Statistics

Show me the Data

Show me the data

Early in my career, I worked for an unreasonable person.

He wanted us, his engineering staff, to show him the data. He wanted us to gather, monitor, analyze and display data regularly. Anytime we needed approval…

The Sum of Squares Concept

Why Do We Use the Sum the Squares so Often?

The data analysis course professor tended to focus on the practical application of statistics.

Statistical Terms about Variation

“Statistics is the language of variation.” I’m sure that is a quote by someone, not me, though. It is true. Statistics is all about variation. In this post let’s explore some of the ways statisticians talk about data and specifically the amount of dispersion in the data.

Role of Reliability Statistics

Generally, I do not talk about statistics before 10am — it’s not polite.

As a reliability professional, statistics is a central feature of the value I bring to the team. And, not just the reliability statistics, all stats. It continues to amaze me…

Show me the data

Show me the data

Early in my career I worked for an unreasonable person.

He wanted us, his engineering staff, to show him the data. He wanted us to gather, monitor, analyze and display data regularly. Anytime we needed approval, funding…

How to Encourage the Use of Statistics

How to Encourage the Use of Statistics

If nothing was uncertain we would not need statistics. Since nearly everything varies in some fashion, we need a way to describe and work with that variability.

Probability and Reliability Goals

Probability

Roll the dice. It is about that simple if any one product will survive to a specific time. Every product has a chance not a guarantee. The time to failure for each product is a function of the use, stresses, assembly, latent…

The Meaning of a Failure

Meaning of a failure

Every failure provides information. It provides time to failure, stress strength relationship, process stability and design margin types of information. In every case. Even failures directly related to human error.

Reliability is not just statistics

Is reliability just statistics?

In a common definition used by engineers reliability is a probability of success. It is the chance of an item operating as expected over some duration in a given environment. In this case we…