Ericsson
Ericsson is a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm. The company offers services and infrastructure in information and communications technology for telecommunications operators, traditional telecommunications and Internet Protocol networking equipment and fixed broadband and business support services, cable television, IPTV, video systems, an extensive services operation. Ericsson had 35% market share in the 2G/3G/4G mobile network infrastructure market in 2012; the company was founded in 1876 by Lars Magnus Ericsson. The company operates in around 180 countries. Ericsson holds over 42,000 granted patents as of December 2016, including many in wireless communications. Lars Magnus Ericsson began his association with telephones in his youth as an instrument maker, he worked for a firm. In 1876, at the age of 30, he started a telegraph repair shop with help from his friend Carl Johan Andersson in central Stockholm and repaired foreign-made telephones.
In 1878 Ericsson began selling his own telephone equipment. His telephones were not technically innovative. In 1878 he made an agreement to supply telephones and switchboards to Sweden's first telecommunications operating company, Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag. In 1878, local telephone importer Numa Peterson hired Ericsson to adjust some telephones from the Bell Telephone Company, he analyzed the technology. He was familiar with Bell and Siemens Halske telephones through his firm's repair work for Telegrafverket and Swedish State Railways, he improved these designs to produce a higher-quality instrument to be used by new telephone companies such as Rikstelefon to provide cheaper service than the Bell Group. Ericsson had no patent or royalty problems because Bell had not patented their inventions in Scandinavia, his training as an instrument maker was reflected in the standard of finish and the ornate design of Ericsson telephones of this period. At the end of the year he started to manufacture telephones much like those of Siemens.
Ericsson became a major supplier of telephone equipment to Scandinavia. Its factory could not keep up with demand. Much of its raw materials were imported. Much of the walnut wood used for cabinets was imported from the United States. Stockholm's telephone network expanded that year and the company reformed into a telephone manufacturer; when Bell bought the biggest telephone network in Stockholm, it only allowed its own telephones to be used with it. Ericsson's equipment was sold to free telephone associations in the Swedish countryside and in other Nordic countries; the prices of Bell equipment and services led Henrik Tore Cedergren to form an independent telephone company called Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag in 1883. As Bell would not deliver equipment to competitors, he formed a pact with Ericsson to supply the equipment for his new telephone network. In 1918 the companies were merged into Allmänna Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson. In 1884, a multiple-switchboard manual telephone exchange was copied from a design by C. E. Scribner at Western Electric.
This was legal because the device was not patented in Sweden, although in the United States it had held patent 529421 since 1879. A single switchboard could handle up to 10,000 lines; the following year, LM Ericsson and Cedergren toured the United States, visiting several telephone exchange stations to gather "inspiration". They found U. S. switchboard designs were more advanced but Ericsson telephones were equal to others. In 1884, a technician named Anton Avén at Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag combined the earpiece and the mouthpiece of a standard telephone into a handset, it was used by operators in the exchanges where operators needed to have one hand free when talking to customers. Ericsson picked up this invention and incorporated it into Ericsson products, beginning with a telephone named The Dachshund; as production grew in the late 1890s, the Swedish market seemed to be reaching saturation, Ericsson expanded into foreign markets through a number of agents. The UK and Russia were early markets, where factories were established improve the chances of gaining local contracts and to augment the output of the Swedish factory.
In the UK, the National Telephone Company was a major customer. The Nordic countries were Ericsson customers. Other countries and colonies were exposed to Ericsson products through the influence of their parent countries; these included Australia and New Zealand, which by the late 1890s were Ericsson's largest non-European markets. Mass production techniques now established. Despite their successes elsewhere, Ericsson did not make significant sales into the United States; the Bell Group and Automatic Electric dominated the market. Ericsson sold its U. S. assets. Sales in Mexico led to inroads into South American countries. South Africa and China were generating significant sales. With his company now multinational, Lars Ericsson stepped down from the company in 1901. Ericsson ignored the growth of automatic telephony in the United States and concentrated
Merck & Co.
