The auto industry serves as a perfect exemplar of three key eras of statistics and data science in service of industry: Total Quality Management (TQM) First in Japan, and later in the U.S., the auto industry became an enthusiastic adherent to the Total Quality Management…
World War II was a crucible of technological innovation, including advances in statistics. Jacob Wolfowitz, born a century ago (1920), looked at the problem of noisy radio transmissions. Coded radio transmissions were critical elements of military command and control, and they were plagued by the…
The cost of bringing a new drug to market is over $2 billion, by some estimates. This covers the R&D, clinical trial testing and regulatory approval costs of the drug that makes it through the whole process, and also the same costs of the 9…
The field of sports statistician is not exactly new; the American Statistical Association's section on Sports Statistics was formed in 1992. Three of Statistics.com's instructors have professional experience in sports statistics - Ben Baumer (SQL) served as statistician for the NY Mets, Stephanie Kovalchik (Meta…
The U.S. baseball season opens Thursday, March 28, and celebrates the 48th season of analytics in baseball, beginning with the founding of the Sabermetric Society in 1971 (the same year that Satchel Paige entered the Hall of Fame). Analytics has come a long way in…
Your country is at war, and an enemy plane has crashed on your territory. It bears the number 60, and a spy has told you that the aircraft are numbered serially. Can you make a guess about the total number of aircraft the enemy has…
In 1994, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, former and current Stanford professors, published the best-seller Built to Last that described how "long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise." It sold over a million copies. Buoyed by that success, Collins and a…
In 1986, the U.S. space shuttle Challenger exploded several minutes after launch. A later investigation found that the cause of the disaster was O-ring failure, due to cold temperatures. The temperature at launch was 39 degrees, colder than any prior launch. The cold caused the…
Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in behavioral economics, much of it with his colleague Amos Tversky, who died in 2006. Kahneman's 2011 classic, Thinking Fast and Slow, is a superbly-written non-technical summary of their fascinating research and its often…
A researcher shakes a sprig from a Christmas tree, and counts the number of needles that fall. He then repeats the process for countless other sprigs. The sprigs are from a variety of species, and the goal is to determine which species do the best…
Convinced that he, like his father, would die in his 40's, Winston Churchill lived his early life in a frenetic hurry. He had participated in four wars on three continents by his mid-20's, served in multiple ministerial positions by his 30's, and published 12 books…
An ethical algorithm... Ethics in algorithms is a popular topic now. Usually the conversation centers around the possible unintentional bias or harm that a statistical or machine learning algorithm could do when it is used to select, score, rate, or rank people. For example -…
Thirty years ago, GE became the brightest star in the firmament of statistical ideas in business when it adopted Six Sigma methods of quality improvement. Those methods had been introduced by Motorola, but Jack Welch's embrace of the same methods at GE, a diverse manufacturing…
In a couple of days, theWall Street Journalwill come out with its November survey of economists' forecasts. It's a particularly sensitive time, with elections in a few days and President Trump attacking the Federal Reserve for for raising interest rates. It's a good time to…
Ever wonder why, in World War II, ships in convoys were safer than ships traveling on their own? Most people assume it was due to the protection afforded by military escort vessels, of which there was a limited supply (insufficient to protect ships traveling on…
