Sign Presentation for Administrative Now

In 1975 I was assigned to the 1/19th Infantry Battalion, 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, HI. Although I was an Infantryman (11B MOS) I was detached from my line unit to Battalion HQ as I had another Secondary MOS in Administration (71L).Under Army Regulations, when someone left for a Leave it was necessary to sign out on the approved Leave form prior to departure. On weekends or other after duty times the forms were sent to the Battalion HQ where the NCO assigned as Charge-of-Quarters managed the sign-out process.One young Private reported to HQ to sign out but the CQ did not find his approved leave in the file. This was not entirely unusual and, as the CQ knew that a leave had been approved by the young man’s Unit Commander, he let him go saying they’d take care of the paperwork when he returned from leave. Tragically he died in an accident while on leave.As one of my regular tasks at Battalion included preparing the Duty Status Report, and as it was especially necessary in this case before the soldier’s family was notified of the death - and before they received Death Benefits - I noted his status as “Present for Duty to Approved Leave to Deceased” and sent this to the soldier’s Company Commander for his signature. While waiting for the form to be signed and returned I also began preparations for the letter that was going to be signed by the Battalion Commander and sent to his family.Instead of signing the form the Company Commander came to Battalion and informed me that this man did not have an approved leave because he did not sign out as required. He further told me that though the man had requested the leave he, as the CO, never approved it. Accordingly, he instructed me to change my status report to “Present for Duty to AWOL to Deceased” which would have resulted in the soldier’s family receiving nothing and being informed that their son was in violation of Army Regulations at the time of his death. I was totally shocked as I knew this was untrue, and I informed the Captain of that fact and that I refused to change my Report.In anger, the Captain ordered me to accompany him to the Battalion Commander’s office to answer for my “insubordination” and face whatever penalty the Colonel deemed appropriate. I did so and explained to the Colonel what had actually happened, that the man’s First Sergeant would verify that the Leave had in fact been approved by the Captain, and that the man’s name was still on the Company HQ’s Duty Status Board noting that he was on Leave, something the 1SG would not had done unless he had personally seen the approved form. The Colonel seemed to side with me and I was dismissed to continue preparing my report and the notification letter. At the same time the 1SG looked into the Company Commander’s waste basket - and found the leave form, signed by him, and then crumpled up and thrown out. He brought the form to Battalion and gave this to the Colonel. While he and I waited outside the office we could hear the Colonel speaking to the Captain in anger but, after a while, he came out of his office, looked at us, and then stated that while the form had in fact been approved the young man still violated regulations by leaving without signing out as required. I was then ordered - again - to change my report noting that this Private died while AWOL.Now I was the angry one and, although just a Junior NCO (3-striper at the time), I gave the Colonel a “one finger salute” and went back to my office and slammed the door, ignoring the Colonel’s order to stop.When the Colonel - and most of his Battalion Officers - came into my office I was ready for them, although I thought I could still end up in Leavenworth. Before the Colonel could say a word I laid out on my desk a stack of Leave Forms that, since I was responsible for Duty Status Reports, had been sent to me for filing. As I went through them I sorted out a number that had not been “properly” handled.“This form is for the Commander of Company C. He is currently on Leave but has not signed out as required by Regulations. I will prepare the AWOL Report on him, Sir. This one is for the First Sergeant of the Combat Support Company. He is currently on leave also but has not signed out. I will report him as AWOL, Sir, as required.” Altogether I found perhaps a dozen others that were technically AWOL to include one of the Colonel’s Staff Officers.The Colonel looked at me, realized how serious I was, and then turned to his officers and said, “How did you people let me get into this mess?” He then turned to me and said, “Sergeant Keith, prepare your report and the letter, noting that this young man was on approved leave at the time of his death.” I responded by saying, “Yes, Sir. Already done.” He then ordered the Captain to return to his office with him where, I expect, the Captain was reamed a new one.A few months later the Colonel - a Lieutenant Colonel actually - was promoted to Full Colonel and reassigned to Division HQ. When I had occasion to go to Division HQ I tried to avoid running into him as I still thought I was on the sh-t list with him but one day I did run into him and he told me to come into his office and close the door. This is what he said: “Sergeant Keith, although you might have handled that situation better, you were right and I was wrong. I apologize.”My respect for this man has never left me to this day.

