Blackbodies are commonly used as a transfer medium in the calibration of radiation thermometers. The ideal blackbody is perfectly isothermal and has an emissivity of precisely 1 at all wavelengths. However, no real material has an emissivity as high as 1, so practical blackbodies are created by forming a cavity, made to be as isothermal as possible, inside a material with a relatively high intr...

Axillary temperatures recorded with a disposable chemical thermometer (DCT) measured a mean 0.29 degrees C higher than a mercury in glass thermometer (MGT) but differences could be wide. Differences between the same methods were however also wide. The DCT is safe and easy to use. Provided the higher readings are taken into consideration it is a suitable alternative to the MGT.

This paper explores some algorithms for automatic quantization of real-valued datasets using thermometer codes for pattern classiication applications. Experimental results indicate that a relatively simple randomized thermometer code generation technique can result in quantized datasets that when used to train simple perceptrons, can yield generalization on test data that is substantially bette...