Quantify!

Quantify!
Author: Göran Grimvall
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2011
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0801897165

Göran Grimvall is determined to help mere mortals understand how scientists get to the kernel of perplexing problems. Entertaining and enlightening, his latest book uses examples from sports, literature, and nature—as well as from the varied worlds of science—to illustrate how scientists make sense of and explain the world around us. Grimvall's fun-to-read essays and easy-to-follow examples detail how order-of-magnitude estimation, extreme cases, dimensional analysis, and other modeling methods work. They also reveal how nonscientists absorb these concepts and use them at home, school, and work. Grimvall's simple, elegant explanations will help you tap into your inner scientist. Read this book and enjoy your own "Aha!" moment.

The Quantified Scholar

The Quantified Scholar
Author: Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2022-08-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231552351

Since 1986, the British government, faced with dwindling budgets and growing calls for public accountability, has sought to assess the value of scholarly work in the nation’s universities. Administrators have periodically evaluated the research of most full-time academics employed in British universities, seeking to distribute increasingly scarce funding to those who use it best. How do such attempts to quantify the worth of knowledge change the nature of scholarship? Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra examines the effects of quantitative research evaluations on British social scientists, arguing that the mission to measure academic excellence resulted in less diversity and more disciplinary conformity. Combining interviews and original computational analyses, The Quantified Scholar provides a compelling account of how scores, metrics, and standardized research evaluations altered the incentives of scientists and administrators by rewarding forms of scholarship that were closer to established disciplinary canons. In doing so, research evaluations amplified publication hierarchies and long-standing forms of academic prestige to the detriment of diversity. Slowly but surely, they reshaped academic departments, the interests of scholars, the organization of disciplines, and the employment conditions of researchers. Critiquing the effects of quantification on the workplace, this book also presents alternatives to existing forms of evaluation, calling for new forms of vocational solidarity that can challenge entrenched inequality in academia.

The Seductions of Quantification

The Seductions of Quantification
Author: Sally Engle Merry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2016-06-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022626131X

We live in a world where seemingly everything can be measured. We rely on indicators to translate social phenomena into simple, quantified terms, which in turn can be used to guide individuals, organizations, and governments in establishing policy. Yet counting things requires finding a way to make them comparable. And in the process of translating the confusion of social life into neat categories, we inevitably strip it of context and meaning—and risk hiding or distorting as much as we reveal. With The Seductions of Quantification, leading legal anthropologist Sally Engle Merry investigates the techniques by which information is gathered and analyzed in the production of global indicators on human rights, gender violence, and sex trafficking. Although such numbers convey an aura of objective truth and scientific validity, Merry argues persuasively that measurement systems constitute a form of power by incorporating theories about social change in their design but rarely explicitly acknowledging them. For instance, the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report, which ranks countries in terms of their compliance with antitrafficking activities, assumes that prosecuting traffickers as criminals is an effective corrective strategy—overlooking cultures where women and children are frequently sold by their own families. As Merry shows, indicators are indeed seductive in their promise of providing concrete knowledge about how the world works, but they are implemented most successfully when paired with context-rich qualitative accounts grounded in local knowledge.

Quantifying the User Experience

Quantifying the User Experience
Author: Jeff Sauro
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2016-07-12
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0128025484

Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User Research, Second Edition, provides practitioners and researchers with the information they need to confidently quantify, qualify, and justify their data. The book presents a practical guide on how to use statistics to solve common quantitative problems that arise in user research. It addresses questions users face every day, including, Is the current product more usable than our competition? Can we be sure at least 70% of users can complete the task on their first attempt? How long will it take users to purchase products on the website? This book provides a foundation for statistical theories and the best practices needed to apply them. The authors draw on decades of statistical literature from human factors, industrial engineering, and psychology, as well as their own published research, providing both concrete solutions (Excel formulas and links to their own web-calculators), along with an engaging discussion on the statistical reasons why tests work and how to effectively communicate results. Throughout this new edition, users will find updates on standardized usability questionnaires, a new chapter on general linear modeling (correlation, regression, and analysis of variance), with updated examples and case studies throughout. - Completely updated to provide practical guidance on solving usability testing problems with statistics for any project, including those using Six Sigma practices - Includes new and revised information on standardized usability questionnaires - Includes a completely new chapter introducing correlation, regression, and analysis of variance - Shows practitioners which test to use, why they work, and best practices for application, along with easy-to-use Excel formulas and web-calculators for analyzing data - Recommends ways for researchers and practitioners to communicate results to stakeholders in plain English

