I recently got hold of the set of data shown in figure 1. What can be done to analyze and make sense of these 65 data values is the theme of this article. Read on to see what is exceptional about these data, not only statistically speaking.

The Atlantic hurricane season is now upon us, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has just released its 2018 seasonal hurricane outlook which calls for a slightly above average season. The potential range of activity indicates that we could expect 10 to 16 named storms, with five to nine becoming hurricanes and one to four becoming major hurricanes.

But remember, it only takes one bad storm to wreak havoc, or in the case of the 2017 hurricane season, three.

Quality is related to processes. A process is “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.” It doesn’t matter whether the process is the handling of invoices, customers in a bank, the manufacture or assembly of parts, insurance claims, the sick passing through a hospital, or any one of thousands of other examples. A process involves movement and action in a sequential fashion.

Confidence intervals show the range of values we can be fairly, well, confident, that our true value lies in, and they are very important to any quality practitioner. I could be 95-percent confident the volume of a can of soup will be 390–410 ml. I could be 99-percent confident that less than 2 percent of the products in my batch are defective.

Demonstrating an improvement to the process often involves proving a significant improvement in the mean, so that’s what we tend to focus on—the center of a distribution.