Hey friends,Specifications :Russia sold Alaska in 1867 to United States of America.The land added 586,412 square miles (1,518,800 km) of new territory to the United States.Russia sold the territory of Alaska to the U.S. for $7.2 millioni. e. 2 cents per acre OR $4.74 per sq. Km.Why Russia sold it :It was during Crimean War that Britain, France and Turkey stood against Russia.The cost and logistical difficulties of supplying the territory had made it an economic liability to the Russians, who were additionally struggling with debt accrued during the disastrous Crimean War (1853–56).Russia feared that territory of Alaska might easily be seized by United Kingdom in case of war.Difficulty in living there and Tlingit tribes of Alaska were more restive, leading to sporadic episodes of violence and the interruption of provisions.Lack of natural resources over there at that time.Why USA bought it :Buying Alaska helped in expansion of territory.it was an important step in the United States rise as a great power in the Asia-Pacific region.This trade helped whom :After a short while, gold mines of Alaska started bringing the States hundreds of millions of dollars. Also, oil deposits were found in Alaska.50 years later, the Americans had earned that amount back 100 times over.If Russia was in possession of Alaska today, the geopolitical situation in the world would have been different.Now, this transaction is seen as a gigantic blunder by the Russians.Today, Alaska has developed as a tourism and military base.Alaska has everything nature can provide. It’s paradise on earth.Thank you

No, absolutely not.  Residencies are getting longer because of work restrictions.  Incomes have fallen drastically.  So to try to make this income up we are working longer hours.  Patients often don't respect us and have some quack theory off the internet that we have to spend 30 minutes debunking.  They also think we are rich and they shouldn't have to pay anything.  We are no longer doctors, but providers.  To try to make a the same amount of money each year we have to see more patients.   We don't like that.  The patient feels cheated.  We feel as if we are not doing our best.  But we ha...

rubs hands togetherBecause, in short, they hadn’t invented accountants yet.This, while it might seem unlikely, is a very good question. The obvious answer, which the other three answers have given more pithily than I can ever hope to be capable of doing, is that there is no evidence of those records. Our earliest examples of writing come from the Sumerians in Mesopotamia in roughly 3500 BC, as covered here.An early cuneiform tablet, from somewhere around 3000 BC.Before that, there’s no evidence of written language. Cuneiform, the Mesopotamian writing system, is the first script we can point to and say, “Yes, that’s definitely a written language.” There are a few potential (though extremely, absolutely, very not at all likely) contenders, e.g. the Vinča symbols, but, even if they did represent a language, those only date to maybe a couple millennia earlier. Again, there’s no records on the scale presented here.But there’s another question, a fun question, below that. Sure, it’s unlikely that there ever were lost written languages - but is it impossible that there were? Could - not was, but could - there have been a written language, invented 100 000 years ago, that was lost to time?It’s not immediately unthinkable. Some writing systems, like Brahmi in India and Phoenician in, well, Phoenicia were originally written on bark or leaves or papyrus, which decay quickly, so we have few records of early Brahmi or Phoenician writing. Maybe our hypothetical lost writing system was written on bark or leaves or animal hide or some other quickly-compostable material, hence why we’ve got no records of it. Come to think of it, the idea of a lost, ancient, etc. writing system isImpossible. I’ll stop the suspense there. It’s not possible. There could not have been a writing system from before 4000-5000 BC at most, and most likely none before Mesopotamian cuneiform in 3500 BC. Why this is the case is an excellent question; to answer it, I’m going to talk about wheels.The wheel is the archetypal simple invention. It’s a ubiquitous round thing that moves stuff: how hard could it be to come up with it? Any group of people who hasn’t come up with it must be stupid or backwards or uncivilized or some variant thereof, right? Except it’s a harder than that. There’s more to inventing the wheel than inventing, um, the wheel.Invent the wheel. Great. In fact, invent three more.Now what? You’ve got four wheels, sure - what are you going to do with them? A modern person would say transportation, but that isn’t obvious. Most early wheels were instead used for pottery, as pottery wheels.Stumble upon the idea of using them for transportation.Alright, sure. How do you plan to go about doing this? In order to invent the cart, you first have to have invented the box, and, again, that isn’t an obvious invention.Invent the box. You’ve got your cart now!Nail the wheels to the side of the cart and you’re - oh, hey, uh…It turns out that if you nail a wheel to the side of a