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Tag Archives: Data management
Recommended: When life gives you coloured cells, make categories
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Recommended: 9 Reasons Excel Users Should Consider Learning Programming
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Recommended: Use of Electronic Health Record Data in Clinical Investigations
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Recommended: A crummy drop-down menu appeared to kill dozens of mothers in Texas.
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This article talks about how bad the maternal mortality rates are in the United States and how bad our effort to try to quantify the rate is. Continue reading
Recommended: ISO 8601
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This xkcd cartoon by Scott Munro is open source, so I can hotlink the image directly. But if you go to the source, https://xkcd.com/1179/, be sure to hover over the image for a second punch line.
Recommended: EuSpRIG horror stories.
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There has been a lot written about data management problems with using spreadsheets, and there is a group the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group that has documented the problem carefully and thoroughly. This page on their website lists the big, big, big problems that have occurred because of spreadsheet mistakes. Any program is capable of producing mistakes, of course, but spreadsheets are particularly prone to errors for a variety of reasons that this group documents. Continue reading
Recommended: The Reinhart-Rogoff error – or how not to Excel at economics
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There has been a lot written about how lousy Microsoft Excel (and other spreadsheet products) are at data management, but the warning sinks in so much more effectively when you can cite an example where the use of Excel leads to an embarrassing retraction. Perhaps the best example is the paper by Carmen Reinhart and Peter Rogoff where a major conclusion was invalidated when a formula inside their Excel spreadsheet accidentally included only 15 of the relevant 20 countries. Here’s a nice description of that event and some suggestions on how to avoid this in the future. Continue reading
Recommended: Data dictionaries
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This is a nice explanation of what goes into a data dictionary, written from the perspective of research data management. Continue reading
Recommended: OpenRefine: A free, open source, powerful tool for working with messy data
I have not had a chance to use this, but it comes highly recommended. OpenRefine is a program that uses a graphical user interface to clean up messy data, but it saves all the clean up steps to insure that your work is well documented and reproducible. I listed Martin Magdinier as the “author” in the citation below because he has posted most of the blog entries about OpenRefine, but there are many contributors to this package and website. Continue reading