Many of the most innovative ways to use new gadgets and services will be discovered by the people for whom they were originally designed.The very last flight of America's space shuttle, which took place in July, carried two iPhones for the first time, using an app that measures things such as altitude and orbital location.
The fledgling field of "people analytics," which measures things such as employee engagement, looks especially promising.
Qualcomm Chief Paul Jacobs, whose company makes the chips that go inside mobile phones, spoke of a future in which patients with chronic diseases such as congestive heart failure will wear a wireless band aid containing a sensor that measures things such as heart rate, blood pressure and amount of oxygen in the blood.
The trouble was, measuring things such as crime levels, transport efficiency and housing stock, meant that the most anodyne cities inevitably rose to the top.
When firms measure things such as name recognition, rather than direct sales, they would do well to look to non-profits.
It wasn't their fault; or rather, it was – owing to their physical composition, you can measure things such as cholesterol in eggs more efficiently than in other foods.
"Companies should measure things such as the average incomes of men and women at each grade, the percentage of men and women at each grade, the percentage of promotions in each grade for men and women and so on.
From this image, the researchers can measure things such as the blood vessels' sizes and how they branch and thus how likely it is that a tumour is malignant.The ultimate aim is more ambitious: not just to detect malignancy, but also to measure the "aggressiveness" of that malignancy in other words, how likely a tumour is to metastasise (ie, to scatter offshoots into the rest of the body).
After agreeing to volunteer as a research subject, users of the myPersonality app answer survey questions and take a series of psychological tests that measure things such as intelligence, competitiveness, extraversion versus introversion, and general satisfaction with life.
For the past few years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering professor Nicholas Makris and colleagues have been developing ways to use low-frequency sound to measure things such as undersea mountains and hurricane intensity (ScienceNOW, 15 April 2008).
Robert Huggins Associates, a British-based economics consultancy, found that the world's top seven regional "knowledge economies", measured by things such as patent registrations, investment in R&D and the proportion of knowledge workers, were all in the United States.Europe has less reason to be cheerful than America.
