Category Archives: Data

Outcome and In-Process Measures

Posted on July 14, 2008 by John Hunter

An outcome measure is used to measure the success of a system. For example, the outcome measure could be the percentage of people who do not get polio (the result). An output measure, for example, would be the number of … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Deming, Management, Process improvement, quote | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Fed Funds Rate Changes Don’t Presage Mortgage Rate Changes

Posted on May 13, 2008 by John Hunter

The recent drastic reductions again emphasize (once again) that changes in the federal funds rate are not correlated with changes in the 30 year fixed mortgage rate. In the last 4 months the discount rate has been reduced nearly 200 … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Economics | Comments Off on Fed Funds Rate Changes Don’t Presage Mortgage Rate Changes

The Defect Black Market

Posted on April 18, 2008 by John Hunter

The Defect Black Market It all started a week before, when the CTO of Damon’s midsize warehousing and transportation company in Northern California announced an innovative program to motivate employees and boost the quality of their logistics software. For every … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Deming, IT, Management, quote, Respect, Software Development | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

Software Supporting Processes Not the Other Way Around

Posted on February 19, 2008 by John Hunter

Rental Car IT What was funny about that exercise were the looks we got from the no nonsense King of IT: “Of course, we want things to be simple and flexible — why are you bothering to tell us this?” … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, IT, Lean thinking, Management, Software Development, Systems thinking | 10 Comments

Improvement Through Designed Experiments

Posted on February 4, 2008 by John Hunter

The Rationale of Scientific Experimentation by John Dowd explains the value of designed experiments. Another difficulty in industrial experimentation is the existence of interactions. As has been stated, manufacturing processes are complex with many factors involved. In many processes these … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Deming, Design of Experiments, Management, Science, Statistics | Comments Off on Improvement Through Designed Experiments

Prediction Markets with Google Employees

Posted on January 10, 2008 by John Hunter

Another interesting experiment from Google: Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google In Google’s terminology, a market asks a question (e.g., “how many users will Gmail have?”) that has 2”5 possible mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive answers … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Data, Economics, Google, Psychology, Statistics, Systems thinking | Comments Off on Prediction Markets with Google Employees

Stratification and Systemic Thinking

Posted on January 6, 2008 by John Hunter

I am reading a fascinating book by Jessica Snyder Sachs: Good Germs, Bad Germs. From page 108: At New York Hospital, Eichenwald and infectious disease specialist Henry Shinefield conceived and developed a controversial program that entailed deliberately inoculating a newborn’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Data, Deming, Health care, Innovation, Management, Quality tools, Science, Statistics, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Bigger Impact: 15 to 18 mpg or 50 to 100 mpg?

Posted on December 24, 2007 by John Hunter

This is a pretty counter-intuitive statement, I believe: You save more fuel switching from a 15 to 18 mpg car than switching from a 50 to 100 mpg car. But some simple math shows it is true. If you drive … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Psychology, Science, Statistics | 3 Comments

Fooled by Randomness

Posted on October 30, 2007 by John Hunter

This is a nice article discussing how people are often fooled by thinking there must be special causes for patterns in random data. I still remember my father showing my classes these lessons when I was in grade school. Playing … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Management, Statistics, Systems thinking | 3 Comments

Search Share Data – Checking the ACSI

Posted on September 20, 2007 by John Hunter

Last month, in a long post criticizing the ACSI I took issue with, among other things, the implications being drawn from an ACSI rating. The ACSI rating of Yahoo was higher than that of Google (though statistically insignificantly so). Anyway, … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Google, Statistics | 4 Comments