title: Inland taipan

text: The coastal taipan anti-venom, known as "taipan antivenom", is effective against the inland taipan venom as well, but it is not as effective in bite victims of the inland taipan as in those of the coastal taipan.


title: Inland taipan

text: Taipan antivenom is produced and manufactured by the Australian Reptile Park and the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in Melbourne.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. There were other computers that had these features, but the ENIAC had all of them in one package. It was Turing-complete and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.


title: ENIAC

text: Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory), its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946, having cost $487,000 (), and was heralded as a "Giant Brain" by the press. It had a speed on the order of one thousand times faster than that of electro-mechanical machines; this computational power, coupled with general-purpose programmability, excited scientists and industrialists alike. The combination of speed and programmability allowed for thousands more calculations for problems. As ENIAC calculated a trajectory in 30 seconds that took a human 20 hours, one ENIAC could replace 2,400 humans.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC was formally accepted by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in July 1946. It was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947, where it was in continuous operation until 1955.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC's design and construction was financed by the United States Army, Ordnance Corps, Research and Development Command, led by Major General Gladeon M. Barnes. The total cost was about $487,000, . The construction contract was signed on June 5, 1943; work on the computer began in secret at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering the following month, under the code name "Project PX", with John Grist Brainerd as principal investigator. Herman H. Goldstine persuaded the Army to fund the project, which put him in charge to oversee it for them.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC was designed by Ursinus College physics professor John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, U.S. The team of design engineers assisting the development included Robert F. Shaw (function tables), Jeffrey Chuan Chu (divider/square-rooter), Thomas Kite Sharpless (master programmer), Frank Mural (master programmer), Arthur Burks (multiplier), Harry Huskey (reader/printer) and Jack Davis (accumulators). Significant development work was undertaken by the female mathematicians who handled the bulk of the ENIAC programming: Jean Jennings, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Snyder, Frances Bilas, and Kay McNulty. In 1946, the researchers resigned from the University of Pennsylvania and formed the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC was a large, modular computer, composed of individual panels to perform different functions. Twenty of these modules were accumulators that could not only add and subtract, but hold a ten-digit decimal number in memory. Numbers were passed between these units across several general-purpose buses (or "trays", as they were called). In order to achieve its high speed, the panels had to send and receive numbers, compute, save the answer and trigger the next operation, all without any moving parts. Key to its versatility was the ability to "branch"; it could trigger different operations, depending on the sign of a computed result.


title: ENIAC

text: By the end of its operation in 1956, ENIAC contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It weighed more than , was roughly in size, occupied and consumed 150 kW of electricity. This power requirement led to the rumor that whenever the computer was switched on, lights in Philadelphia dimmed. Input was possible from an IBM card reader and an IBM card punch was used for output. These cards could be used to produce printed output offline using an IBM accounting machine, such as the IBM 405. While ENIAC had no system to store memory in its inception, these punch cards could be used for external memory storage. In 1953, a 100-word magnetic-core memory built by the Burroughs Corporation was added to ENIAC.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC used ten-position ring counters to store digits; each digit required 36 vacuum tubes, 10 of which were the dual triodes making up the flip-flops of the ring counter. Arithmetic was performed by "counting" pulses with the ring counters and generating carry pulses if the counter "wrapped around", the idea being to electronically emulate the operation of the digit wheels of a mechanical adding machine.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC had 20 ten-digit signed accumulators, which used ten's complement representation and could perform 5,000 simple addition or subtraction operations between any of them and a source (e.g., another accumulator or a constant transmitter) per second. It was possible to connect several accumulators to run simultaneously, so the peak speed of operation was potentially much higher, due to parallel operation.


title: ENIAC

text: It was possible to wire the carry of one accumulator into another accumulator to perform arithmetic with double the precision, but the accumulator carry circuit timing prevented the wiring of three or more for even higher precision. ENIAC used four of the accumulators (controlled by a special multiplier unit) to perform up to 385 multiplication operations per second; five of the accumulators were controlled by a special divider/square-rooter unit to perform up to 40 division operations per second or three square root operations per second.


title: ENIAC

text: The other nine units in ENIAC were the initiating unit (started and stopped the machine), the cycling unit (used for synchronizing the other units), the master programmer (controlled loop sequencing), the reader (controlled an IBM punch-card reader), the printer (controlled an IBM card punch), the constant transmitter, and three function tables.


title: ENIAC

text: The references by Rojas and Hashagen (or Wilkes) give more details about the times for operations, which differ somewhat from those stated above.


title: ENIAC

text: The basic machine cycle was 200 microseconds (20 cycles of the 100 kHz clock in the cycling unit), or 5,000 cycles per second for operations on the 10-digit numbers. In one of these cycles, ENIAC could write a number to a register, read a number from a register, or add/subtract two numbers.


title: ENIAC

text: A multiplication of a 10-digit number by a "d"-digit number (for "d" up to 10) took "d"+4 cycles, so a 10- by 10-digit multiplication took 14 cycles, or 2,800 microseconds—a rate of 357 per second. If one of the numbers had fewer than 10 digits, the operation was faster.


title: ENIAC

text: Division and square roots took 13("d"+1) cycles, where "d" is the number of digits in the result (quotient or square root). So a division or square root took up to 143 cycles, or 28,600 microseconds—a rate of 35 per second. (Wilkes 1956:20 states that a division with a 10 digit quotient required 6 milliseconds.) If the result had fewer than ten digits, it was obtained faster.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC is able to process about 500 FLOPS, compared to modern supercomputers' petascale and exascale computing power.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC used common octal-base radio tubes of the day; the decimal accumulators were made of 6SN7 flip-flops, while 6L7s, 6SJ7s, 6SA7s and 6AC7s were used in logic functions. Numerous 6L6s and 6V6s served as line drivers to drive pulses through cables between rack assemblies.


title: ENIAC

text: Several tubes burned out almost every day, leaving ENIAC nonfunctional about half the time. Special high-reliability tubes were not available until 1948. Most of these failures, however, occurred during the warm-up and cool-down periods, when the tube heaters and cathodes were under the most thermal stress. Engineers reduced ENIAC's tube failures to the more acceptable rate of one tube every two days. According to an interview in 1989 with Eckert, "We had a tube fail about every two days and we could locate the problem within 15 minutes."


title: ENIAC

text: In 1954, the longest continuous period of operation without a failure was 116 hours—close to five days.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC could be programmed to perform complex sequences of operations, including loops, branches, and subroutines. However, instead of the stored-program computers that exist today, ENIAC was just a large collection of arithmetic machines, which originally had programs set up into the machine by a combination of plugboard wiring and three portable function tables (containing 1,200 ten-way switches each). The task of taking a problem and mapping it onto the machine was complex, and usually took weeks. Due to the complexity of mapping programs onto the machine, programs were only changed after huge numbers of tests of the current program. After the program was figured out on paper, the process of getting the program into ENIAC by manipulating its switches and cables could take days. This was followed by a period of verification and debugging, aided by the ability to execute the program step by step. A programming tutorial for the modulo function using an ENIAC simulator gives an impression of what a program on the ENIAC looked like.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC's six primary programmers, Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman, not only determined how to input ENIAC programs, but also developed an understanding of ENIAC's inner workings. The programmers were often able to narrow bugs down to an individual failed tube which could be pointed to for replacement by a technician.


title: ENIAC

text: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman were the first programmers of the ENIAC. They were not, as computer scientist and historian Kathryn Kleiman was once told, "refrigerator ladies", i.e., models posing in front of the machine for press photography. Nevertheless, some of the women did not receive recognition for their work on the ENIAC in their lifetimes. After the war ended, the women continued to work on the ENIAC. Their expertise made their positions difficult to replace with returning soldiers. The original programmers of the ENIAC were neither recognized for their efforts nor known to the public until the mid-1980s.


title: ENIAC

text: These early programmers were drawn from a group of about two hundred women employed as computers at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. The job of computers was to produce the numeric result of mathematical formulas needed for a scientific study, or an engineering project. They usually did so with a mechanical calculator. The women studied the machine's logic, physical structure, operation, and circuitry in order to not only understand the mathematics of computing, but also the machine itself. This was one of the few technical job categories available to women at that time. Betty Holberton (née Snyder) continued on to help write the first generative programming system (SORT/MERGE) and help design the first commercial electronic computers, the UNIVAC and the BINAC, alongside Jean Jennings. McNulty developed the use of subroutines in order to help increase ENIAC's computational capability.


title: ENIAC

text: Herman Goldstine selected the programmers, whom he called operators, from the computers who had been calculating ballistics tables with mechanical desk calculators, and a differential analyzer prior to and during the development of ENIAC. Under Herman and Adele Goldstine's direction, the computers studied ENIAC's blueprints and physical structure to determine how to manipulate its switches and cables, as programming languages did not yet exist. Though contemporaries considered programming a clerical task and did not publicly recognize the programmers' effect on the successful operation and announcement of ENIAC, McNulty, Jennings, Snyder, Wescoff, Bilas, and Lichterman have since been recognized for their contributions to computing. Three of the current (2020) Army supercomputers "Jean", "Kay", and "Betty" are named for Jean Bartik (Betty Jennings), Kay McNulty, and Betty Snyder respectively.


