Although trained on standardized techniques, PE teachers, as lay data collectors, may not have achieved research-level accuracy or reliability.
By the looks of his upcoming schedule, it wouldn't be a stretch to assume most of the paperwork piled on his desk consists of Ebola-related research, and that somewhere in that stack lies data related to the two candidates for vaccines he helped bring to Monrovia.
One component of the project will be a "Geographic Information System," a computer system officials can use to lay out population data, weather information, radiological conditions and other factors on a single map, to help make decisions about protecting the population.
It is perfectly possible to lie with data, says Emmanuel Letouzé of Data-Pop Alliance, a group that includes researchers from MIT and Harvard but the growing expectation that policies be based on figures means that it is getting harder to tell the truth without them.Audio and Video content on Economist.com requires a browser that can handle iFrames.
Here lies data of unprecedented value.
"The purpose of it is not to proclaim anybody the winner of the popular vote count, but to lay out the data," said Bill Keller, managing editor of The New York Times.
"It's for scientists to lay out the data and lay out what they think and then it's for the public to make up its own mind," he told the Guardian this year.
It's not that our politicians didn't know about climate change: I've watched, for two decades, as the world's best scientists make the annual trek to Capitol Hill to lay out the latest data.
The latest economic review from the Office for National Statistics draws on a plethora of recent data to lay out a clear picture of what it calls, "the shape of the economic recovery" – and it's not the one Cameron and his colleagues had been hoping for.
Physiologist Jessica Meir, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia in Canada who studies flight in bar-headed geese, agrees, praising the new study for finally providing field data to lay to rest the entrenched notion that the geese take advantage of tailwinds, as smaller migratory birds have been shown to do.
