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ITEA Sneak-Peak: The Great Escape from Foam Defects
The 2014 ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement is coming up in early May in Dallas, and this year’s International Team Excellence Award Process (ITEA) will also come to a close at the...
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What if the NCAA tournament wasn’t single elimination?
Connecticut just defeated Kentucky to win the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship. The game had the highest combined seeding of any championship game in NCAA tournament history. This shows that while a...
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Viewing Mist-Covered Mountains of Data
A famous classical Chinese poem from the Song dynasty describes the views of a mist-covered mountain called Lushan.The poem was inscribed on the wall of a Buddhist monastery by Su Shi, a renowned poet,...
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Re-analyzing Wine Tastes with Minitab 17
In April 2012, I wrote a short paper on binary logistic regression to analyze wine tasting data. At that time, François Hollande was about to get elected as French president and in the U.S., Mitt...
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ITEA Sneak-Peek: The Great Escape from Foam Defects
The 2014 ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement is coming up in early May in Dallas, and this year’s International Team Excellence Award Process (ITEA) will also come to a close at the...
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A Different Look at the New Medicare Data
It’s been an exciting week to be interested in Medicare data. On April 9th, the American government opened up data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that show charges made to...
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How to Correctly Interpret P Values
The P value is used all over statistics, from t-tests to regression analysis. Everyone knows that you use P values to determine statistical significance in a hypothesis test. In fact, P values often...
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What I Learned From Treating Childbirth as Failure, Part II
A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post titled "What I Learned From Treating Childbirth as Failure" that conveniently ended up getting published the day before my daughter was born. You should read...
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Creating a Custom Report using Minitab, part 1
As a member of Minitab’s Consulting and Custom Development Services team, I get to help companies across a variety of industries create a many different types of reports for management. These reports...
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Creating a Custom Report using Minitab, part 2
Now that you’ve seen how to automatically import data and run analyses in my previous post, let’s create the Monthly Report!I will be using a Microsoft Word Document (Office 2010) and adding bookmarks...
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Hockey Penalties, Fans Booing, and Independent Trials
We’re in the thick of the Stanley Cup playoffs, which means hockey fans are doing what seems to be every sports fan's favorite hobby...complaining about the refs! While most complaints, such as “We’re...
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“Hello, How Can I Help You?”- A Look at Quality Improvement in Financial...
It’s common to think that process improvement initiatives are meant to cater only to manufacturing processes, simply because manufacturing is where Lean and Six Sigma began. However, many other...
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Selecting the Right Quality Improvement Project
I wrote a post a few years back on the difficulties that can ensue when you’re just trying to get started on your Lean Six Sigma or quality improvement initiative. It can become especially difficult...
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Dividing a Data Set into Training and Validation Samples
Adam Ozimek had an interesting post April 15th on the Modeled Behavior blog at Forbes.com. He observed that one of the advantages of big data is how easy it is to get test data to validate a model that...
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Not All P Values are Created Equal
The interpretation of P values would seem to be fairly standard between different studies. Even if two hypothesis tests study different subject matter, we tend to assume that you can interpret a P...
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Chaos at the Kentucky Derby? Bet on It!
If betting wasn't allowed on horse racing, the Kentucky Derby would likely be a little-known event of interest only to a small group of horse racing enthusiasts. But like the Tour de France, the World...
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Proving My Toddler Really Doesn’t Know her Left Foot from her Right
"Do it myself!”If only I had a nickel for every time I heard that phrase from my toddler in a given day. From throwing away trash, to putting frozen waffles in the toaster, to feeding the dog, I hear...
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When Will I Ever See This Statistics Software Again?
Minitab Statistical Software was born out of a desire to make statistics easier to learn: by making the calculations faster and easier with computers, the trio of educators who created the first...
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Exponential: How a Poor Memory Helps to Model Failure Data
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...
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Five Guidelines for Using P values
There is high pressure to find low P values. Obtaining a low P value for a hypothesis test is make or break because it can lead to funding, articles, and prestige. Statistical significance is...
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