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.

Beth Mole. A crummy drop-down menu appeared to kill dozens of mothers in Texas. Ars Technica. 2018, April 12. Available at https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/a-crummy-drop-down-menu-appeared-to-kill-dozens-of-mothers-in-texas/.

This page is moving to a new website.

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.

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.

European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group. EuSpRIG Horror Stories. Available at http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm.

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.

Jonathan Borwein and David H. Bailey. The Reinhart-Rogoff error – or how not to Excel at economics. The Conversation, April 22, 2013. Available at https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-not-to-excel-at-economics-13646.

This is a nice explanation of what goes into a data dictionary, written from the perspective of research data management.

Kristin Briney. Data dictionaries. Data Ab Initio blog, August 5, 2014. Available at http://dataabinitio.com/?p=454%C2%A0.

Martin Magdinier. OpenRefine: A free, open source, powerful tool for working with messy data. Available at http://openrefine.org/index.html.