All posts tagged: Measuring

Feeling behind in life? Psychology says you’re measuring yourself against the wrong timeline

Feeling behind in life? Psychology says you’re measuring yourself against the wrong timeline

Published by Daniella Wilson

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more By a certain age, the story goes, you should have certain things locked down: a successful career, a loving partner, a couple of children running around in the house that you’ve purchased. If you miss these markers, dread tends to set in. You may feel everyone else is moving forward, and that somehow you’ve fallen behind. This is one of the most common anxieties we encounter in life. It’s also one of the most misunderstood. Some psychologists call this schedule we set in our minds as a society, the “social clock” (Getty Images) As a developmental psychologist, I want to offer a more accurate and liberating account of what’s actually going on. The feeling of being behind is real. The timeline producing it, is …

This free Android app turned my phone into a 35-tool measuring tool – and I tested everything

This free Android app turned my phone into a 35-tool measuring tool – and I tested everything

Published by skeptic

Jack Wallen/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET key takeaways This free app can level up your experiments. Anything your phone sensors can pick up, this app can use. Find out just how much information your phone can track. I love getting my geek on, and I do so every day. But sometimes, I need access to scientific tools that are either way out of my price range or inaccessible. The good news is that my Pixel 9 Pro smartphone includes several tools for such purposes. Those tools are the various sensors that the OS and the installed apps depend on. The sensors are used for a range of tasks, including sensing ambient light, recording steps taken, directions on maps, screen rotation, and much more. Also: This hidden Pixel camera setting makes my photos absolutely pop – here’s how Now, imagine if you could unlock the device’s scientific capability by accessing those sensors. By installing a single app, you would have access to the phone’s sensors for things like acceleration, acoustics, color and luminance, …

All the Fancy Measuring Devices Used in Science Rely on Two Stone-Age Techniques

All the Fancy Measuring Devices Used in Science Rely on Two Stone-Age Techniques

Published by skeptic

Humans are animals that measure things. Call us Homo mensura. We have a compulsion to quantify, and for millennia we’ve been inventing new ways to go about it. For anything you can think of, there’s a device to measure it—from sphygmomanometers to spectrophotofluorometers. And of course nowhere is this more true than in science. Well, science and baseball. Physicists build models to explain how the world works. It might be an equation, like the ideal gas law: PV = nRT. This tells us, for example, that if you double the temperature (T) of a gas, all else equal, its gas pressure (P) will double. But to see if the model is legit, or at least useful, we need to get some real-world values and check whether the equation holds. Modeling and measuring, measuring and modeling—that’s science in a nutshell. Of course, today we have some pretty fancy instruments for this. But I’m going to let you in on a little secret: With all of our cool tools, measurement still comes down to either comparison or …

AI Startups are Measuring their Revenues in Likely Fraudulent Ways

AI Startups are Measuring their Revenues in Likely Fraudulent Ways

Published by Jenni Sidey

AI skeptics have long been concerned with the losses and small revenues of AI software companies. In June 2024, almost three years ago, Sequoia partner, David Cahn, estimated that the AI industry needed to generate roughly $600 billion in annual revenue to justify the money being spent on AI infrastructure including data centers and Nvidia GPUs. Last month, market research company, Gartner, said that AI companies need close to “$2 trillion per year in revenue by 2029”, token consumption of between 50,000 and 100,000 times its current rate by 2030, and “a 10% profit margin per token.” With huge losses and small revenues, it is not likely that AI companies will achieve these goals on time. What’s going on here? Usually, companies charge their customers enough money for them to pay their suppliers, and for those suppliers to pay their suppliers. This isn’t happening in AI, however. OpenAI and other AI companies have set prices much lower than their costs to spur demand under the hope that more companies will use AI and then the …

Stealth Assessment: Measuring Training While It Takes Place

Stealth Assessment: Measuring Training While It Takes Place

Published by Jenni Sidey

Never got it. Never really got it. Why do we have tests at school? Why do we measure the performance of training after the training by means of a summative assessment? The ones given at the end of a term to measure mastery of the content that was taught. The multiple-choice tests, or short essay questions, that result in a good or bad grade. Sure, the lion’s share of students dislike taking pop quizzes, tests, and exams. I was one of those students. But even looking back as a former student, now being an instructor and trainer myself, in hindsight I still do not understand why we so often measure the success of training mainly through these final assessments. The primary reason why I don’t understand tests is that they generally do not give feedback that is timely or specific enough to improve learning while it is happening. Ultimately, the goal of the learning process is to learn as much as is needed to meet the goals of the training. The outcome of a test …

