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ASQ Asks: What Can We Do to Encourage STEM? I Say: STEAM
In his March 2015 post, ASQ CEO Paul Borawski asks “What can we do to encourage the next generation of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) professionals?” My answer will be short today because I’ve been actively working on that for the past several months with a senior capstone project team (Cassidy Moellers, Dylan Chance,…
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Sampling Distributions and Central Limit Theorem in R
The Central Limit Theorem (CLT), and the concept of the sampling distribution, are critical for understanding why statistical inference works. There are at least a handful of problems that require you to invoke the Central Limit Theorem on every ASQ Certified Six Sigma Black Belt (CSSBB) exam. The CLT says that if you take many repeated…
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One-proportion z test in R
For quite a while, I’ve been confused by the behavior of the prop.test function in R: 1) the p-values always seem to be slightly off, and 2) the confidence intervals never seem to be symmetric around my estimate of the population proportion. Today, I decided I was going to figure out what was up… and whether I…
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Writing about Business Model Innovation: Where Do You Start?
Innovation is what happens when we create new value by meeting needs. Sometimes, this comes in the form of a new process, product, or program. Other times, it comes in the form of reconfiguring the whole ecosystem for creating and sharing that value — also known as “business model innovation.” A business model is a conceptual…
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Change vs. Transformation: What’s the Difference?
Last week, on the Lean Six Sigma Worldwide discussion group, Gaurav Navula (CEO of Perky Pat India) asked us to reflect on the difference between change and transformation. Change management was a major thrust in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, but you don’t hear as much about it anymore. Today, the tools of change management (making…
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Why the Ban on P-Values? And What Now?
Just recently, the editors of the academic journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology have decided to ban p-values: that’s right, the nexus for inferential decision making… gone! This has created quite a fuss among anyone who relies on significance testing and p-values to do research (especially those, presumably, in social psychology who were hoping to…
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A Linear Congruential Generator (LCG) in R
In my simulation classes, we talk about how to generate random numbers. One of the techniques we talk about is the Linear Congruential Generator (LCG). Starting with a seed, the LCG produces the first number in the sequence, and then uses that value to generate the second one. The second value is used to generate…
Quality and Innovation 