National Institute of Standards and Technology
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is a physical sciences laboratory, a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce. Its mission is to promote industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into laboratory programs that include nanoscale science and technology, information technology, neutron research, material measurement, physical measurement; the American AI initiative has called NIST to lead the development of appropriate technical standards for reliable, trustworthy, secure and interoperable AI systems. The Articles of Confederation, ratified by the colonies in 1781, contained the clause, "The United States in Congress assembled shall have the sole and exclusive right and power of regulating the alloy and value of coin struck by their own authority, or by that of the respective states—fixing the standards of weights and measures throughout the United States". Article 1, section 8, of the Constitution of the United States, transferred this power to Congress.
To coin money, regulate the value thereof, of foreign coin, fix the standard of weights and measures". In January 1790, President George Washington, in his first annual message to Congress stated that, "Uniformity in the currency and measures of the United States is an object of great importance, will, I am persuaded, be duly attended to", ordered Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson to prepare a plan for Establishing Uniformity in the Coinage and Measures of the United States, afterwards referred to as the Jefferson report. On October 25, 1791, Washington appealed a third time to Congress, "A uniformity of the weights and measures of the country is among the important objects submitted to you by the Constitution and if it can be derived from a standard at once invariable and universal, must be no less honorable to the public council than conducive to the public convenience", but it was not until 1838, that a uniform set of standards was worked out. In 1821, John Quincy Adams had declared "Weights and measures may be ranked among the necessities of life to every individual of human society".
From 1830 until 1901, the role of overseeing weights and measures was carried out by the Office of Standard Weights and Measures, part of the United States Department of the Treasury. In 1901, in response to a bill proposed by Congressman James H. Southard, the National Bureau of Standards was founded with the mandate to provide standard weights and measures, to serve as the national physical laboratory for the United States. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Samuel W. Stratton as the first director; the budget for the first year of operation was $40,000. The Bureau took custody of the copies of the kilogram and meter bars that were the standards for US measures, set up a program to provide metrology services for United States scientific and commercial users. A laboratory site was constructed in Washington, DC, instruments were acquired from the national physical laboratories of Europe. In addition to weights and measures, the Bureau developed instruments for electrical units and for measurement of light.
In 1905 a meeting was called that would be the first "National Conference on Weights and Measures". Conceived as purely a metrology agency, the Bureau of Standards was directed by Herbert Hoover to set up divisions to develop commercial standards for materials and products.page 133 Some of these standards were for products intended for government use, but product standards affected private-sector consumption. Quality standards were developed for products including some types of clothing, automobile brake systems and headlamps and electrical safety. During World War I, the Bureau worked on multiple problems related to war production operating its own facility to produce optical glass when European supplies were cut off. Between the wars, Harry Diamond of the Bureau developed a blind approach radio aircraft landing system. During World War II, military research and development was carried out, including development of radio propagation forecast methods, the proximity fuze and the standardized airframe used for Project Pigeon, shortly afterwards the autonomously radar-guided Bat anti-ship guided bomb and the Kingfisher family of torpedo-carrying missiles.
In 1948, financed by the United States Air Force, the Bureau began design and construction of SEAC, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer. The computer went into operation in May 1950 using a combination of vacuum tubes and solid-state diode logic. About the same time the Standards Western Automatic Computer, was built at the Los Angeles office of the NBS by Harry Huskey and used for research there. A mobile version, DYSEAC, was built for the Signal Corps in 1954. Due to a changing mission, the "National Bureau of Standards" became the "National Institute of Standards and Technology" in 1988. Following September 11, 2001, NIST conducted the official investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. NIST, known between 1901 and 1988 as the National Bureau of Standards, is a measurement standards laboratory known as a National Metrological Institute, a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce; the institute's official mission is to: Promote U. S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.
NIST had an operating budget for fiscal year 2007 of about $843.3 million. NIST's 2009 budget was $992 million
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery; the Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early and Late Middle Ages. Population decline, counterurbanisation, collapse of centralized authority and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in Late Antiquity, continued in the Early Middle Ages; the large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, an Islamic empire, after conquest by Muhammad's successors. Although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete.