title: ENIAC

text: The "programmer" and "operator" job titles were not originally considered professions suitable for women. The labor shortage created by World War II helped enable the entry of women into the field. However, the field was not viewed as prestigious, and bringing in women was viewed as a way to free men up for more skilled labor. Essentially, women were seen as meeting a need in a temporary crisis. For example, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics said in 1942, "It is felt that enough greater return is obtained by freeing the engineers from calculating detail to overcome any increased expenses in the computers' salaries. The engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they would. This is due in large measure to the feeling among the engineers that their college and industrial experience is being wasted and thwarted by mere repetitive calculation".


title: ENIAC

text: Following the initial six programmers, an expanded team of a hundred scientists was recruited to continue work on the ENIAC. Among these were several women, including Gloria Ruth Gordon. Adele Goldstine wrote the original technical description of the ENIAC.


title: ENIAC

text: Although the Ballistic Research Laboratory was the sponsor of ENIAC, one year into this three-year project John von Neumann, a mathematician working on the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratory, became aware of this computer. Los Alamos subsequently became so involved with ENIAC that the first test problem run consisted of computations for the hydrogen bomb, not artillery tables. The input/output for this test was one million cards.


title: ENIAC

text: Related to ENIAC's role in the hydrogen bomb was its role in the Monte Carlo method becoming popular. Scientists involved in the original nuclear bomb development used massive groups of people doing huge numbers of calculations ("computers" in the terminology of the time) to investigate the distance that neutrons would likely travel through various materials. John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam realized the speed of ENIAC would allow these calculations to be done much more quickly. The success of this project showed the value of Monte Carlo methods in science.


title: ENIAC

text: A press conference was held on February 1, 1946, and the completed machine was announced to the public the evening of February 14, 1946, featuring demonstrations of its capabilities. Elizabeth Snyder and Betty Jean Jennings were responsible for developing the demonstration trajectory program, although Herman and Adele Goldstine took credit for it. The machine was formally dedicated the next day at the University of Pennsylvania. None of the women involved in programming the machine or creating the demonstration were invited to the formal dedication nor to the celebratory dinner held afterwards.


title: ENIAC

text: The original contract amount was $61,700; the final cost was almost $500,000 (approximately ). It was formally accepted by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in July 1946. ENIAC was shut down on November 9, 1946, for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. There, on July 29, 1947, it was turned on and was in continuous operation until 11:45 p.m. on October 2, 1955.


title: ENIAC

text: A few months after ENIAC's unveiling in the summer of 1946, as part of "an extraordinary effort to jump-start research in the field", the Pentagon invited "the top people in electronics and mathematics from the United States and Great Britain" to a series of forty-eight lectures given in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; all together called "The Theory and Techniques for Design of Digital Computers"—more often named the Moore School Lectures. Half of these lectures were given by the inventors of ENIAC.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC was a one-of-a-kind design and was never repeated. The freeze on design in 1943 meant that the computer design would lack some innovations that soon became well-developed, notably the ability to store a program. Eckert and Mauchly started work on a new design, to be later called the EDVAC, which would be both simpler and more powerful. In particular, in 1944 Eckert wrote his description of a memory unit (the mercury delay line) which would hold both the data and the program. John von Neumann, who was consulting for the Moore School on the EDVAC, sat in on the Moore School meetings at which the stored program concept was elaborated. Von Neumann wrote up an incomplete set of notes ("First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC") which were intended to be used as an internal memorandum—describing, elaborating, and couching in formal logical language the ideas developed in the meetings. ENIAC administrator and security officer Herman Goldstine distributed copies of this "First Draft" to a number of government and educational institutions, spurring widespread interest in the construction of a new generation of electronic computing machines, including Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) at Cambridge University, England and SEAC at the U.S. Bureau of Standards.


title: ENIAC

text: A number of improvements were made to ENIAC after 1947, including a primitive read-only stored programming mechanism using the function tables as program ROM, after which programming was done by setting the switches. The idea has been worked out in several variants by Richard Clippinger and his group, on the one hand, and the Goldstines, on the other, and it was included in the ENIAC patent. Clippinger consulted with von Neumann on what instruction set to implement. Clippinger had thought of a three-address architecture while von Neumann proposed a one-address architecture because it was simpler to implement. Three digits of one accumulator (#6) were used as the program counter, another accumulator (#15) was used as the main accumulator, a third accumulator (#8) was used as the address pointer for reading data from the function tables, and most of the other accumulators (1–5, 7, 9–14, 17–19) were used for data memory.


title: ENIAC

text: In March 1948 the converter unit was installed, which made possible programming through the reader from standard IBM cards. The "first production run" of the new coding techniques on the Monte Carlo problem followed in April. After ENIAC's move to Aberdeen, a register panel for memory was also constructed, but it did not work. A small master control unit to turn the machine on and off was also added.


title: ENIAC

text: The programming of the stored program for ENIAC was done by Betty Jennings, Clippinger, Adele Goldstine and others. It was first demonstrated as a stored-program computer in April 1948, running a program by Adele Goldstine for John von Neumann. This modification reduced the speed of ENIAC by a factor of 6 and eliminated the ability of parallel computation, but as it also reduced the reprogramming time to hours instead of days, it was considered well worth the loss of performance. Also analysis had shown that due to differences between the electronic speed of computation and the electromechanical speed of input/output, almost any real-world problem was completely I/O bound, even without making use of the original machine's parallelism. Most computations would still be I/O bound, even after the speed reduction imposed by this modification.


title: ENIAC

text: Early in 1952, a high-speed shifter was added, which improved the speed for shifting by a factor of five. In July 1953, a 100-word expansion core memory was added to the system, using binary-coded decimal, excess-3 number representation. To support this expansion memory, ENIAC was equipped with a new Function Table selector, a memory address selector, pulse-shaping circuits, and three new orders were added to the programming mechanism.


title: ENIAC

text: Mechanical computing machines have been around since Archimedes' time (see: Antikythera mechanism), but the 1930s and 1940s are considered the beginning of the modern computer era.


title: ENIAC

text: ENIAC was, like the IBM Harvard Mark I and the German Z3, able to run an arbitrary sequence of mathematical operations, but did not read them from a tape. Like the British Colossus, it was programmed by plugboard and switches. ENIAC combined full, Turing-complete programmability with electronic speed. The Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC), ENIAC, and Colossus all used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes). ENIAC's registers performed decimal arithmetic, rather than binary arithmetic like the Z3, the ABC and Colossus.


title: ENIAC

text: Like the Colossus, ENIAC required rewiring to reprogram until April 1948. In June 1948, the Manchester Baby ran its first program and earned the distinction of first electronic stored-program computer. Though the idea of a stored-program computer with combined memory for program and data was conceived during the development of ENIAC, it was not initially implemented in ENIAC because World War II priorities required the machine to be completed quickly, and ENIAC's 20 storage locations would be too small to hold data and programs.


title: ENIAC

text: The Z3 and Colossus were developed independently of each other, and of the ABC and ENIAC during World War II. Work on the ABC at Iowa State University was stopped in 1942 after John Atanasoff was called to Washington, D.C., to do physics research for the U.S. Navy, and it was subsequently dismantled. The Z3 was destroyed by the Allied bombing raids of Berlin in 1943. As the ten Colossus machines were part of the UK's war effort their existence remained secret until the late 1970s, although knowledge of their capabilities remained among their UK staff and invited Americans. ENIAC, by contrast, was put through its paces for the press in 1946, "and captured the world's imagination". Older histories of computing may therefore not be comprehensive in their coverage and analysis of this period. All but two of the Colossus machines were dismantled in 1945; the remaining two were used to decrypt Soviet messages by GCHQ until the 1960s. The public demonstration for ENIAC was developed by Snyder and Jennings who created a demo that would calculate the trajectory of a missile in 15 seconds, a task that would have taken several weeks for a human computer.


title: ENIAC

text: For a variety of reasonsincluding Mauchly's June 1941 examination of the Atanasoff–Berry computer (ABC), prototyped in 1939 by John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry for ENIAC, applied for in 1947 and granted in 1964, was voided by the 1973 decision of the landmark federal court case "Honeywell, Inc. v. Sperry Rand Corp.". The decision included: that the ENIAC inventors had derived the subject matter of the electronic digital computer from Atanasoff; gave legal recognition to Atanasoff as the inventor of the first electronic digital computer; and put the invention of the electronic digital computer in the public domain.


title: ENIAC

text: The main parts were 40 panels and three portable function tables (named A, B, and C). The layout of the panels was (clockwise, starting with the left wall):


title: ENIAC

text: An IBM card reader was attached to Constant Transmitter panel 3 and an IBM card punch was attached to Printer Panel 2. The Portable Function Tables could be connected to Function Table 1, 2, and 3.


