Belt Confessions

The phone book is a great source of numbers.  You can use the prefixes to give your histograms a sense of central tendency and then use a data mining program to find patterns in the remaining four digits. Randomly assign plus and minus values to the 4 digit sequences and divide them by 10 and you can get just about any distribution your boss wants.  Tack on a few labels for the X and Y axis, toss in a few bullet points with things like Box-Cox and residuals and voila you have random data, cooked to perfection, which will allow your audience to easily swallow any conclusions you might offer for their evening enjoyment.

Shame on you all,
I bet some of you have pasted your sigma calculator onto a PPT show at the end of a project & the sigma value has been eg. 3.46, but you have then put in a callout saying “sigma = 5.2” whilst having the point of the callout covering the 3.46 on the actual calculator, in the hope that no one notices & you quickly skip to the next slide, tut tut tut!!
As long as you have satisfied the project team / management team / customers that you have made some breakthrough, i think it is fair to say that most people have ‘manipulated’ a little data in their time, those who say they haven’t are talking BS
Jaybee.