The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire, Rome's direct continuation, survived in the Eastern Mediterranean and remained a major power. The empire's law code, the Corpus Juris Civilis or "Code of Justinian", was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became admired in the Middle Ages. In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions. Monasteries were founded; the Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty established the Carolingian Empire during the 8th and early 9th century. It covered much of Western Europe but succumbed to the pressures of internal civil wars combined with external invasions: Vikings from the north, Magyars from the east, Saracens from the south. During the High Middle Ages, which began after 1000, the population of Europe increased as technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish and the Medieval Warm Period climate change allowed crop yields to increase. Manorialism, the organisation of peasants into villages that owed rent and labour services to the nobles, feudalism, the political structure whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords in return for the right to rent from lands and manors, were two of the ways society was organised in the High Middle Ages.
The Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralised nation-states, reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a unified Christendom more distant. Intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, by the founding of universities; the theology of Thomas Aquinas, the paintings of Giotto, the poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the travels of Marco Polo, the Gothic architecture of cathedrals such as Chartres are among the outstanding achievements toward the end of this period and into the Late Middle Ages. The Late Middle Ages was marked by difficulties and calamities including famine and war, which diminished the population of Europe. Controversy and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the interstate conflict, civil strife, peasant revolts that occurred in the kingdoms. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages and beginning the early modern period.
The Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history: classical civilisation, or Antiquity. The "Middle Ages" first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas or "middle season". In early usage, there were many variants, including medium aevum, or "middle age", first recorded in 1604, media saecula, or "middle ages", first recorded in 1625; the alternative term "medieval" derives from medium aevum. Medieval writers divided history into periods such as the "Six Ages" or the "Four Empires", considered their time to be the last before the end of the world; when referring to their own times, they spoke of them as being "modern". In the 1330s, the humanist and poet Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as antiqua and to the Christian period as nova. Leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodisation in his History of the Florentine People, with a middle period "between the fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of city life sometime in late eleventh and twelfth centuries".
Tripartite periodisation became standard after the 17th-century German historian Christoph Cellarius divided history into three periods: ancient and modern. The most given starting point for the Middle Ages is around 500, with the date of 476 first used by Bruni. Starting dates are sometimes used in the outer parts of Europe. For Europe as a whole, 1500 is considered to be the end of the Middle Ages, but there is no universally agreed upon end date. Depending on the context, events such as the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the Americas in 1492, or the Protestant Reformation in 1517 are sometimes used. English historians use the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to mark the end of the period. For Spain, dates used are the death of King Ferdinand II in 1516, the death of Queen Isabella I of Castile in 1504, or the conquest of Granada in 1492. Historians from Romance-speaking countries tend to divide the Middle Ages into two parts: an earlier "High" and late
United States customary units
United States customary units are a system of measurements used in the United States. The United States customary system developed from English units which were in use in the British Empire before the U. S. became an independent country. However, the United Kingdom's system of measures was overhauled in 1824 to create the imperial system, changing the definitions of some units. Therefore, while many U. S. units are similar to their Imperial counterparts, there are significant differences between the systems. The majority of U. S. customary units were redefined in terms of the meter and the kilogram with the Mendenhall Order of 1893 and, in practice, for many years before. These definitions were refined by the international yard and pound agreement of 1959. Americans use customary units in commercial activities, as well as for personal and social use. In science, many sectors of industry, some of government and military, metric units are used; the International System of Units, the modern form of the metric system, is preferred for many uses by the U.
S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. For newer units of measure where there is no traditional customary unit, international units are used, sometimes mixed with customary units, such as electrical resistance of wire expressed in ohms per thousand feet; the United States system of units is similar to the British imperial system. Both systems are derived from English units, a system which had evolved over the millennia before American independence, which had its roots in Roman and Anglo-Saxon units; the customary system was championed by the U. S.-based International Institute for Preserving and Perfecting Weights and Measures in the late 19th century. Advocates of the customary system saw the French metric, system as atheistic. An auxiliary of the Institute in Ohio published a poem with wording such as "down with every'metric' scheme" and "A perfect inch, a perfect pint". One adherent of the customary system called it "a just weight and a just measure, which alone are acceptable to the Lord".
The U. S. government passed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975, which made the metric system "the preferred system of weights and measures for U. S. trade and commerce". The legislation states that the federal government has a responsibility to assist industry as it voluntarily converts to the metric system, i.e. metrification. This is most evident in U. S. labeling requirements on food products, where SI units are always presented alongside customary units. According to the CIA Factbook, the United States is one of three nations that have not adopted the metric system as their official system of weights and measures. U. S. Customary units are used on consumer products and in industrial manufacturing. Metric units are standard in science, medicine, as well as many sectors of industry and government, including the military. There are anecdotal objections to the use of metric units in carpentry and the building trades, on the basis that it is easier to remember an integer number of inches plus a fraction than a measurement in millimeters, or that foot-inch measurements are more suitable when distances are divided into halves and quarters in parallel.