cart, all the cart has now is a circular piece of wood with a hole in the middle nailed to it. In order for the wheels to turn, you have to connect them.Invent the axle. Invent another one, if you’d like.Connect the wheels to the axles.Nail them to the bottom of the cart and you - no, not again…It turns out that if you have stationary wheels, you can move your cart in exactly one direction, excepting some pushing and pulling. It’s finicky. You can either limit your cart to two wheels or else you have to come up with a way to make the front wheels turn.Either limit your cart to two wheels or come up with a way to make the front wheels turn.Congratulations! You’ve got a functioning cart! It’s complete with box, wheels, axle(s), and optional wheel-turny-bit! Now all you’ve got to do is…oh, well, now, um, you see…You’ve got to make the cart move. Without a way to make the cart move, it’s useless. You could pull it yourself (time-consuming and tiring), or buy a slave (expensive, and also time-consuming and tiring for the slave). Or you could get an animal to pull it. That sounds like a great idea: get a horse or ox, then…uh…about that horse…You need to have domesticated animals. If you’re in a civilization that happens to have animals that are a.) domesticated, b.) large, c.) willing to pull things, and d.) of a body structure that can support pulling heavy things over long distances, great! If your animal is missing any of those elements, though, you’re not going to be using your wheeled cart much. But let’s say you do have that horse.Just strap the horse to the cart andYou have to invent a way of attaching the horse to the cart. This, like everything else so far, is harder than it sounds. A bad harness can come undone or break, be horribly inefficient, and/or harm the animal it’s attached to.Invent a good harness.And with that, you dedicated wheel-inventor, you have a box on wheels that can turn which is itself full of stuff and also attached well to your pack animal of choice. Your cart is ready. There are no more problems with your cart.Set off on your journey and…well, this might be the biggest problem of them all.You need a flat, cleared surface. Your cart can’t go through the bush or the rain forest. Basically, if you’re not on a perfectly flat, clear plain, you need roads. If you haven’t got roads, you can’t drive your cart very far.Invent roads.There you are. Finally. The wheel will be improved from then on, with things like spokes and rubber and motors, but that’s all you need for a primitive wagon sort of vehicle. (Edit: This is not entirely true; see Alan Dillman’s comment here.)If you’re an observant person, you may have noticed that there are an awful lot of steps to inventing a proper wheeled vehicle. To us, we with the wheels, the wheel appears obvious. But it’s only obvious because we’ve had it for so long. Without box, axle, pack animal, or roads, the wheel has no purpose, no necessity to produce it, and thus no invention, or at least no large-scale implementation.Wheel usage, then, is independent of technological advancement. The Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas, who were advanced and civilized by any standard, never made much use of the wheel: their terrain was often mountainous, and their pack animal, the llama, of the wrong build for cart-pulling. The only place wheels were ever used was in children’s toys.There are a lot of steps, conditions, and so on needed to make the wheel useful. Without these conditions, you don’t get wheels.To take it back on topic: it’s a similar case with writing systems.Writing is, like the wheel, ubiquitous. It’s easier for your average literate urban person to imagine a world without farming than one without writing. You write symbols for the sounds you say: how hard could it be to come up with that? Any group of people who hasn’t come up with it must be stupid or backwards or uncivilized or some variant thereof, right?Except, once again, it’s harder than that. Writing has been invented four times: in Mesopotamia; in Egypt; in China; and in Mesoamerica. Every other writing system comes from one of those four. (Our own alphabet is from Egyptian, as covered here.) Each of those four times, writing has developed in the same way, which is as follows:In the beginning, civilization is created. (ahem: This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.)Now you have cities, and people in the cities, and people making and buying and selling food and livestock and slaves and things, and governments taxing people, and a great big stew of transactions that need to be taken care of. There’s a need for administration, for keeping track of records.So, people - and this is the great unsung invention of humanity, ultimately responsible for all of history, art, culture, literature, mathematics, and tradition in the civilized world from five thousand years ago through to today - invent accountants.Then they invent bureaucrats. Administrators. Record-keepers. The people who sit at desks and write things down.And it’s that “write things down” bit that revolutionizes the world. In order to keep track of purchases, taxes, trades, who sold