Wayne Levin, the President of Predictum in Toronto, offers free podcasts about statistical methods and their application using JMP. The podcasts run 15 to 25 minutes long, and each gets downloaded thousands of time. His company works with JMP and SAS users to improve their productivity through education and the
With the 2008 Summer Olympics happening in China right now, I am reminded of when I used to run the 200-meter (1/2 lap) and 400-meter (1 lap) events on my high school track team. I wasn’t that good, but I enjoyed it. My best time in the 200m was about
(NOTE: This is part three of three-part series on stochastic optimization.) Over the last two weeks, I introduced robust process engineering and stochastic optimization – the effort to achieve good product in the face of variation among the factors. Last week, I gave a cooking example. This week, I present
(NOTE: This is part two of a three-part series on stochastic optimization.) In my previous post, I introduced stochastic optimization. In this post, I show a real example. This example was reported in the classic text by George Box and Norman Draper: Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (page 32), and
(NOTE: This is part one of a three-part series on stochastic optimization.) To get to the top of a hill, you just keep going up. However, hills can have subpeaks, so sometimes you have to hunt around to keep going up. But going up is still the basic idea. This
John Sall and Bradley Jones have a piece in the latest issue of the Joint Newsletter of the SPES and Q&P Sections of the American Statistical Association. Their article has the amusing title "Leptokurtosiphobia: Irrational Fear of Non-Normality." Sall and Jones write that "agonizing over normal probability plots and tests
I didn't get any guesses on the odds of flipping various items from my Flipping Odds post. Instead, the commenters went directly to the question of interest, which is how does the chance for one flip affect the chance for two flips being the same? That turns out to be
Statisticians like to talk about flipping coins, especially fair coins, which have an equal chance of being heads or tails. But what about flipping other things? In particular, as an Ultimate Frisbee player, I want to know what the odds are for a flying disc. Maybe knowing the odds will
Brad Jones, JMP's Director of Statistical R&D, has been elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the most prominent professional statistical society in the US. This honor recognizes "outstanding professional contributions to and leadership in the field of statistical science." Brad has a career-long passion for the field of
Statistical intervals can be confusing, even in the minds of those who use them often. José Ramirez, from W.L. Gore & Associates of GORE-TEX® fabric fame, offers a white paper that uses an easy-to-understand manufacturing example to describe the differences between confidence, prediction and tolerance (enclosure) intervals. He provides formulas