The metric system lacks a parallel to the foot. For measuring length, the U. S. customary system uses the inch, foot and mile, which are the only four customary length measurements in everyday use. Since July 1, 1959, these have been defined on the basis of 1 yard = 0.9144 meters except for some applications in surveying. The U. S. the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries agreed on this definition, so it is termed international measure. When international measure was introduced in the English-speaking countries, the basic geodetic datum in North America was the North American Datum of 1927, constructed by triangulation based on the definition of the foot in the Mendenhall Order of 1893, 1 foot = 1200/3937 meters: this definition was retained for data derived from NAD27, but renamed the US survey foot to distinguish it from the international foot. For most applications, the difference between the two definitions is insignificant – one international foot is 0.999998 of a US survey foot, for a difference of about 1/8 inch per mile – but it affects the definition of the State Plane Coordinate Systems, which can stretch over hundreds of miles.
The NAD27 was replaced in the 1980s by the North American Datum of 1983, defined in meters. The SPCSs were updated, but the National Geodetic Survey left the decision of which definition of the foot to use to the individual states. All SPCSs are defined in meters, but seven states have SPCSs defined in US survey feet and an eighth state in international feet: the other 42 states use only meter-based SPCSs. State legislation is important for determining the conversion factor to be used for everyday land surveying and real estate transactions, although the difference is of no practical significance given the precision of normal surveying measurements over short distances. Twenty-four states have legislated that surveying measures should be based on the US survey foot, eight have legislated that they be made on the basis of the international foot, eighteen have not specified the conversion factor from metric units; the most used area unit with a name unrelated to any length unit is the acre. The National Institute of Standards and Technology contends that customary area units are defined in terms of the square survey foot, not the square international foot.
Conversion factors are based on Astin and National Institute
Long and short scales
The long and short scales are two of several large-number naming systems for integer powers of ten that use the same words with different meanings. The long scale is based on powers of one million, whereas the short scale is based on powers of one thousand. For whole numbers less than a thousand million the two scales are identical. From a thousand million up the two scales diverge, using the same words for different numbers, which can cause misunderstanding; every new term greater than million is one thousand times as large as the previous term. Thus, billion means a thousand millions, trillion means a thousand billions, so on. Thus, an n-illion equals 103n + 3; every new term greater than million is one million times as large as the previous term. Thus, billion means a million millions, trillion means a million billions, so on. Thus, an n-illion equals 106n. Countries where the long scale is used include most countries in continental Europe and most that are French-speaking, Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking countries, except Brazil.
The short scale is now used in most English-speaking and Arabic-speaking countries, in Brazil, in the former Soviet Union and several other countries. Number names are rendered in the language of the country, but are similar everywhere due to shared etymology; some languages in East Asia and South Asia, have large number naming systems that are different from both the long and short scales, for example the Indian numbering system. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the United Kingdom used the long scale, whereas the United States used the short scale, so that the two systems were referred to as British and American in the English language. After several decades of increasing informal British usage of the short scale, in 1974 the government of the UK adopted it, it is used for all official purposes. With few exceptions, the British usage and American usage are now identical; the first recorded use of the terms short scale and long scale was by the French mathematician Geneviève Guitel in 1975.
To avoid confusion resulting from the coexistence of short and long term in any language, the SI recommends using the Metric prefix, which keeps the same meaning regardless of the country and the language. Long and short scales remain in de facto use for counting money; the relationship between the numeric values and the corresponding names in the two scales can be described as: The relationship between the names and the corresponding numeric values in the two scales can be described as: The root mil in million does not refer to the numeral, 1. The word, derives from the Old French, from the earlier Old Italian, milione, an intensification of the Latin word, mille, a thousand; that is, a million is a big thousand, much as a great gross is a dozen gross or 12×144 = 1728. The word milliard, or its translation, is found in many European languages and is used in those languages for 109. However, it is unknown in American English, which uses billion, not used in British English, which preferred to use thousand million before the current usage of billion.
