Bowles and Simpson were the co-chairmen of Obama's bipartisan fiscal commission in 2010, and their recommendations came to serve as a yardstick for other debt-reduction proposals.

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Still, Wal-Mart's size, together with the longtime acceptance of same-store sales as a yardstick of a retailer's health, makes for potential fireworks every time the company's executives put out the latest monthly number.

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When calculating such things, people often adopt a familiar unit as a mental yardstick and then generate predictions based on that unit.

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In a recent interview with the Times newspaper, Ken Rogoff, former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund and a leading authority on the U.S. economy, singled out the unemployment statistics as a key yardstick of the severity of the crisis.

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As a check, he compared our ranking to a more common yardstick, the number of published patents (arguably an even cruder measure).

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Pricing the market off forward-12-month's projected earnings is a more dynamic yardstick just so long as you get the trend and momentum right.

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Chess was never likely to be a good yardstick for measuring machine intelligence as its strictly formal nature, devoid of fuzziness and chance, is exactly the opposite of the kind of task where the human brain excels.

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One common yardstick of volatility is standard deviation, which uses annualized monthly returns over time as a baseline.

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's Consumer Price Index, the federal government's primary inflation yardstick, measures the prices of a mix of consumer goods and services such as transportation, energy, food and medical care.

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