cows to who in exchange for what amount of barley, things that no human can hold in their mind, they come up with a system: draw pictures to represent different things. Write, say, “[BOB][2][COW][to][JAMES][for][300][unit][BARLEY]”, using pictures for “cow” and “barley” and dots and lines for “2” and “300”.But how do you write “Bob” or “James” or “to” or “for”? You can’t draw a picture of a preposition! What you can do, however, is draw a picture of a thing that sounds like “to” or “for”. We still do a version of this: “2” sounds like “to”, so you can write “Bob sold 2 cows 2 James 4 300 units of barley”. Substitute the rest of the words for pictures, numbers, or pictures that sound like another word for the thing they represent, and you have a way to keep track of anything.As the civilization would eventually realize, you can do more than accounting with this system. Add some more pictures for the rest of written language and you can write anything you’d like. You can write letters. You can write stories. You can write down the poems that have been floating around orally for centuries. The pictures steadily become more stylized until they no longer look like pictures but rather like abstract symbols.Writing has been invented. By accountants. (In fact, the first name we have record of isn’t the name of a king, or of a legendary hero, or of a poet: it’s of an accountant named Kushim, signing his name on a receipt to file away.)The so-called Kushim tablet, dating to the 3400s BC. It reads: “29 086 units of barley were received over the course of 37 months. Signed, Kushim.”Writing is only practical in a situation where a large amount of information, too large for any one person or even group of people to remember and too boring and specific for any of them to need or want to, has to be recorded for a long period of time. In a tribal hunter-gatherer society, you really only need to remember:edible and poisonous plants and animals: This is something you need to remember, so it’s a.) unlikely anyone would forget it, b.) something practical that needs to be immediately retrieved, and c.) visual in any case. It doesn’t benefit from writing, so writing does not need to be invented to keep track of what you can or can’t eat.histories/stories/traditions: These could benefit from being written down, which is why, when writing was invented, they were some of the earliest things to be written down. In a tribal society, they were passed down orally instead. This didn’t require a superhuman memory, and so worked well enough that writing wasn’t necessary.In an early agricultural societies, writing wasn’t needed, either, for much the same reason; nor in proper towns, because trade was not yet so complicated that it required accountants. It’s like the wheel: it’s useless if you’re missing any of the right parts, the right context, the right environment. Necessity is the mother of invention; inversely, lack of necessity is the, er, contraceptive of invention.The earliest that writing could have arisen is the earliest that complex cities with administration existed, with the oldest surviving records dating from a few centuries later, with the older ones having been lost or destroyed.When is that? It’s about 4000–5000 BC, if you’re stretching the estimate, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, whose governments evolved roughly parallel. From there, they developed accountants, then writing. And when are the earliest records of writing? From just a little after that period. Writing would have been invented in 4000–5000 BC, which is the earliest it could have been invented.The only way writing could have been invented in 100 000–25 000 BC is if there were complex cities with administration back then. It’s easy for writing materials to decay; it’s a lot harder for an entire civilization (and, necessarily, agriculture itself, which is only thought to have been invented 10 000 years ago) to go unnoticed.To answer your question, it isn’t possible that any writing systems existed before 4000-5000 BC at the earliest, because writing (and thus the entirety of literature, and so forth) was invented by accountants. In order to have writing, you need accountants; to have accountants, you need cities; to have cities, you need civilization; to have civilization, you need agriculture.Thanks for asking!

Neither (and no, Aramaic didn’t evolve from Arabic).Syriac is a variety of Aramaic, and Arabic definitely didn’t develop from it or any other varitey of Aramaic (notwithstanding a couple of others here who think Aram and Arab sounding similar is somehow evidence. It isn’t—not once you know what Aram meant in ancient times (i.e, what is now Syria: Aramaya literally means “of Syria”—a reflection of the Syrian origin of the language):Aram (region) - WikipediaIt also starts with an Aleph; Arabic’s name starts with a Ayin (and no, Aramaic didn’t lose its Ayins in ancient times, nor did Arabic gain Ayins).Arabic lacks the Northwest Semitic innovations common to both Hebrew and Aramaic (such as word-initial mutation of w to y). It also lacks Aramaic’s suffix (which then became the language’s equivalent to the definite article