Democracy in the novel Lord of the Flies :: essays papers

Democracy in the novel Lord of the Flies M.E. Sullivan said, â€Å"Democracy is only as successful as the people who make it work,† proves itself in the novel Lord of the Flies. I agree with this statement because, if there are to many people opposing one thing there will be war. The boys in this book struggled back and forth trying to establish a stable government. Democracy was forming in the group but, dictatorship was quickly sneaking up behind. Democracy was an essential thing for the boys to survive on the island. Ralph tried to form a democratic nation from the beginning using the conch as a symbol. Everyone listened when the conch was blown. The system was working but after a couple months people started to get different ideas of ruling. Jack, who was basically the leader of the underworld tried to replace democracy with a strong dictatorship. Since the idea of a new type of government, democracy was losing power quickly. Jack and his followers tried to bring down the democracy quickly because he or they wanted to be ruler. Jack did not want to be ruled by someone less superior than him. Jack and his group stopped obeying Ralph’s orders, and also they stopped going to the meetings when the conch was sounded. Jack started a rebellion against Ralph. Since the rebellion most of the kids joined Jack, and some stayed with Ralph. Two tribes were formed the democratic and the dictatorship tribes. Once the tribes formed, democracy was abolished. Jack didn’t have everyone under his rule so, he was still unhappy. To get the children of the island to follow him, he went to the extent of murder. Simon and Piggy were victims of two different governments colliding together. After the death of Simon and Piggy, Ralph was alone. The democratic group was finally gone. The dictators had taken over. In conclusion, democracy in this novel was over thrown by a dictatorship.

Assess Different Indicators Used to Measure Development Essay

Development is a process of change that affects people’s lives, which may involve an improvement in the quality of life as perceived by the people undergoing change. As development is such a wide category, it can be split into social and economic factors as well as simple and composite indicators. To start with, many economic indicators are used to measure a country’s development. GDP (Gross Domestic Product), this is the total value of goods and services produced in a country. GNP (Gross National Product) includes income from investments abroad and PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) takes into account local cost of living and is usually expressed per capita. These are the three main economic indicators. Many advantages appear when using economic measurement as an indicator, such as it is a useful figure for comparing countries and often used to rank countries to establish a fair system of aid payments. Also, each country can be easily compared and calculated so that patterns can be seen quickly. However, this way of measurement does come with a lot of problems. For example, the distribution of wealth is unequal I most/all countries but when studying the indicator results, it shows that supposedly the country has an equal distribution. This results in inequality being ‘covered up’ and a true picture is not shown which therefore makes the result lack in validity. Countries have different currencies, which is an issue within itself but this is enlarged when countries have different currency fluctuations. This makes it hard to then compare each countries results to one another as the values shown have different rates of wealth. Although, this problem is being tackled by converting all the currencies to US$ so easy comparisons can be made, and patterns can be easily shown when comparing countries. Other problems that come from using economic indicators are they can be manipulated by governments who want to appear poor to collect more aid and it does not take into account informal economies which are very important in less developed countries. To try and eliminate the economic problems, social indicators are also used to make the results as accurate as possible. Social indicators are used mainly to give an idea about the peoples quality of life in that country, although this can be significantly hard to actually categorise. The main indicators for the social categories are Life Expectancy (the average lifespan of someone born in that country), Birth Rate (number of babies born per thousand people per year). This allows a clear indicator of a countries level of development, as well as being able to predict the future situation to plan accordingly. BR can be affected by population policies (e.g. China’s one child policy) and figures in LEDCs are not necessarily accurate. Literacy Rate (percentage of the population able to read and write) also has negatives such as when used on its own it doesn’t tell us whether the figure is a consequence of too few schools or the fact that children are having to work. The other issue is that it takes no notice of other skills (agricultural for example) the people may have which are equally valuable (e.g. a good understanding of farming techniques). Literacy rates is used as an indicator because it does show the amount of education on offer and tells us how many children could or couldn’t attend school. Finally, Infant Mortality (the number of children who die before they reach the age of one for every thousand live births per year). An advantage of using these four social indicators to ‘measure’ a country as a general point is that more patterns are shown by comparing economic and social factors. For example, the higher the GDP per person the higher the life expectancy showing a positive correlation between the two. As stated in the opening paragraph, the development of a country can also be measured by using simple and composite indicators. The indicators discussed above in both economic and social categories are classed as simple indicators (excluding GDP). The composite indicator definition is as follows: ‘Composite indicators measures are used when single indicators cannot adequately capture such multi-dimensional concepts. Ideally, a composite indicator should be based on a theoretical framework / definition, which allows individual indicators/variables to be selected, combined and weighted in a manner which reflects the dimensions or structure of the phenomena being measured’. Simplified, composite indicators combine a number of single component indices to give a combined score. A frequent composite indicator that is often used is the HDI (Human Development Index). this combines PPP, life expectancy, adult literacy and average number of years in schooling. Other composite indicators include GEM (Gender Empowerment Measure) and GDI (Gender-related Development Index) to measure gender inequality. Other quality of life indicators could measure a variety of social and economic fac tors. Composite indicators are often considered more reliable as they combine a number of simple indicators to give one average score. The problem with this however is having only an average result. As previously discussed, by having an average score the result lacks validity as it doesn’t show a true picture. In conclusion, the method that gives the most accurate and true representation of a country, in my opinion, is to use a combination of social and economic simple indicators. Many positives and negatives come from using simple and composite indicators, but the key problem with using composite is that it only gives an average. The main point of creating and using indicators is to get the true representation of a countries development, and composite indicators often do no prove this where as simple indicators are more likely to. View as multi-pages

