Mon, 03/30/2015 - 16:02
Right now I’m enjoying my daily dose of morning joe. As the steam rises off the cup, the dark, rich liquid triggers a powerful enzyme cascade that jump-starts my brain and central nervous system, delivering potent glints of perspicacity into the…
Wed, 02/04/2015 - 11:42
If you’re not a statistician, looking through statistical output can sometimes make you feel a like you’ve wandered into Alice in Wonderland. Suddenly, you find yourself in a fantastical world where strange and mysterious phantasms appear out of…
Thu, 09/25/2014 - 11:53
The word “kurtosis” sounds like a painful, festering disease of the gums. But the term actually describes the shape of a data distribution.
Frequently, you’ll see kurtosis defined as how sharply “peaked” the data are. The three main types of…
Tue, 08/12/2014 - 15:21
If you teach statistics or quality statistics, you’re probably already familiar with the cuckoo egg data set.
The common cuckoo has decided that raising baby chicks is a stressful, thankless job. It has better things to do than fill the screeching…
Mon, 06/23/2014 - 00:00
You know what really gets on my nerves? A lot of things.
That slow, slinky way that cats walk by. Grrrr.
The rude, abrupt arrival of delivery persons in their obnoxiously loud trucks. (Why do they always pull up just as I'm settling down for a nap…
Tue, 06/03/2014 - 13:45
These days, my memory isn’t what it used to be. Besides that, my memory isn’t what it used to be. But my incurable case of CRS (can’t remember stuff) is not nearly as bad as that of the exponential distribution.
When modeling failure data for…
Wed, 04/09/2014 - 18:02
My previous article examined how an equivalence test can shift the burden of proof when you perform a hypothesis test of the means. This allows you to more rigorously test whether the process mean is equivalent to a target or to another mean.
Here…
Tue, 04/08/2014 - 15:47
With more options come more decisions. With equivalence testing added to Minitab 17, you now have more statistical tools to test a sample mean against target value or another sample mean.
Equivalence testing is extensively used in the biomedical…
Tue, 12/03/2013 - 10:13
What factors significantly affect how quickly my couch-potato pooch obeys the “lay down” command? The cushiness of the floor surface? The tone of voice used? The type of reward she gets? How hungry she is?
In part one we looked at the elements for…
Mon, 11/11/2013 - 12:23
Nala, our 6-year-old golden retriever, loves her dogma. That’s her sitting in front of church on Sunday morning. But she’s not crazy about her catechism. For example, she doesn’t always dutifully follow the “lay down” commandment.
What…