Are the Data the Data?

摘要

An argument broke out over a large set of production data. Can you imagine such a thing? At issue were some large financial implications. Who you gonna call? A statistician, of course-namely, me. The team consisted of subject matter experts, production experts and management. Subject matter and production experts talked about the large mass of production line data accumulated over the years. Of course, they didn't have time to clean up the data before making it available to the rest of us, they said. That's as it should be, the bosses said. The data are the data.