This paper examines one aspect of the legacy of the Value-Free Ideal in conservation science: the view that measurements and metrics are value-free epistemic tools detached from ideological, ethical, social, and, generally, non-epistemic considerations. Contrary to this view, I will argue that traditional measurement practices entrenched in conservation are in fact permeated with non-epistemic values. I challenge the received view by revealing three non-epistemic assumptions underlying traditional metrics: (1) a human-environment demarcation, (2) the desirability of a people-free landscape, (...) and (3) the exclusion of cultural diversity from biodiversity. I also draw a connection between arguments for retaining traditional metrics to “scientific colonialism,” exemplified by a fortress conservation model. I conclude by advocating for abandoning the myth of the intrinsic value-freedom of measurement practices and embracing metrics aligned with societal and scientific goals. (shrink)

Metrics shape our social worlds in many and more ways. Everyday quantifications of our preferences, our behaviors and our relationships, alter us and the institutions that we constitute. This essay takes a brief look at the metrics of business ethics through two analytic devices. Representation explains the notion that metrics can capture or demonstrate ethics and performativity explains the notion that metrics can shape or constitute ethics. The analytic distinction between representation and performativity is obscured in (...) practice when metrics become targets, indeed much of the social power of metrics comes from their use as targets. Hence, we should pay attention to the world of practice in which measuring and doing are entangled. However, we should not lose sight of the limitations of measurement and the possibility that there are areas of ethical life best left unmeasured. (shrink)

Active Metric Control via Informational State Manipulation: Specification of a Causal-Symmetric Warp Drive develops a warp-drive concept within a causal-symmetric informational framework, in which gravity is treated as the macroscopic effect of an underlying informational medium rather than as a fundamental force sourced only by ordinary matter. The work introduces an additional informational energy density derived from quantum relative entropy between the local physical state and an informational equilibrium reference state. This informational contribution formally plays the role of “exotic matter” (...) in the warp-drive metric, but is reinterpreted as emergent negentropy generated by highly structured non-equilibrium quantum information. -/- Within this framework, the paper specifies a family of warp-drive metrics whose source is entirely informational, using a minimal k-essence–type model that allows controlled violation of the usual null energy condition while maintaining a standard sound speed and avoiding ghost instabilities. It proposes a chronology protection criterion based on a smooth, strictly monotonic profile of an informational conductivity parameter, which yields a sufficient condition for global hyperbolicity and the absence of closed timelike curves. A scaling analysis quantifies the extreme informational energy densities required for realistic bubble sizes and superluminal speeds, showing that they approach near-Planckian levels. The work therefore recasts faster-than-light travel as a problem of quantum informational engineering and links its feasibility to experimentally constrainable informational parameters rather than to unknown forms of exotic matter. (shrink)

Research assessment and grant funding are vital to higher education. However, the reliance on quantitative metrics in these processes has raised concerns about their validity and potential negative consequences. This study aims to investigate the game of numbers in research assessment and grant funding, focusing on the perspectives of experienced researchers from around the globe. Accidental sampling elicited responses from more than 15 experienced researchers across different academic disciplines, institutions, and countries. The data were collected from the popular “Reviewer (...) 2 Must be Stopped!” Facebook platform, which includes more than 135,000 members across the globe. Two posts were made, allowing participants to share their experiences, perspectives, and concerns related to metrics and numbers in research assessment and grant funding. The results from the thematic analysis revealed diverse perspectives among experienced researchers. Some participants expressed concerns about the dominance of quantitative metrics, highlighting the limitations and potential biases associated with their use. Others acknowledged the value of certain indicators in showcasing research impact. Moreover, the impact of metrics on grant funding awards was also documented. The study highlights the necessity for a more balanced and context-aware approach to research assessment and grant funding, incorporating qualitative measures and acknowledging the diverse nature of research impact. (shrink)

Let G be a group with a metric invariant under left and right translations, and let ?r be the ball of radius r around the identity. A (k,r)-metric approximate subgroup is a symmetric subset X of G...

