Timing can sometimes be everything and being able to keep a running time using a specialized counting style is important. Yet, the accuracy and precision of the two dominant strategies, "-one-thousand" or "-mississippi" is basically unknown. In this experiment, Scientific AmeriKen will explore these two techniques and several others in order to find the best technique to become a human stopwatch!

The primary techniques are tried and true, supposedly, but may not be efficient on longer counts where multi-syllable numbers start coming into play. On the basis of this, Scientific AmeriKen hypothesizes a hybrid count, one that starts, "-one-thousand" and then shifts to "-thousand" will be the most accurate and precise.

Used in this experiment was Sound Forge 5.0 to record and time all counts, and a three year old. Strategies include, "-one-thousands", "- thousands", shift count, "-one-thousands" accented, both "-one-thousands" and "-thousands" in spanish, and "-mississippi". Each strategy was attempted 3 times for both a 10 second and 30 second count.

Show in the table above, is the average and standard deviation of three attempts for each. The 3 yr old "-mississippies" was extrapolated out to assume 10 mississippies.

Surprisingly, the precision of the techniques is better than expected, deviations only being fractions of a second a ten second count and between 1-2 seconds. The common strategies, "-one-thousand" and "-Mississippi" show decent accuracy as well, but as was hyptohesized, the accuracy depends on the length of the intended count. For shorter counts it appears "-one-thousand" was more accurate, whereas, "Mississippies" were fairly accurate at 30 seconds. The shift count strategy did help, being only 1 second off in accuracy, yet strangely, using a "-one-thousand" strategy was nearly dead on and the most precise suggesting this will be the method Scientific AmeriKen will utilize in all longer counts. When all counts are averaged across all 10 second and 30 second groups, the accuracy was nearly spot on, suggesting the best approach would be to use each technique equally in the course of the count. Impressively, early indications suggests the 3 yr old may prove to be the best human stop watch, with just a bit more practice.