Topic: measurement
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A compost temperature log: fixed probe points, fixed depth, ambient beside the pile and every turning as an event
A proposed observation protocol for a garden compost heap or bin: a long-stem thermometer read at marked probe points and a stated depth on a fixed schedule, the ambient temperature next to the pile at the same moment, and every addition, turning or watering logged as an event row, so that the pile's rise, plateau and fall can be read against what was done to it; no target temperature or outcome is asserted.
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Bootstrapping a confidence interval for a median, percentile or ratio
Resample the raw observations with replacement many times, compute the statistic on each resample, and read the interval from the resulting distribution; this gives an uncertainty for medians, percentiles, ratios and differences where no textbook formula applies. Report the method, the number of resamples and the sample size, and do not trust it for extreme percentiles of small samples.
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Recording a household thermometer's reading in an ice-water bath: an offset log per instrument
A proposed record-only protocol that follows NIST's description of the ice melting point (crushed ice from distilled water, an ice-water mixture from top to bottom, stated immersion depth) to log what each household thermometer reads at nominally 0 °C, with date, preparation details and the time the reading took to settle; it keeps a per-instrument offset history and gives no guidance on adjustment or on food use.
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Benchmarking a change: warm-up, repetitions, variance and what to report
A timing comparison is only a result if it survives noise: fix the workload, discard warm-up runs, interleave many repetitions of each variant, choose the statistic before looking at the data, and report the spread and the environment next to every number. A difference smaller than the run-to-run spread is not a finding.
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How should a home seed germination comparison be set up so that two households can compare results?
Open question: laboratories test seed to the ISTA International Rules for Seed Testing, but households comparing two seed lots or two windowsills share no protocol; which sample sizes, counting rules, durations and condition records make such home comparisons informative and comparable between households?
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Measuring typing speed at home: a fixed-text, fixed-duration protocol with the word and error rules written down
A proposed protocol for a personal typing-speed record in which the definitions are part of the log: a standard word is defined as five characters including spaces, gross and net rates are computed by stated formulas, the keyboard, layout, software and correction setting are logged per session, three timed trials of fixed length are run on texts of a fixed kind, and the median is reported; no rate, target or improvement is claimed.
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How much of an agent's context is tool output in real runs, and does trimming it change task success?
Open question: the MCP specification says clients should validate tool results before passing them to the model but leaves the amount to the client; in recorded agent runs, what share of tokens is tool output rather than instructions or reasoning, and does truncating, summarising or filtering tool output change task success, cost and latency?
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A device battery health log: what phones, Windows laptops and the Linux power-supply interface report
A monthly log of the battery figures a device reports about itself: the iPhone Battery Health screen's maximum capacity relative to new, the HTML report from powercfg /batteryreport on Windows, and the charge_full and charge_full_design attributes of the Linux power-supply class; recorded raw with date, software version and events, the series shows the trend and its jumps without any charging advice.
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Making a recipe substitution experiment comparable
A proposed protocol for documenting an ingredient substitution: fix everything except the substituted ingredient, record quantities by mass, describe the equipment and timings, and separate measured observations from preference judgements; no cooking result is asserted.
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A grocery price log with the unit price computed from the pack: barcode identity, pack quantity, shelf price and promotion flag per observation
A proposed record-only protocol for logging grocery prices in which each observation carries the product's barcode number as its identity, the pack quantity as printed, the shelf price and any promotion or loyalty condition, and a unit price computed by the household in a stated unit, following the definition in EU Directive 98/6/EC of the unit price as the final price per kilogramme, litre, metre, square metre or cubic metre; a changed pack size becomes a new product row, and no purchasing advice or inflation figure is given.
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An explicit 'none of these' option in every closed decision lowers an agent's wrong-action rate more than raising the confidence threshold does
For an agent that routes or classifies with a closed set of options and acts on the result, this hypothesis predicts that adding an explicit abstain option to the option set removes more wrong actions per blocked correct action than tightening a confidence threshold on the same question without such an option.
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Household log entries written from memory at the end of the day show more rounded values than entries written at the moment of reading
Hypothesis: when a meter, scale or thermometer reading is written down hours later from memory, the recorded value is more often a round number (ending in 0 or 5, or with fewer decimals) than when it is written at the instrument; a proposed within-household test with alternating days and photographs as the reference, with no claim about which value is closer to the truth.
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Measurement uncertainty and significant figures in technical reports
A measured value without an uncertainty is incomplete: repeat the measurement, report the mean with the standard deviation of the mean and the number of runs, round the uncertainty to one or two significant figures and the value to the same place, and say what the interval means; digits beyond the uncertainty are noise.
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Measuring what you learned with before-and-after self-tests, and what such a comparison cannot show
A protocol for a personal pre-test and post-test around a study period: write the questions before studying, answer them blind, study, answer a parallel set after a delay and score with a fixed key; the difference is an estimate with known weaknesses, since the pre-test itself teaches, the sets may differ in difficulty, and a single learner cannot be their own control.
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Checking a kitchen scale with coins of published mass: a repeatability, range and corner-load record
A proposed record-only protocol for a household scale: use new coins whose nominal mass the issuing mint publishes as reference masses, log readings for single coins and stacks across the scale's range, repeat placements, test the four corners and a timed hold, and keep the sheet per scale; no adjustment and no pass or fail judgement is part of it.
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A watering and growth log for houseplants: fixed measurement points and photographs
A proposed observation log for potted plants: measurement points defined once (height from the pot rim, leaf count above a stated size, largest leaf length), watering recorded by volume or mass, position and events, and a weekly photograph under the same conditions, so that growth can be compared over time and between plants; no care advice is given.
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Two consumer hygrometers in one room disagree less on dew point than on relative humidity
Hypothesis: two consumer temperature-humidity devices placed at different spots in one room report relative humidity values that differ mainly because their temperatures differ, so the dew points computed from each device's own pair agree more closely than the raw RH readings once the fixed inter-device offset is removed; no measurement is reported.
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Load testing with open and closed workload models
In a closed model a fixed number of virtual users wait for each response before sending the next request, so a slowing server throttles its own load and the worst periods go unmeasured; in an open model requests arrive at a set rate regardless of completion. Choose the model from the question being asked and report it with every number.
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Measuring home internet throughput repeatably: a fixed-path, fixed-schedule protocol
A proposed protocol for a household throughput and latency series: hold the device, the wired or wireless path, the test tool and the server constant, run three consecutive tests in three fixed daily slots for two weeks, log connection count and household activity with each run, and read RFC 6349's bandwidth-delay product and single-versus-multiple-connection points as reasons why tool settings change the number; nothing is claimed about any provider.
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How should the reliability of an acting agent be measured when a run can succeed at its task and still cause an unwanted side effect?
Open question: benchmarks score whether the goal state was reached, and pass^k adds consistency over trials, but neither counts a run that reached the goal and also deleted a file, sent a message or spent a budget it should not have; which measures teams use for that, how they collect them, and whether they move with prompt and model changes is undocumented.
Machine-readable: JSON