In a number of publications A.N. Prior considered the use of what he called ‘metric tense logic’. This is a tense logic in which the past and future operators P and F have an index representing a temporal distance, so that Pnα means that α was true n -much ago, and Fn α means that α will be true n -much hence. The paper investigates the use of metric predicate tense logic in formalising phenomena ormally treated by such devices as (...) multiple indexing or quantification over times. (shrink)

Active Metric Control via Informational State Manipulation: Specification of a Causal-Symmetric Warp Drive -/- In this paper, faster-than-light travel is reformulated as a problem of informational engineering rather than exotic matter. Within the Causal-Symmetric Informational Framework, gravity is treated as an equation of state of an underlying informational medium, and non-equilibrium quantum information becomes a genuine energy source. The warp drive is specified by actively generating an informational energy density from the quantum relative entropy of the local state with respect (...) to an informational equilibrium state. This gives rise to an informational stress–energy contribution that formally plays the role of exotic matter in general relativity, but is reinterpreted as emergent “negentropy” rather than as an ad hoc negative-energy fluid. Using a minimal k-essence model, the paper derives this informational source from a covariant action and shows that controlled violation of the usual null energy condition can be achieved while retaining a unit sound speed and avoiding ghost instabilities. -/- Beyond sourcing the metric, the framework also addresses causality. The same informational structure that drives the warp bubble controls the effective invariant speed of light through a spatial profile of the conductivity parameter “kappa”. By designing the kappa gradient in the bubble wall to be smooth and strictly monotonic, the paper formulates a chronology protection conjecture that yields a sufficient condition for global hyperbolicity and the absence of closed timelike curves. A quantitative scaling analysis shows that the required informational energy density grows extremely rapidly with bubble size and speed, reaching values near the Planck energy density even for modest warp configurations. This shifts the central challenge from unknown exotic matter to the controlled generation of enormous amounts of structured quantum information, far beyond current technology but precise enough to be linked to prospective experimental bounds on kappa from delayed-choice quantum random number generators. (shrink)

The paper introduces a broad family of metrics applicable to finite and countably infinite strings, or, by extension, to formal structures serving as semantics for countable languages. The main focus is on applications to sets of pointed Kripke models, a semantics for modal logics. For the resulting metric spaces, the paper classifies topological properties including which metrics are topologically equivalent, providing sufficient conditions for compactness, characterizing clopen sets and isolated points, and characterizing the metrical topologies by a concept (...) of logical convergence. We then apply the approach to maps from dynamic epistemic logic, showing that product updates with action models yield continuous maps, hence allowing for an interpretation of the iterated updates as discrete time dynamical systems. (shrink)

What has the dispositional analysis of properties and laws (e.g. Molnar, Powers, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003; Mumford, Laws in nature, Routledge London, 2004; Bird, Nature’s metaphysics, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2007) to offer to the scientific understanding of physical properties?—The article provides an answer to this question for the case of spacetime points and their metrical properties in General Relativity. The analysis shows that metrical properties are not ‘powers’, i.e. they cannot be understood as producing the effects of spacetime on (...) matter with metaphysical necessity. Instead they possess categorical characteristics which, in connection with specific laws, explain those effects. Thus, the properties of spacetime do not favor the metaphysics of powers with respect to properties and laws. (shrink)

It is shown that for compact metric spaces the following statements are pairwise equivalent: “X is Loeb”, “X is separable”, “X has a we ordered dense subset”, “X is second countable”, and “X has a dense set G = ∪{Gn : n ∈ ω}, ∣Gn∣ < ω, with limn→∞ diam = 0”. Further, it is shown that the statement: “Compact metric spaces are weakly Loeb” is not provable in ZF0 , the Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory without the axiom of regularity, and (...) that the countable axiom of choice for families of finite sets CACfin does not imply the statement “Compact metric spaces are separable”. (shrink)

