We consider a misconception common among students of statistics involving "adjusted" and "unadjusted" sums-of-squares. While the presence of misconception has been noted before (e.g. Hamilton (1986)), we argue that it may be related to the language we use in describing the meaning of...

Design reliability at the beginning of a product development program is typically low and development costs can account for a large proportion of total product cost. We consider how to conduct development programs (series of tests and redesigns) for one-shot systems (which are destroyed at first...

There is a little-known but very simple generalization of the standard result that for uncorrelated variables with a common mean and variance, the expected sample variance is the marginal variance. The generalization justifies the use of the usual standard error of the sample mean in possibly...

We consider problems of quantifying and monitoring accuracy and precision of measurement in mass spectrometry, particularly in contexts where there is unavoidable day-to-day/period-to-period changes in instrument sensitivity. First we consider the issue of estimating instrument sensitivity based...