law if they have the opportunity. According to Plato, this is akin to anarchy, where there are little if any laws governing men. The democratic man is therefore a free spirit, spending as he wills, running after his desires, and having no set goal or focus in life.

The parallel case of a democratic person is someone who is utterly controlled by desires, acknowledging no bounds of taste or virtue in the perpetual effort to achieve the momentary satisfaction that pleasure provides.

Tyranny

The last and the worst form of government is the tyrannical form, where all power is with one man, a leader who rises from the chaos of democracy, thirsting for power but not having the wisdom or learning to use it wisely. He will merely take advantage of the lawlessness to seize power and rule with an iron fist, often unjustly, and the populace will fear and loathe him but remain helpless. The tyrant will spend his time wasting the vast volume of his ill-gotten wealth, living under constant threat of assassination or rebellion.

A tyrranic person, then, must be one whose entire life is focussed upon the satisfaction of a single desire at the expense of everything else that truly matters. Governments and people of this last variety are most perfectly unjust, even though they may appear to be well-organized and effective.

Division of House

In parliamentary procedure, a division of the assembly (also division of the house or simply division) is a voting method in which the members of the assembly take a rising vote (stand up) or go to different parts of the chamber, literally dividing into groups indicating a vote in favour of or in opposition to a motion on the floor.

It is one of the forms in which the decision of the House is ascertained. Normally, when a motion is put to the House members for and against it indicate their opinion by saying "Aye" or "No" from their seats. The Chair goes by the voices and declares that the motion is either accepted or negatived by the House. If a member challenges the decision, the Chair orders that the lobbies be cleared. Then the division bell is rung and an entire network of bells installed in the various parts and rooms in Parliament House and Parliament House Annexe rings continuously for three and a half minutes. Members and Ministers rush to the Chamber from all sides. After the bell stops, all the doors to the Chamber are closed and nobody can enter or leave the Chamber till the division is over. Then the Chair puts the question for second time and declares whether in its opinion the "Ayes" or the "Noes", have it. If the opinion so declared is again challenged, the Chair asks the votes to be recorded by operating the Automatic Vote Recording Equipment. 

This was the method used to decide motions in the Roman Senate (and was occasionally used in democratic Athens).

Divisions

There are three methods of holding a Division:

(i) by operating the Automatic Vote Recorder,
(ii) by distributing ‘Ayes’ and ‘Noes’ slips in the House, and
(iii) by members going into the Lobbies.

However, the method of recording of votes in Lobbies has become obsolete ever since the installation of Automatic Vote Recording machine. This procedure has not been used for the last two decades.

A few days after the constitution of new Lok Sabha, seats in the House which are the same as the Division numbers are allotted to all members. It is imperative that members besides speaking from the seats allotted to them also record votes therefrom at a Division, which reflects the correct position in respect of the voting results arrived at.

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The Story of Computer

Since ancient times, people have had ways to deal with data and numbers. Computing hardware has evolved from simple devices to aid calculation, to mechanical calculators, punched card data processing and then to modern stored-program computers.Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one correspondence with fingers. The earliest counting device was probably a form of tally stick. The abacus was early used for arithmetic tasks. What we now call the Roman abacus was used in Babylonia as early as 2400 BC. Since then, many other forms of reckoning boards or tables have been invented.

As trade and tax system grew in complexity, people saw that faster, more reliable and exact tools were needed for doing math and keeping records.

Scottish mathematician and physicist John Napier discovered that the multiplication and division of numbers could be performed by the addition and subtraction, respectively, of the logarithms of those numbers. While producing the first logarithmic tables, Napier needed to perform many tedious multiplications. It was at this point that he designed his 'Napier's bones', an abacus-like device that greatly simplified calculations that involved multiplication and division.

Mechanical calculators - In the mid-1600's, Blaise Pascal and his father, who was a tax officer himself, were working on  taxes for the French government in Paris.  The two spent hours figuring and re-figuring taxes that each citizen owed.  Young Blaise decided in 1642 to build an adding and subtraction machine that could aide in such a tedious and time consuming process.  Blaise Pascal started some pioneering work on calculating machines and after three years of effort and 50 prototypes he invented the mechanical calculator. He built twenty of these machines (called Pascal's Calculator or Pascaline) in the following ten years. The machine Blaise made had a set of eight gears that worked together much like an odometer keeps track of a car's mileage.  His machine encountered many of problems.  For one, it was always breaking down.  Second, the machine was slow and extremely costly.  And third, people were afraid to use the machine thinking it might replace their jobs.  Pascal later became famous for math and philosophy, but he is still remember for his role in computer technology.  In his honor, there is a computer language named Pascal.

