Ever since sportswriter Henry Chadwick popularized the box score in the 19th century, baseball fans have had a love affair with statistics.

As soon as we have two or more instruments for measuring the same property the question of equivalence raises its head. This paper provides an operational definition of when two or more instruments are equivalent in practice. 

In most healthcare settings, workers attend weekly, monthly, or quarterly meetings where performances are reported, analyzed, and compared to goals in an effort to identify trends.

Within maintenance management, the term MTBF (mean time between failures) is the most important key performance indicator after physical availability.

Managers the world over want to know if things are “in control.” This usually is taken to mean that the process is producing 100-percent conforming product, and to this end an emphasis is placed upon having a good capability or performance index.

During recent visits to Twitter and LinkedIn, I’ve become increasingly shocked by the devolution of the posts to vacuous nonsense.

‘Process Capability: What It Is and How It Helps,” parts one,

With the click of your mouse you can turn a list of values into a bubble plot. No thought or effort is required. Simply sit back and let the software gods do the heavy lifting of transforming your list of numbers into a fancy graph. What could possibly go wrong?

If Fyodor Dostoyevsky had been a mathematician, he might have written a book called Crime and Statistics. However, since “statistics” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “punishment,” it wouldn’t have sold as well.

“People think that if you collect enormous amounts of data you are bound to get the right answer. You are not bound to get the right answer unless you are enormously smart.”