Citation metrics are statistical measures of scientific output that draw on citation indexes. They purport to capture the impact of scientific articles and the journals in which they appear. As evaluative tools, they are mostly used in the natural sciences, but they are also acquiring an important role in the humanities. While the strengths and weaknesses of citation metrics are extensively debated in a variety of fields, they have only recently started attracting attention in the philosophy of science (...) literature. This paper takes a further step in this direction and presents an analysis of citation metrics from the perspective of a Kuhnian model for the development of science. Starting from Gillies’ argument against the use of citation metrics for scientific research (2008), this paper shows that citation metrics interfere with the development of normal science in certain fields or subfields. The main issue is that citation metrics do not take field-specific differences into account, thereby selectively favoring some fields and arbitrarily hindering the development of others. In other words, this paper shows that current citation metrics fail to “carve science at its joints”. In light of this, the paper cautions against their use for evaluative purposes. (shrink)

Info-metrics is a framework for rational inference based on insufficient information. The complete info-metric framework, accompanied with many interdisciplinary examples and case studies, as well as graphical representations of the theory appear in the new book “Foundations of Info-Metrics: Modeling, Inference and Imperfect Information,” Oxford University Press, 2018. In this commentary, I describe that framework in general terms, demonstrate some of the ideas via simple examples, and provide arguments for using it to transform information into useful knowledge.

We classify countable metrically homogeneous graphs of diameter 3.

Cloud computing (ClC) has become a more popular computer paradigm in the preceding few years. Quality of Service (QoS) is becoming a crucial issue in service alteration because of the rapid growth in the number of cloud services. When evaluating cloud service functioning using several performance measures, the issue becomes more complex and non-trivial. It is therefore quite difficult and crucial for consumers to choose the best cloud service. The user's choices are provided in a quantifiable manner in the current (...) methods for choosing cloud services. Hence, this study attempts to achieve this objective through construction. decision-making framework so-called cloud services evaluator (CSsEv). The main indicator and its sub-indicators are formed as nodes at levels(n) in tree soft sets (TSSs). Thereafter Single Value Neutrosophic Sets (SVNSs) as branch of neutrosophic sets which conjunction with the Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique to facilitate analysis and evaluation process for the available Cloud services providers. Hence, entropy is employed to obtain indicators and sub_indicators weights and Complex Proportional Assessment utilizes these weights to facilitate the decision process of selecting optimal ClSPs. (shrink)

We prove that each ∀1 free amalgamation class K over a finite relational language L admits a countable generic structure M isometrically embedding all countable structuresin K relative to a fixed metric. We expand L by infinitely many binary predicates expressingdistance, and prove that the resulting expansion of K has a model companion axiomatizedby the first‐order theory of M. The model companion is non‐finitely axiomatizable, evenover a strong form of the axiom scheme of infinity.

Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) employ an evolving framework of calibrated language for assessing and communicating degrees of certainty in findings. A persistent challenge for this framework has been ambiguity in the relationship between multiple degree-of-certainty metrics. We aim to clarify the relationship between the likelihood and confidence metrics used in the Fifth Assessment Report (2013), with benefits for mathematical consistency among multiple findings and for usability in downstream modeling and decision analysis. We discuss (...) how our proposal meshes with current and proposed practice in IPCC uncertainty assessment. (shrink)

The last two decades have seen a great deal of scandals in the business world. Many of them have to do with accounting and management control, but in substantially different ways. This paper focuses on the dysfunctional effects of systems of measurement and incentives, and the possible ways to overcome those dysfunctional effects, achieving a stable state of goal congruence through the introduction of justice in the design and use of management control systems, by contributing to the ethical development within (...) the organization. We first analyze how the discipline of control systems came into being, and show how, in the last decades, both in theory and practice, has gone in a direction of becoming more ‘automatic,’ and then, we provide some case studies of how they are at the origin of many of the scandals. Borrowing from Rosanas and Velilla and from Cugueró-Escofet and Rosanas, we develop a model of control systems based on justice, where we make the distinction between formal and informal justice. We are then able to show how informal justice is the key element in the dynamics of a control system: to preserve formal justice, or to evolve toward formal justice. In any case, it is a necessary condition to reach a state of maximum goal congruence, stable through time, as a consequence of the ethical development that this type of systems are able to generate. (shrink)