title: ENIAC

text: In 1996, in honor of the ENIAC's 50th anniversary, The University of Pennsylvania sponsored a project named, ""ENIAC-on-a-Chip"", where a very small silicon computer chip measuring 7.44 mm by 5.29 mm was built with the same functionality as ENIAC. Although this 20 MHz chip was many times faster than ENIAC, it had but a fraction of the speed of its contemporary microprocessors in the late 1990s.


title: ENIAC

text: In 1997, the six women who did most of the programming of ENIAC were inducted into the Technology International Hall of Fame. The role of the ENIAC programmers is treated in a 2010 documentary film titled "" by LeAnn Erickson. A 2014 documentary short, "The Computers" by Kate McMahon, tells of the story of the six programmers; this was the result of 20 years' research by Kathryn Kleiman and her team as part of the ENIAC Programmers Project. In 2022 Grand Central Publishing released "Proving Ground" by Kathy Kleiman, a hardcover biography about the six ENIAC programmers and their efforts to translate block diagrams and electronic schematics of the ENIAC, then under construction, into programs that would be loaded into and run on ENIAC once it was available for use.


title: ENIAC

text: In 2011, in honor of the 65th anniversary of the ENIAC's unveiling, the city of Philadelphia declared February 15 as ENIAC Day.


title: Henry Ford II

text: Henry Ford II (September 4, 1917 – September 29, 1987), sometimes known as "Hank the Deuce", was an American businessman in the automotive industry. He was the oldest son of Edsel Ford I and oldest grandson of Henry Ford I. He was president of the Ford Motor Company from 1945 to 1960, chief executive officer (CEO) from 1947 to 1979, and chairman of the board of directors from 1960 to 1980. Under the leadership of Henry Ford II, Ford Motor Company became a publicly traded corporation in 1956. From 1943 to 1950, he also served as president of the Ford Foundation.


title: Henry Ford II

text: Henry Ford II was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Eleanor Clay Ford and Edsel Ford on September 4, 1917. He, brothers Benson and William, and sister Josephine, grew up amid affluence. He graduated from The Hotchkiss School in 1936. He attended Yale University, where he served on the business staff of "The Yale Record", the campus humor magazine, but left in 1940 before graduation. During this time, he became a member of the Zeta Psi fraternity.


title: Henry Ford II

text: When his father Edsel, president of Ford, died of cancer in May 1943 (during World War II), Henry Ford II was serving in the Navy and unable to inherit the presidency of the family-owned business. The elderly and ailing Henry Ford I, company founder, re-assumed the presidency, though mentally inconsistent, suspicious, and considered no longer fit for the presidency position by most of the company's directors. For the previous 20 years, although he had long been without any official executive title, the elder Ford always had "de facto" control over the company; the board and the management had never seriously defied him, and this moment was not different. The directors elected him, and he served until the end of the war. During this period, the company began to decline, losing over $10 million a month ($ in dollars ). The administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt considered a government acquisition of the company to ensure continued war production, but the idea never progressed to execution.


title: Henry Ford II

text: Henry Ford II left the Navy in July 1943 and joined the company's management a few weeks later. After two years, he assumed presidency of the business on September 21, 1945. Since it had been assumed that Edsel Ford would continue in his capacity as president of the company for much longer than turned out to be the case, Henry Ford II had received little preparation for the position, and he inherited the company during a chaotic period; its European factories had suffered a great deal of damage during the war, and domestic sales were also in decline.


title: Henry Ford II

text: Henry Ford II immediately adopted an aggressive management style. One of his first acts as company president was to place John Bugas in charge of company management, dismissing much of his grandfather's inner circle, especially Harry Bennett, chief of the Ford Service Department, whom the elder Ford had hired to block unionization of the Ford labor force by violent means. Next, acknowledging his inexperience, Henry II hired several seasoned executives to support him. He hired former General Motors executives Ernest Breech and Lewis Crusoe away from the Bendix Corporation. Breech was to serve in the coming years as the young Ford's business mentor, and the Breech–Crusoe team would form the core of Ford's business expertise, offering much-needed experience.


title: Henry Ford II

text: Additionally, Ford hired ten young up-and-comers, known as the "Whiz Kids". These ten, gleaned from an Army Air Forces statistical team, Ford envisioned as giving the company the ability to innovate and stay current. Two of them, Arjay Miller and Robert McNamara, went on to serve as presidents of Ford themselves. A third member, J. Edward Lundy, served in key financial roles for several decades and helped to establish Ford Finance's position as a major worldwide financial operation. As a team, the "Whiz Kids" are probably best remembered as the design team for the 1949 Ford, which they took from concept to production in nineteen months, and which re-established Ford as a formidable automotive company. It was reported that 100,000 orders for this car were taken the day it was introduced to the market.


title: Henry Ford II

text: Ford became president and CEO of Ford Motor Company in 1945. In 1956, under his leadership, the company became a publicly traded corporation and dedicated its new world headquarters building. During his term as CEO of Ford, he resided in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. On July 13, 1960, he was additionally elected chairman before resigning as president on November 9, 1960. He would ultimately resign as CEO on October 1, 1979, and as chairman on March 13, 1980. His nephew, William Clay Ford, Jr. would later assume these positions after 20 years of non-Ford family management of the company. During this interim, the family's interests were represented on the board by Henry's younger brother William Clay Ford, Sr., as well as Henry's son Edsel Ford II and his nephew William Clay Ford, Jr.


title: Henry Ford II

text: During the early 1960s Ford engaged in lengthy negotiations with Enzo Ferrari to buy Ferrari, with a view to expanding Ford's presence in motorsport in general and at the Le Mans 24 Hours in particular. However negotiations collapsed due to disputes regarding control over Ferrari's Scuderia Ferrari racing division. The collapse of the deal led him to inaugurate the Ford GT40 project, intended to end Ferrari's dominance at Le Mans (the Italian marque won the race six consecutive times from 1960 to 1965). In 1966, after two difficult years in 1964 and 1965, the GT40 Mark II's locked out the podium at both the Daytona 24 Hours and the Sebring 12 Hours before taking the first of four consecutive wins at Le Mans.


title: Henry Ford II

text: In the late 1960s, Ford became personally involved in the development of the Lincoln Continental Mark III. He made design decisions that overrode Focus groups and Ford engineers alike. Ford ultimately selected both the final exterior and interior designs. The result was a Ford Motor Company flagship that single-handedly made Lincoln profitable and spawned a three-decade market rivalry between the Lincoln Mark series and Cadillac's Eldorado series. The success of the Mark III has been considered to be the high point of Ford's career.


title: Henry Ford II

text: In 1973-74, as it became clear that the U.S. automobile market would begin to favor smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, Ford's then-President Lee Iacocca was highly interested in buying powertrains from Honda Motor Company as a way to minimize the cost of developing a small Ford car for the North American market, such as a modified version of Ford of Europe's Ford Fiesta. The plan was rejected by Henry Ford II, who stated: "No car with my name on the hood is going to have a Jap engine inside." Although, strictly speaking, it was too late for that, as the Ford Motor Company had been selling a Mazda compact pickup truck as the Ford Courier since late 1971, Ford did not like the idea of flagship North American passenger car models moving in that direction. Ford Motor Company did go on to adapt to the era in which Japanese, German, and American participation in a globalized automobile industry became tightly integrated. For example, Ford's relationship with Mazda was well developed even before the end of Henry Ford II's period of influence. However, in Iacocca's view, it lagged several years behind GM and Chrysler, due to Henry Ford II's unappealable influence, before others led it forward despite his resistance.


title: Henry Ford II

text: Henry Ford II's management style caused the company's fortunes to fluctuate in more ways than one. For example, he allowed the offering of public stock in 1956, which raised $650 million for the company ($ in dollars ), but the "experimental car" program instituted during his tenure, the Edsel, cost the company almost half that. Likewise, Henry Ford II hired the creative Lee Iacocca, who was fundamental to the success of the Ford Mustang, in 1964, but fired Iacocca due to personal disputes in 1978 (about the break in their relationship, Iacocca quoted Ford as saying, "Sometimes you just don't like somebody.") Iacocca later retorted, "If a guy is over 25 percent a jerk, he's in trouble. And Henry was 95 percent." He formally retired from all positions at Ford Motor Company on October 1, 1982, upon reaching the company's mandatory retirement age of 65, but remained the ultimate source of authority at Ford until his death in 1987.


title: Henry Ford II

text: Ford died of pneumonia in Detroit at Henry Ford Hospital on September 29, 1987, at age 70. After a private funeral service at Christ Church Grosse Pointe, his remains were cremated and the ashes scattered.


title: Henry Ford II

text: Henry Ford II is portrayed by Tracy Letts in the 2019 film "Ford v Ferrari" (released under the title "Le Mans '66" in some parts of Europe).


title: Jean Piaget

text: Jean William Fritz Piaget (, , ; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual". His theory of child development is studied in pre-service education programs. Educators continue to incorporate constructivist-based strategies.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 while on the faculty of the University of Geneva, and directed the center until his death in 1980. The number of collaborations that its founding made possible, and their impact, ultimately led to the Center being referred to in the scholarly literature as "Piaget's factory".


