Current events in metrology for fun, profitable, and self-sustaining sustainability impacts

At the main event I attended last week at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, the #giveyouthachance philanthropic gathering at the Aquarium of the Bay, multiple people independently spoke to aligning social and environmental values with financial values, and explicitly stated that economic growth does not automatically entail environmental degradation.

As my new buddy David Traub (introduced as a consequence of the New Algorithm event in Stockholm in June with Angelica Lips da Cruz) was the MC, he put me on the program at the last minute, and gave me five minutes to speak my piece in a room of 30 people or so. A great point of departure was opened up when Carin Winter of MissionBe.org spoke to her work in mindfulness education and led a guided meditation. So I conveyed the fact that the effects of mindfulness practice are rigorously measurable, and followed that up with the analogy from music (tuning instruments to harmonize relationships),  with the argument against merely shouldering the burden of costs because it is the right thing to do, with the counter-argument for creating efficient competitive markets for sustainable impacts, and with info on the previous week’s special session on social and psychological metrology at IMEKO in Belfast. It appeared that the message of metrology as a means for making sustainability self-sustaining, fun, and profitable got through!

Next up: Unify.Earth has developed their own new iteration on blockchain, which will be announced Monday, 24 September, at the UN SDG Media Center (also see here) during the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact Summit. The UEX (Unify Earth Exchange) fills the gap for human capital stocks left by the Universal Commons‘ exclusive focus on social and natural capital.

So I’ve decided to go to NY and have booked my travel.

Back in February, Angelica Lips da Cruz recounted saying six months before that it would take two years to get to where we were at that time. Now another seven months have passed and I am starting to feel that the acceleration is approaching Mach 1! At this rate, it’ll be the speed of light in the next six months….

LivingCapitalMetrics Blog by William P. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at livingcapitalmetrics.wordpress.com.
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Self-Sustaining Sustainability, Once Again, Already

The urgent need for massive global implementations of sustainability policies and practices oddly and counterproductively has not yet led to systematic investments in state of the art sustainability metric standards. My personal mission is to contribute to meeting this need. Longstanding, proven resources in the art and science of precision instrumentation calibration and explanatory theory are available to address these problems. In the same way technical standards for measuring length, mass, volume, time, energy, light, etc. enable the coordination of science and commerce for manufactured capital and property, so, too, will a new class of standards for measuring human, social, and natural capital.

This new art and science contradicts common assumptions in three ways. First, contrary to popular opinion that measuring these things is impossible, over 90 years of research and practice support a growing consensus among weights and measures standards engineers (metrologists) and social and psychological measurement experts that relevant unit standards are viable, feasible, and desirable.

Common perceptions are contradicted in a second way in that measurement of this kind does not require reducing human individuality to homogenized uniform sameness. Instead of a mechanical metaphor of cogs in a machine, the relevant perspective is an organic or musical one. The goal is to ensure that local uniqueness and creative improvisations are freely expressed in a context informed by shared standards (like DNA, or a musical instrument tuning system).

The third way in which much of what we think we know is mistaken concerns how to motivate adoption of sustainability policies and practices. Many among us are fearful that neither the general population nor its leaders in government and business care enough about sustainability to focus on implementing solutions. But finding the will to act is not the issue. The problem is how to create environments in which new sustainable forms of life multiply and proliferate of their own accord. To do this, people need means for satisfying their own interests in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The goal, therefore, is to organize knowledge infrastructures capable of informing and channeling the power of individual self-interest. The only way mass scale self-sustaining sustainable economies will ever happen is by tapping the entrepreneurial energy of the profit motive, where profit is defined not just in financial terms but in the quality of life and health terms of authentic wealth and genuine productivity.

We manage what we measure. If we are to collectively, fluidly, efficiently, and innovatively manage the living value of our human, social, and natural capital, we need, first, high quality information expressed in shared languages communicating that value. Second, we need, to begin with, new scientific, legal, economic, financial, and governmental institutions establishing individual rights to ownership of that value, metric units expressing amounts of that value, conformity audits for ascertaining the accuracy and precision of those units, financial alignments of the real value measured with bankable dollar amounts, and investment markets to support entrepreneurial innovations in creating that value.

The end result of these efforts will be a capacity for all of humanity to pull together in common cause to create a sustainable future. We will each be able to maximize our own personal potential at the same time we contribute to the greater good. We will not only be able to fulfill the potential of our species as stewards of the earth, we will have fun doing it! For technical information resources, see below. PDFs are available on request, and can often be found freely available online.

