Growing up as a scientist, I didn’t see role models who looked like me. I grew up in a small town where my father was a physicist—and my role model.  He nurtured me to be a scientist, just like him.

Management of change (MOC) is a defined process that organizations establish and follow to ensure health, safety, and reduction of risk during periods of change.

Pay. It’s the topic we love to avoid. We don’t discuss it with friends or family. It’s verboten at cocktail parties. Heck, we discuss cancer, religion, and abortion at dinner parties more easily than we talk about our paychecks.

Investors and business leaders are always on the lookout for the next big thing, the paradigm shift that will upend industries and change the world. The hope is to get in early and ride the wave—or at least avoid getting flattened by it.

Scientists at the U.S.

In less than two months we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention of the control chart, a tool most often associated with statistical process control (SPC). Considering SPC from our modern perspective made us ask, “Is SPC still relevant?”

Everyone knows customer service is increasingly automated and impersonal—that’s a “dog bites man” story. It’s not news because it happens all the time. When a man bites a dog, that’s news.

When presented with a collection of data from operations or production, many will start their analysis by computing descriptive statistics and fitting a probability model to the data. But before you do this, there’s an easy test that you need to perform.

If a robot traveling to a destination has just two possible paths, it only needs to compare the routes’ travel time and probability of success.