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Quality Improvement in Financial Services
Process improvement through methodologies such as Six Sigma and Lean has found its way into nearly every industry. While Six Sigma had its beginnings in manufacturing, we’ve seen it and other process...
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Coffee or Tea? Analyzing Categorical Data with Minitab
Here at Minitab we have a quite a few coffee drinkers. From personal observation, it seemed as if people who are more outgoing are the ones doing most of the coffee drinking, while people who are less...
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T for 2. Should I Use a Paired t or a 2-sample t?
Boxers or briefs. Republican or Democrat. Yin or yang. Why is it that life often seems to boil down to two choices? Heck, it even happens when you open the Basic Stats menu in Minitab. You’ll see a...
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Exploratory Data Analysis: The First (and Sometimes Last) Step
by Matthew Barsalou, guest bloggerA good way to begin researching a topic is with exploratory data analysis (EDA). In his 1977 book Exploratory Data Analysis, John Tukey suggested using EDA to collect...
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Analyzing Baseball Park Factors: Checking the Data
Being a fan of both baseball and statistics is a special kind of joy. I’m sure many of you have noticed the same appeal that Leonard Koppett did when he wrote that "Statistics are the lifeblood of...
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My Favorite Quality Tool: Process Mapping
We all seem to have our favorite statistical or quality improvement tool. Jim Frost wrote a tribute to regression analysis. Dawn Keller seems to enjoy control charts. Eston Martz discusses reliability...
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Regression Analysis: How to Interpret the Constant (Y Intercept)
The constant term in linear regression analysis seems to be such a simple thing. Also known as the y intercept, it is simply the value at which the fitted line crosses the y-axis. While the concept is...
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Statistical Fun … at the Grocery Store?
Grocery shopping. For some, it's the most dreaded household activity. For others, it's fun, or perhaps just a “necessary evil.” Personally, I enjoy it! My co-worker, Ginger, a content manager here at...
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P and U Charts and Limburger Cheese: A Smelly Combination
The art of cheese-making has been around for thousands of years. By that measure, Limburger cheese is a relative newcomer. It was first produced in the 1800s in the Duchy of Limburg (now split by...
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Is this the Year the Pittsburgh Pirates Snap the Streak, or is the Collapse...
We’re 93 games into the Major League Baseball regular season, and for the 3rd year in a row the Pittsburgh Pirates have a winning record. Unfortunately for Pittsburgh fans, the previous two seasons...
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Uncle Joe’s Fantasy: Picking the Perfect Age to Reverse Your Aging Process
My Uncle Joe is always fantasizing about ways to outsmart Father Time.“Suppose you could reverse your aging process at some fixed point in your life,” he says to me, a crazed gleam in his eye.“So you...
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Analyzing Baseball Park Factors: Highlighting Unrealistic Data
The last time I posted, I used Minitab to find an error in the baseball park factor data that ESPN provides on its website. The error was easy to spot because no other values for Chase Field were...
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The Odds of Finding a Four-Leaf Clover Revisited: How Do Some People Find So...
Picture of four-leaf clover by Joe Papp. This may seem to be an odd time to write about four-leaf clovers, the traditional Irish lucky charms. However, clovers are currently growing full-force in my...
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Minitab's LinkedIn Group: A Great Place to Talk Stats
If you've got questions about quality improvement and statistics, I've got a resource for you: the Minitab Network on LinkedIn. I'm privileged to serve as the moderator of this group, which lets people...
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The Gentleman Tasting Coffee: A Variation on Fisher’s Famous Experiment
by Matthew Barsalou, guest bloggerIn the 1935 book The Design of Experiments, Ronald A. Fisher used the example of a lady tasting tea to demonstrate basic principles of statistical experiments. In...
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How Lean Six Sigma Students at Rose-Hulman Reduced Food Waste
To promote ethical and moral responsibility in shaping its graduates, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology created a sustainability initiative to reduce its own environmental footprint. As part of that...
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How Do Elite Fantasy Football Players Perform a Year Later? Part 1
In 2006, LaDainian Tomlinson set an NFL record by scoring 28 rushing touchdowns. The next year he had about half of that, only scoring 15. In 2011, Calvin Johnson caught a ridiculous 11 touchdown...
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Graph Quest: How to Show that Life on Venus Is Safer than Life on Mars
True confession: Nothing fires quickly from the top of my head. At least nothing very lucid or useful. To come up with a good idea, I have to dredge thoughts slowly from the thick sludge and sediment...
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How Do Elite Fantasy Football Players Perform a Year Later? Part 2
Last week I used Minitab's paired t test to compare how quarterbacks and running backs performed the season after finishing in the top 3 in fantasy points. Quarterbacks did not perform significantly...
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Calculating Baseball Park Factors: Minitab Execs Make it Fast
I’ve expressed an interest in baseball park factors that I’m still exploring. It intrigues me that parkfactors.com says that there are 6 neutral parks in major league baseball, even though when I look...
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