Tips for Multi-Resolution Delphi Applications

When designing forms in Delphi, its often useful to write the code so that your application (forms and all objects) looks essentially the same regardless of what the screen resolution is. The first thing you want to remember early on in the form design stage is whether  youre going to allow the form to be scaled or not. The advantage of not scaling is that nothing changes at runtime. The disadvantage of not scaling is that nothing changes at runtime (your form may be far too small or too large to read on some systems if it is not scaled). If youre not going to scale the form, set  Scaled  to False. Otherwise, set the property to True. Also, set AutoScroll to False: the opposite would mean not changing the forms frame size at runtime, which doesnt look good when the forms contents do change size. Important Considerations Set the forms font to a scalable TrueType font, like Arial. Only Arial will give you a font within a pixel of the desired height.​  If the font used in an application is not installed on the target computer, then Windows will select an alternative font within the same font family to use instead. Set the forms Position property to something other than poDesigned, which leaves the form where you left it at design time. This usually ends up way off to the left on a 1280x1024 screen—and completely off the 640x480 screen. Dont crowd controls on the form—leave at least 4 pixels between controls  so that a one-pixel change in border locations (due to scaling) wont show up as overlapping controls. For single line labels that are alLeft or alRight aligned, set AutoSize to True. Otherwise, set AutoSize to False. Make sure there is enough blank space in a label component to allow for font width changes - a blank space that is 25% of the length of the current string display length is a little too much but safe. Youll need at least 30% expansion space for string labels if you plan to translate your app into other languages. If AutoSize is False, make sure you actually set the label width appropriately. If AutoSize is True, make sure there is enough room for the label to grow on its own. In multi-line, word-wrapped labels, leave at least one line of blank space at the bottom. Youll need this to catch the overflow when the text wraps differently when the font width changes with scaling. Dont assume that because youre using large fonts, you dont have to allow for text-overflow—somebody elses large fonts may be larger than yours! Be careful about opening a project in the IDE at different resolutions. The forms PixelsPerInch property will be modified as soon as the form is opened, and will be saved to the DFM if you save the project. Its best to test the app by running it standalone and edit the form at only one resolution. Editing at varying resolutions and font sizes invite component drift and sizing problems. Make sure that you set your PixelsPerInch for all your forms to 120. It defaults to 96, which causes scaling problems at a lower resolution. Speaking of component drift, dont rescale a form multiple times, at design time or runtime. Each rescaling introduces round-off errors which accumulate very quickly since coordinates are strictly integral. As fractional amounts are truncated off the controls origins and sizes with each successive rescaling, the controls will appear to creep northwest and get smaller. If you want to allow your users to rescale the form any number of times, start with a freshly loaded/created form before each scaling so that scaling errors do not accumulate. In general, it is not necessary to design forms at any particular resolution, but it is crucial that you review their appearance at 640x480 with large and small fonts, and at a high-resolution with small and large fonts, before releasing your app. This should be part of your regular system compatibility testing checklist. Pay close attention to any components that are essentially single-line TMemos—things like TDBLookupCombo. The Windows multi-line edit control always shows only whole lines of text—if the control is too short for its font, a TMemo will show nothing at all (a TEdit will show clipped text). For such components, its better to make them a few pixels too large than to be one pixel too small and not show any text at all. Keep in mind that all scaling is proportional to the difference in the font height between runtime and design time, not  the pixel resolution or screen size. Remember also that the origins of your controls will be changed when the form is scaled—you cant very well make components bigger without also moving them over a bit. Anchors, Alignment, and Constraints: Third party VCL Once you know what  issues  to bear in mind when scaling Delphi forms on different screen resolutions, you are ready for some coding. When working with Delphi version 4 or higher,  several properties are designed to help us maintain the look and layout of controls on a form. Use  Align  to align a control to the top, bottom left, or right of a form or panel and have it remain there even if the size of the form, panel, or component that contains the control, changes. When the parent is resized, an aligned control also resizes so that it continues to span the top, bottom, left, or right edge of the parent. Use  Constraints  to specify the minimum and maximum width and height of the control. When Constraints contains maximum or minimum values, the control can’t be resized to violate those constraints. Use  Anchors  to ensure that a control maintains its current position relative to an edge of its parent, even if the parent is resized. When its parent is resized, the control holds its position relative to the edges to which it is anchored. If a control is anchored to opposite edges of its parent, the control stretches when its parent is resized. procedure ScaleForm (F: TForm; ScreenWidth, ScreenHeight: LongInt) ;begin F.Scaled : True; F.AutoScroll : False; F.Position : poScreenCenter; F.Font.Name : Arial; if (Screen.Width ScreenWidth) then begin F.Height : LongInt(F.Height) * LongInt(Screen.Height) div ScreenHeight; F.Width : LongInt(F.Width) * LongInt(Screen.Width) div ScreenWidth; F.ScaleBy(Screen.Width,ScreenWidth) ; end;end;