Statistics

Election season always bring various stats from polls, interviews and anecdotal evidence. However, you don’t need to look to politics to see meaningless stats.

Let me just give one example.

Xerox has a press release about receiving the “Best” in Annual Survey of Office Workers. The survey indicates that Xerox color printers and multifunction systems are the best. Period.

You can read the full release here if you are so inclined.

There is one key problem about the designation that is lost among all the rhetoric. continue reading...

I am amazed at how many different opinions can come from the same set of stats. It is fascinating to me the decisions that business leaders will make based on a set of stats that are likely to be interpreted incorrectly.

I was doing a little research and ran across a post on Universal Health Care.

One of the doctors who worked on the study (obviously biased to a national health care program) commented that most doctors support national health insurance. He said:

As doctors, we find that our patients suffer because of increasing deductibles, co-payments, and restrictions on patient care. More and more, physicians are turning to national health insurance as a solution to this problem.

Basically, he is saying that patients suffer because of insurance not because of lack of insurance. Since when has the government ever provided a service that private business hasn't done better? continue reading...