This book is a collection of diverse essays by scholars, policy-makers and creative practitioners who explore the burgeoning field of cultural measurement and its political implications. Offering critical histories and creative frameworks, it presents new approaches to accounting for culture in local, national and international contexts.

A clear, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to communicating and understanding numbers and data—from bestselling business author Chip Heath. How much bigger is a billion than a million? Well, a million seconds is twelve days. A billion seconds is…thirty-two years. Understanding numbers is essential—but humans aren’t built to understand them. Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five—anything from six to infinity was known as “lots.” While the numbers in our world have gotten increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. How can we translate millions and billions and milliseconds and nanometers into things we can comprehend and use? Author Chip Heath has excelled at teaching others about making ideas stick and here, in Making Numbers Count, he outlines specific principles that reveal how to translate a number into our brain’s language. This book is filled with examples of extreme number makeovers, vivid before-and-after examples that take a dry number and present it in a way that people click in and say “Wow, now I get it!” You will learn principles such as: -SIMPLE PERSPECTIVE CUES: researchers at Microsoft found that adding one simple comparison sentence doubled how accurately users estimated statistics like population and area of countries. -VIVIDNESS: get perspective on the size of a nucleus by imagining a bee in a cathedral, or a pea in a racetrack, which are easier to envision than “1/100,000th of the size of an atom.” -CONVERT TO A PROCESS: capitalize on our intuitive sense of time (5 gigabytes of music storage turns into “2 months of commutes, without repeating a song”). -EMOTIONAL MEASURING STICKS: frame the number in a way that people already care about (“that medical protocol would save twice as many women as curing breast cancer”). Whether you’re interested in global problems like climate change, running a tech firm or a farm, or just explaining how many Cokes you’d have to drink if you burned calories like a hummingbird, this book will help math-lovers and math-haters alike translate the numbers that animate our world—allowing us to bring more data, more naturally, into decisions in our schools, our workplaces, and our society.

There are fundamental tasks common to every society: children have to be raised, homes need to be cleaned, meals need to be prepared, and people who are elderly, ill, or disabled need care. Day in, day out, these responsibilities can involve both monotonous drudgery and untold rewards for those performing them, whether they are family members, friends, or paid workers. These are jobs that cannot be outsourced, because they involve the most intimate spaces of our everyday lives--our homes, our bodies, and our families. Mignon Duffy uses a historical and comparative approach to examine and critique the entire twentieth-century history of paid care work--including health care, education and child care, and social services--drawing on an in-depth analysis of U.S. Census data as well as a range of occupational histories. Making Care Count focuses on change and continuity in the social organization along with cultural construction of the labor of care and its relationship to gender, racial-ethnic, and class inequalities. Debunking popular understandings of how we came to be in a "care crisis," this book stands apart as an historical quantitative study in a literature crowded with contemporary, qualitative studies, proposing well-developed policy approaches that grow out of the theoretical and empirical arguments.

As a group of organisms that are too small to see and best known for being agents of disease and death, microbes are not always appreciated for the numerous supportive and positive contributions they make to the living world. Designed to support a course in microbiology, Microbiology: A Laboratory Experience permits a glimpse into both the good and the bad in the microscopic world. The laboratory experiences are designed to engage and support student interest in microbiology as a topic, field of study, and career. This text provides a series of laboratory exercises compatible with a one-semester undergraduate microbiology or bacteriology course with a three- or four-hour lab period that meets once or twice a week. The design of the lab manual conforms to the American Society for Microbiology curriculum guidelines and takes a ground-up approach -- beginning with an introduction to biosafety and containment practices and how to work with biological hazards. From there the course moves to basic but essential microscopy skills, aseptic technique and culture methods, and builds to include more advanced lab techniques. The exercises incorporate a semester-long investigative laboratory project designed to promote the sense of discovery and encourage student engagement. The curriculum is rigorous but manageable for a single semester and incorporates best practices in biology education.

Revision of author's thesis (doctoral)--Columbia University, 2014, titled Making it count: statistics and state-society relations in the early People's Republic of China, 1949-1959.

An inside look at how community service organizations really work Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? In Making Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations and shows that while volunteers learn important lessons, they are not always the lessons that empowerment programs aim to teach. With short-term funding and a dizzy mix of mandates from multiple sponsors, community programs develop a complex web of intimacy, governance, and civic life. Eliasoph describes the at-risk youth served by such programs, the college-bound volunteers who hope to feel selfless inspiration and plump up their resumés, and what happens when the two groups are expected to bond instantly through short-term projects. She looks at adult "plug-in" volunteers who, working in after-school programs and limited by time, hope to become like beloved aunties to youth. Eliasoph indicates that adult volunteers can provide grassroots support but they can also undermine the family-like warmth created by paid organizers. Exploring contradictions between the democratic rhetoric of empowerment programs and the bureaucratic hurdles that volunteers learn to navigate, the book demonstrates that empowerment projects work best with less precarious funding, more careful planning, and mandatory training, reflection, and long-term commitments from volunteers. Based on participant research inside civic and community organizations, Making Volunteers illustrates what these programs can and cannot achieve, and how to make them more effective.

Many very intelligent people don't like dealing with numbers. Similarly, many gifted scientists are not especially interested in studying people and their cultural behaviour. In this book, we argue that being interested in people and their cultures, and helping students and others to use numbers to pursue these interests, are not mutually exclusive. Research methods are becoming an increasingly important requirement for students of all kinds. But many students, particularly those in the humanities, struggle with concepts drawn from the social sciences and find quantitative and statistical information inaccessible and daunting. Nonetheless, such concepts are found in nearly all areas of society, from market research and opinion polls to psychological studies of human behaviour. This book aims to provide a simple guide to the process of conducting research in the humanities, with special reference to media and culture, from the planning stage, through the data gathering, to the analysis and interpretation of results: 'planning it', 'doing it' and 'understanding it'. The book aims to show how students' own choice of research topic can be refined into a manageable research question and how the most appropriate methodologies can be applied. Each section draws on actual examples from research that the authors and their students have conducted. Topics covered include: choosing a research question and method; instrument design and pilot data; practical procedures; research with children; looking at statistics; and interpretation of results.Features:*Based on the authors' practical experience as researchers and teachers and is thus accessible, practical and 'how to'.*Includes students' own work as examples.*Bridges the 'divide' between social science and humanities research methods and will therefore appeal to a broad range of students and teachers.