title: Jean Piaget

text: According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Piaget was "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing". However, his ideas did not become widely popularized until the 1960s. This then led to the emergence of the study of development as a major sub-discipline in psychology. By the end of the 20th century, Piaget was second only to B. F. Skinner as the most-cited psychologist of that era.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget was born in 1896 in Neuchâtel, in the Francophone region of Switzerland. He was the oldest son of Arthur Piaget (Swiss), a professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel, and Rebecca Jackson (French). Rebecca Jackson came from a prominent family of French steel foundry owners of English descent through her Lancashire-born great-grandfather, steelmaker James Jackson. Piaget was a precocious child who developed an interest in biology and the natural world. His early interest in zoology earned him a reputation among those in the field after he had published several articles on mollusks by the age of 15.


title: Jean Piaget

text: When he was 15, his former nanny wrote to his parents to apologize for having once lied to them about fighting off a would-be kidnapper from baby Jean's pram. There never was a kidnapper. Piaget became fascinated that he had somehow formed a memory of this kidnapping incident, a memory that endured even after he understood it to be false.


title: Jean Piaget

text: He developed an interest in epistemology due to his godfather's urgings to study the fields of philosophy and logic. He was educated at the University of Neuchâtel, and studied briefly at the University of Zürich. During this time, he published two philosophical papers that showed the direction of his thinking at the time, but which he later dismissed as adolescent thought. His interest in psychoanalysis, at the time a burgeoning strain of psychology, can also be dated to this period.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget moved from Switzerland to Paris after his graduation and he taught at the Grange-Aux-Belles Street School for Boys. The school was run by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet-Simon test (later revised by Lewis Terman to become the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales). Piaget assisted in the marking of Binet's intelligence tests. It was while he was helping to mark some of these tests that Piaget noticed that young children consistently gave wrong answers to certain questions. Piaget did not focus so much on the fact of the children's answers being wrong, but that young children consistently made types of mistakes that older children and adults managed to avoid. This led him to the theory that young children's cognitive processes are inherently different from those of adults. Ultimately, he was to propose a global theory of cognitive developmental stages in which individuals exhibit certain common patterns of cognition in each period of development.


title: Jean Piaget

text: In 1921, Piaget returned to Switzerland as director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva. At this time, the institute was directed by Édouard Claparède. Piaget was familiar with many of Claparède's ideas. including that of the psychological concept 'groping' which was closely associated with "trials and errors" observed in human mental patterns.


title: Jean Piaget

text: In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay (7 January 1899 – 3 July 1983); the couple had three children, whom Piaget studied from infancy. From 1925 to 1929, Piaget worked as a professor of psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of science at


title: Jean Piaget

text: the University of Neuchatel. In 1929, Jean Piaget accepted the post of Director of the International Bureau of Education and remained the head of this international organization until 1968. Every year, he drafted his "Director's Speeches" for the IBE Council and for the International Conference on Public Education in which he explicitly addressed his educational credo.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Having taught at the University of Geneva, and at the University of Paris in 1964, Piaget was invited to serve as chief consultant at two conferences at Cornell University (11–13 March) and the University of California, Berkeley (16–18 March). The conferences addressed the relationship of cognitive studies and curriculum development, and strived to conceive implications of recent investigations of children's cognitive development for curricula.


title: Jean Piaget

text: In 1979, Piaget was awarded the Balzan Prize for Social and Political Sciences. Piaget died on 16 September 1980, and, as he had requested, was buried with his family in an unmarked grave in the Cimetière des Rois (Cemetery of Kings) in Geneva.


title: Jean Piaget

text: The resulting theoretical frameworks are sufficiently different from each other that they have been characterized as representing different "Piagets." More recently, Jeremy Burman responded to Beilin and called for the addition of a phase before his turn to psychology: "the zeroeth Piaget."


title: Jean Piaget

text: Before Piaget became a psychologist, he trained in natural history and philosophy. He received a doctorate in 1918 from the University of Neuchâtel. He then undertook post-doctoral training in Zürich (1918–1919), and Paris (1919–1921). He was hired by Théodore Simon to standardize psychometric measures for use with French children in 1919. The theorist we recognize today only emerged when he moved to Geneva, to work for Édouard Claparède as director of research at the Rousseau Institute, in 1922.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget first developed as a psychologist in the 1920s. He investigated the hidden side of children's minds. Piaget proposed that children moved from a position of egocentrism to sociocentrism. For this explanation he combined the use of psychological and clinical methods to create what he called a semiclinical interview. He began the interview by asking children standardized questions and depending on how they answered, he would ask them a series of nonstandard questions. Piaget was looking for what he called "spontaneous conviction" so he often asked questions the children neither expected nor anticipated. In his studies, he noticed there was a gradual progression from intuitive to scientific and socially acceptable responses. Piaget theorized children did this because of the social interaction and the challenge to younger children's ideas by the ideas of those children who were more advanced.


title: Jean Piaget

text: This work was used by Elton Mayo as the basis for the famous Hawthorne Experiments. For Piaget, it also led to an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1936.


title: Jean Piaget

text: In this stage, Piaget believed that the process of thinking and intellectual development could be regarded as an extension of the biological process of the (adaptation) of the species, which has also two ongoing processes: assimilation and accommodation. There is "assimilation" when a child responds to a new event in a way that is consistent with an existing schema. There is "accommodation" when a child either modifies an existing schema or forms an entirely new schema to deal with a new object or event.


title: Jean Piaget

text: He argued infants were engaging in the act of assimilation when they sucked on everything in their reach. He claimed infants transform all objects into an object to be sucked. The children were assimilating the objects to conform to their own mental structures. Piaget then made the assumption that whenever one transforms the world to meet individual needs or conceptions, one is, in a way, assimilating it. Piaget also observed his children not only assimilating objects to fit their needs, but also modifying some of their mental structures to meet the demands of the environment. This is the second division of adaptation known as accommodation. To start, the infants only engaged in primarily reflex actions such as sucking, but not long after, they would pick up objects and put them in their mouths. When they do this, they modify their reflex response to accommodate the external objects into reflex actions. Because the two are often in conflict, they provide the impetus for intellectual development—the constant need to balance the two triggers intellectual growth.


title: Jean Piaget

text: In the model Piaget developed in stage three, he argued that intelligence develops in a series of stages that are related to age and are progressive because one stage must be accomplished before the next can occur. For each stage of development the child forms a view of reality for that age period. At the next stage, the child must keep up with earlier level of mental abilities to reconstruct concepts. Piaget conceived intellectual development as an upward expanding spiral in which children must constantly reconstruct the ideas formed at earlier levels with new, higher order concepts acquired at the next level.


title: Jean Piaget

text: It is primarily the "Third Piaget" (the logical model of intellectual development) that was debated by American psychologists when Piaget's ideas were "rediscovered" in the 1960s.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget studied areas of intelligence like perception and memory that are not entirely logical. Logical concepts are described as being completely reversible because they can always get back to the starting point, meaning that if one starts with a given premise and follows logical steps to reach a conclusion, the same steps may be done in the opposite order, starting from the conclusion to arrive at the premise. The perceptual concepts Piaget studied could not be manipulated. To describe the figurative process, Piaget uses pictures as examples. Pictures cannot be separated because contours cannot be separated from the forms they outline. Memory is the same way: it is never completely reversible; people cannot necessarily recall all the intervening events between two points. During this last period of work, Piaget and his colleague Inhelder also published books on perception, memory, and other figurative processes such as learning.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Because Piaget's theory is based upon biological maturation and stages, the notion of readiness is important. Readiness concerns when certain information or concepts should be taught. According to Piaget's theory, children should not be taught certain concepts until they reached the appropriate stage of cognitive development. For example, young children in the preoperational stage engage in "irreversible" thought and cannot comprehend that an item that has been transformed in some way may be returned to its original state.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget defined himself as a 'genetic' epistemologist, interested in the process of the qualitative development of knowledge. He considered cognitive structures development as a differentiation of biological regulations. When his entire theory first became known – the theory in itself being based on a structuralist and a cognitivitist approach – it was an outstanding and exciting development in regards to the psychological community at that time.


title: Jean Piaget

text: There are a total of four phases in Piaget's research program that included books on certain topics of developmental psychology. In particular, during one period of research, he described himself studying his own three children, and carefully observing and interpreting their cognitive development. In one of his last books, "Equilibration of Cognitive Structures: The Central Problem of Intellectual Development", he intends to explain knowledge development as a process of equilibration using two main concepts in his theory, assimilation and accommodation, as belonging not only to biological interactions but also to cognitive ones.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget believed answers for the epistemological questions at his time could be answered, or better proposed, if one looked to the genetic aspect of it, hence his experimentations with children and adolescents. As he says in the introduction of his book "Genetic Epistemology": "What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge."