We introduce a new way of defining metric temporal logic on a real-numbers flow of time. The idea is based on having semantics which allow us to refer to a single universal clock of arbitrary precision in order to impose metric constraints. This gives us a new metric temporal logic which is very expressive, is natural to use, can be applied in very general situations, affords a wide range of useful abbreviations and operators, has a PSPACE decision procedure, and has (...) the promise of being amenable to standard reasoning techniques. Thus it has many advantages over the existing metric temporal logics. We provide a decision procedure via conversion to a non-metric temporal logic, hence doing metric reasoning with no clocks. (shrink)

1. Fairness is about the just distribution of society's resources, and in ML, the main resource being distributed is model performance, e.g. the translation quality produced by machine translation...

BackgroundCommunity engagement in research has gained momentum as an approach to improving research, to helping ensure that community concerns are taken into account, and to informing ethical decision-making when research is conducted in contexts of vulnerability. However, guidelines and scholarship regarding community engagement are arguably unsettled, making it difficult to implement and evaluate.DiscussionWe describe normative guidelines on community engagement that have been offered by national and international bodies in the context of HIV-related research, which set the stage for similar work (...) in other health related research. Next, we review the scholarly literature regarding community engagement, outlining the diverse ethical goals ascribed to it. We then discuss practical guidelines that have been issued regarding community engagement. There is a lack of consensus regarding the ethical goals and approaches for community engagement, and an associated lack of indicators and metrics for evaluating success in achieving stated goals. To address these gaps we outline a framework for developing indicators for evaluating the contribution of community engagement to ethical goals in health research.SummaryThere is a critical need to enhance efforts in evaluating community engagement to ensure that the work on the ground reflects the intentions expressed in the guidelines, and to investigate the contribution of specific community engagement practices for making research responsive to community needs and concerns. Evaluation mechanisms should be built into community engagement practices to guide best practices in community engagement and their replication across diverse health research settings. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 7-8, November - December 2019, Page 880-882.

Different proprietary databases have been used extensively in research to assess the environmental performance and environmental risk of companies. This study explores the convergent validity of the environmental ratings of MSCI ESG STATS, Thomson Reuters ASSET4 and Global Engagement Services. The study shows that the ratings have common dimensions, but on aggregate, they do not converge. On the environmental opportunity side, KLD environmental strengths, and ASSET4 and GES environmental performance metrics correlate highly and provide convergent scores for US companies (...) from 2003–2011. On the environmental risk side, KLD environmental concerns converge with the GES environmental industry risk and company emissions from the ASSET4 database. Further analysis confirms that industry-related risks are drivers of company-specific environmental performance. (shrink)

The issue of plagiarism—claiming credit for work that is not one’s own, rightly, continues to cause concern in the academic community. An analysis is presented that shows the effects that may arise from metrics-based assessments of research, when credit for an author’s outputs (chiefly publications) is given to an institution that did not support the research but which subsequently employs the author. The incentives for what is termed here “institutional plagiarism” are demonstrated with reference to the UK Research Assessment (...) Exercise in which submitting units of assessment are shown in some instances to derive around twice the credit for papers produced elsewhere by new recruits, compared to papers produced ‘in-house’. (shrink)