What a rare lensed supernova could mean for measuring cosmic expansion

What a rare lensed supernova could mean for measuring cosmic expansion

Published by Jenni Sidey

A burst of light in the deep sky is doing something it should not be able to do. It looks like one supernova, but it shows up as several copies at once, scattered around two foreground galaxies. The effect is not a telescope trick or a camera glitch. It is gravity, bending the path of the light so it reaches Earth along different routes, on different schedules. The object is SN 2025wny, nicknamed “SN Winny,” and it sits about 10 billion light-years away. It is also a superluminous supernova, a kind of stellar explosion so bright that it can still be detected from extreme distances. The team behind the work, from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU), and the Max Planck Institutes for Astrophysics (MPA) and Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), says the alignment is so unlikely that the odds of finding a similar event are below one in a million. That rarity is exactly why astronomers are excited. If they can measure the time gaps between the different images of the same …

We’re Measuring AI on the Wrong Ruler

We’re Measuring AI on the Wrong Ruler

Published by Jenni Sidey

Every debate about artificial intelligence (AI) seems to revolve around the same question: Is it smarter than we are? The subtitles of the questions might change, and the endpoints might be argued, but behind the cacophony of authoritative brilliance is a shared assumption—that intelligence lives on a single line. More of it on one end, less on the other. Humans are somewhere along that spectrum, and machines are moving toward us. But with all the discussion and debate, we rarely stop to examine the ruler itself. And the moment we ask whether AI is ahead of us, we have already accepted that we are measuring the same thing. The Illusion of a Shared Scale It’s understandable why we default to this handy ruler. Large language models create the very stuff of our humanity, from words to images. And this output clearly looks like thinking, and it is commonly better than what we humans produce. But let’s be careful not to get our hand slapped by that ruler in the process. Here’s what we need to …

How can we tell if citizen participation actually works? A new framework for measuring impact – Evidence & Policy Blog

How can we tell if citizen participation actually works? A new framework for measuring impact – Evidence & Policy Blog

Published by skeptic

Franziska Sörgel, Nora Weinberger, Julia Hahn, Christine Milchram and Maria Maia This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Assessing the effectiveness of citizen participation: the development of an impact scheme’. Citizen participation has become central to research policy, yet we rarely ask the crucial follow-up question: what difference does it actually make? In our recent Evidence & Policy article, we propose an impact scheme that helps to move participation from a well-intentioned ritual to a practice with measurable, meaningful effects.    The last decade has seen an explosion of participatory formats designed to gather citizen and stakeholder feedback on science and innovation policy. From citizens’ assemblies to co-creation workshops, public dialogue has become the new punctuation mark in research agendas and beyond. Nevertheless, a fundamental problem persists: we lack systematic ways to measure whether these processes genuinely influence research priorities or merely provide a democratic façade with little real impact. This gap matters enormously for both research institutions that invest resources in participation and for citizens who provide their time and expertise.  At the Karlsruhe Institute …

Measuring the deep tech gender gap – POLITICO

Measuring the deep tech gender gap – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

A central output of the project is the Gender Gap in Investments Dashboard, developed by Dealroom. The dashboard is a prototype repository that already presents a clear picture of the current state of the gender investment gap using Dealroom data. It brings together information on company founding teams and venture funding outcomes across Europe in a single, accessible interface. The dashboard is not an endpoint. It is designed as a foundation that can, over time, incorporate additional data sources, improve coverage, and offer a more nuanced view of how gender, sector, funding stage and geography interact. The long-term ambition is to support the development of a credible, shared European data infrastructure on gender and investment. What the data show: Deep tech remains highly skewed Even at this early stage, the dashboard reveals persistent imbalances. Across Europe, startups with at least one woman founder raise just 14.4 percent of all venture capital (VC) rounds and 12 percent of total VC funding. In deep tech, the imbalance is even starker. Around 80 percent of deep-tech companies are founded by all-male …

Why measuring methane production matters

Why measuring methane production matters

Published by skeptic

Recent research highlights the advantages of C-Lock’s GreenFeed system for measuring methane production in dairy farming, emphasising that mass flux measurements provide more reliable data for research and decision-making than traditional concentration-based sensors. As the livestock industry moves toward more accurate methane measurement, one distinction is becoming increasingly important: the difference between methane concentration measurements and methane production measurements. While both can offer insights, they are not interchangeable – and new research shows why measuring methane as a mass flux provides a more reliable foundation for research, genetic selection, and on-farm decision making. A recent five-month study conducted in Switzerland evaluated methane ‘sniffer’ sensors installed inside an automated milking system (AMS) and compared them with C-Lock’s GreenFeed Emission Monitoring System — a widely used on-farm tool that measures methane production in grams per day. The results reinforce a key message: concentration-based measurements are highly sensitive to sensor placement and animal behaviour, while GreenFeed’s mass-flux approach offers greater consistency and confidence. Concentration vs production Most AMS sniffers measure methane concentration (ppm) in the air near a …