title: Jean Piaget

text: 1. "Sensorimotor stage": from birth to age two. The children experience the world through movement and their senses. During the sensorimotor stage children are extremely egocentric, meaning they cannot perceive the world from others' viewpoints. The sensorimotor stage is divided into six substages:


title: Jean Piaget

text: Some followers of Piaget's studies of infancy, such as Kenneth Kaye argue that his contribution was as an observer of countless phenomena not previously described, but that he didn't offer explanation of the processes in real time that cause those developments, beyond analogizing them to broad concepts about biological adaptation generally. Kaye's "apprenticeship theory" of cognitive and social development refuted Piaget's assumption that mind developed endogenously in infants until the capacity for symbolic reasoning allowed them to learn language.


title: Jean Piaget

text: 2. "Preoperational stage": Piaget's second stage, the preoperational stage, starts when the child begins to learn to speak at age two and lasts up until the age of seven. During the preoperational stage of cognitive development, Piaget noted that children do not yet understand concrete logic and cannot mentally manipulate information. Children's increase in playing and pretending takes place in this stage. However, the child still has trouble seeing things from different points of view. The children's play is mainly categorized by symbolic play and manipulating symbols. Such play is demonstrated by the idea of checkers being snacks, pieces of paper being plates, and a box being a table. Their observations of symbols exemplifies the idea of play with the absence of the actual objects involved. By observing sequences of play, Piaget was able to demonstrate that, towards the end of the second year, a qualitatively new kind of psychological functioning occurs, known as the preoperational stage.


title: Jean Piaget

text: The preoperational stage is sparse and logically inadequate in regard to mental operations. The child is able to form stable concepts as well as magical beliefs. The child, however, is still not able to perform operations, which are tasks that the child can do mentally, rather than physically. Thinking in this stage is still egocentric, meaning the child has difficulty seeing the viewpoint of others. The preoperational stage is split into two substages: the symbolic function substage, and the intuitive thought substage. The symbolic function substage is when children are able to understand, represent, remember, and picture objects in their mind without having the object in front of them. The intuitive thought substage is when children tend to propose the questions of "why?" and "how come?" This stage is when children want the knowledge of knowing everything.


title: Jean Piaget

text: 3. "Concrete operational stage": from ages seven to eleven. Children can now converse and think logically (they understand reversibility) but are limited to what they can physically manipulate. They are no longer egocentric. During this stage, children become more aware of logic and conservation, topics previously foreign to them. Children also improve drastically with their classification skills


title: Jean Piaget

text: 4. "Formal operational stage": from age eleven to sixteen and onwards (development of abstract reasoning). Children develop abstract thought and can easily conserve and think logically in their mind. Abstract thought is newly present during this stage of development. Children are now able to think abstractly and use metacognition. Along with this, the children in the formal operational stage display more skills oriented towards problem solving, often in multiple steps.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget had sometimes been criticized for characterizing preoperational children in terms of the cognitive capacities they lacked, rather than their cognitive accomplishments. A "late turn" in the development of Piaget's theory saw the emergence of work on the accomplishments of those children within the framework of his psychology of functions and correspondences. This new phase in Piaget's work was less stage-dependent and reflected greater continuity in human development than would be expected in a stage-bound theory. This advance in his work took place toward the end of his very productive life and is sometimes absent from developmental psychology textbooks.


title: Jean Piaget

text: An example of a function can involve sets X and Y and ordered pairs of elements (x,y), in which x is an element of X and y, Y. In a function, an element of X is mapped onto exactly one element of Y (the reverse need not be true). A function therefore involves a unique mapping in one direction, or, as Piaget and his colleagues have written, functions are "univocal to the right" (Piaget et al., 1977, p. 14). When each element of X maps onto exactly one element of Y "and" each element of Y maps onto exactly one element of X, Piaget and colleagues indicated that the uniqueness condition holds in either direction and called the relationship between the elements of X and Y "biunivocal" or "one-to-one." They advanced the idea that the preoperational child manifests some understanding of one-way order functions.


title: Jean Piaget

text: According to Piaget's Genevan colleagues, the "semilogic" of these order functions sustains the preoperational child's ability to use of spatial extent to index and compare quantities. The child, for example, could use the length of an array to index the number of objects in the array. Thus, the child would judge the longer of two arrays as having the greater number of objects. Although imperfect, such comparisons are often fair ("semilogical") substitutes for exact quantification. Furthermore, these order functions underlie the child's rudimentary knowledge of environmental regularities. Young children are capable of constructing—this reflects the constructivist bent of Piaget's work—sequences of objects of alternating color. They also have an understanding of the pairwise exchanges of cards having pictures of different flowers.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget and colleagues have examined morphisms, which to them differ from the operative transformations observed on concrete operational children. Piaget (1977) wrote that "correspondences and morphisms are essentially comparisons that do not transform objects to be compared but that extract common forms from them or analogies between them" (p. 351). He advanced the idea that this type of knowledge emerges from "primitive applications" of action schemes to objects in the environment. In one study of morphisms, Piaget and colleagues asked children to identify items in a series of movable red cutouts that could cover a pre-specified section of each of four base cards—each card had a red area and a white area. The task, in effect, asked the child to superimpose the cut-outs on a base card to make the entire card appear to be red. Although there were 12 cutouts in all, only three, which differed slightly from each other, could make an entire base card look red. The youngest children studied—they were age 5—could match, using trial and error, one cut-out to one base card. Piaget et al. called this type of morphism bijection, a term-by-term correspondence. Older children were able to do more by figuring out how to make entire card appear to be red by using three cutouts. In other words, they could perform three to one matching. Piaget et al. (1977) called a many-to-one match surjection.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget provided no concise description of the development process as a whole. Broadly speaking it consisted of a cycle:


title: Jean Piaget

text: This process may not be wholly gradual, but new evidence shows that the passage into new stages is more gradual than once thought. Once a new level of organization, knowledge and insight proves to be effective, it will quickly be generalized to other areas "if they exist". As a result, transitions between stages can seem to be rapid and radical, but oftentimes the child has grasped one aspect of the new stage of cognitive functioning but not addressed others. The bulk of the time spent in a new stage consists of refining this new cognitive level; however it does not always happen quickly. For example, a child may see that two different colors of Play-Doh have been fused together to make one ball, based on the color. However, if sugar is mixed into water or iced tea, then the sugar "disappeared" and therefore does not exist to the child at that stage. These levels of one concept of cognitive development are not realized all at once, giving us a gradual realization of the world around us.


title: Jean Piaget

text: It is because this process takes this dialectical form, in which each new stage is created through the further differentiation, integration, and synthesis of new structures out of the old, that the sequence of cognitive stages are logically necessary rather than simply empirically correct. Each new stage emerges only because the child can take for granted the achievements of its predecessors, and yet there are still more sophisticated forms of knowledge and action that are capable of being developed.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Because it covers both how we gain knowledge about objects and our reflections on our own actions, Piaget's model of development explains a number of features of human knowledge that had never previously been accounted for. For example, by showing how children progressively enrich their understanding of things by acting on and reflecting on the effects of their own previous knowledge, they are able to organize their knowledge in increasingly complex structures. Thus, once a young child can consistently and accurately recognize different kinds of animals, he or she then acquires the ability to organize the different kinds into higher groupings such as "birds", "fish", and so on. This is significant because they are now able to know things about a new animal simply on the basis of the fact that it is a bird – for example, that it will lay eggs.


title: Jean Piaget

text: At the same time, by reflecting on their own actions, children develop an increasingly sophisticated awareness of the "rules" that govern them in various ways. For example, it is by this route that Piaget explains this child's growing awareness of notions such as "right", "valid", "necessary", "proper", and so on. In other words, it is through the process of objectification, reflection and abstraction that the child constructs the principles on which action is not only effective or correct but also "justified".


title: Jean Piaget

text: One of Piaget's most famous studies focused purely on the discriminative abilities of children between the ages of two and a half years old, and four and a half years old. He began the study by taking children of different ages and placing two lines of sweets, one with the sweets in a line spread further apart, and one with the same number of sweets in a line placed more closely together. He found that, "Children between 2 years, 6 months old and 3 years, 2 months old correctly discriminate the relative number of objects in two rows; between 3 years, 2 months and 4 years, 6 months they indicate a longer row with fewer objects to have "more"; after 4 years, 6 months they again discriminate correctly" ("Cognitive Capacity of Very Young Children", p. 141). Initially younger children were not studied, because if at four years old a child could not conserve quantity, then a younger child presumably could not either. The results show however that children that are younger than three years and two months have quantity conservation, but as they get older they lose this quality, and do not recover it until four and a half years old. This attribute may be lost due to a temporary inability to solve because of an overdependence on perceptual strategies, which correlates more candy with a longer line of candy, or due to the inability for a four-year-old to reverse situations.


title: Jean Piaget

text: By the end of this experiment several results were found. First, younger children have a discriminative ability that shows the logical capacity for cognitive operations exists earlier than acknowledged. This study also reveals that young children can be equipped with certain qualities for cognitive operations, depending on how logical the structure of the task is. Research also shows that children develop explicit understanding at age 5 and as a result, the child will count the sweets to decide which has more. Finally the study found that overall quantity conservation is not a basic characteristic of humans' native inheritance.


