Writing for the Dallas News, Jackie Wang describes how data entry errors lead to the erroneous belief that Texas pregnancy related death rates were more than double the national rate. Short story: Texas thought it had terribly high rates of pregnancy related deaths. It didn't. Turns out that folks were just using the online system for reporting cause of death incorrectly. So, human data entry errors lead to what looked like a spike in maternal deaths. Like, whenever I make a change in my grade book columns in Blackboard, I always forget to hit "Save" and then the changes I make aren't saved. Only here, that sort of small error caused Texas to think that death rates for pregnancy complications was 14.6:100,000, not the reported 38.4:100,000. Which is an enormous difference. And a lot of money was spent to rectify the problem, which wasn't a problem, but those actions were probably still good for women and babies and families. This article details how Texas had ...

Here is another example of why representative sampling MUST include women. For years and years, car crash test dummies for adults were all based upon the 50th percentile male. As such, even in vehicles with high safety ratings, women still have higher rates of certain injuries (head, neck, pelvis) than men. In fact, the article cites research that found that belted female car occupants in accidents have a 47% higher chance of suffering a serious injury and a 71% higher chance of suffering a moderate injury compared to men in a car. http://leevinsel.com/blog/2013/12/30/why-carmakers-always-insisted-on-male-crash-test-dummies I wrote a previous blog post about this video that outlines how using only  male rats for pharmaceutical research lead to problems with disproportionately high numbers of side effects in female humans . And this NPR story details changes to federal rules in order to correct this issue with animal testing. How to use in class: -Inappropriate sampling i...

In honor of the New Year, a post about health.  A team of researchers from Harvard made a brief video that describes their recent publication. The video includes discussion about their hypothesis generation, methodology, and research findings.  Their research question: Does the game Pokemon Go actually improve the health of users? How to use this video in your class: -This is an easily understood research project to share with your RM students. It also goes into detail about the statistics used for analysis. -And the researchers, from fancy-pants Harvard, aren't afraid of being a bit silly and having fun as researchers. As demonstrated by the below images from the video: This guy. Seriously. I hope to some day love my data as much as he loves his data. And they made graphs using Pokemon balls -How do we get our research ideas? Sometimes, from observations about every day living. This research was inspired by the Pokemon Go phenomena. I try to ...