This paper examines the epistemic status of availability as it is used in contemporary operational and distributed information systems. While availability is commonly treated as a unified system property, in practice it is derived from heterogeneous observational layers, including infrastructure state, service behavior, and business-level functionality. -/- The paper argues that such usage produces a form of semantic fragmentation: scalar indicators that are numerically stable but lack declared structural equivalence. A minimal formalization shows that equality of availability values does not (...) imply informational isomorphism across observational domains. -/- Interpreting monitoring subsystems as observational localities within the framework of Coherent Observational Epistemology (COE), the paper characterizes model-free availability as a case of inter-local inference performed without verified structural alignment. The Unified Availability Model (UAM) is presented as an example of model-based availability that restores cross-layer coherence. -/- The analysis contributes to the philosophy of measurement and observation in complex technical systems, demonstrating how engineering indicators may function as epistemic constructs rather than direct system properties. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of program evaluation in contemporary urban agriculture. Drawing on data from an exploratory study designed at the request of and in collaboration with urban agriculture practitioners in Massachusetts, it describes both their critiques of extant practices of program evaluation and their visions for alternative ways of telling the story of their work. Related, it explores practitioners’ interest in building capacity for policy advocacy, working collectively to create transformative social change, and, related, establishing new kinds (...) of relationships with state and philanthropic funders. Building on scholarship that has observed that urban agriculture is characterized by an internal contradiction—i.e., its simultaneous orientation to “neoliberal” and “radical” agendas —this analysis calls attention, especially, to the complex role of metrics, which may not only entrench neoliberalism in UA organizations, but also provide a mechanism for challenging its assumptions and advancing the radical project of food justice. (shrink)

Data and metrics play an unmistakably powerful role in today's society. Over the years, their use has expanded to cover almost every sphere of everyday life. This book provides a critical investigation into what we can call a ""metric culture"" in which practices of self-tracking and quantification have become more popular than ever before.

The idea that sentences can be closer or further apart in meaning is highly intuitive. Not only that, it is also a pillar of logic, semantic theory and the philosophy of science, and follows from other commitments about similarity. The present paper proposes a novel way of comparing the ‘distance’ between two pairs of propositions. We define ‘\ is closer in meaning to \ than \ is to \’ and thereby give a precise account of comparative propositional similarity facts. Notably, (...) our definition eschews metric assumptions, which are unrealistic in most applications of interest. (shrink)

Social media is fueling the increasing individualization of impact metrics. While democratizing for some, for others, the move reinforces privilege and exacerbates inequality.

This paper explores the interplay between AI metrics and policymaking by examining the conceptual and methodological frameworks of global AI metrics and their alignment with National Artificial Intelligence Strategies (NAIS). Through topic modeling and qualitative content analysis, key thematic areas in NAIS are identified. The findings suggest a misalignment between the technical and economic focus of global AI metrics and the broader societal and ethical priorities emphasized in NAIS. This highlights the need to recalibrate AI evaluation frameworks (...) to include ethical and other social considerations, aligning AI advancements with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for an inclusive, ethical, and sustainable future. (shrink)

This work is conducted within the framework of experimental philosophy and represents a comprehensive study that combines theoretical and practical aspects. It integrates a phenomenological approach with natural science methods to study the phenomenology of virtual experience. The research posits that virtual reality (VR) emerges only at the moment of the self-revelation of being “to the entity” as a result of human interaction with technologies that create sensory impressions. The author analyzes the current state of technologies producing virtual reality, with (...) particular attention to proprioceptive sensations. It is emphasized that the physical body continues to play an important role in the perception of virtual reality, as VR technologies are not yet sufficiently integrated with the complex proprioception system of the human body. Furthermore, the vestibular system retains its functionality regardless of whether the user is in the real or virtual world. These factors indicate that the physical body remains significant; even in virtual reality, a person remains inseparably connected to it. The author’s concept of the field behavior of virtual reality is presented, opening new perspectives for understanding human interaction with the virtual environment. The author highlights the field interference of the real and the virtual, the superposition of real and virtual components in the perception of virtual reality by humans, combined by the human brain into a single perception. The result of the study is a constructed model of probabilistic dependencies between elements of immersion and metrics of phenomenological experience. This work contributes to the development of interdisciplinary research and is important for experimental philosophy, providing a methodological basis for the empirical study of philosophical questions and the analysis of complex interrelations between immersion and human behavior in virtual environments. (shrink)

