Pathering Flik

Patherine Flik - This article is about a unit of measure. For the Disney character, see List of A Bug's Life characters. For the Hungarian airline, see Flik 14. For the title "Flik and Flok", see Flik and Flok (disambiguation).

This article is about the unit of spectral radiance. For the unit of time, see Flick (time).

In radio astronomy, the unit flik was coined by a group at Lockheed in Palo Alto, California as a substitute for the SI derived unit W cm−2 sr−1 µm−1, or watts divided by centimeters squared, steradians, and micrometers.[1]

This is primarily used as a unit of spectral radiance or sterance. While it started out used only in Lockheed, many in the radio astronomy field adopted its use.

He was voiced by Bill Hunter

Personality
Measurement is the assignment of a number to a characteristic of an object or event, which can be compared with other objects or events.[1][2] The scope and application of a measurement is 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.[2] However, in other fields such as statistics as well as the socialand behavioral sciences, measurements can have multiple levels, which would include nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio scales.[1][3]

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.

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

Intelligence
Measurements most commonly use the International System of Units (SI) as a comparison framework. The system defines seven fundamental units: kilogram, metre, candela, second, ampere, kelvin, and mole. Six of these units are defined without reference to a particular physical object which serves as a standard (artifact-free), while the kilogram is still embodied in an artifact which rests at the headquarters of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres near Paris. Artifact-free definitions fix measurements at an exact value related to a physical constant or other invariable phenomena in nature, in contrast to standard artifacts which are subject to deterioration or destruction. Instead, the measurement unit can only ever change through increased accuracy in determining the value of the constant it is tied to.

The first proposal to tie an SI base unit to an experimental standard independent of fiat was by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914),[4] who proposed to define the metre in terms of the wavelength of a spectral line.[5] This directly influenced the Michelson–Morley experiment; Michelson and Morley cite Peirce, and improve on his method.[6]

Standards
With the exception of a few fundamental quantum constants, units of measurement are derived from historical agreements. Nothing inherent in nature dictates that an inch has to be a certain length, nor that a mile is a better measure of distance than a kilometre. Over the course of human history, however, first for convenience and then for necessity, standards of measurement evolved so that communities would have certain common benchmarks. Laws regulating measurement were originally developed to prevent fraud in commerce.

Units of measurement are generally defined on a scientific basis, overseen by governmental or independent agencies, and established in international treaties, pre-eminent of which is the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM), established in 1875 by the Metre Convention, overseeing the International System of Units (SI) and having custody of the International Prototype Kilogram. The metre, for example, was redefined in 1983 by the CGPM in terms of light speed, while in 1960 the international yard was defined by the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa as being exactly 0.9144 metres.

In the United States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a division of the United States Department of Commerce, regulates commercial measurements. In the United Kingdom, the role is performed by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), in Australia by the National Measurement Institute,[7] in South Africa by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and in India the National Physical Laboratory of India.

Agility
Before SI units were widely adopted around the world, the British systems of English units and later imperial units were used in Britain, the Commonwealth and the United States. The system came to be known as U.S. customary units in the United States and is still in use there and in a few Caribbean countries. These various systems of measurement have at times been called foot-pound-second systems after the Imperial units for length, weight and time even though the tons, hundredweights, gallons, and nautical miles, for example, are different for the U.S. units. Many Imperial units remain in use in Britain, which has officially switched to the SI system—with a few exceptions such as road signs, which are still in miles. Draught beer and cider must be sold by the imperial pint, and milk in returnable bottles can be sold by the imperial pint. Many people measure their height in feet and inches and their weight in stone and pounds, to give just a few examples. Imperial units are used in many other places, for example, in many Commonwealth countries that are considered metricated, land area is measured in acres and floor space in square feet, particularly for commercial transactions (rather than government statistics). Similarly, gasoline is sold by the gallon in many countries that are considered metricated.

Metric system
The metric system is a decimal system of measurement based on its units for length, the metre and for mass, the kilogram. It exists in several variations, with different choices of base units, though these do not affect its day-to-day use. Since the 1960s, the International System of Units (SI) is the internationally recognised metric system. Metric units of mass, length, and electricity are widely used around the world for both everyday and scientific purposes.

The metric system features a single base unit for many physical quantities. Other quantities are derived from the standard SI units. Multiples and fractions are expressed as powers of 10 of each unit. When smaller or larger units are more convenient for given use, metric prefixes can be added to the base unit to denote its multiple by a power of ten: a thousandth (10−3) of a metre is a millimetre, while a thousand (103) metres is a kilometre. Unit conversions are thus always simple, so that convenient magnitudes for measurements are achieved by simply moving the decimal place: 1.234 metres is 1234 millimetres or 0.001234 kilometres. The use of fractions, such as 2/5 of a metre, is not prohibited, but uncommon. There is no profusion of different units with different conversion factors as in the Imperial system which uses, for example, inches, feet, yards, fathoms, and rods for length.

International System of Units
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. The original SI units for the seven basic physical quantities were:[8]

Trivia

 * Airy points
 * Conversion of units
 * Detection limit
 * Differential linearity
 * Dimensional analysis
 * Dimensionless number
 * Econometrics
 * Electrical measurements
 * History of measurement
 * History of science and technology
 * ISO 10012, Measurement management systems
 * Instrumentation
 * Integral linearity
 * Key relevance in locksmithing
 * Least count
 * Levels of measurement
 * Measurement in quantum mechanics
 * Measuring instrument
 * NCSL International
 * Number sense
 * Observation
 * Observable quantity
 * Orders of magnitude
 * Primary instrument
 * Psychometrics
 * Remote sensing
 * Quantification (science)
 * Standard (metrology)
 * Statistics
 * Test method
 * Timeline of temperature and pressure measurement technology
 * Timeline of time measurement technology
 * Units of measurement
 * Uncertainty principle
 * Measurement uncertainty
 * Virtual instrumentation
 * Web analytics
 * Weights and measures
 * List of unusual units of measurement
 * List of humorous units of measurement