Portraits

Shewhart’s memorandum of May 1924 gave an engineer a way to separate ordinary variation from a change worth investigating.

An examiner’s time for one application is set in advance by the office, and complexity moves the number of hours rather than removing the limit.

A holdout study switches advertising off in one region for weeks, and the sales given up in that silence are what buy the number.

Nightingale and Farr worked from mortality tables that officials had already read and shelved.

Paris certified 243 influenza deaths in the winter of 1889, while the city’s total burials ran far above the average of the three preceding years.

Ilarion Kompantsev takes a share of the result instead of a monthly retainer, but cannot publicly show the campaigns that bring him income.

One missing tag on a client’s thank-you page caused Maryna Butovych to stop hiring developers and build websites herself.

Oleksandr Koliesnikov put twelve customer questions to four AI systems before he changed anything, and appeared in none of the 44 commercial answers.

Olga Medvetska explains, through Vilha’s cot, why a rebuilt fixing can be checked while talk about quality cannot.

Daniel Bar Shay is building a maintenance practice around the gap between a healthy server signal and a failed customer transaction.