The financial term, which derives from milliard, is used on financial markets, as, unlike the term, billion, it is internationally unambiguous and phonetically distinct from million. Many long scale countries use the word billiard for one thousand long scale billions, the word trilliard for one thousand long scale trillions, etc; the existence of the different scales means that care must be taken when comparing large numbers between languages or countries, or when interpreting old documents in countries where the dominant scale has changed over time. For example, British English and Italian historical documents can refer to either the short or long scale, depending on the date of the document, since each of the three countries has used both systems at various times in its history. Today, the United Kingdom uses the short scale, but France and Italy use the long scale; the pre-1974 former British English word billion, post-1961 current French word billion, post-1994 current Italian word bilione, German Billion.
Therefore, each of these words translates to the American English or post-1974 British English word: trillion, not billion. On the other hand, the pre-1961 former French word billion, pre-1994 former Italian word bilione, Brazilian Portuguese word bilhão and the Welsh word biliwn all refer to 109, being short scale terms; each of these words translates to post-1974 British English word billion. The term billion meant 1012 when introduced. In long scale countries, milliard was defined to its current value of 109, leaving billion at its original 1012 value and so on for the larger numbers; some of these countries, but not all, introduced new words billiard, etc. as intermediate terms. In some short scale countries, milliard was defined to 109 and billion dropped altogether, with trillion redefined down to 1012 and so on for the larger numbers. In many short scale countries, milliard was dropped altogether and billion was redefined down to 109, adjusting downwards the value of trillion and all
Cubic metre
The cubic metre or cubic meter is the SI derived unit of volume. Its SI symbol is m3, it is the volume of a cube with edges one metre in length. An alternative name, which allowed a different usage with metric prefixes, was the stère, still sometimes used for dry measure. Another alternative name, no longer used, was the kilolitre. A cubic metre of pure water at the temperature of maximum density and standard atmospheric pressure has a mass of 1000 kg, or one tonne. At 0 °C, the freezing point of water, a cubic metre of water has less mass, 999.972 kilograms. It is sometimes abbreviated to cu m, m3, M3, m^3, m**3, CBM, cbm when superscript characters or markup cannot be used. Abbreviated cbm in the freight business and MTQ in international trade. Cubic decametre the volume of a cube of side length one decametre equal to a megalitre 1 dam3 = 1000 m3 = 1 MLCubic hectometre the volume of a cube of side length one hectometre equal to a gigalitre in civil engineering abbreviated MCM for million cubic metres 1 hm3 = 1000000 m3 = 1 GLCubic kilometre the volume of a cube of side length one kilometre equal to a teralitre 1 km3 = 1000000000 m3 = 1 TL Cubic decimetre known as DCM in Rubber compound processing.
The volume of a cube of side length one decimetre equal to a litre 1 dm3 = 0.001 m3 = 1 LCubic centimetre the volume of a cube of side length one centimetre equal to a millilitre 1 cm3 = 0.000001 m3 = 10−6 m3 = 1 mLCubic millimetre the volume of a cube of side length one millimetre equal to a microlitre 1 mm3 = 0.000000001 m3 = 10−9 m3 = 1 µL
Old English
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest historical form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, as the language of the upper classes by Anglo-Norman, a relative of French; this is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, as during this period the English language was influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English. Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic dialects spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles and Jutes; as the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain: Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, Latin, brought to Britain by Roman invasion. Old English had four main dialects, associated with particular Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: Mercian, Northumbrian and West Saxon.
It was West Saxon that formed the basis for the literary standard of the Old English period, although the dominant forms of Middle and Modern English would develop from Mercian. The speech of eastern and northern parts of England was subject to strong Old Norse influence due to Scandinavian rule and settlement beginning in the 9th century. Old English is one of the West Germanic languages, its closest relatives are Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Like other old Germanic languages, it is different from Modern English and difficult for Modern English speakers to understand without study. Old English grammar is similar to that of modern German: nouns, adjectives and verbs have many inflectional endings and forms, word order is much freer; the oldest Old English inscriptions were written using a runic system, but from about the 9th century this was replaced by a version of the Latin alphabet. Englisc, which the term English is derived from, means'pertaining to the Angles'. In Old English, this word was derived from Angles.