Merck & Co. Inc. d.b.a. Merck Sharp & Dohme outside the United States and Canada, is an American multinational pharmaceutical company and one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world; the company was established in 1891 as the United States subsidiary of the German company Merck, founded in 1668 by the Merck family. Merck & Co. was expropriated by the US government during World War I and subsequently established as an independent American company in 1917. While it operates as Merck & Co. in North America, the original Merck based in Darmstadt holds the rights to the Merck name everywhere else. Merck & Co. is the world's seventh largest pharmaceutical company by market capitalization and revenue. Its headquarters is located in New Jersey; the company ranked No. 78 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. Merck & Co. publishes The Merck Manuals, a series of medical reference books for physicians, nurses and veterinarians. These include Therapy, the world's best-selling medical reference.
The Merck Index, a compendium of chemical compounds, was published by Merck & Co. before being acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2012. Merck & Co. traces its origins to its original German parent company Merck, established by the Merck family in 1668 when Friedrich Jacob Merck purchased a drug store in Darmstadt. In the 19th century, the Merck company in Darmstadt evolved from a pharmacy to a major pharmaceutical company which pioneered the commercial manufacture of morphine. In 1891, family member George Merck emigrated to the United States and set up Merck & Co. in New York as the US subsidiary of the family company. Merck & Co. operated from 1891 to 1917 as the US subsidiary of the Merck Group. After the U. S entered World War I, the Merck Group's US subsidiary Merck & Co. was confiscated under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. Company head George W. Merck purchased back the stock in 1919, but U. S. Merck remained a separate company from its former German parent. Merck & Co. hold the trademark rights to the "Merck" name in North America, while its former parent company retains the rights in the rest of the world.
In 1929, H. K. Mulford Company merged with Dohme, Inc.. This company brought to the future Merck & Co. Inc. vaccine technology, including immunization of cavalry horses in World War I and delivery of a diphtheria antitoxin in 1925. In 1953, Merck & Co. merged with Philadelphia-based Sharp & Dohme, Inc. founded by Alpheus Phineas Sharp and Carl Friedrich Louis Dohme in 1845, becoming the largest US drugmaker. The merger combined Merck & Co.'s strength in scientific research and chemical manufacturing with Sharp & Dohme's sales and distribution system and its marketing expertise. The combined company kept the trade name Merck in the United States and Canada, as Merck Sharp & Dohme outside North America. In 1965 Merck & Co. acquired Charles E. Frosst Ltd. of Montreal, Quebec and created Merck-Frosst Canada, Inc. as its Canadian subsidiary and pharmaceutical research facility. Merck & Co. closed this facility in July 2010, the company was renamed Merck Canada in 2011. The company was incorporated in New Jersey in 1970.
It has an operating subsidiary, KBI Inc., formed as a joint venture with AstraZeneca. In November 1993, Merck & Co. completed a $6 billion purchase of Medco Containment Services Inc. one of the largest mail-order pharmacy and managed-care drug companies. Merck & Co. spun Medco off ten years and on August 20, 2003, Medco Health Solutions began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. In November 2009, Merck & Co. announced that it would merge with competitor Schering-Plough in a US$41 billion deal. Although Merck & Co. was in reality acquiring Schering-Plough, the purchase was structured on paper as a "reverse merger", in which "Old" Merck & Co. was renamed Merck Sharp & Dohme, Schering-Plough renamed as "Merck & Co. Inc." so that it could, continue as the surviving public corporation. The maneuver was an attempt to preserve Schering-Plough's rights to market Remicade, decided by arbitration; the merger was completed on November 4, 2009. As of 2015, Merck Sharp & Dohme remains a subsidiary of the Co. parent.
