Function
Under the authority of the Metric Convention, the BIPM helps to ensure uniformity of SI weights and measures around the world. It does so through a series of consultative committees, whose members are the national metrology laboratories of the Convention's member states, and through its own laboratory work.
The BIPM carries out measurement-related research. It takes part in and organises international comparisons of national measurement standards and performs calibrations for member states.
The BIPM has an important role in maintaining accurate worldwide time of day. It combines, analyzes, and averages the official atomic time standards of member nations around the world to create a single, official Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
The BIPM is also the keeper of the international prototype of the kilogram.
Read more about this topic: International Bureau Of Weights And Measures
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“The mother’s and father’s attitudes toward the child correspond to the child’s own needs.... Mother has the function of making him secure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“The intension of a proposition comprises whatever the proposition entails: and it includes nothing else.... The connotation or intension of a function comprises all that attribution of this predicate to anything entails as also predicable to that thing.”
—Clarence Lewis (1883–1964)
“Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.”
—Robert Warshow (1917–1955)