By the time you read this, the amazingly long U.S. presidential election will be over. All U.S. citizens will be wandering around aimlessly bumping into objects, pressing their hands to the sides of their heads as the indignation poisons slowly leave their bodies, leaving them with a hangover-like malaise and an intermittent need to babble a mishmash of campaign slogans. So, to cheer you up, I present you with the rest of the story I began last month about acceptance sampling.

The second flawed premise
Let’s examine the assumption there even is an acceptable proportion of the lot that is bad or below the acceptable quality level (AQL). If the AQL in this case were 1 percent, that means that in the box that I’m accepting, on average I would have five bad units. I’m pretty sure that if you were a soldier who got the round that went “pfft” instead of “bang,” that you would be ready to do a quality control test on the next batch using the supplier as the target (Oh wait, that would reward the poor quality suppliers, wouldn’t it?).

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