Word: census
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...stroke of 12 one night this month, church bells rang, sirens wailed and gongs boomed the length and breadth of Ghana. The noise signaled neither a national holiday nor a sneak air attack. It was meant simply to remind Ghanaians that a new census was about to begin...
While the U.S. early next month will take its 19th census since 1790, heads are also being counted in some 90 other countries and territories-from the U.S.S.R. to Greenland-during this decennial year. When all the figuring is done, roughly half of the world's 3.6 billion people will have been accounted for. Census takers traveling on foot and horseback, by dugout canoe, reindeer sled and helicopter will collect the raw statistics that will enable developing countries to chart their next five-year plans and industrial nations to study (among other things) the migratory patterns of their people...
Machiavellian Device. First undertaken as long ago as 3800 B.C. by the Babylonians and in 3000 B.C. by the Chinese, head counts have often proved unpopular because of their association in the public mind with taxation and conscription. When a national census was proposed to the British Parliament some 200 years ago, an enraged M.P. described the project as "totally subversive to the last remains of English liberty." Only in 1801 was the idea reluctantly accepted. The notion that the census is a Machiavellian device designed to enhance the power of the government is still strong; Machiavelli did, in fact...
...modern man but even his yawns. He is observed by hidden cameras when he shops. This year, 12 million U.S. citizens will face the possibility of a $100 fine and/or 60 days in jail if they refuse to answer certain questions about their income and job on the 1970 census. Although a developing body of law has begun to establish the rights and wrongs of wiretapping and bugging, modern technology provides Government agencies and others with ever more subtle and delicate means of surveillance. Legislatures and courts have hardly begun to deal with what may soon prove...
Last summer a preliminary survey by a team of University of California researchers suggested that early predictions of wholesale plant and animal destruction in the waters off Santa Barbara may well have been exaggerated (TIME, June 13). Their findings may be confirmed later this month when a wildlife census will be made. Some ecological changes have already been detected. An aerial survey along a 30-mile stretch of beach recently counted only 200 grebe, compared with the past population of 4,000 to 7,000. Divers have discovered large patches of sunken oil that lie in gooey ribbons...