Monday, February 27, 2012

Eye Test

A Test for ALZHEIMERS?
I received an email a few days ago about how counting F’s in a certain sentence could test for Alzheimer's disease. Here’s the sentence:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS
OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

Now go ahead and count every "F" in the above sentence.

How many did you find?

You might be surprised that there are six F’s in that sentence. If you did not find all six F’s, that does not mean you have Alzheimer’s.

This same sentence has been around for 40-50 years to demonstrate the fallacy of 100% inspection. When I was teaching Quality Control courses we often used this identical sentence to show that 100% inspection would not catch all the defectives (The F’s). The results often surprised people.

Most of the people I worked with in classes would also miss some of the F’s. Once I remember one fellow in my class that said he found 7 F’s. When I questioned him, he replied, “Well I counted 6 F’s but figured I might have missed one so I said I found 7 F’s.” I thought that was funny and a little weird!

(100% Inspection is a poor means to insure quality. Product quality most be built into the product, not inspected into the product.)

~~~
Tennessee Granddaddy Says:
Live each day in gratitude.
Smile and be kind.
When given the opportunity,
try to be a little help to someone.

~~~
Quote of the Day
Preconceived notions are the locks
on the door to wisdom.
~Merry Browne

~~~
Joke of the Day

An obviously distraught student entered the school's IT office complaining that his email wasn't working. His attempts to get tickets for an on-campus concert kept resulting in returned emails.

He showed the tech the email address he was attempting to reach. The tech asked him where he obtained such an unusual email address.

The student replied, "The sign advertising the concert said, 'begins@7:30PM'."



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2 comments:

Robin said...

love your blog but I must confess my problem --- no way can I find more than 3 Fs. Finished, Files and Scientific. Where are the other 3?

Tennessee Granddaddy said...

Dear Robin,
This is Tennessee Granddaddy writing.
The other 3 F's are in the little word "OF"... they occur 3 times.
Don't feel bad most people miss the F's in "OF".