The core aims of the Global Health Impact Project include incentivizing pharmaceutical companies for socially conscious production and promoting socially conscious consumption among consumers. Its backbone is a metric that computes the amount of illness burden alleviated by a pharmaceutical drug. This essay aims to assess the connection between values and numbers in the Global Health Impact Project. Specifically, I concentrate on two issues, the anonymity of illness burden and the distribution of health benefits. The former issue asks whether we (...) should treat the illness burden of every person the same. The latter issue asks among whom health benefits should be fairly distributed. Examination of these issues begs for clarification of some of the key concepts of the Global Health Impact Project, such as the definition of essential medicines and the significance of national borders. Although this essay focuses on the two particular metric issues in the Global Health Impact Project, its core argument is applicable to other metrics for ethically motivated initiatives—to construct a metric for an ethically motivated initiative, it is not only important to articulate underlying concepts and values, but it is also important to operationalize them, so they are consistently reflected in the metric. (shrink)

Using Big Data to better understand urban questions is an exciting field with challenging methodological and theoretical problems. It is also, however, potentially troubling when Big Data is applied uncritically to urban governance via the ideas and practices of “smart cities”. This essay reviews both the historical depth of central ideas within smart city governance —particular the idea that enough data/information/knowledge can solve society problems—but also the ways that the most recent version differs. Namely, that the motivations and ideological underpinning (...) behind the goal of urban betterment is largely driven by technology advocates and neoliberalism rather than the strong social justice themes associated with earlier applications of data to cities. Geosocial media data and metrics derived from them can provide useful insight and policy direction. But one must be ever mindful that metrics don’t simply measure; in the process of deciding what is important and possible to measure, these data are simultaneously defining what cities are. (shrink)

ESG metrics are performance indicators, mainly of non-financial nature, designed to assess an organization’s commitment to sustainability and responsible business practices. These metrics provide valuable insights. This chapter offers a comprehensive overview of typical ESG metrics in various aspects of practical applications.Furthermore, this chapter explores the landscape of ESG ratings. The ESG ratings allow stakeholders, especially investors, to compare a company’s performance with its peers, in order to make informed investment decisions.Finally, it discusses the impact of ISO (...) standards and certifications in various industry sectors and introduces the approach to a successful certification process. (shrink)

We show that the formulations of non-relativistic quantum mechanics can be derived from an extended least action principle. The principle can be considered as an extension of the least action principle from classical mechanics by factoring in two assumptions. First, the Planck constant defines the minimal amount of action a physical system needs to exhibit during its dynamics in order to be observable. Second, there is constant vacuum fluctuation along a classical trajectory. A novel method is introduced to define the (...) information metrics to measure additional observability due to vacuum fluctuations, which is then converted to an additional action through the first assumption. Applying the variational principle to minimize the total actions allows us to recover the basic quantum formulations including the uncertainty relation and the Schrödinger equation in the position representation. In the momentum representation, the same method can be applied to obtain the Schrödinger equation for a free particle while further investigation is still needed for a particle with an external potential. Furthermore, the principle brings in new results on two fronts. At the conceptual level, we find that the information metrics for vacuum fluctuations are responsible for the origin of the Bohm quantum potential. Even though the Bohm potential for a bipartite system is inseparable, the underlying vacuum fluctuations are local. Thus, inseparability of the Bohm potential does not justify a non-local causal relation between the two subsystems. At the mathematical level, quantifying the information metrics for vacuum fluctuations using more general definitions of relative entropy results in a generalized Schrödinger equation that depends on the order of relative entropy. The extended least action principle is a new mathematical tool. It can be applied to derive other quantum formalisms such as quantum scalar field theory. (shrink)

