Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The zero-crossing rate is the rate of sign-changes along a signal, i.e., the rate at which the signal changes from positive to negative or back. In the fields of communications, signal processing, and in electrical engineering more generally, a signal is any time-varying or spatial-varying quantity. In the physical world, any quantity measurable through time or over space can be taken as a signal. Within a complex society, any set of human information or machine data can also be taken as a signal. Such information or machine data (for example, the dots on a screen, the ink making up text on a paper page, or the words now flowing into the reader''s mind) must all be part of systems existing in the physical world either living or non-living.