De Facto Measure Research Articles

Undergraduate institutional MCAT scores as predictors of USMLE step 1 performance.

Medical schools using formal undergrad-uate selectivity measures do so to compensate for the psychometricinadequacies of college grade-point averages, believing that moremeaning can be derived from the GPA if it is attached to a measureof institutional performance (academic rigor) or selectivity (strin-gent admission standards).Researchers have reported mixed results on whether formal mea-sures of undergraduate institution selectivity are useful contributorsto predicting medical student performance.

Legacy of implementing industrial health and safety in developing countries.

Aiming to develop public attention to the hindrance of national and international efforts on industrial health and safety, this paper explores some important issues, such as the reasons for the lack of motivation to implement necessary measures in developing countries. Examples are likewise given to show why working people are significantly exposed to a number of occupational problems that are reflected in a deterioration of their health, safety and well being. In lieu thereof, an introduction of health and safety is not itself a solution, if certain changes are not rationalised according to the local need. While health and safety intervention is concerned, then local need is of prime importance. If individual situation is not clearly outlined, then preventive and control measures can be treated as a de facto measure. Hence immediate attention, collaboration and co-operation is needed from all the concerned parties such as local government authorities, semi-government or private organisations and international communities for proper implementation of work regulations as well as industrial acts and rules in various workplaces in each of the developing countries.

Truth in SPEC benchmarks

The System Performance Evaluation Cooperative (SPEC) benchmarks are a set of integer and floating-point programs that are intended to be “effective and fair in comparing the performance of high performance computing systems”. SPEC ratings are often quoted in company advertising and have been trusted as the de facto measure of comparison for computer systems. Recently, there has been some concern regarding the fairness and the value of these benchmarks for comparing computer systems. In this paper we investigate the following two questions regarding the SPEC92 benchmark suite: 1) How sensitive are the SPEC ratings to various tunings? 2) How reproducible are the published results? For six vendors, we compare the published SPECpeak and SPECbase ratings, and observe an 11% average improvement in the SPECpeak ratings due to changes in the compiler flags alone. In our own attempt to reproduce the published SPEC ratings, we came across various “explicit” and “hidden” tuning parameters that we consider unrealistic. We suggest a new unit called SPECsimple that requires using only the -O compiler optimization flag, shared libraries, and standard system configuration. SPECsimple is designed to better match the performance experienced by a typical user. Our measured SPECsimples are 65-86% of the advertised SPECpeak performance. We conclude this paper by citing cases compiler optimizations specifically designed for SPEC programs, in which performance decreases drastically or the computed results are incorrect if the compiled program does not exactly match the SPEC benchmark program. These findings show that the fairness and value of the popular SPEC benchmarks are questionable.