hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1926.txt

Episode: 1926
Title: HPR1926: National Measurements Institutes
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1926/hpr1926.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:13:52

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This in HPR episode 1926 entitled National Measurements Institutes.
It is hosted by UNIMP and in about 11 minutes long.
The summary is a short overview of what the institute's do.
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Hello my name is here to talk to you about a bit of science.
I wanted to talk about the institutions found around the world called National Measurements Institutes.
Normally each country has their own National Measurement Institutes.
The classically the top three are considered to be P2B in Germany,
the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, United Kingdom,
and the NIST National Institutes of Standards and Technology in the United States of America.
These institutions, what they do is they give out standards of measurements.
They say what a meter is, they say what a kilogram is,
they say what a candela is for light, they can support industry and other companies
that do measurement devices.
For example we have a multi meter that's a fluke and it says that it has standard deviation and uncertainty.
If it's really good it'll say it's traceable to a national standard.
So when you measure a current you know it's a current to a certain uncertainty of maybe 0.1 plus minus
whatever the temperature is uncertainty.
There's ways of finding out how accurate your measurement is
and the ways to find out is these traceability chain going back to the national standards.
In the computer world what this normally means is for example the UTC time.
So you would normally have this trace to one of these national institutes that transmits the time to the near second.
So time is used for other things in the GPS system as well.
That's a way to find out where you are.
You just send a signal to the satellite somewhere and then measure the amount coming back.
Recently now in London Stock Exchange has used the national standards of time or use to certify when a transaction was made.
So you can certify that actually this transaction of buying wheat was done before this transaction was done before buying corn or whatever.
And you know they can be down to micro milli or nanoseconds depending on how good it's needed.
Now these institutions are very important because you can always imagine some people if you buy a piece of wood in IKEA you hope that it will be the same piece of wood in your local hardware shop if you say they just want one meter.
So this traceability is very important to get consistent measurements.
And they are normally the science that studies measurements is called metrology not meteorology as in the weather but metrology so it's the science of measurements.
And sometimes it's found that we, not with the national measurements institutes, they work with universities in order to ensure that measurements they get are consistent and get good measurements out of their system.
They are normally found kind of like two academic for industry and to industrialize for academics.
And they kind of sit in between nice and comfortably but I think industry really appreciates the national measurement institutes and those as of late academics really start getting more interest in national measurement institutes because of their ties with industry.
So it's like five that we have amp, meter, mole, candela and I don't forget the other one.
Anyway so there's standard units that you want to have measured and insured that they are good measurements.
Now there's also more complex things that you would want to measure. So for example if you are getting into radiotherapy in a hospital you want to ensure that the amount of radiation is very exact.
So you send, let's say your calibration artifact which might be some sort of nuclear source and you send it to an enemy and they say okay if you use this artifact to calibrate your machines you will know that you are doing such amounts of sea birds or whatever unit measurements is used for radiation dosage.
So that's another point that's important. Another place where it might be important is in materials. So material science is makes things a bit more complex because you have a lot of things that influence your material.
So you've got heat so you've got to relate to the Kelvin but you want to make sure that certain material under certain amount of stress, under certain amount of cycles of stress for example creates a creep and all those you know there's like processes that are standardized to do these measurements.
So you can ensure that a material of a certain type can resist certain amount of pressure and you say well you know companies and steel factories are responsible for doing that and I would say yes but then they would always have to trace to national standards if you want to make a public and traceable the only way to get real value.
So valuable measurements is by traceable tracing to national standards which national measurement institutes can do. So how are these national measurements born?
So one of the big things that ties them all together is the BIPM which stands for something in France relating to the borough international of ways and measures.
And this institute found in France is actually I believe it's an international land so even when Napoléon was around conquering people so he didn't get into that space because that was considered international land and it's not even part of France.
And what this institution does is that it holds the killer reference, I mean at least for now killer reference is going to be redefined.
And what it is is where all the scientists agree to document the way things are measured.
So there is a common language as to the way things are used so the international units is not just something that is well known as something that is written and documented by this institution.
Another thing that this institution does is that it takes the guide of uncertainty measurements otherwise known as the gum GUM.
And this tells you how you should do measurements. So for all of you doing probably some sort of statistics you probably went into looking at the gum as to how things are written.
Normally there's like quick guides and things that will simplify it because it can be quite heavy on math.
But the whole basics is that when you say standard deviation what actually you mean is that most of your data is held between 65% of that, let's say, Gaussian Bell.
That probably is a bit terminology.
So if you imagine if you say that you have a value and you say that value is 50 and that you have a certain standard deviation you know that if you repeat that measurement again your values will most within 65% probability will be held within those.
That's standard deviation. So what's normally done is you say K equals 2 which means 2 times standard deviation which would put you in 95% standard deviation.
And that will bring us to, for example, the measurements that are asserted that they needed to have a 5 omega.
So that means that there are standard deviation contained. They were very, very certain so 99.99. I don't know how many 9s are certain particle or got particle whatever exists.
So yeah, so that's about it I think. So there's a national measurement institute. I went over metrology science and I went over the guide of uncertainty measurement.
So if you ever, you know, just look it up. If you ever need to do a measurement, that's the way to do it. Of course there's good practice guides and little short shorter and simpler ways to explain it. I'm not going to go into it because I'm probably going to do a poor job.
But yeah, so please, when citing numbers of measurement and stuff, try to put some form of uncertainty and make it proper.
And notice that when you say the normal standard deviation, that's only 65% probability that it's there. So it's really poor chance that your measurement is going to be there.
So that's all. Thank you very much. And hopefully I'll bring in more acrophobic radio podcasts. Here's the way one last thing. Please, please don't take any of what I said as a mantra or something that's come forward. Please cross check yourself.
I wouldn't want you to get hurt in any way or to use me as a reference. Okay. Well, thank you very much again and catch you later. Bye.
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