Traveling with the GDP Through Early Development Economics' History
In the vast body of development theoretical knowledge one element has been of a considerable longevity: the abstraction of a Gross Domestic Product to represent a given economic entity. This paper suggests approaching the history of development thinking by travelling with the GDP through this discourse. The GDP has been contested as an indicator of economic development ever since it was first put to use in the 1940s. However, the specific mode of knowledge which is expressed in this abstraction has opened up a quite universally shared frame of reference in which a North-South-Divide became operational. The paper argues that GDP figures have become facts that travel easily across the globe because constant work is being undertaken to uphold the conditions for their mobility. Based on this observation the development endeavour can be located historically in a manifold constellation of the statistical acquisition of economic insight, political utopia, state intervention, the emerging prospect of economic planning in capitalist and noncapitalist systems and the quest for the international standardization of economic knowledge production.
Making Measuring Instruments
In the mid-nineteenth century, economists had many numbers but relatively few measurements; by the mid-twentieth century, they began to take for granted that they had measurements for most of the phenomena about which they theorized. This is the change that marks the impact of the age of measurement, and my interest in this prespective essay is to provide an understanding of what this change entailed. Out of many different economists’ individual practical measuring projects around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there emerged a number of different kinds of measuring instruments, each carefully fashioned for economics. By looking carefully at the materials collected in this volume, we can discern that these instruments can be grouped according to the strategies or recipes that were followed in making such measuring instruments. As a historical development, first the instruments, then the strategies, served to connect the ambitions of economists seeking accurate scientific measures of their world with the practically necessary, sometimes mundane, but never trivial tasks of data collection.
An operational method for estimating signal to noise ratios from data acquired with imaging spectrometers
A method, using the concept of local means and local standard deviations of small imaging blocks and using a box counting procedure, has been developed for unsupervised estimation of the average signal to noise ratios of images in which the noise is additive. The method has been applied to simulated images with Gaussian noise, to images acquired with the Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer and with the Geophysical and Environmental Research Imaging Spectrometer. The method is compared with other techniques for estimating signal to noise ratios from imaging data. It is believed that the method is generally applicable to images having many small homogeneous blocks. Because the method does not take into account interband effects, it is not appropriate to use the method to estimate signal to noise ratios from images having nonnegligible interband radiometric calibration errors at spatial scales less than or equal to the size of the small imaging blocks used in the noise estimation.