My Masters was in Biomedical Engineering. Us students finishing our degree had a final rehearsal with a visiting professor. We went through our experiments and our findings. We were all measuring the electricity in muscle. My friend finished and looked to the visitor for his constructive comments. The visitor said; 'I think you have mistaken noise for signal....I can see you have measured the electricity from the lights in the room, not the signal from the muscle'! The start of a very bad day!
To a professor it was obvious. To the student they both looked equal, until he spotted what noise looked like. He went on to produce the cleanest experiments out of our group.
In performance when we are not overwhelmed with signals we can see the noise. Otherwise there is either obscurity or mystery as in this schematic from Software engineer Mike Wolfe.
Signal to noise is a daily action.
Where is your day on this grid?
Comments