Around 1820, Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar created the first successful, mass-produced mechanical calculator, the Thomas Arithmometer, that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide.It was mainly based on Leibniz' work. Mechanical calculators remained in use until the 1970s.

In 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed a loom in which the pattern being woven was controlled by punched cards.

The next big step for computers arrived in the 1830's when Charles Babbage decided to build a machine to help him complete and print mathematical tables.  Babbage was a mathematician who taught at Cambridge University in England.  He began planning his calculating machine calling it the Analytical Engine.  The idea for this machine was amazingly like the computer we know today.  It was to read a program from punched cards, figure and store the answers to different problems, and print the answer on paper.  Babbage died before he could complete the machine.  However because of his remarkable ideas and work, Babbage is know as the Father of Computers.

The next huge step for computers came when Herman Hollerith entered a contest given by the U.S. Census Bureau.  The contest was to see who could build a machine that would count and record information faster.  Hollerith, a young man working for the Bureau built a machine called the Tabulating Machine that read and sorted data from punched cards.  The holes punched in the cards matched each person's answers to questions.  For example, married, single, and divorces were answers on the cards.In the late 1880s, Herman Hollerith invented data storage on punched cards that could then be read by a machine.   The Tabulator read the punched cards as they passed over tiny brushes.  Each time a brush found a hole, it completed an electrical circuit.  This caused special counting dials to increase the data for that answer.

Thanks to Hollerith's machine, instead of taking seven and a half years to count the census information it only took three years, even with 13 million more people since the last census.  Happy with his success, Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896.  The company later was sold in 1911.  And in 1912 his company became the International Business Machines Corporation, better know today as IBM.

The era of modern computing began with a flurry of development before and during World War II. Most digital computers built in this period were electromechanical - electric switches drove mechanical relays to perform the calculation. These devices had a low operating speed and were eventually superseded by much faster all-electric computers, originally using vacuum tubes.

In 1936 British mathematician Alan Turing proposed the idea of a machine that could process equations without human direction. The machine (now known as a Turing machine) resembled an automatic typewriter that used symbols for math and logic instead of letters. Turing's machine was the theoretical precursor to the modern digital computer.

The first all electronic computer was the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer).  ENIAC was a general purpose digital computer built in 1946 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.  The ENIAC contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes. In twenty seconds, ENIAC could do a math problem that would have taken 40 hours for one person to finish. The ENIAC was built the time of World War II had as its first job to calculate the feasibility of a design for the hydrogen bomb.The ENIAC was 100 feet long and 10 feet tall.Many of ENIAC's first tasks were for military purposes, such as calculating ballistic firing tables and designing atomic weapons. Since ENIAC was initially not a stored program machine, it had to be reprogrammed for each task.

A more modern type computer began with John von Neumann's development of software written in binary code.  It was von Neumann who began the practice of storing data and instructions in binary code and initiated the use of memory to store data, as well as programs.  A computer called the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Computer) was built using binary code in 1950.  Before the EDVAC, computers like the ENIAC could do only one task then they had to be rewired to perform a different task or program.  The EDVAC's concept of storing different programs on punched cards instead of rewiring computers led to the computers that we know today.

Transistor computers - The bipolar transistor was invented in 1947. From 1955 onwards transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to the "second generation" of computers. Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors have many advantages: they are smaller, and require less power than vacuum tubes, so give off less heat. Silicon junction transistors were much more reliable than vacuum tubes and had longer, indefinite, service life. Transistorized computers could contain tens of thousands of binary logic circuits in a relatively compact space.

The next great advance in computing power came with the advent of the integrated circuit (the Chip). The first practical ICs were invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor.Kilby described his new device as “a body of semiconductor material wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated.”

Noyce also came up with his own idea of an integrated circuit half a year later than Kilby.His chip solved many practical problems that Kilby's had not. Produced at Fairchild Semiconductor, it was made of silicon, whereas Kilby's chip was made of germanium.

This new development heralded an explosion in the commercial and personal use of computers and led to the invention of the microprocessor. While the subject of exactly which device was the first microprocessor is contentious, partly due to lack of agreement on the exact definition of the term "microprocessor", it is largely undisputed that the first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004, designed and realized by Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin, and Stanley Mazor at Intel.

