Start the Way that You Want by Saving Current Window Layout
Did you ever show up to your hotel room at the end of a long day of traveling and find the covers turned down with chocolates on the bed?When something's ready for you to use right when you're ready...
View ArticleBanned: P Values and Confidence Intervals! A Rebuttal, Part 1
Banned! In February 2015, editor David Trafimow and associate editor Michael Marks of the Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychologydeclared that the null hypothesis statistical testing procedure...
View ArticleFundamentals of Gage R&R
Before cutting an expensive piece of granite for a countertop, a good carpenter will first confirm he has measured correctly. Acting on faulty measurements could be costly.While no measurement system...
View ArticleSeeing Quality in Full Color with Crayola's Quality Team
This week I'm at 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...
View ArticleA Field Guide to Statistical Distributions
by Matthew Barsalou, guest blogger. The old saying “if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, then it must be a duck” may be appropriate in bird watching; however, the same...
View ArticleReducing Quality Variation with ANCOVA , part 1
by Erwin Gijzen, Guest BloggerPeople who work in quality improvement know that the root causes of quality issues are hard to find. A typical production process can contain hundreds of potential causes....
View ArticleReducing Quality Variation with ANCOVA, part 2
By Erwin Gijzen, Guest BloggerIn my previous post, we assessed the out-of-spec level for a process with capability analysis and visualized process variability using a control chart. Our goal is to...
View ArticleImproving Recycling Processes at Rose-Hulman, Part III
In previous posts, I discussed the results of a recycling project done by Six Sigma students at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology last spring. (If you’re playing catch up, you can read Part I and...
View ArticleLooking at the Avengers with Conditional Formatting
The first summer blockbuster of 2015 was released two weeks ago—The Avengers: Age of Ultron. The first Avengers film featured a pretty well known cast of superheroes (if, of course, you’re a superhero...
View ArticleReady for Prime Time: Use P' and U' Charts to Avoid False Alarms
All processes have some variation. Some variation is natural and nothing to be concerned about. But in other cases, there is unusual variation that may need attention. By graphing process data against...
View ArticleAutomatically Update Your Conditional Formatting
If you’ve checked out What’s New in Minitab 17, you’ve had the chance to see that Conditional Formatting leads the list. If you’ve been reading the Minitab blog, you’ve had the chance to see...
View ArticleBanned: P Values and Confidence Intervals! A Rebuttal, Part 2
In my previous post, I wrote about the hypothesis testing ban in the Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology. I showed how P values and confidence intervals provide important information that...
View ArticleTime of Game: Are MLB Games Getting Any Shorter?
Over the past few years, the average length of an MLB game has been steadily increasing. We can create a quick time series plot in Minitab Statistical Software to display this:As games have been...
View ArticleWhy Is Continuous Data "Better" than Categorical or Discrete Data?
Earlier, I wrote about the different types of data statisticians typically encounter. In this post, we're going to look at why, when given a choice in the matter, we prefer to analyze continuous data...
View ArticleMaking Data Analysis Easier with Coding Schemes, Part 1
Since Minitab 17 Statistical Software launched in February 2014, we've gotten great feedback from many people have been using the General Linear Model and Regression tools.But in speaking with people...
View ArticleMaking Data Analysis Easier with Coding Schemes, Part 2
In my previous post, I showed you that the coefficients are different when choosing (-1,0,1) vs (1,0) coding schemes for General Linear Model (or Regression). We used the two different equations to...
View ArticleWhat Effect Will Moving Extra Points to the 15 Yard Line Have?
The NFL recently announced that after scoring a touchdown, teams will be required to kick the extra point from the 15 yard line as opposed to the 2 yard line. This is a pretty big change. And whether...
View ArticleDesign of Experiment (DOE): Searching for a Selfie Fountain of Youth
I've never understood the fascination with selfies.Maybe it's because I'm over 50. After surviving the slings and arrows of a half a century on Earth, the minute or two I spend in front of the bathroom...
View ArticleDo Criminals Pay the Cost of Their Crimes?
In Minitab Statistical Software, putting a regression line on a scatterplot is as easy as choosing a picture with a regression line on a scatterplot:A neat trick is that you can also add calculated...
View ArticleGraphing Distributions with Probability Distribution Plots
Scientists who use the Hubble Space Telescope to explore the galaxy receive a stream of digitized images in the form binary code. In this state, the information is essentially worthless- these 1s and...
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