The use of standard and reliable measurements is essential in many areas of life, but nowhere is it of more crucial importance than in the world of science, and physics in particular. This book contains 20 contributions presented as part of Course 206 of the International School of Physics Enrico Fermi on New Frontiers for Metrology: From Biology and Chemistry to Quantum and Data Science, held in Varenna, Italy, from 4 -13 July 2019. The Course was the 7th in the Enrico Fermi series devoted to metrology, and followed a milestone in the history of measurement: the adoption of new definitions for the base units of the SI. During the Course, participants reviewed the decision and discussed how the new foundation for metrology is opening new possibilities for physics, with several of the lecturers reflecting on the implications for an easier exploration of the unification of quantum mechanics and gravity. A wide range of other topics were covered, from measuring color and appearance to atomic weights and radiation, and including the application of metrological principles to the management and interpretation of very large sets of scientific data and the application of metrology to biology. The book also contains a selection of posters from the best of those presented by students at the Course. Offering a fascinating exploration of the latest thinking on the subject of metrology, this book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners from many fields.

How did Americans come to quantify their society’s progress and well-being in units of money? In today’s GDP-run world, prices are the standard measure of not only our goods and commodities but our environment, our communities, our nation, even our self-worth. The Pricing of Progress traces the long history of how and why we moderns adopted the monetizing values and valuations of capitalism as an indicator of human prosperity while losing sight of earlier social and moral metrics that did not put a price on everyday life. Eli Cook roots the rise of economic indicators in the emergence of modern capitalism and the contested history of English enclosure, Caribbean slavery, American industrialization, economic thought, and corporate power. He explores how the maximization of market production became the chief objective of American economic and social policy. We see how distinctly capitalist quantification techniques used to manage or invest in railroad corporations, textile factories, real estate holdings, or cotton plantations escaped the confines of the business world and seeped into every nook and cranny of society. As economic elites quantified the nation as a for-profit, capitalized investment, the progress of its inhabitants, free or enslaved, came to be valued according to their moneymaking abilities. Today as in the nineteenth century, political struggles rage over who gets to determine the statistical yardsticks used to gauge the “health” of our economy and nation. The Pricing of Progress helps us grasp the limits and dangers of entrusting economic indicators to measure social welfare and moral goals.

Fuzzy systems and data mining are indispensible aspects of the computer systems and algorithms on which the world has come to depend. This book presents papers from FSDM 2021, the 7th International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Data Mining. The conference, originally due to take place in Seoul, South Korea, was held online on 26-29 October 2021, due to ongoing restrictions connected with the COVID-19 pandemic. The annual FSDM conference provides a platform for knowledge exchange between international experts, researchers, academics and delegates from industry. This year, the committee received 266 submissions, and this book contains 52 papers, including keynotes and invited presentations, oral and poster contributions. The papers cover four main areas: 1) fuzzy theory, algorithms and systems – including topics like stability; 2) fuzzy applications – which are widely used and cover various types of processing as well as hardware and architecture for big data and time series; 3) the interdisciplinary field of fuzzy logic and data mining; and 4) data mining itself. The topic most frequently addressed this year is fuzzy systems. The book offers an overview of research and developments in fuzzy logic and data mining, and will be of interest to all those working in the field of data science.

First published in 1951, this book examines the role of measurement in obtaining and applying economic knowledge. Esteemed economist Richard Stone divides his topic into four sections: questions of fact and empirical constructs; the truth or falsity of a hypothesis; the estimation of parameters; and questions of prediction.

This volume highlights the importance of replicating previous economic experiments for understanding the robustness and generalizability of behavior. Readers will gain a better understanding of the role that replication plays in scientific discovery as well as valuable insights into the robustness of previously reported findings.

" "If a student researcher had only one handbook on their bookshelf, Miller and Salkind's Handbook would certainly have to be it. With the updated material, the addition of the section on ethical issues (which is so well done that I'm recommending it to the departmental representative to the university IRB), and a new Part 4 on "Qualitative Methods," the new Handbook is an indispensable resource for researchers." "Dan Cover, Department of Sociology, Furman University The book considered a "necessity" by many social science researchers and their students has been revised and updated while retaining the features that made it so useful. The emphasis in this new edition is on the tools with which graduate students and more advanced researchers need to become familiar as well as be able to use in order to conduct high quality research.

This publication contains a substantial amount of detail about the broad history of the development of econometric software based on the personal recollections of many people. For economists, the computer has increasingly become the primary applied research tool, and it is software that makes the computer work.

This text addresses the understanding and alleviation of poverty, inequality, and inequity using a unique and broad mix of concepts, measurement methods, statistical tools, software, and practical exercises. Part I discusses basic fundamental issues of well-being and poverty measurement. Part II develops an integrated framework for measuring poverty, social welfare, inequality, vertical equity, horizontal equity, and redistribution. Part III presents and develops recent methods for testing the robustness of distributive rankings. Part IV discusses ways of using policy to alleviate poverty, improve welfare, increase equity, and assess the impact of growth. Part V applies the tools to real data. Most of the book’s measurement and statistical tools have been programmed in DAD, a well established and widely available free software program that has been tailored especially for income distribution analysis and is used by scholars, researchers, and analysts in nearly 100 countries worldwide. It requires basic understanding of calculus and statistics. Abdelkrim Araar and Jean-Yves Duclos teach economics at Université Laval in Québec City.