I’ve commented several times about the way we measure safety. Many companies measure accumulated hours worked without incident, but injury rates, or failure rates, are the most common benchmark. We look at the number of failures of the system compared to the number of hours worked in the same time period. This leads to a…
Tag Archive: statistics
Measuring Opposites
One of the things that struck me as odd when I first starting working in a manufacturing facility is the way we measured safety. The big sign on the way in to the plant indicated the number of days since the last accident. A reminder that unfortunately was set back to “1″ far too often….
Luck and Lottery – Part 1
The most frequently heard lottery stories seem to be related to the misfortune of winning. There are news stories and television programs devoted to the exploration of how winning the lottery results in breakdown of the individual or family involved. We don’t however learn about the countless many who win and do not go on…
Safety in Numbers
I was always good in math, but I was never fond of statistics. Studying engineering in college, I had to take a class called Statistics For Engineers, which was really just like any other stats class, except the questions pertained to engineering problems. My friends assumed that meant the questions were along the lines of:…
3 Questions – Is Your First Answer Correct?
Your personal safety is determined one decision at a time. Sometimes you are dependent on the decisions of others. Other drivers, your doctor, the guy who puts new brakes in your car. But how does your personal decision process work? Do you know? Take a moment to answer these three questions: A ball and a…
2 Situations, an Either-Or Choice in Each
Do you know much about your own decision processes? Are you risk-averse? We think differently depending on how the choices are stated. Consider this situation: You have to choose between either – an 80% chance of winning $4,000 with a 20% chance of winning nothing or – a 100% chance of receiving $3,000 Then look…
Forced Ranking – Who’s the Best?
I’ll start with my HR hat on – I do not like forced ranking or required distribution of employee ratings. If you don’t know what that means, well, you are fortunate. Basically, it is a system of taking large groups of employees and ranking them from first to worst. If I was in a half-full…
How’s My Driving – Revisited
A few posts back I wrote about an incident in which a failed to respond to a traffic signal at the correct time and nearly caused an accident. No one honked or yelled at me, which would not have corrective effect, but my own recognition caused me to understand what happened, and I expect to…
Too Many Celebrities Are Dying
On Twitter last week, I caught a couple of tweets with the idea that too many famous people have died recently. I thought that was an interesting idea, and wondered how many is just enough? Everyday people die across a city, a country, a continent, and the world. Some are known to just the few…
What Do You Want Your Statistic To Be?
I love statistics. Or how people use statistics to prove a point. I remember someone telling me that statistics are like a light pole. It can illuminate or it can be used by a drunk to hold himself up. Take this one for example: Seventy-five percent of all adult deaths are preventable. I don’t remember…
