Variations in Legal Requirements
This meant that the user had to specify under what legal regime he wanted to use his dosimeter, as each country could - and did have their own local laws for such measurements. In each region, sometimes down to regions with tiny populations such as Western Australia, only one combination was usually legally accepted and that could be very different to an adjoining region. While these decision may have seemed sensible at the time, users were in general not adequately informed of these problems and this resulted in many measurement errors.
The five main parameters that were commonly different in different political entities were:
- Threshold
- Criterion level
- Exchange rate
- Exponential or linear integration
- 'Head-on' or random incidence calibration
There were of course others, such as the single event maximum level, the peak value etc.
To reduce the variations of instrument required to be manufactured, some commercial companies made complex "Universal" units where all these things could be selected by the user. As measuring noise was not well understood, such complexity clearly militated against accurate results and many anecdotal stories give examples of huge errors resulting; as very few unqualified users understood the complex issues involved.
Read more about this topic: Noise Dosimeter
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“I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. My wife, however, will unerringly point out that the cheese or the leftover roast is hiding right in front of my eyes. Hundreds of such experiences convince me that men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds. These are differences which cannot be attributed to variations in visual acuity. Man and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)
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