Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Sample size: Zero

A Zero.

Randy Whitman is on Toyota's long long subpoena documents request list, in an honored place as one of the experts that the company has in its cross-hairs.

Randy can be credited as the statistician who discovered the 400% spike in Toyota UA complaints after the ETCS was adopted. This is the spike that Toyoda-san said under oath that he had not known about, per his Bookout deposition. Randy deserves some fame.

He wrote an incisive blog post some time ago and it deserves to be remembered and quoted.


He wrote:
"How many vehicles in NASA's exhaustive search for an electronic-based cause of unintended, high-speed acceleration actually had experienced an incident of unintended, high-speed acceleration?

An investigative article published in Corporate Counsel has disclosed the answer more than two years after the NASA report was made public. Corporate Counsel's investigation revealed that NASA specialists specifically responsible for the inspection, analysis, simulation and testing of potentially suspect component parts in its investigation were never given access to components from any vehicle that had experienced unintended, high-speed acceleration. Not even one. The sample size was zero. In fact, the Corporate Counsel article states, "Some of the scientists on this team wouldn't sign NASA's final report."

[emphasis added]


So dear reader, which do you think is more true--the "narrative," or the facts of the spike and the sample size?