Word: metric
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...southern Australia, the heart of the country's $30 billion agricultural economy. Even in good times, Murray-Darling receives as little as 10 in. of rain a year, but 70% of the country's irrigation resources flow to the basin, creating a fertile desert able to produce 1.2 million metric tons of water-thirsty rice, among other crops...
While the school collapses have been in the news in the last week, the country is still drowning in the aftermath of the storms. Gonaives, the country's third largest town, was the hardest hit and is still buried under 3 million metric tons of mud. Medecins San Frontiers (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) has set up mobile clinics, distributed water and constructed a temporary hospital in Gonaives, since the government hospital was completely destroyed during Hurricane Hannah in late August. In hard-to-reach areas, however, malnutrition is growing and the food supply shrinks. Daily food insecurity affects...
...least when it comes to saving their parent institution money. The science complexes in Cambridge and Longwood—usually energy hogs whose buildings use three- to eight-times more energy per square foot than other buildings across campus—avoided the emission of 416 metric tons of carbon and saved $160,000 through the Shut the Sash competition. Since the Resource Efficiency Program (REP)—a university-sposnored initiative that pays students to reach out to others about environmental matters—was founded in 2002, the College has seen savings quantified at over...
Several aspects of Engdahl’s and Sarkozy’s opinions are disturbing. We should ask ourselves if it is possible to continue to evaluate literary achievement on a common and universal metric without in some way disadvantaging writers from nations with newly emerging literatures. And even if the question of abstract “fairness” seems irrelevant to the ultimate goal of the Nobel—which is to recognize superior lifetime achievement in the field of letters—that irrelevance renders the question of whether or not one can assign a national identity...
...than their own intellectual leanings. In addition, at least in the humanities, a strict grading system forces professors to create hard and often arbitrary distinctions between works that cannot easily be compared. In most academic environments, these concerns are outweighed by the need to provide some sort of clear metric of performance to potential employers or other educational institutions. If Harvard College, for example, were to abandon letter grading, it might be difficult for firms or graduate schools to know which students were qualified and which were not. Grades also provide a clear motivation to attend class, do the readings...