Friday, July 28, 2006

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

TGIF! I decided to cap off the week by doing a little bit of analysis work in Excel. Simple stuff, really, and I spent more time typing up my results in Powerpoint than I did doing the analysis (thanks to a lot of up front work that I did a month ago). I surprised myself with the results. I had previously been making one recommendation just based on a gut feeling, but when I actually threw numbers at the problem, as my Operations Analysis training has shown me to do, I realized that things weren't quite as significant as I had expected, and I'm changing my recommendation. Amazing what a few cold, hard statistics can do. (I could have twisted the statistics to back up my recommendation if I had wanted, too! Math is fun that way!) Anyway, onward to a hopefully relaxing weekend.

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