As of December 2013, the US company had 76,000 employees in 120 countries with 31 factories worldwide. It is one of the world's seven largest pharmaceutical companies; the Merck Company Foundation has distributed more than $480 million to educational and non-profit organizations since it was founded in 1957. On December 7, 2012, the foundation announced that it was ending its donations to the Boy Scouts of America because of "its policy that excludes members on the basis of sexual orientation", which "directly conflicts with the Merck Foundation's giving guidelines". In October 2013, Merck & Co. announced it would cut 8,500 jobs in an attempt to cut $2.5bn from its costs by 2015. The company's shares rose 2.35 % to US$48.73 in New York trading. The new losses, combined with 7,500 job cuts announced in 2011 and 2012, amount in total to 20% of its workforce. In June 2014 Merck & Co. announced its acquisition of Idenix Pharmaceuticals for $3.85 billion. In December 2014 Merck & Co. announced they would be spending $8.4 billion to buy Cubist Pharmaceuticals.
In the same month the company acquired the Swiss biotechnology company OncoEthix for up to $375 million dependent upon certain milestone achievements. In July 2015 Merck & Co. and Ablynx expanded their 18 month old
Military technology
Military technology is the application of technology for use in warfare. It comprises the kinds of technology that are distinctly military in nature and not civilian in application because they lack useful or legal civilian applications, or are dangerous to use without appropriate military training; the line is porous. Military technology is researched and developed by scientists and engineers for use in battle by the armed forces. Many new technologies came as a result of the military funding of science. Weapons engineering is the design, development and lifecycle management of military weapons and systems, it draws on the knowledge of several traditional engineering disciplines, including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, electro-optics, aerospace engineering, materials engineering, chemical engineering. This section is divided into the broad cultural developments; the first use of stone tools may have begun during the Paleolithic Period. The earliest stone tools are from the site of Lomekwi, dating from 3.3 million years ago.
Stone tools diversified through the Pleistocene Period. The earliest evidence of warfare between two groups is recorded at the site of Nataruk in Turkana, where human skeletons with major traumatic injuries to the head, ribs and hands, including an embedded obsidian bladelet on a skull, are evidence of inter-group conflict between groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago. Humans entered the Bronze Age as they learned to smelt copper into an alloy with tin to make weapons. In Asia where copper-tin ores are rare, this development was delayed until trading in bronze began in the third millennium BCE. In the Middle East and Southern European regions, the Bronze Age follows the Neolithic period, but in other parts of the world, the Copper Age is a transition from Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Although the Iron Age follows the Bronze Age, in some areas the Iron Age intrudes directly on the Neolithic from outside the region, with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa where it was developed independently.
The first large-scale use of iron weapons began in Asia Minor around the 14th century BCE and in Central Europe around the 11th century BCE followed by the Middle East and India and China. The Assyrians are credited with the introduction of horse cavalry in warfare and the extensive use of iron weapons by 1100 BCE. Assyrians were the first to use iron-tipped arrows; the Wujing Zongyao, written by Zeng Gongliang, Ding Du, others at the order of Emperor Renzong around 1043 during the Song dynasty illustrate the eras focus on advancing intellectual issues and military technology due to the significance of warfare between the Song and the Liao and Yuan to their north. The book covers topics of military strategy and the production and employment of advanced weaponry. Advances in military technology aided the Song dynasty in its defense against hostile neighbors to the north; the flamethrower found its origins in Byzantine-era Greece, employing Greek fire in a device with a siphon hose by the 7th century.
The earliest reference to Greek Fire in China was made in 917, written by Wu Renchen in his Spring and Autumn Annals of the Ten Kingdoms. In 919, the siphon projector-pump was used to spread the'fierce fire oil' that could not be doused with water, as recorded by Lin Yu in his Wuyue Beishi, hence the first credible Chinese reference to the flamethrower employing the chemical solution of Greek fire. Lin Yu mentioned that the'fierce fire oil' derived from one of China's maritime contacts in the'southern seas', Arabia Dashiguo. In the Battle of Langshan Jiang in 919, the naval fleet of the Wenmu King from Wuyue defeated a Huainan army from the Wu state; the Chinese applied the use of double-piston bellows to pump petrol out of a single cylinder, lit at the end by a slow-burning gunpowder match to fire a continuous stream of flame. This device was featured in description and illustration of the Wujing Zongyao military manuscript of 1044. In the suppression of the Southern Tang state by 976, early Song naval forces confronted them on the Yangtze River in 975.
