Make no mistake

Gosh "" is this for real? Is this what Probability Theory is up to in the corporate universe: setting a Six Sigma target of imperfection "" "no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities" "" for action heroes in "black belts" to bow before?

Wow, that must be some shareholder pressure (heck, 0.4 of a defect?). In the olden days, probability was the stuff of wonder: if from a microscopic blob it is that you originate, feel lucky that it was you and not any of the other hundred million wriggly sperms who got here. Got the odds?

With a start like that, the subject cannot but be exciting, to say nothing of cinematic stimulation; even a kid can figure that the bad guy with the roulette revolver in Sholay has a grittier grasp of probability than at least one of the two good guys with the double-headed coin.

Probability is no less fun once it gets academic. Just pause to ponder the poetry of the core concept: certainty is defined as a probability of one. But scientific sense is made only of probabilities less than that.

Interesting, is it not? But Pearson Power, publisher of The Certified Six Sigma Black Belt Handbook, makes you yell the yell you'd reserve only for a Karate attempt at slicing a brick "" an object roughly as charming as this book.

The book does, of course, explain Six Sigma as a quality tool, even as a "philosophy" that will take over your worklife as you subject process after process to the DMAIC routine: Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control. All to get the likelihood of error down to the preset limit "" with error defined as any measure slipping out of customer specifications.

The handbook lapses now and then into revelatory mode (who'd have guessed "lack of adequate communication is one of the most frequently noted causes of team failure"?), but still manages to prove itself useful as a refresher course in Applied Statistics if you adopt your own Critical Path Method to read through it.

Hint: go for "conditional probability" and "expected value" before "omega hypothesis testing" and "alpha error risk" (for a given test, the probability of rejecting a hypothesis that's actually true).

... is tea had anywhere in the world's cornershops over such topics? Who knows. But for that favour alone, of forcing the issue, Pearson Power deserves credit.

Stimulation is stimulation, whatever the colour of the dice. Once the book is put aside, one wonders how much further Statistics will go as an endeavour of free will, having already tried to bring itself to bear on everything, even what in truth ultimately defies definition.

Even so, suppositions never cease. Gee "" would Laplace have given Napoleon his legendary "no need of that hypothesis" shrug if he had thought again? Or would he, perhaps, as recounted in the "French Connection" chapter of Peter Bernstein's provocative Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, have behaved more like Pascal, the 17th century co-author of Probability Theory, and used the logic of expected value to hedge himself?

For such a brave advocate of a maximal domain for rational enquiry, Laplace's last lines were unmistakably unassuming: he expressed awe at how little mankind did know.

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THE CERTIFIED SIX SIGMA
BLACK BELT HANDBOOK

Donald Benbow & TM Kubiak
Pearson Power
Price: Rs 499; pages: 352