Mamo and LaMamo are twin brothers living in the small Nigerian village of Keti, where their domineering father controls their lives. With high hopes the twins attempt to flee from home, but only LaMamo escapes successfully and is able to live their dream of becoming a soldier who meets beautiful women. Mamo, the sickly, awkward twin, is doomed to remain in the village with his father. Gradually he comes out of his father's shadow and gains local fame as a historian, and, using Plutarch's Parallel Lives as his model, he embarks on the ambitious project of writing a "true" history of his people. But when the rains fail and famine rages, religious zealots incite the people to violence--and LaMamo returns to fight the enemy at home. A novel of ardent loyalty, encroaching modernity, political desire, and personal liberation, Measuring Time is a heart-wrenching history of Nigeria, portrayed through the eyes of a single family.

Time is the crucial ingredient in history, and yet historians rarely talk about time as such. These essays offer new insight into the development of modern conceptions of time, from the Christian dating system (BC/AD or BCE/CE) to the idea of “modernity” as a new epoch in human history. Are the Gregorian calendar, world standard time, and modernity itself simply impositions of Western superiority? How did the idea of stages of history culminating in the modern period arise? Is time really accelerating? Can we—should we—try to move to a new chronological framework, one that reaches back to the origins of humans and forward away or beyond modernity? These questions go to the heart of what history means for us today. Time is now on the agenda.

In this fascinating book Masatoshi Kajita recounts the importance of precise measurements and their inherent uncertainty, before telling the story of humankind's efforts to define and measure time with increasing accuracy, culminating in the development of atomic clocks. These improvements in the accurate measurement of time and frequency have played a pivotal role in the development of modern science; including the confirmation of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and the recent detection of gravity waves. Furthermore, such measurements afforded by atomic clocks and other mechanisms are being used to examine key questions about the very fundamentals of our universe, the possibility of symmetry violation and even testing the idea that there may be variation of the fundamental constants themselves over time.

Meant to complement rather than compete with the existing books on the subject, this book deals with the project performance and control phases of the project life cycle to present a detailed investigation of the project’s time performance measurement methods and risk analysis techniques in order to evaluate existing and newly developed methods in terms of their abilities to improve the corrective actions decision-making process during project tracking. As readers apply what is learned from the book, EVM practices will become even more effective in project management and cost engineering. Individual chapters look at simulation studies in forecast accuracy; schedule adherence; time sensitivity; activity sensitivity; and using top-down or bottom-up project tracking. Vanhoucke also offers an actual real-life case study, a tutorial on the use of ProTrack software (newly developed based on his research) in EVM, and conclusions on the relative effectiveness for each technique presented.

Real-world examples and engaging activities guide readers in learning about measuring time with a calendar. Readers practice selecting appropriate measuring tools and units of measurement, converting between units, and solving problems by measuring.

Explains how to keep track of the parts of the day with a clock; describes the development of the sundial, the hourglass, and the clock; and discusses minutes and seconds, telling time, analog and digital timepieces, and ways to express the time.

Ipswich Chronicle Photo Kitty Robertson's "Measuring Time" is an exquisite collection of essays, reflections on a 20th century life in small town New England, that first were published in the Ipswich Chronicle. Kitty is the author of "The Orchard: A Memoir." That remembering of hard times and kind people received glowing reviews: Boston Globe: "In graceful prose, 'The Orchard' makes the old seem new; it unsettles us from the uncertainties of our own modern truths." New York Times: "The book is nothing short of a hymn." San Jose Mercury: "This book is a gem." Washington Post: "Adele Crockett Robertson turns out to have been a very good writer, and "The Orchard" is a lovely book." "Kitty's writing has a rhythm like the tides. Like music. Like the best bluegrass music, which from me is the ultimate compliment." North Shore Sunday editor Taylor Armerding continues: "Mostly she taught those of us who had the good fortune to know her, that you can see the world without having to see the whole world. That when you choose a tiny corner of it, get to know its land and its people, train your eyes and your mind to look for beauty in the great, small and tiniest things, that you have seen a world and lived a life as exquisite as any." "Measuring Time" is like that, petals, perhaps, of the apple blossoms of "The Orchard." "Look through my eyes for a little while," Kitty invites, "and may what you see bring you the joy it brings to me."