Southern Tang forces attempted to use flamethrowers against the Song navy, but were accidentally consumed by their own fire when violent winds swept in their direction. Although the destructive effects of gunpowder were described in the earlier Tang dynasty by a Daoist alchemist, The earliest developments of the gun barrel and the projectile-fire cannon were found in late Song China; the first art depiction of the Chinese'fire lance' was from a Buddhist mural painting of Dunhuang, dated circa 950. These'fire-lances' were widespread in use by the early 12th century, featuring hollowed bamboo poles as tubes to fire sand particles, lead pellets, bits of sharp metal and pottery shards, large gunpowder-propelled arrows and rocket weaponry. Perishable bamboo was replaced with hollow tubes of cast iron, so too did the terminology of this new weapon change, from'fire-spear' huo qiang to'fire-tube' huo tong; this ancestor to the gun was complemented by the ancestor to the cannon, what the Chinese referred to since th
Research
Research comprises "creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of humans and society, the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications." It is used to establish or confirm facts, reaffirm the results of previous work, solve new or existing problems, support theorems, or develop new theories. A research project may be an expansion on past work in the field. Research projects can be used to develop further knowledge on a topic, or in the example of a school research project, they can be used to further a student's research prowess to prepare them for future jobs or reports. To test the validity of instruments, procedures, or experiments, research may replicate elements of prior projects or the project as a whole; the primary purposes of basic research are documentation, interpretation, or the research and development of methods and systems for the advancement of human knowledge. Approaches to research depend on epistemologies, which vary both within and between humanities and sciences.
There are several forms of research: scientific, artistic, social, marketing, practitioner research, technological, etc. The word research is derived from the Middle French "recherche", which means "to go about seeking", the term itself being derived from the Old French term "recerchier" a compound word from "re-" + "cerchier", or "sercher", meaning'search'; the earliest recorded use of the term was in 1577. Research has been defined in a number of different ways, while there are similarities, there does not appear to be a single, all-encompassing definition, embraced by all who engage in it. One definition of research is used by the OECD, "Any creative systematic activity undertaken in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man and society, the use of this knowledge to devise new applications."Another definition of research is given by John W. Creswell, who states that "research is a process of steps used to collect and analyze information to increase our understanding of a topic or issue".
It consists of three steps: pose a question, collect data to answer the question, present an answer to the question. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines research in more detail as "studious inquiry or examination; this material is of a primary source character. The purpose of the original research is to produce new knowledge, rather than to present the existing knowledge in a new form. Original research can take a number of forms, depending on the discipline. In experimental work, it involves direct or indirect observation of the researched subject, e.g. in the laboratory or in the field, documents the methodology and conclusions of an experiment or set of experiments, or offers a novel interpretation of previous results. In analytical work, there are some new mathematical results produced, or a new way of approaching an existing problem. In some subjects which do not carry out experimentation or analysis of this kind, the originality is in the particular way existing understanding is changed or re-interpreted based on the outcome of the work of the researcher.
The degree of originality of the research is among major criteria for articles to be published in academic journals and established by means of peer review. Graduate students are required to perform original research as part of a dissertation. Scientific research is a systematic way of harnessing curiosity; this research provides scientific information and theories for the explanation of the nature and the properties of the world. It makes practical applications possible. Scientific research is funded by public authorities, by charitable organizations and by private groups, including many companies. Scientific research can be subdivided into different classifications according to their academic and application disciplines. Scientific research is a used criterion for judging the standing of an academic institution, but some argue that such is an inaccurate assessment of the institution, because the quality of research does not tell about the quality of teaching. Research in the humanities involves different methods such as for example hermeneutics and semiotics.
