Standard issue
World Standards Day 2022 will soon be upon us. The public鈥檚 enthusiasm for this annual bifurcated event, which celebrates the technical rules and regulations that keep society running, seems undimmed by the covid-19 pandemic.
The bifurcation is geographical. This year, most of the world will celebrate World Standards Day on 14 October. This date is specified by a consortium of three groups: the International Organization for Standardization, the International Electrotechnical Commission and the International Telecommunication Union. The goal is to recognise the importance of international standards.
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Meanwhile, the US Celebration of World Standards Day will take place on 13 October. Its date is specified by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the official theme is 鈥淪ustaining the U.S. Standards Model and American Standards Leadership鈥�.
The world, the US included, began celebrating World Standards Day in 1970. In some years, the US has a World Standards Week. Usually, none of the dates of the country鈥檚 World Standards Week coincide with the date of the world鈥檚 World Standards Day. The innovation continues.
This year, the US celebrates two World Standards Weeks. ANSI鈥檚 website says the first happened on 17 to 19 May (thus officially a three-day week), and the second will happen on 10 to 14 October (five days). Elsewhere on its site, ANSI says the second week will span 10 to 13 October (four days). Confusion is a standard in this world.
When to add the teabag?
We invite you, if you are a right-thinking tea drinker, to join us in the most proper imaginable ritual of celebrating World Standards Day. At the stroke of 4pm, heft and enjoy a cup of tea. That is provided, of course, that you or a trusted one has prepared the cuppa in accordance with the official British tea standard, BS ISO 3103:2019: 鈥淭ea. Preparation of liquor for use in sensory tests鈥�.
Copies of BS ISO 3103:2019 can be purchased from the British Standards Institution for 拢138. (Note: members of the British Standards Institution can obtain it at half price, a mere 拢69!) Also note that while 鈥渁ddition of milk is not essential, it sometimes helps to accentuate differences in flavour and colour鈥�.
Five pages long, the standard has been updated from earlier versions as the UK worked to maintain its leadership position in an unstable world. The best-known of those earlier versions, , was awarded the Ig Nobel Literature Prize in 1999.
Publication day
Feedback was recently present at a relaxed discussion between a physics professor and a psychology professor. Both had been among the speakers at a public event earlier that day.
The physicist said (this is a paraphrase, as no one was taking notes): In my field, when a new study is published, everyone gets excited and immediately tries to figure out what is wrong with that study. But I notice that in psychology, things seem to work in a different way.
The psychologist replied: Very different. In my field, when we see a new study, everyone gets excited and tries to figure out how to build on this new knowledge.
Discuss, if you like (being careful to supply clear examples, and to point to documentation thereof).
Snore score
It can be annoyingly difficult to measure how annoying a person鈥檚 snoring can be. Researchers at the University of Regensburg, Germany, offer up a solution: 鈥淎n objective statement about the annoyance of snoring can be made with the Psychoacoustic Snore Score (PSS). The PSS was developed based on subjective assessments and is strongly influenced by observed sound pressure levels.鈥�
Their assessment of how to assess snoring appears in the study , published in the journal Sleep and Breathing.
This kind of work isn鈥檛 easy to do well. There are complexities, such as the example mentioned by the Regensburg team: 鈥淚n a study on the sleep quality of women living with snorers, Blumen et al. had to exclude 7 out of 23 couples. The reason was that the women themselves snored to a relevant extent.鈥�
Much confusion arises, they suggest, from the interplay of the snoring with whatever other annoying sounds happen to be in the air. They list some noises that, when heard in symphony with a snorer, often prove most annoying: garbage collection, stormy weather, a bell ringing.
The study also looks back at earlier work that aimed to classify the range of potential annoyance posed by a snoring bed partner: , published in Chest in 1999.
That research 鈥� done at the University of Minnesota, the Dortmund Sleep Disorders Clinic in Germany and elsewhere 鈥� claimed to reveal a discrepancy concerning sex: 鈥淭he average levels of snoring sound intensity were significantly higher for men than for women.鈥� Discuss at your peril.
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