In all, there's 755 million people living in the Americas. So last March, at the Fourth Americas Business Forum in Costa Rica, U.S. Commerce Secretary Bill Daley challenged both the governments and the business leaders. And also we can take steps to ensure that business is conducted in the most efficient manner. The ministers of all our member nations, many of them at least, have issued similar challenges, and they're telling us, the National Measurement Institutes, to get on with it, to make the kind of progress that's necessary to support these collaborations, and to do it soon. SIMnet is a cooperative initiative that responds directly to these challenges.
Measurement standards are kind of generic tools.
They're used widely by industry. They support all kinds of custody exchange in the marketplace. To the outside observer, a nanometer's a nanometer, a watt's a watt, two parts in a billion are just that. The truth of the matter is that we know through experience that measurements are often a fertile ground for arguments in trade disputes. A gear manufacturer's nanometer may turn out to be somewhat different than the nanometer that's measured by a product certification lab in another country.