Humanities scholars do not search for the ultimate correct answer to a question, but instead, explore the issues and details that surround it. Context is always important, context can be social, political, cultural, or ethnic. An example of research in the humanities is historical research, embodied in historical method. Historians use primary sources and other evidence to systematically investigate a topic, to write histories in the form of accounts of the past. Other studies aim to examine the occurrence of behaviours in societies and communities, without looking for reasons or motivations to explain these; these studies may be qualitative or quantitative, can use a variety of approaches, such as queer theory or feminist theory. Artistic research seen as'practice-based research', can take form when creative works are considered both the research and the object of research itself, it is the debatable body of thought which offers an alternative t
Novartis
Novartis International AG is a Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company based in Basel, Switzerland. It is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies by sales. Novartis manufactures the drugs clozapine, carbamazepine, imatinib mesylate, letrozole, methylphenidate and others. In 1996, Ciba-Geigy merged with Sandoz. Other Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz businesses were sold, or, like Ciba Specialty Chemicals, spun off as independent companies; the Sandoz brand disappeared for three years, but was revived in 2003 when Novartis consolidated its generic drugs businesses into a single subsidiary and named it Sandoz. Novartis divested its agrochemical and genetically modified crops business in 2000 with the spinout of Syngenta in partnership with AstraZeneca, which divested its agrochemical business. Novartis is a full member of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
Novartis AG is a publicly traded Swiss holding company. Novartis AG owns, directly or indirectly, all companies worldwide that operate as subsidiaries of the Novartis Group. Novartis's businesses are divided into three operating divisions: Advanced Accelerator Applications and Sandoz. Novartis operates directly and through dozens of subsidiaries in countries around the world, each of which fall under one of the divisions, that Novartis categorizes as fulfilling one or more of the following functions: "Holding/Finance: the entity is a holding company and/or performs finance functions for the Group. Novartis owned 24.9% of Idenix Pharmaceuticals prior to its sale to Merck & Co, Inc. Novartis has two significant license agreements with Genentech, a Roche subsidiary. One agreement is for Lucentis. Novartis has established a multi-functional center in Hyderabad, India, in order to offshore several of its R&D, clinical development, medical writing and administrative functions; the global service centere began in 2001 with 17 people.
The center supports the drug major’s operations in the pharmaceuticals, eye care and generic drugs segments. This centre covers more than 870,000 square feet - large enough to house 8000 people. Overall, Novartis was the world's second largest pharmaceutical company in 2011. An IMS Health report ranked Novartis as the biggest pharma company in 2012. Alcon: Alcon was the world's largest and most profitable eye care company when Novartis bought it, with 2009 annual sales of $6.5 billion and net income of $2 billion. At that time, Novartis stated that it believed the two companies could generate some $200 million of potential annual pre-tax cost synergies. In April 2019, Novartis completed the spin-off of Alcon as a separate commercial entity. Sandoz: As of 2013, Sandoz was the world's second-largest generic drug company, contributing US$1.09 billion to Novartis' operating profit on US$8.70 billion in revenue in 2012. Sandoz' biosimilars leads its field, getting the first biosimilar approvals in the EU.
In 2018, Sandoz reported USD $9.9 billion in net sales. Vaccines and Diagnostics Division: In 2013,Novartis announced it was considering selling this division off. While "sales in the unit were up 14% for the first half of 2013, it reported an operating loss of $240 million in the first half of 2013 after a $250 million loss for all 2012.... Vaccine revenue was $1.4 billion in 2012 and has been forecast to more than double to $3.14 billion by 2018.". In 2014, Novartis announced its intention of selling the Vaccines Division to CSL Limited for $275 million; this sale was completed in late 2015 and the division was integrated into CSL's BioCSL operation with the combined entity trading as Seqirus In June 2018 Novartis sold its consumer healthcare joint venture vaccines division to GlaxoSmithKline for USD 13.0 billion. Consumer: Novartis is not a leader in the over-the-counter or animal health segments. In 2012, Novartis ranked 7th on the Access to Medicine Index, which "ranks companies on how they make their products available to the world’s poor."
