Solution to interlaboratory consensus building challenge

Solution to phenylbutazone purity challenge.

In the last 15 years NMR has become a reference technique for the determination of purity for organic standards containing NMR active nuclei [1, 2]. The puzzle proposed for this Analytical Challenge was focused on the use of 1H-NMR for the characterization of a phenylbutazone standard. Such material was purchased from Sigma-Aldrich and analyzed in parallel by HPLC-UV and 1H-NMR. Initially, appl...

Solution to spectroscopy challenge 8.

Malic acid was first isolated by Carl Wilhelm Scheele from apple juice in 1785. Scheele was born in 1742 in Stralsund. The German seaport of Stralsund is situated on the southern coast of a sound of the Baltic Sea that separates the island of Rügen from the mainland. This small town remained under Swedish control until 1815, when it became a part of the Prussian Province of Pomerania. Thus, Sch...

Solution to half-titration challenge.

Determining Consensus Values in Interlaboratory Comparisons and Proficiency Testing

An important part of interlaboratory comparisons and proficiency testing is the determination of the reference value of the measurand and the associated uncertainty. It is desirable to have reference values with low uncertainty, but it is crucial that these values are reliable, i.e. they are correct within their stated uncertainty. In some cases it is possible to obtain reference values from la...

Consensus building: How to persuade a group

Many decisions in private and public organizations are made by groups. The paper explores strategies that the sponsor of a proposal may employ to convince a qualified majority of group members to approve the proposal. Adopting a mechanism design approach to communication, it emphasizes the need to distill information selectively to key members of the group and to engineer persuasion cascades in...