Quantification

Quantification
Author: Anna Szabolcsi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2010-01-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 113949158X

Quantification forms a significant aspect of cross-linguistic research into both sentence structure and meaning. This book surveys research in quantification starting with the foundational work in the 1970s. It paints a vivid picture of generalized quantifiers and Boolean semantics. It explains how the discovery of diverse scope behaviour in the 1990s transformed the view of quantification, and how the study of the internal composition of quantifiers has become central in recent years. It presents different approaches to the same problems, and links modern logic and formal semantics to advances in generative syntax. A unique feature of the book is that it systematically brings cross-linguistic data to bear on the theoretical issues, covering French, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Russian, Japanese, Telugu (Dravidian), and Shupamem (Grassfield Bantu) and points to formal semantic literature involving quantification in around thirty languages.

Quantified

Quantified
Author: Joe Whitworth
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2015-09-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 161091614X

In Quantified, Whitworth draws lessons from the world's most tech-savvy, high-impact organizations to show how we can make real gains for the environment. The principles of his approach, dubbed quantified conservation, will be familiar to any thriving entrepreneur: situational awareness, bold outcomes, innovation and technology, data and analytics, and gain-focused investment. As President of The Freshwater Trust, Whitworth has put quantified conservation into practice, pioneering the model of a "do-tank" that is dramatically changing how rivers can get restored across the United States. The stories in Quantified highlight the most precious of resources--water--but they apply to any environmental effort. Whether in the realm of policy, agriculture, business, or philanthropy, Whitworth is charting a new course for conservation.

Cognitive Development

Cognitive Development
Author: David Klahr
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2022-02-16
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000549445

Originally published in 1976, the authors present a theory of cognitive development based upon an information-processing approach. This approach leads to the presentation of precise models of performance on a number of tasks derived from a set of critical quantitative concepts: elementary quantification, number concepts, conservation and transitivity. These models encompass both early and late developmental stages, and a process model of the developmental mechanism itself is outlined. Here is one of the first attempts to apply the information-processing view of cognitive psychology to developmental issues raised by empirical work in the Piagetian tradition. It includes an extensive analysis of the processing demands of several of the classic tasks and describes the development of a system capable of performing a wide range of other tasks, including the ability to be self-modifying. It provides an introduction to general concepts and detailed properties of cognitive models stated as production systems. It will be most valuable for students in cognitive development and related courses in developmental, cognitive, and educational psychology, as well as computer science.

Quantifying Measurement

Quantifying Measurement
Author: Jeffrey H Williams
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1681744341

Measurements and experiments are made each and every day, in fields as disparate as particle physics, chemistry, economics and medicine, but have you ever wondered why it is that a particular experiment has been designed to be the way it is. Indeed, how do you design an experiment to measure something whose value is unknown, and what should your considerations be on deciding whether an experiment has yielded the sought after, or indeed any useful result? These are old questions, and they are the reason behind this volume. We will explore the origins of the methods of data analysis that are today routinely applied to all measurements, but which were unknown before the mid-19th Century. Anyone who is interested in the relationship between the precision and accuracy of measurements will find this volume useful. Whether you are a physicist, a chemist, a social scientist, or a student studying one of these subjects, you will discover that the basis of measurement is the struggle to identify the needle of useful data hidden in the haystack of obscuring background noise.

Quantifying the Qualitative

Quantifying the Qualitative
Author: Katya Drozdova
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 125
Release: 2015-12-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 148339249X

Quantifying the Qualitative presents a systematic approach to comparative case analysis based on insights from information theory. This new method, which requires minimal quantitative skills, helps students, policymakers, professionals, and scholars learn more from comparative cases. The approach avoids the limitations of traditional statistics in the small-n context and allows analysts to systematically assess and compare the impact of a set of factors on case outcomes with easy-to-use analytics. Rigorous tools reduce bias, improve the knowledge gained from case studies, and provide straightforward metrics for effectively communicating results to a range of readers and leaders.

InfoWorld

InfoWorld
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 146
Release: 1997-09-15
Genre:
ISBN:

InfoWorld is targeted to Senior IT professionals. Content is segmented into Channels and Topic Centers. InfoWorld also celebrates people, companies, and projects.