Friday 22 November 2019

LOGISTICS, PLANNING & ARRANGING TRANSPORT (V)

The Grandma inside La Torre del Rellotge, Barcelona
Today, The Grandma is still participating in her Logistics course in Sant Boi de Llobregat. It is an interesting course full of information, data and bibliography and she is a little saturated but she knows it is the normal human reaction when you are learning lots of things at the same time.

She has decided to go out to relax and try to applicate her new knowledge to the day-by-day. She has visited the Port of Barcelona and she has paid attention to the Torre del Rellotge, a former lighthouse that also has its own little story: it has the honour of being one of the geodesic points where the scientist Pierre François André Méchain took the measurements he used as the basis of the metric system.


Measuring is an important aspect in Logistics, as important as the necessity of searching standard units to apply around the world. The Grandma is very interested in talking about containers measures.


She has been practising with measurements, an important aspect of Logistics. Recorded systems of weights and measures originate in the 3rd or 4th millennium BC. Even the very earliest civilizations needed measurement for purposes of agriculture, construction, and trade. 

Early standard units might only have applied to a single community or small region, with every area developing its own standards for lengths, areas, volumes and masses. Often such systems were closely tied to one field of use, so that volume measures used, for example, for dry grains were unrelated to those for liquids, with neither bearing any particular relationship to units of length used for measuring cloth or land.

With development of manufacturing technologies, and the growing importance of trade between communities and ultimately across the Earth, standardized weights and measures became critical.

The Grandma has remembered the importance of Phi number in our lives, from a simple shell to the solar system.

More information: The Golden Number

Starting in the 18th century, modernized, simplified and uniform systems of weights and measures were developed, with the fundamental units defined by ever more precise methods in the science of metrology. The discovery and application of electricity was one factor motivating the development of standardized internationally applicable units.

Weights and measures have taken a great variety of forms over the course of history, from simple informal expectations in barter transactions to elaborate state and supranational systems that integrate measures of many different kinds.

The Golden Triangle
Weights and measures from the oldest societies can often be inferred at least in part from archaeological specimens, often preserved in museums. The comparison of the dimensions of buildings with the descriptions of contemporary writers is another source of information. An interesting example of this is the comparison of the dimensions of the Greek Parthenon with the description given by Plutarch from which a fairly accurate idea of the size of the Attic foot is obtained.

Because of the comparative volume of artifacts and documentation, we know much more about the state-sanctioned measures of large, advanced societies than we do about those of smaller societies or about the informal measures that often coexisted with official ones throughout history. In some cases, we have only plausible theories and we must sometimes select the interpretation to be given to the evidence.

By studying the evidence given by all available sources, and by correlating the relevant facts, we obtain some idea of the origin and development of the units. We find that they have changed more or less gradually with the passing of time in a complex manner because of a great variety of modifying influences.

It is possible to group official measurement systems for large societies into historical systems that are relatively stable over time, including: the Babylonian system, the Egyptian system, the Phileterian system of the Ptolemaic age, the Olympic system of Greece, the Roman system, the British system, and the metric system.

More information: Canva

Measurement is the assignment of a number to a characteristic of an object or event, which can be compared with other objects or events. The scope and application of measurement are dependent on the context and discipline.

In the natural sciences and engineering, measurements do not apply to nominal properties of objects or events, which is consistent with the guidelines of the International vocabulary of metrology published by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. However, in other fields such as statistics as well as the social and behavioral sciences, measurements can have multiple levels, which would include nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio scales.

The earliest known uniform systems of weights and measures seem all to have been created at some time in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC among the ancient peoples of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, and perhaps also Elam (in Iran) as well.

Margot measures the cargo
Early Babylonian and Egyptian records and the Hebrew Bible indicate that length was first measured with the forearm, hand, or finger and that time was measured by the periods of the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies.

When it was necessary to compare the capacities of containers such as gourds or clay or metal vessels, they were filled with plant seeds which were then counted to measure the volumes.

When means for weighing were invented, seeds and stones served as standards. For instance, the carat, still used as a unit for gems, was derived from the carob seed. 

Measurement is a cornerstone of trade, science, technology, and quantitative research in many disciplines. Historically, many measurement systems existed for the varied fields of human existence to facilitate comparisons in these fields. Often these were achieved by local agreements between trading partners or collaborators.

Since the 18th century, developments progressed towards unifying, widely accepted standards that resulted in the modern International System of Units (SI). This system reduces all physical measurements to a mathematical combination of seven base units. The science of measurement is pursued in the field of metrology.

More information: Transcinco

The measurement of a property may be categorized by the following criteria: type, magnitude, unit, and uncertainty. They enable unambiguous comparisons between measurements.

-The level of measurement is a taxonomy for the methodological character of a comparison. For example, two states of a property may be compared by ratio, difference, or ordinal preference. The type is commonly not explicitly expressed, but implicit in the definition of a measurement procedure.

-The magnitude is the numerical value of the characterization, usually obtained with a suitably chosen measuring instrument.

-A unit assigns a mathematical weighting factor to the magnitude that is derived as a ratio to the property of an artifact used as standard or a natural physical quantity.

-An uncertainty represents the random and systemic errors of the measurement procedure; it indicates a confidence level in the measurement. Errors are evaluated by methodically repeating measurements and considering the accuracy and precision of the measuring instrument.

More information: IContainers

The International System of Units (abbreviated as SI from the French language name Système International d'Unités) is the modern revision of the metric system. It is the world's most widely used system of units, both in everyday commerce and in science.

The SI was developed in 1960 from the metre-kilogram-second (MKS) system, rather than the centimetre-gram-second (CGS) system, which, in turn, had many variants. During its development the SI also introduced several newly named units that were previously not a part of the metric system.

Margot measures the cargo
There are two types of SI units, base units and derived units.

Base units are the simple measurements for time, length, mass, temperature, amount of substance, electric current and light intensity.

Derived units are constructed from the base units, for example, the watt, i.e. the unit for power, is defined from the base units as m2·kg·s−3. Other physical properties may be measured in compound units, such as material density, measured in kg/m3.

ISO 10012:2003, Measurement management systems-Requirements for measurement processes and measuring equipment is the ISO standard that specifies generic requirements and provides guidance for the management of measurement processes and metrological confirmation of measuring equipment used to support and demonstrate compliance with metrological requirements. It specifies quality management requirements of a measurement management system that can be used by an organization performing measurements as part of the overall management system, and to ensure metrological requirements are met.

ISO 10012:2003 is not intended to be used as a requisite for demonstrating conformance with ISO 9001, ISO 14001 or any other standard. Interested parties can agree to use ISO 10012:2003 as an input for satisfying measurement management system requirements in certification activities.

Other standards and guides exist for particular elements affecting measurement results, e.g. details of measurement methods, competence of personnel, and interlaboratory comparisons.

ISO 10012:2003 is not intended as a substitute for, or as an addition to, the requirements of ISO/IEC 17025. 


Finally, The Grandma has reviewed some vocabulary. She has been studying the different kind of transports, the name of measurements in English and their conversion to the different measurement systems.

More information: Metric Conversions



Numbers are the product of counting.
Quantities are the product of measurement.
This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate
because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next.

Gregory Bateson

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