EDIT: I’ve found other interpretations, such as an extension of the feminine, or as an inversion of the ha pronoun—think “noun+ha”, instead if “ha+noun” (Pat-El, 2009, “The development of the Semitic Definite Article: a Syntactic approach), or its use of dhu as a purely genitive marker (Frozen itself in a genitive form).Arabic also doesn’t have Aramaic’s tendency of turning n’s to r’s ( bar in Aramaic, bin in Arabic, for example), not did it share the trend toward spirantization (so it can’t even be said to very influenced by Aramaic, beyond some loanwords. EDIT: and apparently, they got those from writing, since the pronounciation is too archaic, or just plain off***). Finally, Arabic largely lost the originaly conceptive derivation (this takes some explanation: in PS, you got a concept for a root—say m-l-k, by adding an ūt ending. So m-l-k = malkūtum* “kingship”. Arabic borrowed this word from Aramaic, but beyond a few loanwords of this form from it and Hebrew, this form was lost early in Arabic’s evolution; concepts are instead done in other ways: most commonly, like this: 3-S-b > 3aSabiyyah).Similarly, Aramaic lacks the following features that Arabic exhibited since the earliest attestations in text (as complete sentences, anyway)1-fi (Arabic for “in”)2-inna and anna (I forget the technical term in English, but they look like this in Arabic: إن، أن(.3-the use of the maf’ul form.4–negative ma (this is partly shared with Hebrew, but in Hebrew’s case it’s largely a poetic device, and is not used at all in regular speech or writing (it’s in the bible); Arabic’s ma no longer just means “what”, but also means “not”)5-broken plurals (this btw isn’t as helpful in figuring out where Arabic belongs; we’ll return to this).Finally: both are first attested withing a century of each other—not enough time for Aramaic to become Arabic (and certainly not enough to develop the complex case system Proto-Arabic had, which survives in our writing to this day: that system btw is more complex than what PS had).Arabic is currently classified as a Primary branch of Central Semitic (the other is NW Semitic—Aramaic goes here, along with Hebrew, Amorite, and possibly Sabaean and its kin, though Sabaean and its kin might themselves form a primary offshoot of Central Semitic). So the features it does share with Aramaic are typically those it inherited from proto-central-Semitic, spoken sometime before 2000BC. Keep in mind that Semitic languages exhibit signs of constant contact for long period before they split off from each other: this is why Moabite—a Canaanite dialect—has features similar to those in Aramaic and Arabic (the use of n instead of m for plurals comes to mind).So Arabic didn’t evolve from Aramaic. While we’re at it, it sure as heck didn’t evolve from Sabaean** or any other Epigraphic South Arabian Language (Arabic lacks the bizarre turn those fellows took with the case system, which uses m, n, and null to indicate various states of definitiveness; the specifics have prompted one linguist to propose that Aramaic and Sabaean are somehow related more closely than previously believed (Sabaean doens’t have the w-y change though, so…)).Additionally, the broken plural system used there and in Arabic are different in form anyway, with slightly different strategies (the differences are even greater with Ethio-Semitic). It’s now being proposed (notably by Huehnergard and al-Jallad), that all broken plurals are in fact derived from a PS strategy for plurals, lost in Akkadian and NW Semitic.So Arabic evolved directly from a proto-Central Semitic dialect. The only question is where?Well, I can tell you where it didn’t:1-Yemen: not attested there till c. The 1st Century BC. It has another issue—one shared by Oman (see below).2-Central Arabia: the Thamudic inscriptions there typically reveal an undeciphered language (if it were Arabic, we’d know: keep reading)3-Ihsa’: Arabic is found there, but it postdates the first record of either Arabic or Arabs.4-Oman: we know South Semitic languages were spoken there first: they all have a notable Cushitic substratum that Sabaean and Arabic lack. That should tell you something obvious, so I’ll not type up the paragraph needed to elaborate.5-Ethiopia: they did their own thing there too, and this is first attested around the same time Arabic is.6-the fertile crescent proper (obvious reasons).So where is Arabic from?Well, there’s one area left out: the marginal regions in what is now Jordan, the Sinai, and eastern Syria, and the Hijaz (particularly the north). That’s the only area that hasn’t been ruled out. Any inscriptions?well, yes: here are some inscriptions—mostly in Jordan and Hijaz (I’ll transliterate into the languages current writing system: any missing long vowels should be easy to fill in):مرد عل اجرفس كسر هسلسلة (if you know your Holy Land History, you can date this one)فيفعل لا فدا و لا اثرا فكن هنا يبغنا الموت لا ابغاه فكن هنا ارد جرج لا يردنالصعب بن وهب هسفرلشر بن نشدال بن فرس و هرق هنقة (the last part would be spelled nowadays as و هرّق هناقة(here’s a curse (can you spot the deity?)