The current use of citation-based metrics to evaluate the research output of individual researchers is highly discriminatory because they are uniformly applied to authors of single-author articles as well as contributors of multi-author papers. In the latter case, these quantitative measures are counted, as if each contributor were the single author of the full article. In this way, each and every contributor is assigned the full impact-factor score and all the citations that the article has received. This has a (...) multiplication effect on each contributor's citation-based evaluative metrics of multi-author articles, because the more contributors an article has, the more undeserved credit is assigned to each of them. In this paper, I argue that this unfair system could be made fairer by requesting the contributors of multi-author articles to describe the nature of their contribution, and to assign a numerical value to their degree of relative contribution. In this way, we could create a contribution-specific index of each contributor for each citation metric. This would be a strong disincentive against honorary authorship and publication cartels, because it would transform the current win-win strategy of accepting honorary authors in the byline into a zero-sum game for each contributor. (shrink)

This article contributes to a growing conversation about the role of numbers in promoting gendered agendas in potentially contradictory ways. Drawing from interviews with gender advisors—the professionals tasked with mainstreaming gender in development projects—in an East African country, I begin from the paradox that gender advisors articulate a strong preference for qualitative data to best capture the lives of the women they aim to assist while voicing a need for quantitative metrics. I demonstrate that gender advisors come to imagine (...) metrics as expeditious bureaucratic tools able to inspire cooperation from otherwise reluctant coworkers. I argue that development organizations are gendered in ways—acutely seen in how advisors struggle, are sidelined, and attempt to advance their goals with numbers—that lead to the utility of valuing quantitative metrics over qualitative ones. I establish two theoretical contributions: Gendered organizations theory is essential to understanding the adoption and globalization of performance metrics, and in an age of evidence-based decision making, the utility of quantified data to garner resources is heightened, rewarding those who adopt quantified knowledge production. I coin the term “the paradox of quantified utility” to describe how these material advantages encourage even skeptics to value quantitative metrics. (shrink)

De Marchi and Lorenzetti :253-261, 2016) have recently argued that in fields where the journal impact factor is not calculated, such as in the humanities, it is key to find other indicators that would allow the relevant community to assess the quality of scholarly journals and the research outputs that are published in them. The authors' suggestion is that information concerning the journal's rejection rate and the number of subscriptions sold is important and should be used for such assessment. The (...) question addressed by the authors is very important, yet their proposed solutions are problematic. Here I point to some of these problems and illustrate them by considering as a case in point the field of philosophy. Specifically, here I argue for four main claims. First, even assuming that IF provides a reliable indicator of the quality of journals for the assessment of research outputs, De Marchi and Lorenzetti have failed to validate their suggested indicators and proxies. Second, it has not been clarified why, in absence of IF, other journal-based metrics that are currently available should not be used. Third, the relationship between IF and rejection rate is more complex than the authors suggest. Fourth, accepting the number of sold subscriptions as a proxy would result in discrimination against open access journals. The upshot of my analysis is that the question of how to assess journals and research outputs in the humanities is still far from resolved. (shrink)

We study conditions for a topological space to be metrizable, properties of metrizable spaces, and the role the axiom of choice plays in these matters.

In the mid twenty-tens, many major food companies committed to sustainably source their priority ingredients, including North American commodity crops. With deadlines set for the decade’s end, companies joined multi-stakeholder initiatives and developed standards, metrics, and other assessment tools to help them track and drive progress. In short, they embarked on the sort of corporate supply chain governance that agri-food scholars have long studied. But how would this governance happen, especially in the commodity supply chains where companies knew and (...) controlled little about upstream production? Treating supply chain governance as not just a corporate undertaking but also the work of mid-level sustainability managers, this paper examines the practical skills and knowledge, or mētis, employed by managers in their efforts to win the support of colleagues, farmers, and other supply chain actors. This analysis provides insight into how and why food companies’ approaches to governing agricultural sustainability have changed since they set their 2020 sourcing goals. More broadly, it highlights the contingent nature of their governance. (shrink)