title: Jean Piaget

text: According to Jean Piaget, genetic epistemology attempts to "explain knowledge, and in particular scientific knowledge, on the basis of its history, its sociogenesis, and especially the psychological origins of the notions and operations upon which it is based". Piaget believed he could test epistemological questions by studying the development of thought and action in children. As a result, Piaget created a field known as genetic epistemology with its own methods and problems. He defined this field as the study of child development as a means of answering epistemological questions.


title: Jean Piaget

text: A schema is a structured cluster of concepts, it can be used to represent objects, scenarios or sequences of events or relations. The original idea was proposed by philosopher Immanuel Kant as innate structures used to help us perceive the world.


title: Jean Piaget

text: A schema (pl. schemata) is the mental framework that is created as children interact with their physical and social environments. For example, many 3-year-olds insist that the sun is alive because it comes up in the morning and goes down at night. According to Piaget, these children are operating based on a simple cognitive schema that things that move are alive. At any age, children rely on their current cognitive structures to understand the world around them. Moreover, younger and older children may often interpret and respond to the same objects and events in very different ways because cognitive structures take different forms at different ages.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget (1953) described three kinds of intellectual structures: behavioural (or sensorimotor) schemata, symbolic schemata, and operational schemata.


title: Jean Piaget

text: According to Piaget, children use the process of assimilation and accommodation to create a schema or mental framework for how they perceive and/or interpret what they are experiencing. As a result, the early concepts of young children tend to be more global or general in nature.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Similarly, Gallagher and Reid (1981) maintained that adults view children's concepts as highly generalized and even inaccurate. With added experience, interactions, and maturity, these concepts become refined and more detailed. Overall, making sense of the world from a child's perspective is a very complex and time-consuming process.


title: Jean Piaget

text: These schemata are constantly being revised and elaborated upon each time the child encounters new experiences. In doing this children create their own unique understanding of the world, interpret their own experiences and knowledge, and subsequently use this knowledge to solve more complex problems. In a neurological sense, the brain/mind is constantly working to build and rebuild itself as it takes in, adapts/modifies new information, and enhances understanding.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget wanted to revolutionize the way research was conducted. Although he started researching with his colleagues using a traditional method of data collection, he was not fully satisfied with the results and wanted to keep trying to find new ways of researching using a combination of data, which included naturalistic observation, psychometrics, and the psychiatric clinical examination, in order to have a less guided form of research that would produce more empirically valid results.


title: Jean Piaget

text: As Piaget developed new research methods, he wrote a book called "The Language and Thought of the Child", which aimed to synthesize the methods he was using in order to study the conclusion children drew from situations and how they arrived to such conclusion. The main idea was to observe how children responded and articulated certain situations with their own reasoning, in order to examine their thought processes (Mayer, 2005).


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget administered a test in 15 boys with ages ranging from 10 to 14 years in which he asked participants to describe the relationship between a mixed bouquet of flowers and a bouquet with flowers of the same color. The purpose of this study was to analyze the thinking process the boys had and to draw conclusions about the logic processes they had used, which was a psychometric technique of research. Piaget also used the psychoanalytic method initially developed by Sigmund Freud. The purpose of using such method was to examine the unconscious mind, as well as to continue parallel studies using different research methods. Psychoanalysis was later rejected by Piaget, as he thought it was insufficiently empirical (Mayer, 2005).


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget argued that children and adults used speech for different purposes. In order to confirm his argument, he experimented analyzing a child's interpretation of a story. In the experiment, the child listened to a story and then told a friend that same story in his/her/their own words. The purpose of this study was to examine how children verbalize and understand each other without adult intervention. Piaget wanted to examine the limits of naturalistic observation, in order to understand a child's reasoning. He realized the difficulty of studying children's thoughts, as it is hard to know if a child is pretending to believe their thoughts or not. Piaget was the pioneer researcher to examine children's conversations in a social context – starting from examining their speech and actions – where children were comfortable and spontaneous (Kose, 1987).


title: Jean Piaget

text: After conducting many studies, Piaget was able to find significant differences in the way adults and children reason; however, he was still unable to find the path of logic reasoning and the unspoken thoughts children had, which could allow him to study a child's intellectual development over time (Mayer, 2005). In his third book, "The Child's Conception of the World", Piaget recognized the difficulties of his prior techniques and the importance of psychiatric clinical examination. The researcher believed that the way clinical examinations were conducted influenced how a child's inner realities surfaced. Children would likely respond according to the way the research is conducted, the questions asked, or the familiarity they have with the environment. The clinical examination conducted for his third book provides a thorough investigation into a child's thinking process. An example of a question used to research such process was: "Can you see a thought?" (Mayer, 2005, p. 372).


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget recognized that psychometric tests had its limitations, as children were not able to provide the researcher with their deepest thoughts and inner intellect. It was also difficult to know if the results of child examination reflected what children believed or if it is just a pretend situation. For example, it is very difficult to know with certainty if a child who has a conversation with a toy believes the toy is alive or if the child is just pretending. Soon after drawing conclusions about psychometric studies, Piaget started developing the clinical method of examination. The clinical method included questioning a child and carefully examining their responses – in order to observe how the child reasoned according to the questions asked – and then examining the child's perception of the world through their responses. Piaget recognized the difficulties of interviewing a child and the importance of recognizing the difference between "liberated" versus "spontaneous" responses (Mayer, 2005, p. 372).


title: Jean Piaget

text: Judged by today's standards of psychological research, Piaget's research methods would be considered problematic. Indeed, one modern reviewer has commented that "many of Piaget's pioneering investigations would probably be rejected from most modern journals on methodological grounds of sample size, non-standard measurement, and lack of inter-rater reliability".


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget's research relied on very small samples that were not randomly selected. His book "The Origins of Intelligence in Children" was based on the study of just three children: his own. This means that it is difficult to generalize Piaget's findings to the broader population. Piaget interacted closely with his research subjects and did not follow a set script, meaning that experimental conditions may not have been exactly the same from participant to participant, introducing issues of consistency. As he worked in the era before widespread use of voice recording equipment, his data collection method was simply to make handwritten notes in the field, which he would analyse himself. This differs from the modern practice of using multiple coders to ensure test validity. Furthermore, critics such as Linda Siegel have argued that Piaget's experiments did not adequately control for social context and the child's understanding (or lack of understanding) of the language used in the test task, leading to mistaken conclusions about children's lack of reasoning skills.


title: Jean Piaget

text: These methodological issues mean that when scientists have tried to replicate Piaget's experiments, they have found that small changes to Piaget's procedures lead to different results. For example, in Piaget's tests of object-permanence and conservation of number, the ages at which children pass the tests varies greatly based on small variations in the test procedure, challenging Piaget's theoretical interpretations of his test results.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget wanted to research in environments that would allow children to connect with some existing aspects of the world. The idea was to change the approach described in his book "The Child's Conception of the World" and move away from the vague questioning interviews. This new approach was described in his book "The Child's Conception of Physical Causality", where children were presented with dilemmas and had to think of possible solutions on their own. Later, after carefully analyzing previous methods, Piaget developed a combination of naturalistic observation with clinical interviewing in his book "Judgment and Reasoning in the Child", where a child's intellect was tested with questions and close monitoring. Piaget was convinced he had found a way to analyze and access a child's thoughts about the world in a very effective way (Mayer, 2005). Piaget's research provided a combination of theoretical and practical research methods and it has offered a crucial contribution to the field of developmental psychology (Beilin, 1992). "Piaget is often criticized because his method of investigation, though somewhat modified in recent years, is still largely clinical". He observes a child's surroundings and behavior. He then comes up with a hypothesis testing it and focusing on both the surroundings and behavior after changing a little of the surrounding.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Despite his ceasing to be a fashionable psychologist, the magnitude of Piaget's continuing influence can be measured by the global scale and activity of the Jean Piaget Society, which holds annual conferences and attracts around 700 participants. His theory of cognitive development has proved influential in many different areas:


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget is considered to be the most influential figure in developmental psychology. However, many of aspects of his theories are no longer accepted by mainstream psychologists. Developmental psychologists today do not view development as taking place in stages and many of Piaget's empirical findings have been overturned by subsequent research. For example, psychologists no longer view young children as being incapable of understanding abstract concepts, and no longer believe that babies do not understand object permanence. Despite this, developmental psychologists do acknowledge the importance of Jean Piaget's legacy as the founder of their field. They recognize his innovative empirical work, his attempts to integrate his results into a unified theoretical model and the way he created a path for subsequent researchers to follow. Indeed, many developmental psychology researchers today work in a post-Piagetian or neo-Piagetian framework.


title: Jean Piaget

text: By using Piaget's theory, educators focus on their students as learners. As a result of this focus, education is learner-centered and constructivist-based to an extent. Piaget's theory allows teachers to view students as individual learners who add new concepts to prior knowledge to construct, or build, understanding for themselves. Teachers who use a learner-centered approach as a basis for their professional practices incorporate the several dispositions. They provide experience-based educational opportunities. These teachers also contemplate the learners' individual qualities and attitudes during curriculum planning. Educators allow learners' insights to alter the curriculum. They nourish and support learners' curiosity. They also involve learners' emotions and create a learning environment in which students feel safe.