فهلت عورم عور حجر بعد سفر (with modern spelling: فهلّات عوّري ما عوّر حجر بعد سفر)A random king’s name from the area:حارثLet me put this way: I’ll let any Arab who reads the above take a stab at translation. There’s one word here that may be not so obvious, but context might clear it up (these are all rock inscriptions: that’s all the context needed)I mentioned tow people here: Huehnergard and al-Jallad. Their articles are readily available online, and they do a great job explaining the evidence. Conclusive? No. It’s possible more inscriptions could upend this, so this might make this all outdated anyway. But currently, that origin makes the most sense: the earliest mention of Arabs (or any Arabic word), are as soldiers fighting in Northern Syria at Qarqar, 853BC, as part of a coalition of a dozen princes against Shalmaneser III. As gindibu—their leader—is listed as a prince, this suggest they’ve been around long enough to form at least a proto-state.Anyone arguing for a Yemeni origin (or anywhere else) for the language would have to explain the earlier mention in the North, and also explain how a people in Yemen were able to bring a contingent all the way to Northern Syria—and not be noted for this by anyone. Finally, why no evidence of Arabic in the south till centuries later—by which time the Arabs produced three polities in the north (Gindibu’s Arabs, Qeder, Nabataea)?EDIT: I’ve fixed so typos, and added suggestions for further typos to be fixed.**there are two branches of Semitic represented in these inscriptions: South and Central (Ethiosemitic traditionally under the former, though it might in fact be separate). Sabaean is in the latter, as are a few of the other Old South Arabian languages.***It seems strange, until you consider that even in many Arab areas, Aramaic was used for administration (the Nabataeans were Arab, and spoke Arabic, but used Aramaic for administration. This was a pro-business policy: the Nabataeans—much like Arabs later on, and into the present—have always appreciated business: they were as much merchants as nomad and warriors.)

Others have responded with the immediate causes: the things Morsi did to precipitate it and the structural factors within the army that enabled it. But there is a deeper answer here: Morsi never should have been elected in the first place. In the first round of voting, over three quarters of Egyptian voters voted against Morsi. And that's not surprising for an Islamist candidate like Morsi; in a Pew poll near the election time, 54% cited secular Turkey and 7% secular Tunisia as the best role models for Egyptian government, as opposed to only 32% for Islamist Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, they were using a voting system which forced the secular reform candidates to divide instead of cooperating, so that in the second round the only choices were the Islamist Morsi, and the Mubarak appointee Shafik. And if the only thing rejected by more Egyptians than fundamentalist Islamism was the old guard; 77% had welcomed Mubarak's resignation in an April 2011 Pew poll. So Morsi only won as a lesser evil option. That may seem normal to many Americans (or to a lesser degree to British, Canadians, Indians, and Australians), accustomed to voting for the lesser evil every election. But it is far from being a necessary fact about democracy. No voting system can give everyone their first choice, but many of them can take a deeper look at more choices than the single-vote (aka plurality or first-past-the-post) system used far too much in too many places, especially in the English-speaking world. Specifically, approval voting¹ in the first round would almost certainly have elected a reform candidate like Amr Moussa in Egypt. Moussa's approval ratings were a remarkable 81% on the eve of the election, and a poll had him crushing both of the actual runoff candidates by a margin of over 2:1.²Clearly, Morsi's actions in office were aimed more towards pleasing his core supporters than to broadening his support. But that may be because the two-round single-choice voting system gave him an inflated sense of his support from the outset. If he had truly had a 52% mandate as it appeared from the second round totals, perhaps his divisive tactics would have worked better for him. So in a way, the voting system let him down too, though it clearly let the Egyptian people down more tragically.----¹ "Approval voting" is simply a name for the system where you can vote for any number of candidates, and the one with the most votes wins. In this case, since Egypt has runoffs, the two with the most votes would go on to the runoff.² This Al Ahram pairwise poll had questionable demographics and should probably be discounted by 10 points or so, but there's still no way to unskew such a dominant win into a loss. For instance, the 78-22 victory it showed for Moussa over Morsi was better than Shafik's tally in his strongest region in the real election.----postscript: None of this should be read as a comment on whether overthrowing Morsi was the right thing for the military to do. That question is above my pay grade. I'm just saying that if they'd used a good voting system in the first place, they never would have been put into this situation.

