Monthly Archives: July 2018

1968 Vietnam War Statistics

Posted on 22-July-2018 by mathscinotes

It has been 50 years since 1968, and I have been seeing quite a few retrospectives on television about that tumultuous year. I was in 6th-grade in 1968 and the chaos of that year is still very clear in my memory – I remember spending quite a bit of class time on the Paris peace talks. One lesson was about how the Paris Peace negotiators argued about the shape of the table at which they would sit. Arguing about the shape of a table while people were dying seemed ridiculous to a 12-year boy. After hearing all these recent discussions about 1968, I decided to look at the US Vietnam casualty data (Figure 1) to see what insights I could gain on that year. All my work is done in Excel and my workbook is here. Continue reading →

Posted in History Through Spreadsheets | 4 Comments

I Forgot – VLOOKUP is Not Case-Sensitive

Posted on 20-July-2018 by mathscinotes

I almost sent out a spreadsheet today that contained a VLOOKUP error – I forgot that VLOOKUP is not case sensitive. Fortunately, I caught my error seconds before I hit send. Today's post is about how I chose to perform a case-sensitive lookup in an ancient version of Excel. Continue reading →

Posted in Excel | Comments Off on I Forgot – VLOOKUP is Not Case-Sensitive

Evenly Spaced Points on Logarithmic Graphic Using Excel

Posted on 9-July-2018 by mathscinotes

I am doing some testing at an Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) facility this week. Part of the test specification requires that we inject audio frequency interference on the power supply lines at discrete frequencies that range from 10Hz to 100+KHz, with 30 frequencies selected from each decade of frequencies (e.g. 10 Hz to 100 Hz, 100 Hz to 1 kHz, etc.). Figure 1 shows a specification similar to the one I am performing. My test facility that has chosen the discrete frequencies to be evenly spaced on a logarithmic axis. I started to wonder how the frequencies were selected – let's work through it. Continue reading →

Posted in Excel, General Mathematics | 1 Comment

Test Time vs BER and Confidence Level Using Excel

Posted on 4-July-2018 by mathscinotes

I am currently working as a project manager on a serial data channel qualification task. During this work, I need to estimate the time required to perform dozens of Bit Error Rate (BER) measurements under different scenarios (see Figure 1). In these measurements, we are working to ensure that our BER is always 1E-10 or less. I have performed this calculation many times and have derived all the associated formulas here. BER is a statistical parameter and its measurement is a function of the confidence level you want in your answer.  In this case, we want the highest confidence level possible consistent with a two-week test effort. Continue reading →

Posted in Electronics, Excel | 1 Comment