The real yardstick for the chancellors' debate, therefore, is whether the public's views about Alistair Darling, George Osborne or Vince Cable have changed at all tonight.
After our initial surprise, Efron says that the real yardstick for measuring probability is "How surprised should we be?" How surprising is it, to use this example, that two 70-year-old men in the same town should die within two hours of each other?
But the only real yardstick against which his success should be measured is whether he can offer to millions of Italians – mostly female and mostly young – the possibility of contributing to the growth of a society that has been stagnating for two decades.
Major gains have been achieved by all developmental yardsticks - real income, life expectancy, infant survival and levels of education and nutrition.
A financial measure known as funds from operations, which is considered a yardstick for real estate funds, is expected to be 37 or 38 cents a share.
"Using real G.D.P. as a yardstick, the year-over-year trend rate of economic growth now stands at a prodigious 6percentt, so obviously the expectation of a slowdown in the economy's pace is not a particularly heroic assumption".
By liquidating its portfolio and turning it into real cash, it became a yardstick for the investment performance of a microfinance institution.At first sight, its returns look unexciting: just 6% annually, despite lots of risk.
Only then will we have a yardstick to measure real progress against exciting rhetoric.
The Bank said the change reflects new data on differences in the cost of living across countries, while preserving the real purchasing power of the previous yardstick.
The Fijian props must be dreading their evening out with the England front row and, by the same yardstick, I can see real problems ahead for the underdogs at the line-out.
