But Mr. Bernabè, 63, gets animated when he talks about the financial benchmarks that have charted the company's recovery.
AbZ said funding must go to programs with clear benchmarks that have strong financial and policy oversight.
If so, it would be the latest in a long list of financial benchmarks that have been rigged in ways that have bolstered bankers' bonuses.
They discovered that their discipline had been measuring biodiversity with a very narrow lens: looking, for instance, at habitats only in a particular region of the ocean, or at the rise or decline of a particular species, and usually with respect to benchmarks that had been set just decades earlier.
But shortly afterward the government of Guinea declared that Rio Tinto was developing the mine too slowly, citing progress benchmarks that had been missed, and implying that the company was simply hoarding the Simandou deposit — keeping it from competitors while focussing on mines elsewhere.
If only the same were true for the stock market benchmarks that have proliferated in the last two decades.
After all, its the tech benchmarks that have led the market higher in the past few months even as other stocks have languished.
For example, SPEC released the CPU2000 benchmark suite containing benchmarks that have a dynamic instruction count of several hundreds of billions of instructions.
The use of these benchmarks has been very useful in comparing states in the USA on an agreed upon series of child care benchmarks that have a great deal of support in the research literature (American Academy of Pediatrics [AAP] & American Public Health Association [APHA], 2012, 2013; NACCRRA, 2007, 2009, 2011).
Reactions to the Common Core Standards -- a new set of education benchmarks that have been adopted in 45 states -- have been varied, polarized and political.
