Steve For my sins, I started work in an industrial research laboratory.
One time the laboratory was having some sort of open day[1] and one of my colleagues had a printed card announcing the rate of migration of chlorine ions through magnetite which must have had some bearing upon the apparatus supposedly on show. Although he was a PhD, this key result, thought to be of great importance for understanding corrosion at high temperatures and pressures, was presented as, relying approximately on your numbers, 1.48 +/- 0.4. The point, something I learned in my *school* physics laboratory (or was it my school chemistry laboratory!), was to adjust the precision of a reported measurement to match the degree of uncertainty. If my physics master (or my chemistry master) had been presented with "1.48 +/- 0.4.", I would have suffered some severe "marking down"! In case my point has been missed, with something like +/- 0.4 uncertainty, you should have said the following: "... the average the z9 is 1.5 times faster ... ." - [1] This reminds me of another sort of "open day" held in the Royal Festival Hall. I was obliged to roll a rack of equipment across the main hall between the seats and the stage where Mstislav Rostropovich was rehearsing - actually and necessarily taking a short break. He didn't give me the friendliest of looks as I tried to give an apologetic look in return! - Chris Mason On Wed, 18 Jul 2012 22:43:30 +0000, Finch, Steve (ES - Mainframe) <[email protected]> wrote: > I would say that on the average the z9 is 1.48 times faster , but that number > depends on what the program is doing. The number could be 1.1 to 1.8 > depending on what the batch program is doing. It's the old - your mileage > will vary comment > The purpose of PCR is to deal with the flux factor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