Self-Sustaining Sustainability

Relevant Information Resources

William P. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

Barney, M., & Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2016). Adaptive measurement and assessment. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 3, 469-490.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (1997). Physical disability construct convergence across instruments: Towards a universal metric. Journal of Outcome Measurement, 1(2), 87-113.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (1999). Foundations for health status metrology: The stability of MOS SF-36 PF-10 calibrations across samples. Journal of the Louisiana State Medical Society, 151(11), 566-578.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2000). Objectivity in psychosocial measurement: What, why, how. Journal of Outcome Measurement, 4(2), 527-563.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2002). “The Mystery of Capital” and the human sciences. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 15(4), 854 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt154j.htm].

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2003). The mathematical metaphysics of measurement and metrology: Towards meaningful quantification in the human sciences. In A. Morales (Ed.), Renascent pragmatism: Studies in law and social science (pp. 118-153). Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2004). Meaning and method in the social sciences. Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy & Social Sciences, 27(4), 429-454.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2007). Living capital metrics. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 21(1), 1092-1093 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt211.pdf].

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2009, November 19). Draft legislation on development and adoption of an intangible assets metric system. Living Capital Metrics blog: https://livingcapitalmetrics.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/draft-legislation/.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2009). Invariance and traceability for measures of human, social, and natural capital. Measurement, 42(9), 1278-1287.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2009). NIST Critical national need idea White Paper: metrological infrastructure for human, social, and natural capital (http://www.nist.gov/tip/wp/pswp/upload/202_metrological_infrastructure_for_human_social_natural.pdf). Washington, DC: National Institute for Standards and Technology.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2010, 22 November). Meaningfulness, measurement, value seeking, and the corporate objective function: An introduction to new possibilities. LivingCapitalMetrics.com, Sausalito, California.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2010). Measurement, reduced transaction costs, and the ethics of efficient markets for human, social, and natural capital. Bridge to Business Postdoctoral Certification, Freeman School of Business, Tulane University (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2340674).

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2010). The standard model in the history of the natural sciences, econometrics, and the social sciences. Journal of Physics Conference Series, 238(1), 012016.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2011). Bringing human, social, and natural capital to life: Practical consequences and opportunities. In N. Brown, B. Duckor, K. Draney & M. Wilson (Eds.), Advances in Rasch Measurement, Vol. 2 (pp. 1-27). Maple Grove, MN: JAM Press.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2012). Measure and manage: Intangible assets metric standards for sustainability. In J. Marques, S. Dhiman & S. Holt (Eds.), Business administration education: Changes in management and leadership strategies (pp. 43-63). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2012). What the world needs now: A bold plan for new standards [Third place, 2011 NIST/SES World Standards Day paper competition]. Standards Engineering, 64(3), 1 & 3-5 [http://ssrn.com/abstract=2083975].

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2015). A probabilistic model of the law of supply and demand. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 29(1), 1508-1511 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt291.pdf].

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2015). Rasch measurement as a basis for metrologically traceable standards. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 28(4), 1492-1493 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt284.pdf].

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2015). Rasch metrology: How to expand measurement locally everywhere. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 29(2), 1521-1523.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2017, September). Metrology, psychometrics, and new horizons for innovation. 18th International Congress of Metrology, Paris, 10.1051/metrology/201709007.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2017). A practical approach to modeling complex adaptive flows in psychology and social science. Procedia Computer Science, 114, 165-174.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2018). How beauty teaches us to understand meaning. Educational Philosophy and Theory, in review.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2018). Separation theorems in econometrics and psychometrics: Rasch, Frisch, two Fishers, and implications for measurement. Scandinavian Economic History Review, in review.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., Harvey, R. F., & Kilgore, K. M. (1995). New developments in functional assessment: Probabilistic models for gold standards. NeuroRehabilitation, 5(1), 3-25.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., Harvey, R. F., Taylor, P., Kilgore, K. M., & Kelly, C. K. (1995). Rehabits: A common language of functional assessment. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 76(2), 113-122.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2011, January). Metrology for the social, behavioral, and economic sciences (Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences White Paper Series).National Science Foundation: http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sbe_2020/submission_detail.cfm?upld_id=36.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2011, August 31 to September 2). A technology roadmap for intangible assets metrology. In Fundamentals of measurement science. International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO) TC1-TC7-TC13 Joint Symposium, http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24493/ilm1-2011imeko-018.pdf, Jena, Germany.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2016). Theory-based metrological traceability in education: A reading measurement network. Measurement, 92, 489-496.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Wilson, M. (2015). Building a productive trading zone in educational assessment research and practice. Pensamiento Educativo: Revista de Investigacion Educacional Latinoamericana, 52(2), 55-78.

Pendrill, L., & Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2013). Quantifying human response: Linking metrological and psychometric characterisations of man as a measurement instrument. Journal of Physics Conference Series, 459, 012057.

Pendrill, L., & Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2015). Counting and quantification: Comparing psychometric and metrological perspectives on visual perceptions of number. Measurement, 71, 46-55.

 

LivingCapitalMetrics Blog by William P. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at livingcapitalmetrics.wordpress.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com.