In 2010, Novartis was in the top three pharma companies. For the fiscal year 2018, Novartis reported earnings of US$12.6 billion, with an annual revenue of US$53.2 billion, an increase of 6.05% over the previous fiscal cycle. Novartis shares traded at over $91 per share, its market capitalization was valued at over US$209.7B billion in February 2019. Novartis was created in 1996 from the merger of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz Laboratories, both Swiss companies with long histories. Ciba-Geigy was formed in 1970 by the merger of J. R. Geigy Ltd and CIBA. Combining the histories of the merger partners, the company's effective history spans 250 years. In 1859, Alexander Clavel (180
Engineer
Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, analyze and test machines, systems and materials to fulfill objectives and requirements while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, regulation and cost. The word engineer is derived from the Latin words ingenium; the foundational qualifications of an engineer include a four-year bachelor's degree in an engineering discipline, or in some jurisdictions, a master's degree in an engineering discipline plus four to six years of peer-reviewed professional practice and passage of engineering board examinations. The work of engineers forms the link between scientific discoveries and their subsequent applications to human and business needs and quality of life. In 1961, the Conference of Engineering Societies of Western Europe and the United States of America defined "professional engineer" as follows: A professional engineer is competent by virtue of his/her fundamental education and training to apply the scientific method and outlook to the analysis and solution of engineering problems.
He/she is able to assume personal responsibility for the development and application of engineering science and knowledge, notably in research, construction, superintending, managing and in the education of the engineer. His/her work is predominantly intellectual and varied and not of a routine mental or physical character, it requires the exercise of original thought and judgement and the ability to supervise the technical and administrative work of others. His/her education will have been such as to make him/her capable of and continuously following progress in his/her branch of engineering science by consulting newly published works on a worldwide basis, assimilating such information and applying it independently. He/she is thus placed in a position to make contributions to the development of engineering science or its applications. His/her education and training will have been such that he/she will have acquired a broad and general appreciation of the engineering sciences as well as thorough insight into the special features of his/her own branch.
In due time he/she will be able to give authoritative technical advice and to assume responsibility for the direction of important tasks in his/her branch. Engineers develop new technological solutions. During the engineering design process, the responsibilities of the engineer may include defining problems and narrowing research, analyzing criteria and analyzing solutions, making decisions. Much of an engineer's time is spent on researching, locating and transferring information. Indeed, research suggests engineers spend 56% of their time engaged in various information behaviours, including 14% searching for information. Engineers must weigh different design choices on their merits and choose the solution that best matches the requirements and needs, their crucial and unique task is to identify and interpret the constraints on a design in order to produce a successful result. Engineers apply techniques of engineering analysis in production, or maintenance. Analytical engineers may supervise production in factories and elsewhere, determine the causes of a process failure, test output to maintain quality.
They estimate the time and cost required to complete projects. Supervisory engineers are responsible for entire projects. Engineering analysis involves the application of scientific analytic principles and processes to reveal the properties and state of the system, device or mechanism under study. Engineering analysis proceeds by separating the engineering design into the mechanisms of operation or failure, analyzing or estimating each component of the operation or failure mechanism in isolation, recombining the components, they may analyze risk. Many engineers use computers to produce and analyze designs, to simulate and test how a machine, structure, or system operates, to generate specifications for parts, to monitor the quality of products, to control the efficiency of processes. Most engineers specialize in one or more engineering disciplines. Numerous specialties are recognized by professional societies, each of the major branches of engineering has numerous subdivisions. Civil engineering, for example, includes structural and transportation engineering and materials engineering include ceramic and polymer engineering.
Mechanical engineering cuts across just about every discipline since its core essence is applied physics. Engineers may specialize in one industry, such as motor vehicles, or in one type of technology, such as turbines or semiconductor materials. Several recent studies have investigated. Research suggests that there are several key themes present in engineers' work: technical work, social work, computer-based work and information behaviours. Among other more detailed findings, a recent work sampling study found that engineers spend 62.92% of their time engaged in technical work, 40.37% in social work, 49.66% in computer-based work. Furthermore, there was considerable overlap between these different types of work, with engineers spending 24.96% of their time engaged in technical and social work, 37.97% in technical and non-social, 15.42% in non-technical and social, 21.66% in non-technical and non-social. Engineering is an information-intensive field, with research finding that engineers spend 55
Progress
Progress is the movement towards a refined, improved, or otherwise desired state or, in the context of progressivism, the idea that advancements in technology and social organization can result in an improved human condition. The concept of progress was introduced in the early 19th century social theories social evolution as described by Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, it was present in the Enlightenment's philosophies of history. As a goal, social progress has been advocated by varying realms of political ideologies with different theories on how it is to be achieved. Specific indicators for measuring progress can range from economic data, technical innovations, change in the political or legal system, questions bearing on individual life chances, such as life expectancy and risk of disease and disability. GDP growth has become a key orientation for politics and is taken as a key figure to evaluate a politician's performance. However, GDP has a number of flaws that make it a bad measure of progress for developed countries.
