On Teaching Statistics - Part II

It's taken me quite a while to get back to this blog due to some health issues that I'm dealing with. Nontheless, it's time to pick up from where I left off.

I taught a statistics course (most of it, anyway) to a class of undergraduate engineering majors at Valencia Community College in Orlando, FL. I'm happy to report that, after a ten year absence from the classroom, my students were just as enthusiastic and eager to learn as those I'd taught more than a decade ago. Their responses to my presentations gives me great hope for the future of our society.

Meanwhile, I've become engaged in another project through ASTM Committee E-11, which deals with standards in the quality and statistics world. Working with several others, I'm helping to develop a statistics standard that will show users how to make the most of small data sets and samples; conditions which tend to be the norm in the industrial and commercial worlds where I began my career. In addition, there is always the question of whether or not data follows a normal (or Gaussian) distribution pattern. It's not always easy to find this out when you don't have lots of data, and methods are needed to figure out such things as - are the data random, what do the data say about a process and its capability, what happens when we order the data, and similar issues. I'll have more on this at a later time.