Wed, 01/06/2016 - 11:56
Not long ago, I couldn’t abide statistics. I respected the field, in much the same way a gazelle respects a lion. Most of my early experiences with statistics indicated that close encounters resulted in pain, so I avoided further contact whenever…
Tue, 10/27/2015 - 10:48
I read trade publications that cover everything from banking to biotech, looking for interesting perspectives on data analysis and statistics, especially where they pertain to quality improvement.
Recently I read a great blog post by Tony Taylor,…
Tue, 09/29/2015 - 14:12
Whatever industry you’re in, you’re going to need to buy supplies. If you’re a printer, you’ll need to purchase inks, various types of printing equipment, and paper. If you’re in manufacturing, you’ll need to obtain parts that you don’t make…
Tue, 09/15/2015 - 11:41
When we take pictures with a digital camera or smartphone, what the device really does is capture information in the form of binary code. At the most basic level, our precious photos are really just a bunch of 1s and 0s, but if we were to look at…
Mon, 08/10/2015 - 11:05
Statisticians say the darnedest things. At least, that’s how it can seem if you’re not well-versed in statistics.
When I began studying statistics, I approached it as a language. I quickly noticed that, compared to other disciplines, statistics…
Wed, 07/29/2015 - 13:15
If you’ve read the first two parts of this tale, you know it started when I published a post that involved transforming data for capability analysis. When an astute reader asked why Minitab didn‘t seem to transform the data outside of the…
Tue, 07/28/2015 - 14:20
In my last post, I told you how I had double-checked the analysis in a post that involved running the Johnson transformation on a set of data before doing normal capability analysis on it. A reader asked why the transformation didn’t work on the…
Mon, 07/27/2015 - 12:32
I don’t like the taste of crow, which is a shame, because I’m about to eat a huge helping of it.
I’m going to tell you how I messed up an analysis. But in the process, I learned some new lessons and was reminded of some older ones I should…
Thu, 05/14/2015 - 10:27
Last week I attended the American Society for Quality’s World Conference on Quality and Improvement in Nashville, TN. The ASQ conference is a great opportunity to see how quality professionals are tackling problems in every industry, from…
Thu, 03/12/2015 - 12:11
In part one of this column, I showed you how to set up data collection for a gauge R&R analysis using the Assistant in Minitab 17. In this case, the goal of the gauge R&R study is to test whether a new tool provides an effective metric for…