title: Jean Piaget

text: There are two differences between the preoperational and concrete operational stages that apply to education. These differences are reversibility and decentration. At times, reversibility and decentration occur at the same time. When students think about the steps to complete a task without using a particular logical, sequential order, they are using reversibility. Decentration allows them to concentrate on multiple components of a problematic task at a time. Students use both reversibility and decentration to function throughout the school day, follow directions, and complete assignments.


title: Jean Piaget

text: An example of a student using reversibility is when learning new vocabulary. The student creates a list of unfamiliar words from a literary text. Then, he researches the definition of those words before asking classmate to test him. His teacher has given a set of particular instructions that he must follow in a particular order: he must write the word before defining it, and complete these two steps repeatedly. A child in the preoperational stage gets confused during this process and needs assistance from the teacher to stay on task. The teacher refers him back to his text in order to notate the next word before he can define it. A child in the preoperational stage does not understand the organization required to complete this assignment. However, a child in the concrete operational stage understands the organization, and he can recall the steps in any order while being able to follow the order given. Using decentration, the child has the two activities on his mind: identify words and find them in the dictionary.


title: Jean Piaget

text: A sample of decentration is a preschooler may use a toy banana as a pretend telephone. The child knows the difference between the fruit and a phone. However, in this form of play, he is operating on two levels at once. In an older child at the concrete operational level, decentration allows him to complete subtraction of two-digit numbers and indicate which of the problems also involved borrowing from the other column. The student simultaneously does both. Using reversibility, the student has to move mentally between two subtasks.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Regarding the giving of praise by teachers, praise is a reinforcer for students. Adolescents undergo social-emotional development such that they seek rapport with peers. Thus, teacher praise is not as powerful for students who see teachers as authority figures. They give no value to praise provided by adults, or they have no respect for the individual who is giving praise.


title: Jean Piaget

text: During the 1970s and 1980s, Piaget's works also inspired the transformation of European and American education, including both theory and practice, leading to a more 'child-centered' approach. In "Conversations with Jean Piaget", Bringuier says: "Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society ... but for me and no one else, education means making creators... You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists" (Bringuier, 1980, p. 132).


title: Jean Piaget

text: His theory of cognitive development can be used as a tool in the early childhood classroom. According to Piaget, children developed best in a classroom with interaction.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget defined knowledge as the ability to modify, transform, and "operate on" an object or idea, such that it is understood by the operator through the process of transformation. Learning, then, occurs as a result of experience, both physical and logical, with the objects themselves and how they are acted upon. Thus, knowledge must be assimilated in an active process by a learner with matured mental capacity, so that knowledge can build in complexity by scaffolded understanding. Understanding is scaffolded by the learner through the process of equilibration, whereby the learner balances new knowledge with previous understanding, thereby compensating for "transformation" of knowledge.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Learning, then, can also be supported by instructors in an educational setting. Piaget specified that knowledge cannot truly be formed until the learner has matured the mental structures to which that learning is specific, and thereby development constrains learning. Nevertheless, knowledge can also be "built" by building on simpler operations and structures that have already been formed. Basing operations of an advanced structure on those of simpler structures thus scaffolds learning to build on operational abilities as they develop. Good teaching, then, is built around the operational abilities of the students such that they can excel in their operational stage and build on preexisting structures and abilities and thereby "build" learning.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Evidence of the effectiveness of a contemporary curricular design building on Piaget's theories of developmental progression and the support of maturing mental structures can be seen in Griffin and Case's "Number Worlds" curriculum. The curriculum works toward building a "central conceptual structure" of number sense in young children by building on five instructional processes, including aligning curriculum to the developmental sequencing of acquisition of specific skills. By outlining the developmental sequence of number sense, a conceptual structure is built and aligned to individual children as they develop.


title: Jean Piaget

text: However, the cognitive scientist Karen Fuson has argued that the impact of Piagetian theories in education has not been entirely positive because his work has frequently been misinterpreted. In particular, Piaget's focus on children's interactions with objects in the concrete operational stage has led to an approach to education in which young children are encouraged to learn mathematics by manipulating real objects, but without the necessary direct instruction from teachers that they need to understand what they are doing and to link their activities to symbolic mathematics. This has had a particularly negative impact on low-attaining children who need more support from a more knowledgeable other to make meaning and progress with their learning.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Psychologist Mark Seidenberg has criticised the field of Education Studies for placing too much emphasis on the works of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky and other historical psychologists while failing to keep up with the major advances in cognitive science in the decades since they were active. Meanwhile, a 2016 systematic review of education research showed that constructivist approaches to early childhood education inspired by Piaget and Vygotsky are less effective than comprehensive approaches that incorporate direct skills teaching.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget believed in two basic principles relating to character education: that children develop moral ideas in stages and that children create their conceptions of the world. According to Piaget, "the child is someone who constructs his own moral world view, who forms ideas about right and wrong, and fair and unfair, that are not the direct product of adult teaching and that are often maintained in the face of adult wishes to the contrary" (Gallagher, 1978, p. 26). Piaget believed that children made moral judgments based on their own observations of the world.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget's theory of morality was radical when his book "The Moral Judgment of the Child" was published in 1932 for two reasons: his use of philosophical criteria to define morality (as universalizable, generalizable, and obligatory) and his rejection of equating cultural norms with moral norms. Piaget, drawing on Kantian theory, proposed that morality developed out of peer interaction and that it was autonomous from authority mandates. Peers, not parents, were a key source of moral concepts such as equality, reciprocity, and justice.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget attributed different types of psychosocial processes to different forms of social relationships, introducing a fundamental distinction between different types of said relationships. Where there is constraint because one participant holds more power than the other the relationship is asymmetrical, and, importantly, the knowledge that can be acquired by the dominated participant takes on a fixed and inflexible form. Piaget refers to this process as one of social transmission, illustrating it through reference to the way in which the elders of a tribe initiate younger members into the patterns of beliefs and practices of the group. Similarly, where adults exercise a dominating influence over the growing child, it is through social transmission that children can acquire knowledge. By contrast, in cooperative relations, power is more evenly distributed between participants so that a more symmetrical relationship emerges. Under these conditions, authentic forms of intellectual exchange become possible; each partner has the freedom to project his or her own thoughts, consider the positions of others, and defend his or her own point of view. In such circumstances, where children's thinking is not limited by a dominant influence, Piaget believed "the reconstruction of knowledge", or favorable conditions for the emergence of constructive solutions to problems, exists. Here the knowledge that emerges is open, flexible and regulated by the logic of argument rather than being determined by an external authority.


title: Jean Piaget

text: In short, cooperative relations provide the arena for the emergence of operations, which for Piaget requires the absence of any constraining influence, and is most often illustrated by the relations that form between peers (for more on the importance of this distinction see Duveen & Psaltis, 2008; Psaltis & Duveen, 2006, 2007). This is thus how, according to Piaget, children learn "moral judgement" as opposed to "cultural norms" (or maybe ideological norms).


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget's research on morality was highly influential in subsequent work on moral development, particularly in the case of Lawrence Kohlberg's highly influential stage theory of moral development which dominated moral psychology research until the end of the twentieth century.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Historical changes of thought have been modeled in Piagetian terms. Broadly speaking these models have mapped changes in morality, intellectual life and cognitive levels against historical changes (typically in the complexity of social systems).


title: Jean Piaget

text: Neo-Piagetian stages have been applied to the maximum stage attained by various animals. For example, spiders attain the circular sensory motor stage, coordinating actions and perceptions. Pigeons attain the sensory motor stage, forming concepts.


title: Jean Piaget

text: The origins of human intelligence have also been studied in Piagetian terms. Wynn (1979, 1981) analysed Acheulian and Oldowan tools in terms of the insight into spatial relationships required to create each kind. On a more general level, Robinson's "Birth of Reason" (2005) suggests a large-scale model for the emergence of a Piagetian intelligence.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget's models of cognition have also been applied outside the human sphere, and some primatologists assess the development and abilities of primates in terms of Piaget's model.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Philosophers have used Piaget's work. For example, the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas has incorporated Piaget into his work, most notably in "The Theory of Communicative Action." The philosopher Thomas Kuhn credited Piaget's work with helping him to understand the transition between modes of thought which characterized his theory of paradigm shifts. Yet, that said, it is also noted that the implications of his later work do indeed remain largely unexamined. Shortly before his death (September 1980), Piaget was involved in a debate about the relationships between innate and acquired features of language, at the Centre Royaumont pour une Science de l'Homme, where he discussed his point of view with the linguist Noam Chomsky as well as Hilary Putnam and Stephen Toulmin.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget also had a considerable effect in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence. Seymour Papert used Piaget's work while developing the Logo programming language. Alan Kay used Piaget's theories as the basis for the Dynabook programming system concept, which was first discussed within the confines of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC). These discussions led to the development of the Alto prototype, which explored for the first time all the elements of the graphical user interface (GUI), and influenced the creation of user interfaces in the 1980s and beyond.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget's theories, however, have not gone without scrutiny. A main figure whose ideas contradicted Piaget's ideas was the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky stressed the importance of a child's cultural background as an effect to the stages of development. Because different cultures stress different social interactions, this challenged Piaget's theory that the hierarchy of learning development had to develop in succession. Vygotsky introduced the term Zone of proximal development as an overall task a child would have to develop that would be too difficult to develop alone.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Also, the so-called neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development maintained that Piaget's theory does not do justice either to the underlying mechanisms of information processing that explain transition from stage to stage or individual differences in cognitive development. According to these theories, changes in information processing mechanisms, such as speed of processing and working memory, are responsible for ascension from stage to stage. Moreover, differences between individuals in these processes explain why some individuals develop faster than other individuals (Demetriou, 1998).


