The anticipated release of EnlistTM cotton, corn, and soybean cultivars likely will increase the use of 2,4-D, raising concerns over potential injury to susceptible cotton. An experiment was conducted at 12 locations over 2013 and 2014 to determine the impact of 2,4-D at rates simulating drift (2 g ae ha−1) and tank contamination (40 g ae ha−1) on cotton during six different growth stages. Growth stages at application included four leaf (4-lf), nine leaf (9-lf), first bloom (FB), FB + 2 wk, FB + 4 wk, and FB + 6 wk. Locations were grouped according to percent yield loss compared to the nontreated check (NTC), with group I having the least yield loss and group III having the most. Epinasty from 2,4-D was more pronounced with applications during vegetative growth stages. Importantly, yield loss did not correlate with visual symptomology, but more closely followed effects on boll number. The contamination rate at 9-lf, FB, or FB + 2 wk had the greatest effect across locations, reducing the number of bolls per plant when compared to the NTC, with no effect when applied at FB + 4 wk or later. A reduction of boll number was not detectable with the drift rate except in group III when applied at the FB stage. Yield was influenced by 2,4-D rate and stage of cotton growth. Over all locations, loss in yield of greater than 20% occurred at 5 of 12 locations when the drift rate was applied between 4-lf and FB + 2 wk (highest impact at FB). For the contamination rate, yield loss was observed at all 12 locations; averaged over these locations yield loss ranged from 7 to 66% across all growth stages. Results suggest the greatest yield impact from 2,4-D occurs between 9-lf and FB + 2 wk, and the level of impact is influenced by 2,4-D rate, crop growth stage, and environmental conditions.

Is intelligence a fit topic for intellectual history? The creation and institutionalization of IQ (the initials have become self-sufficient, and no longer stand for “intelligence quotient”) have been a favorite topic in the history of psychology, and have even achieved some standing in social histories of class, race, and mobility, especially in the United States. The campaign to quantify intelligence tended to remove it from the domain of intellectual history, which after all has traditionally emphasized ideas and interpretations. Measurement, and not alone of the mind, was pursued as a way to rein in the intellect by making it more rigorous. What was pushed out the door, however, returned through the window in the form of debates about what intelligence means; in what sense and with what tools it can be measured; and how these measures relate to other ways of comprehending mind, thought, and reason. Quantification, a potent strategy for releasing science from the grip of history, is itself profoundly historical, as a half-century of modern scholarship has demonstrated. This historicizing of the antihistorical embodies what we may call counterreflexivity, and, as such, is partly about puncturing illusions, though it need not take a negative view of the social role of science. The perspective of history is all the more essential because the depoliticization of merit through science entails a consequential moral and political choice. Measurement, by rationalizing and stabilizing the idea of intelligence, enabled it more readily to enter everyday discourse and to be put to work in schools, businesses, and bureaucracies.

It is an unusual and memorable privilege to address so international a gathering here in North Carolina on the Fourth of July. American nationalism in recent times has not been very broad-minded, and I'm envious of a society that can attract so many participants from all over the world. But the issue of cosmopolitanism and parochialism pertains to academic discipline as well as to nationality. Historians and economists do not always understand one another very well, and while economists are able to bring in bigger incomes and to maintain a higher public profile, historians maintain a certain authority in regard to scholarly writing about the past. Practitioners of history of economics have often been upbraided for failing to write “real” history, and I have been known to write in this vein. At least I am among those who have tried to persuade members of this society of the merits of history, history of science, and science studies as models for writing history of economics. At the same time I have been seduced by the fascination of this field to devote much of my own research to it, and in these efforts I have come to admire and to draw inspiration from what is distinctive in historical writing on economics, as well as what seems most familiar from the standpoint of the historical discipline.

Quantification is not merely a strategy for describing the social and natural worlds, but a means of reconfiguring them. It entails the imposition of new meanings and the disappearance of old ones. Often it is allied to systems of experimental or administrative control, and in fact considerable feats of human organization are generally required even to create stable, reasonably standardized measures. This essay urges that the uses of quantification in science, social science, and bureaucratic social and economic policy are analogous in important ways to accountancy.