Quality-related data collection is useful, but statistics can also deliver misleading and even dysfunctional results when incomplete. This is often the case when information is collected only from surviving people or products, extremely satisfied or dissatisfied customers, or propagators of bad news about relatively rare incidents. This is simply an extension of the basic principle that a sample should reflect the entire population rather than just a portion—especially a portion that might self-select for the indicated reasons.

Survivor bias

Survivor bias occurs when samples include only people or items that survive harmful conditions. When World War I started in 1914, the soldiers of most armies wore cloth or leather caps that provided almost no protection against shrapnel and small arms fire. The French, for example, replaced their world-famous kepi with the equally recognizable Adrian helmet only in 1915. The British followed suit and introduced the Brodie, later called “Tin Kelly,” helmet. Even the famous German spiked helmet was made of leather and not steel, to be replaced by the Stahlhelm a year into the war.

(IDS: Woburn, MA) -- IDS NXT is a comprehensive AI vision system with a wide range of workflows and tools for realizing your own AI vision applications. The intelligent IDS NXT cameras can process tasks “on device” and deliver image processing results as well.

The camera’s tasks are determined by apps that are uploaded to the cameras and executed there. Their functionality can thus be changed anytime. This is supported by software such as IDS NXT lighthouse, with which users can not only train neural networks but now also create their own vision apps. The system offers both beginners and professionals enormous scope for designing AI vision apps.

The initial phase in development is often one of the greatest challenges in realizing a project. But the current 2.6 software release for IDS NXT focuses primarily on simplifying app creation. With the help of the new Application Assistant in IDS NXT lighthouse, users can configure a complete vision app under guidance in just a few steps, which they can then run directly on an IDS NXT camera.

In late 1999, Scott Paton, then editor-in-chief and publisher of Quality Digest, asked his readers to provide him with their definitions of quality. The feedback was impressive: More than 80 responses were received, ranging “from the sublime to the ridiculous,” in Napoleon's words.

In his editorial column, Paton shared some of the proposed definitions. The editor’s picks consisted of two categories: the “more light-hearted definitions” and “the more serious definitions.” It is within the latter category that an interesting twofold definition of quality by Karl Albrecht of Karl Albrecht International appeared:
1. Objective quality is the degree of compliance of a process or its outcome with a predetermined set of criteria that are presumed essential to the ultimate value it provides. Example: the proper formulation of medicine.
2. Subjective quality is the level of perceived value reported by the person who benefits from a process or its outcome. It may subsume various intermediate quality measures, both objective and subjective. Example: the pain relief provided by medication (Paton, 2000).

(Soprana Personnel International: Vilnius, Lithuania) -- Seventy-six percent of global employees want to continue working from home, which could be challenging for team managers and leaders.