Making Comparisons Count

Making Comparisons Count
Author: Ruth Chang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2014-01-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1135714703

This book attempts to answer two questions: Are alternatives for choice ever incomparable? and In what ways can items be compared? The arguments offered suggest that alternatives for choice no matter how different are never incomparable, and that the ways in which items can be compared are richer and more varied than commonly supposed.

Making Comparisons Count

Making Comparisons Count
Author: Ruth Chang
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2002
Genre: Comparison (Philosophy)
ISBN: 9780815337829

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

How Countries Count Crime

How Countries Count Crime
Author: John A. Eterno
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2022-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000634280

This edited collection illuminates the weaknesses and strengths of crime reporting across a wide range of countries, with a focus on democratic countries in which the police bear some accountability to citizens. In one compendium, for the first time, this book documents how different countries record (or fail to record) crimes. With chapters written by native authors who are experts on the practices of their respective countries, the book explores practices in 15 different countries across the globe. Organized with a parallel, country-by-country approach, the book describes and analyzes methods police use to record crimes, with the awareness that the counting of crimes is not only an issue of empirical measurement, but also one of social construction. Crime reporting practices vary widely by country. In some cases, reports are not taken, and in others, reports are carefully based on preliminary investigations. Willful manipulation of crime reports can and does occur, and the book explores related factors such as political pressure, personal ambition, community safety, and more. Discussion questions at the end of each chapter help the reader evaluate the significant issues influencing each country. The editors conclude by suggesting best practices for crime reporting and the collection of crime data. A unique addition to this book is a foreword by Tofiq Murshudlu, the Head of Drugs and Crime for the United Nations in Vienna. The book is intended for a wide range of audiences, including policing scholars, law enforcement and community leaders, and students of criminal justice.

Incommensurability and its Implications for Practical Reasoning, Ethics and Justice

Incommensurability and its Implications for Practical Reasoning, Ethics and Justice
Author: Martijn Boot
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2017-06-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1786602296

If values conflict and rival human interests clash we often have to weigh them against each other. However, under particular conditions incommensurability prevents the assignment of determinable and impartial weights. In those cases an objective balance does not exist. The original thesis of this book sheds new light on aspects of incommensurability and its implications for public decision-making, ethics and justice. Martijn Boot analyzes a number of previously ignored or unrecognized concepts, such as ‘incomplete comparability’, ‘incompletely justified choice’, ‘indeterminateness’ and ‘ethical deficit’ – concepts that are essential for comprehending problems of incommensurability. Apart from problematic implications, incommensurability has also favourable consequences. It creates room for autonomous rational choices that are not dictated by reason. Besides, insight into incommensurability promotes recognition of different possible rankings of universally valid but sometimes conflicting human values. This book avoids unnecessary technical language and is accessible not only for specialists but for a large audience of philosophers, ethicists, political theorists, economists, lawyers and interested persons without specialized knowledge.

A Philosophy of Comparisons

A Philosophy of Comparisons
Author: Hartmut von Sass
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2021-09-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 135018439X

Comparing is one of the most essential practices, in our everyday life as well as in science and humanities. In this in-depth philosophical analysis of the structure, practice and ethics of comparative procedures, Hartmut von Sass expands on the significance of comparison. Elucidating the ramified structure of comparing, von Sass suggests a typology of comparisons before introducing the notion of comparative injustice and the limits of comparisons. He elaborates on comparing as practice by relating comparing to three relative practices – orienting, describing, and expressing oneself – to unfold some of the most important chapters of what might be called comparativism. This approach allows von Sass to clarify the idea of the incomparable, distinguish between different versions of incomparability and shed light on important ethical aspects of comparisons today. Confronting the claim that we are living in an age of comparisons, his book is an important contribution to ideas surrounding all-encompassing measurements and scalability and their critique.