title: Jean Piaget

text: Over time, alternative theories of child development have been put forward, and empirical findings have done a lot to undermine Piaget's theories. For example, Esther Thelen and colleagues found that babies would not make the A-not-B error if they had small weights added to their arms during the first phase of the experiment that were then removed before the second phase of the experiment. This minor change should not impact babies' understanding of object permanence, so the difference that this makes to babies' performance on the A-not-B task cannot be explained by Piagetian theory. Thelen and colleagues also found that various other factors also influenced performance on the A-not-B task (including strength of memory trace, salience of targets, waiting time and stance), and proposed that this could be better explained using a dynamic systems theory approach than using Piagetian theory. Alison Gopnik and Betty Repacholi found that babies as young as 18 months old can understand that other people have desires, and that these desires could be very different from their own desires. This contradicts Piaget's view that children are very egocentric at this age.


title: Jean Piaget

text: Furthermore, modern cognitive science had undermined Piaget's view that young children are unable to comprehend number as they are not able to work with abstract concepts in the sensorimotor stage. This Piagetian view has led many educators to believe that it is not appropriate to teach simple arithmetic to young children as it will not lead to real understanding. However, experiments by Starkey et al. have shown that children have an understanding of abstract numbers from as young as 6 months old while more recent studies by Izard et al. have shown that even newborns can perceive abstract numbers. For a full discussion of this, see Stanislas Dehaene's "The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics".


title: Jean Piaget

text: Some supporters of Piaget counter that his critics' arguments depend on misreadings of Piaget's theory. See also Brian Rotman's "Jean Piaget: Psychologist of the Real", an exposition and critique of Piaget's ideas, and Jonathan Tudge and Barbara Rogoff's "Peer influences on cognitive development: Piagetian and Vygotskian perspectives".


title: Jean Piaget

text: Piaget inspired innumerable studies and even new areas of inquiry. The following is a list of critiques and commentaries, organized using the same citation-based method as the list of his own major works (above). These represent the significant and influential post-Piagetian writings in their respective sub-disciplines.


title: Direct democracy

text: Direct democracy or pure democracy is a form of democracy in which the electorate decides on policy initiatives without elected representatives as proxies. This differs from the majority of currently established democracies, which are representative democracies. The theory and practice of direct democracy and participation as its common characteristic was the core of work of many theorists, philosophers, politicians, and social critics, among whom the most important are Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and G.D.H. Cole.


title: Direct democracy

text: In direct democracy, the people decide on policies without any intermediary or representative, whereas in a representative democracy people vote for representatives who then enact policy initiatives. Depending on the particular system in use, direct democracy might entail passing executive decisions, the use of sortition, making laws, directly electing or dismissing officials, and conducting trials. Two leading forms of direct democracy are participatory democracy and deliberative democracy.


title: Direct democracy

text: Semi-direct democracies, in which representatives administer day-to-day governance, but the citizens remain the sovereign, allow for three forms of popular action: referendum (plebiscite), initiative, and recall. The first two forms—referendums and initiatives—are examples of direct legislation. , thirty countries allowed for referendums initiated by the population on the national level.


title: Direct democracy

text: A compulsory referendum subjects the legislation drafted by political elites to a binding popular vote. This is the most common form of direct legislation.


title: Direct democracy

text: A popular referendum empowers citizens to make a petition that calls existing legislation to a vote by the citizens. Institutions specify the timeframe for a valid petition and the number of signatures required, and may require signatures from diverse communities to protect minority interests. This form of direct democracy effectively grants the voting public a veto on laws adopted by the elected legislature, as in Switzerland.


title: Direct democracy

text: A citizen-initiated referendum (also called an initiative) empowers members of the general public to propose, by petition, specific statutory measures or constitutional reforms to the government and, as with other referendums, the vote may be binding or simply advisory. Initiatives may be direct or indirect: with the direct initiative, a successful proposition is placed directly on the ballot to be subject to vote (as exemplified by California's system). With an indirect initiative, a successful proposition is first presented to the legislature for their consideration; however, if no acceptable action is taken after a designated period of time, the proposition moves to direct popular vote. Constitutional amendments in Switzerland, Liechtenstein or Uruguay go through such a form of indirect initiative.


title: Direct democracy

text: A deliberative referendum is a referendum that increases public deliberation through purposeful institutional design.


title: Direct democracy

text: Power of recall gives the public the power to remove elected officials from office before the end of their designated standard term of office.


title: Direct democracy

text: The earliest well-documented direct democracy is said to be the Athenian democracy of the 5th century BC. The main bodies in the Athenian democracy were the assembly, composed of male citizens; the boulê, composed of 500 citizens; and the law courts, composed of a massive number of jurors chosen by lot, with no judges. Ancient Attica had only about 30,000 male citizens, but several thousand of them were politically active in each year and many of them quite regularly for years on end. The Athenian democracy was "direct" not only in the sense that the assembled people made decisions, but also in the sense that the people – through the assembly, boulê, and law courts – controlled the entire political process, and a large proportion of citizens were involved constantly in public affairs. Most modern democracies, being representative, not direct, do not resemble the Athenian system.


title: Direct democracy

text: Also relevant to the history of direct democracy is the history of Ancient Rome, specifically during the Roman Republic, traditionally founded around 509 BC. Rome displayed many aspects of democracy, both direct and indirect, from the era of Roman monarchy all the way to the collapse of the Roman Empire. While the Roman senate was the main body with historical longevity, lasting from the Roman kingdom until after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, it did not embody a purely democratic approach, being made up – during the late republic – of former elected officials, providing advice rather than creating law. The democratic aspect of the constitution resided in the Roman popular assemblies, where the people organised into "centuriae" or into tribes – depending on the assembly – and cast votes on various matters, including elections and laws, proposed before them by their elected magistrates. Some classicists have argued that the Roman republic deserves the label of "democracy", with universal suffrage for adult male citizens, popular sovereignty, and transparent deliberation of public affairs.


title: Direct democracy

text: Many historians mark the end of the Republic with the "lex Titia", passed on 27 November 43 BC, which eliminated many oversight provisions.


title: Direct democracy

text: Modern-era citizen-lawmaking occurs in the cantons of Switzerland from the 13th century. In 1847 the Swiss added the "statute referendum" to their national constitution. They soon discovered that merely having the power to veto Parliament's laws was not enough. In 1891 they added the "constitutional amendment initiative". Swiss politics since 1891 have given the world a valuable experience-base with the national-level constitutional amendment initiative. In the past 120 years, more than 240 initiatives have been put to referendums. Most popular initiatives are discussed and approved by the Parliament before the referendum. Out of the remaining initiatives that go to the referendum, only about 10% are approved by voters; in addition, voters often opt for a version of the initiative rewritten by the government. (See "Direct democracy in Switzerland" below.)


title: Direct democracy

text: Some of the issues surrounding the related notion of a direct democracy using the Internet and other communications technologies are dealt with in the article on e-democracy and below under the heading "Electronic direct democracy". More concisely, the concept of open-source governance applies principles of the free software movement to the governance of people, allowing the entire populace to participate in government directly, as much or as little as they please.


title: Direct democracy

text: It has been suggested that direct democracy could be one of the bases of anarchist and left-libertarian political thought. Direct democracy has been championed by anarchist thinkers since its inception, and direct democracy as a political theory has been largely influenced by anarchism.


title: Direct democracy

text: Athenian democracy developed in the Greek city-state of Athens, comprising the city of Athens and the surrounding territory of Attica, around 600 BC. Athens was one of the first known democracies. Other Greek cities set up democracies, and even though most followed an Athenian model, none were as powerful, stable, or well-documented as that of Athens. In the direct democracy of Athens, the citizens did not nominate representatives to vote on legislation and executive bills on their behalf (as in the United States) but instead voted as individuals. The public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire of the comic poets in the theatres.


title: Direct democracy

text: Solon (594 BC), Cleisthenes (508–507 BCE), and Ephialtes (462 BC) all contributed to the development of Athenian democracy. Historians differ on which of them was responsible for which institution, and which of them most represented a truly democratic movement. It is most usual to date Athenian democracy from Cleisthenes since Solon's constitution fell and was replaced by the tyranny of Peisistratus, whereas Ephialtes revised Cleisthenes' constitution relatively peacefully.