The progression in hardware representation of a bit of data:

• Vacuum Tubes (1950s) - one bit on the size of a thumb
• Transistors (1950s and 1960s) - one bit on the size of a fingernail
• Integrated Circuits (1960s and 70s) - thousands of bits on the size of a hand
• Silicon computer chips (1970s and on) - millions of bits on the size of a finger nail.

Note - The first successful high level programming language - FORTRAN Computer Programming Language - John Backus & IBM (1954)

Legislative Procedure in Rajya Sabha

National Mission on Oilseeds and Oil Palm (NMOOP)

• India’s vegetable oil economy is world’s fourth largest after USA, China & Brazil.
• The oilseed accounts for 13% of the Gross Cropped Area, 3% of the Gross National Product and 10% value of all agricultural commodities.
• This sector has recorded annual growth rate of area, production and yield @ 2.44%, 5.47% and 2.96% respectively during last decade (1999-2009).
• The diverse agro-ecological conditions in the country are favourable for growing 9 annual oilseed crops, which include 7 edible oilseeds (groundnut, rapeseed & mustard, soybean, sunflower, sesame, safflower and niger) and two non-edible oilseeds (castor and linseed).
• Oilseeds cultivation is undertaken across the country in about 27 million hectares mainly on marginal lands, of which 72% in confined to rainfed farming. India is one of the major oilseeds grower and importer of edible oils.
• A substantial portion of our requirement of edible oil is met through import of palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia.
• Tree Borne Oilseeds (TBOs), like sal, mahua, simarouba, kokum, olive, karanja, jatropha, neem, jojoba, cheura, wild apricot, walnut, tung etc. are cultivated/grow in the country under different agro-climatic conditions in a scattered form in forest and non-forest areas as well as in waste land /deserts/hilly areas.

National Mission on Oilseeds and Oil Palm (NMOOP)

National Mission on Oilseeds and Oil Palm (NMOOP) envisages increase in production of vegetable oils sourced from oilseeds, oil palm and TBOs from 7.06 million tonnes (average of 2007-08 to 2011-12) to 9.51 million tonnes by the end of Twelfth Plan (2016-17).

The Mission is proposed to be implemented through three Mini Missions with specific target - Mini Mission on Oil Seeds,Mini Mission on Oil Palm,Mini Mission on Tree Borne Oil seeds.

The strategy to implement the proposed Mission will include increasing Seed Replacement Ratio (SRR).

Aims : - Increasing irrigation coverage under oil seeds from 26% to 36%.

- Diversification of area from low yielding cereals crops to oil seeds crops

- Inter-cropping of oil seeds with cereals/ pulses/ sugarcane

- Use of fallow land after paddy /potato cultivation

- Expansion of cultivation of Oil Palm & TBOs in watersheds and wastelands

- Enhancing procurement of oil seeds and collection & processing of TBOs

- Cost of the interventions proposed under the Mission will be in the ratio of 75:25 between the Central and the State Government

The oilseeds and oil palm development programme of  ISOPOM along with liability of ISOPOM and tree borne oilseeds development programme for the approved programme will be subsumed under the Mission.

MISSION STRUCTURE:

Executive Committee (EC): At the apex level, the Mission will be monitored by a high level Executive Committee (EC) Chaired by the Union Minister of Agriculture.EC will be the policy making body providing suitable directives and guidance to the Mission and reviewing the overall progress and development of the Mission. EC will lay down and also amend the operational guidelines regarding day to day operation of the Mission.

Standing Committee (SC): A Standing Committee will be constituted under the Chairmanship of Secretary (A&C) to oversee activities of the Mission and to approve the Annual Action Plans (AAP) of the states and implementing agencies under the Mission.

Mission Monitoring Committee (MMC): A Mission Monitoring Committee will be constituted under the Chairmanship of Joint Secretary (Oilseeds) DAC who will also be the Ex-Officio Mission Director of NMOOP, to oversee the monitoring activities of the three Mini Missions

A State Level Standing Committee will be constituted by the State Government under the Chairmanship of Agriculture Production Commissioner/Principal Secretary/Secretary (Agriculture)

The State Governments may have in place a sound mechanism for involvement of PRIs in the formulation, prioritization of activities & identification of beneficiaries at grass root level.