During the 9th century, all invading Germanic tribes were referred to as Englisc. It has been hypothesised that the Angles acquired their name because their land on the coast of Jutland resembled a fishhook. Proto-Germanic *anguz had the meaning of'narrow', referring to the shallow waters near the coast; that word goes back to Proto-Indo-European *h₂enǵʰ- meaning'narrow'. Another theory is that the derivation of'narrow' is the more connection to angling, which itself stems from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning bend, angle; the semantic link is the fishing hook, curved or bent at an angle. In any case, the Angles may have been called such because they were a fishing people or were descended from such, therefore England would mean'land of the fishermen', English would be'the fishermen's language'. Old English was not static, its usage covered a period of 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 5th century to the late 11th century, some time after the Norman invasion. While indicating that the establishment of dates is an arbitrary process, Albert Baugh dates Old English from 450 to 1150, a period of full inflections, a synthetic language.
Around 85 per cent of Old English words are no longer in use, but those that survived are basic elements of Modern English vocabulary. Old English is a West Germanic language, it came to be spoken over most of the territory of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which became the Kingdom of England. This included most of present-day England, as well as part of what is now southeastern Scotland, which for several centuries belonged to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Other parts of the island – Wales and most of Scotland – continued to use Celtic languages, except in the areas of Scandinavian settlements where Old Norse was spoken. Celtic speech remained established in certain parts of England: Medieval Cornish was spoken all over Cornwall and in adjacent parts of Devon, while Cumbric survived to the 12th century in parts of Cumbria, Welsh may have been spoken on the English side of the Anglo-Welsh border. Norse was widely spoken in the parts of England which fell under Danish law. Anglo-Saxon literacy developed after Christianisation in the late 7th century.
The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is Cædmon's Hymn, composed between 658 and 680. There is a limited corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries, but the oldest coherent runic texts date to the 8th century; the Old English Latin alphabet was introduced around the 9th century. With the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by Alfred the Great in the 9th century, the language of government and literature became standardised around the West Saxon dialect. Alfred advocated education in English alongside Latin, had many works translated into the English language. In Old English, typical of the development of literature, poetry arose before prose, but King Alfred the Great chiefly inspired the growth of prose. A literary standard, dating from the 10th century, arose under the influence of Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, was followed by such writers as the prolific Ælfric of Eynsham. Th
Hundredweight
The hundredweight also known as the centum weight or quintal, is an English, US customary unit of weight or mass of various values. Its value differs between the imperial systems; the two values are distinguished in American English as the "short" and "long" hundredweight and in British English as the "cental" and the "imperial hundredweight". The short hundredweight or cental of 100 lb is used in the US; the long or imperial hundredweight of 8 stone is in informal use in the imperial system but its use for trade in the UK was ended by Schedule 1, Part VI of the Weights and Measures Act 1985. Under both conventions, there are 20 hundredweight in a ton, producing a "short ton" of 2000 lb and a "long ton" of 2240 lb; the hundredweight has had many values. In England in around 1300, different "hundreds" were defined; the Weights and Measures Act of 1835 formally established the present imperial hundredweight of 112 lb. The use in trade of measures by "cental", "hundredweight", or "quintal" have now been banned in the United Kingdom under the Weights and Measures Act of 1985.
The United States and Canada came to use the term "hundredweight" to refer to a unit of 100 lb. This measure was banned from British use—upon risk of being sued for fraud—by the Weights and Measures Act of 1824 but, in 1879, the measure was legalized under the name "cental" in response to legislative pressure from British merchants importing wheat and tobacco from the United States; the short hundredweight is used in the US in the sale of livestock and some cereal grains and oilseeds and concrete additives and on some commodities in futures exchanges. A few decades ago, commodities weighed in terms of long hundredweight included cattle, cattle fodder, coal, some industrial chemicals, other industrial materials, so on. However, since increasing metrication in most English-speaking countries, it is now less used. Church bell ringers use the unit although church bell manufacturers are moving over to the metric system. Older blacksmiths' anvils are stamped with a three-digit number indicating their total weight in hundredweight, quarter-hundredweight, pounds.
Thus, an anvil stamped "1.1.8" will weigh 148 lb. The Imperial hundredweight is used as a measure of vehicle weight in the Bailiwick of Guernsey, although it was redefined as 50.8kg in 1991. Avoirdupois system The short and long hundred of 100 and 120 Hundred, the medieval unit of measure
listen); non-SI unit, symbol: t), commonly referred to as the metric ton in the United States and Canada, is a non-SI metric unit of mass equal to 1,000 kilograms[1][2][3][4] or one megagram (symbol: Mg). It is equivalent to approximately 2,204.6 pounds,[5] 1.102 short tons (US) or 0.984 long tons (UK). Although not part of the SI, the tonne is accepted for use with SI units and prefixes by the International Committee for Weights and Measures.[6]