For example, environmental damage is not taken into account nor is the sustainability of economic activity. Wikiprogress has been set up to share information on evaluating societal progress, it aims to facilitate the exchange of ideas and knowledge. HumanProgress.org is another online resource that seeks to compile data on different measures of societal progress. The Social Progress Index is a tool developed by the International Organization Imperative Social Progress, which measures the extent to which countries cover social and environmental needs of its citizenry. There are fifty-two indicators in three areas or dimensions: Basic Human Needs, Foundations of Wellbeing and Opportunities which show the relative performance of nations. Indices that can be used to measure progress include: Scientific progress is the idea that the scientific community learns more over time, which causes a body of scientific knowledge to accumulate; the chemists in the 19th century knew less about chemistry than the chemists in the 20th century, they in turn knew less than the chemists in the 21st century.
Looking forward, today's chemists reasonably expect that chemists in future centuries will know more than they do. This process differs from non-science fields, such as human languages or history: the people who spoke a now-extinct language, or who lived through a historical time period, can be said to have known different things from the scholars who studied it but they cannot be said to know less about their lives than the modern scholars; some valid knowledge is lost through the passage of time, other knowledge is gained, with the result that the non-science fields do not make scientific progress towards understanding their subject areas. From the 18th century through late 20th century, the history of science of the physical and biological sciences, was presented as a progressive accumulation of knowledge, in which true theories replaced false beliefs; some more recent historical interpretations, such as those of Thomas Kuhn, tend to portray the history of science in terms of competing paradigms or conceptual systems in a wider matrix of intellectual, cultural and political trends.
These interpretations, have met with opposition for they portray the history of science as an incoherent system of incommensurable paradigms, not leading to any scientific progress, but only to the illusion of progress. Aspects of social progress, as described by Condorcet, have included the disappearance of slavery, the rise of literacy, the lessening of inequalities between the sexes, reforms of harsh prisons and the decline of poverty. How progress improved the degraded status of women in traditional society was a major theme of historians starting in the Enlightenment and continuing to today. British theorists William Robertson and Edmund Burke, along with many of their contemporaries, remained committed to Christian- and republican-based conceptions of virtue, while working within a new Enlightenment paradigm; the political agenda related beauty and morality to the imperatives and needs of modern societies of a high level of sophistication and differentiation. Two themes in the work of Robertson and Burke—the nature of women in'savage' and'civilized' societies and'beauty in distress'—reveals how long-held convictions about the character of women with regard to their capacity and right to appear in the public domain, were modified and adjusted to the idea of progress and became central to an enlightened affirmation of modern European civilization.
Classics experts have examined the status of women in the ancient world, concluding that in the Roman Empire, with its superior social organization, internal peace, rule of law, allowed women to enjoy a somewhat better standing than in ancient Greece, where women were distinctly inferior. The inferior status of women in traditional China has raised the issue of whether the idea of progress requires a thoroughgoing reject of traditionalism—a belief held by many Chinese reformers in the early 20th century. Historians Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish asking, "Should we in fact abandon the idea of progress as a view of the past," answer that there is no doubt "that the status of women has improved markedly" in cultures that have adopted the Enlightenment idea of progress. Modernization was promoted by classical liberals in the 19th and 20th centuries, who called for the rapid modernization of the economy and society to remove the traditional hindrances to free markets and free movements of people. During the Enlightenment in Europe social commentators
