Dr. Deming published more than 170 articles over his lifetime, wrote numerous unpublished papers for students and clients, and conducted hundreds of studies. These and other writings are in the National Archives in The Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington, DC. Access to the collection is restricted and controlled by the LOC – please contact them for permission to view the archive.
Dr. Deming wrote this article to comment on recommendations made by an auditing standard of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, to explain why those recommendations conflicted with statistical practice. In addition to identification of indefensible methods in auditing, Dr. Deming provides a solid primer on Cause-System, Frame, Random Sampling, Stable Cause-System in Manufacturing, and the Likelihood Ratio.
The twelve-page article appeared in the Journal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance, Vol 2, No.3, Spring 1979, pp. 197-208.
When this paper was written, the cost of handling freight on the platforms of motor carriers of general freight amounted to easily 20% of the total cost of transportation of general freight by truck. In this paper, Dr. Deming aimed to learn how certain costs on the platform vary with the weights of shipments. He studied the total minutes required to handle freight on the platform by method and movement, for selected weights from 50 pounds to 15,000 pounds . Time was recorded separately for “truck to platform”, “platform to truck”, and “truck to truck” movements. Categories analyzed were (1) manual handling, no dragline or dragline not used, (2) manual handling at terminals where dragline is used, and (3) fork lift. Although data used were from the “Motor Carrier Platform Study”, June 1973, Interstate Commerce Commission, the same methods of analysis can be used today. Dr. Deming includes a summary of results, source of data, method of analysis, and estimates of parameters and their standard errors.
This nine-page article appeared in Transportation Journal, Vol 17, No.4, 1978, pp. 5-13.
Of every dollar spent for transporting articles moved as common general freight by motor carrier in the 1970s, 13 cents was for stop-time at pickup and delivery. In this paper Dr. Deming explored the relationship between stop-time and weight. Using Interstate Commerce Commission cost data Dr. Deming fit a least squares line to the data for each region, calculated coefficients and standard errors, and developed the mathematical relationship between weight and man-minutes required to handle shipments. He then compared his results with the Commission’s procedure for the computation of minutes per shipment.
This seven-page article was published in the Transportation Journal, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1979: pp.79-85.