§ 1. Introduction. In this communication we present some recent results on the classification of Polish metric spaces up to isometry and on the isometry groups of Polish metric spaces. A Polish metric space is a complete separable metric space.Our first goal is to determine the exact complexity of the classification problem of general Polish metric spaces up to isometry. This work was motivated by a paper of Vershik [1998], where he remarks : “The classification of Polish spaces up to (...) isometry is an enormous task. More precisely, this classification is not ‘smooth’ in the modern terminology.” Our Theorem 2.1 below quantifies precisely the enormity of this task.After doing this, we turn to special classes of Polish metric spaces and investigate the classification problems associated with them. Note that these classification problems are in principle no more complicated than the general one above. However, the determination of their exact complexity is not necessarily easier.The investigation of the classification problems naturally leads to some interesting results on the groups of isometries of Polish metric spaces. We shall also present these results below.The rest of this section is devoted to an introduction of some basic ideas of a theory of complexity for classification problems, which will help to put our results in perspective. Detailed expositions of this general theory can be found, e.g., in Hjorth [2000], Kechris [1999], [2001]. (shrink)

In today'sCountry ranking rapidly evolving world, innovationInnovation plays a crucial role in a country’s economic well-being. This research presents a new approach to assessing and ranking nations based on their innovationInnovation capabilities. Using a wide range of indicators from the OECD guidelines, the study examines various aspects of innovationInnovation, such as research and development (R&D), collaborationR&D Collaboration, and the economic impact of innovative efforts. The study uses the LOPCOW methodLopcow method to carefully weigh these indicators and the COCOSO methodCocoso method (...) to systematically classify countries. This comprehensive analysis highlights global innovationInnovation competencies. Our results reveal clear patterns in global innovationInnovation. We see that traditionally innovative countries continue to be ahead. In addition, the methodology used covers specific criteria that involve not only the development of new technologies, but also the improvement of the production process and innovationsInnovation in services and policies. It ensures comprehensive coverage and represents national innovationInnovation capabilities in multiple dimensions. Therefore, the presented research validates the efficiency of the integrated LOPCOW-COCOSO methodCocoso method in sorting countries according to the level of innovationInnovation and provides useful insights for policymakers, industry leaders, and researchers. (shrink)

This paper focuses on development of a composite diversity index that is appropriate for use in social reporting. Critics of currents methods argue that simplecounts of race or other attributes for measuring diversity are not sufficient for measuring the complexities of a diverse workplace. To address this criticism, broader and more appropriate diversity indices based on probability and multiple measures are demonstrated by applying quantitative models developed in biodiversity and political science research. US IPEDS data, available for more than 4,500 (...) higher education institutions, are used to demonstrate the model. The paper sets the stage for diversity reporting by describing selected reporting frameworks and relevant court rulings. (shrink)

Dwork, Hardt, Pitassi, Reingold, & Zemel [6] introduced two notions of fairness, each of which is meant to formalize the notion of similar treatment for similarly qualified individuals. The first of these notions, which we call additive metric fairness, has received much attention in subsequent work studying the fairness of a system composed of classifiers which are fair when considered in isolation [3, 4, 7, 8, 12] and in work studying the relationship between fair treatment of individuals and fair treatment (...) of groups [6, 7, 13]. Here, we extend these lines of research to the second, less-studied notion, which we call multiplicative metric fairness. In particular, we exactly characterize the fairness of conjunctions and disjunctions of multiplicative metric fair classifiers, and the extent to which a classifier which satisfies multiplicative metric fairness also treats groups fairly. This characterization reveals that whereas additive metric fairness becomes easier to satisfy when probabilities of acceptance are small, leading to unfairness under functional and group compositions, multiplicative metric fairness is better-behaved, due to its scale-invariance. (shrink)