One summer during college I went cross country with a friend who was one of the most physically powerful people I ever met. He was 6’4” of pure muscle, a collegiate east coast heavyweight wrestling champion and was the captain and a defensive lineman of our college’s football team. He was about 265 pounds when we went cross-country, and there was not an ounce of fat on him. His biceps were twice as big as my thighs and his chest was so big if you hollowed it out you could probably take a nap in it.He used to tell me how random people would try to pick fights with him. He was a gentle giant,...

You feel like flying!Every situation is a story, and there is no situation that cannot be better managed in terms of outcome by human intervention. A regulatory issue can be signNowly accelerated by automation and a development issue could be delivered by deft implementation.The IAS offers you two choices: do things and get things done. Both roles require knowledge, imagination and commitment. In short, it offers you the platform to design solutions. What makes me tick is my ability to spot missing links and create solutions.I joined as SDM Jharsuguda, a sub-division of undivided Sambalpur District on September 01, 1989. Now Jharsuguda is a District managed by a DM/SP. The first file that came to me was " Sensitive Booths for the General Elections 1989." What a situation! It was baptism by fire.When I convened a meeting of all the officers connected with the elections to devise a strategy, we found to our dismay that none had  any previous election experience whatsoever! So there I was, fresh from JNU & Mussoorie; at the seashore of life.Every challenge contains within itself an opportunity and we set to work de novo. Those were the days of the ballot box and printed ballot papers. Polling parties, members of which are strangers to each other, had to be formed, trained, motivated and supplied with numerous items before being despatched in Trucks to polling stations, many of which are located in tough terrain and inaccessible areas.Our inquiry revealed that all across the State, the formation and despatch of polling parties took two to four days. We asked ourselves can it be done in a day? Can the departure of polling parties be engineered to accelerate this critical process?Research revealed that delay emanated from the fact that there prevailed a spartan boot camp mentality about the whole thing, and polling personnel were not made to feel at ease. On the Sunday morning of despatch I put the time of arrival at 8/30AM, half an hour before "Ramayan", whereas everywhere else it was 11AM, an hour after. My colleagues were aghast, each thinking of his own Ramayan.I said the solution is simple: we will put a dozen TV sets around so we can all begin on an auspicious note, what with on payment breakfast kiosks and tea on the winter morning. Whoa! That simple? Those days, superior bureaucrats were the stern type and this openness was a novelty. And it worked.Research further revealed that counters were opened item wise so that each team had to visit each counter making it a 15 motion affair. If we made it into a one motion affair we could cut down at least one full day. I said we will do it booth wise. With booth nos 1-50 getting all their items from counter A and so on. Simple? All innovation is.Whew! Our guys said sir jaldi karo so we can leave by 2PM, and have lunch on the way and signNow our destination by 8PM. Making them willing participants we did the despatch in a single day. We did the general election 1989 and the state election in 1990 within the same winter, innovating as we went along. Mind you , the sitting CM was from our Sub-Division, and I was his returning officer.I applied my methods in my subsequent postings as SDM Talcher, ADM Cuttack (undivided), DM Sundargarh and Mayurbhanj, and Divisional Commissioner Central Division. In Mayurbhanj, a massive tribal District with four subdivisions spread over 10,000sq kms, we did in a day what it took full four days on previous elections and the skeptics are shaking their heads till this day! I was election observer Raigarh, Thrissur, Jalandhar, & Howrah; and in every election I have left my unique imprint, and my successors have followed. If some of them did not acknowledge their debt to me, well it is all in the game! For me it is #IndiaFirst!

The common law began hundreds of years ago in England.  At that time, there were no real statutes.  Rather, the courts just made up the rules as they went along.  To truly make it law rather than just an ad hoc system, the courts would follow the rules that the prior courts had determined unless there was substantial reason for overruling at prior rule.  Accordingly, over time, the courts developed complicated sets of rules to govern most of the situations that life might present.  For instance, they determined that assault meant intentionally taking an action that was intended to put anther in fear of being physically harmed.  They determined that battery was the unconsented touching of another person.  They determined that you may have a valid contract even if no written document detailing it was ever signed.  Over time, the legislatures would decided that the common law rules developed by the courts were not the best rule and they would pass a statute that changed the rule.  For instance, the statute of frauds requires that certain types of contract should be completely void if they are not documented in writing, one example being a contract for the purchase of land.  In today's world, there are of course not only many statutes but rules and regulations that have been implemented by legislatures and administrative agencies. But many of those are enacted against the background of the common law.  Thus, in many instances, lawsuits now days are still determined by common law principles but many others are governed by statutory or regulatory provisions.