Making Numbers Count

Making Numbers Count
Author: Chip Heath
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1982165456

A clear, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to communicating and understanding numbers and data—from bestselling business author Chip Heath. How much bigger is a billion than a million? Well, a million seconds is twelve days. A billion seconds is…thirty-two years. Understanding numbers is essential—but humans aren’t built to understand them. Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five—anything from six to infinity was known as “lots.” While the numbers in our world have gotten increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. How can we translate millions and billions and milliseconds and nanometers into things we can comprehend and use? Author Chip Heath has excelled at teaching others about making ideas stick and here, in Making Numbers Count, he outlines specific principles that reveal how to translate a number into our brain’s language. This book is filled with examples of extreme number makeovers, vivid before-and-after examples that take a dry number and present it in a way that people click in and say “Wow, now I get it!” You will learn principles such as: -SIMPLE PERSPECTIVE CUES: researchers at Microsoft found that adding one simple comparison sentence doubled how accurately users estimated statistics like population and area of countries. -VIVIDNESS: get perspective on the size of a nucleus by imagining a bee in a cathedral, or a pea in a racetrack, which are easier to envision than “1/100,000th of the size of an atom.” -CONVERT TO A PROCESS: capitalize on our intuitive sense of time (5 gigabytes of music storage turns into “2 months of commutes, without repeating a song”). -EMOTIONAL MEASURING STICKS: frame the number in a way that people already care about (“that medical protocol would save twice as many women as curing breast cancer”). Whether you’re interested in global problems like climate change, running a tech firm or a farm, or just explaining how many Cokes you’d have to drink if you burned calories like a hummingbird, this book will help math-lovers and math-haters alike translate the numbers that animate our world—allowing us to bring more data, more naturally, into decisions in our schools, our workplaces, and our society.

Practices of Comparing

Practices of Comparing
Author: Angelika Epple
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2020-06-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 3839451663

Practices of comparing shape how we perceive, organize, and change the world. Supposedly innocent, practices of comparing play a decisive role in forming categories, boundaries, and hierarchies; but they can also give an impetus to question and change such structures. Like almost no other human practice, comparing pervades all social, political, economic, and cultural spheres. This volume outlines the program of a new research agenda that places comparative practices at the center of an interdisciplinary exploration. Its contributions combine case studies with overarching systematic considerations. They show what insights can be gained and which further questions arise when one makes a seemingly trivial practice - comparing - the subject of in-depth research.

Data And Society

Data And Society
Author: Paul Beynon-davies
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2021-07-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9811237263

Most literature thinks of the relationship between data and society as additive, meaning that data and society are seen as two separate sets of things but which overlap to form an intersection. The literature then goes off to unpack the intersection of the two circles and partners the term data in this manner with terms descriptive of the domain of society — ownership, control, surveillance, and privacy, to name but a few.Within this book, we want to promote an alternative viewpoint of the relationship between data and society. Rather than explaining how data fits with or contributes to some burning societal issues, we want to explain how data is constitutive of many such issues. The term constitutive is used here in the sense of data having power to institute, establish, or enact society.Our viewpoint means that if you are to properly understand the constitutive nature of data, you must start from first principles and closely examine the nature of data itself. You must also focus on the mechanics of data — how data is represented and articulated in records or more generally in data structures.Our aim in doing this is to examine the place of data structures across cultures and societies. In doing so, we hope to better understand why we, as humans, make records. In doing this, we can also better understand some of the unintended consequences of the use of records, which particularly plague us in the modern world.

Classroom-Ready Rich Math Tasks, Grades K-1

Classroom-Ready Rich Math Tasks, Grades K-1
Author: Beth McCord Kobett
Publisher: Corwin
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021-04-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1544399111

Detailed plans for helping elementary students experience deep mathematical learning Do you work tirelessly to make your math lessons meaningful, challenging, accessible, and engaging? Do you spend hours you don’t have searching for, adapting, and creating tasks to provide rich experiences for your students that supplement your mathematics curriculum? Help has arrived! Classroom Ready-Rich Math Tasks for Grades K-1 details 56 research- and standards-aligned, high-cognitive-demand tasks that will have your students doing deep-problem-based learning. These ready-to-implement, engaging tasks connect skills, concepts and practices, while encouraging students to reason, problem-solve, discuss, explore multiple solution pathways, connect multiple representations, and justify their thinking. They help students monitor their own thinking and connect the mathematics they know to new situations. In other words, these tasks allow students to truly do mathematics! Written with a strengths-based lens and an attentiveness to all students, this guide includes: • Complete task-based lessons, referencing mathematics standards and practices, vocabulary, and materials • Downloadable planning tools, student resource pages, and thoughtful questions, and formative assessment prompts • Guidance on preparing, launching, facilitating, and reflecting on each task • Notes on access and equity, focusing on students’ strengths, productive struggle, and distance or alternative learning environments. With concluding guidance on adapting or creating additional rich tasks for your students, this guide will help you give all of your students the deepest, most enriching and engaging mathematics learning experience possible.