Peer Review

Quartz guide to bad data

Material Detail page

Bookmark

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:: An exhaustive reference to problems seen in real-world data, along with suggestions on how to resolve them and who should be responsible.
Type of Material:: Reference and Tutorial
Recommended Uses:: Research projects, lecture, team discussions.
Technical Requirements:: Any browser
Identify Major Learning Goals:: Examples and discussion points in statistics or spreadsheet based programming classes – or more widely any discipline that uses data to reach conslusions. (eg: science, politics or journalism).
Target Student Population:: College general ed, college lower division, Researchers in data driven areas.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: None – but a basic understanding of statistics and programming and spreadsheets would be useful.

Rating:
Strengths:: This site begins with a list of issues encountered in real-world data, organized by who should resolve them: the source (nineteen issues, eg: values are missing in the dataset), the user (sixteen issues, eg: margin of error is too large), a third party expert (eight issues, eg: there are inexplicable outliers), or a programmer (two issues, eg: data are in scanned documents). Translations are available to Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. Included in the content are issues related to data collection bias, data entry errors, software issues, purposeful deceit, and other common faulty practices. Descriptions often include examples or links to examples and cross references to possibly related issues.
Concerns:: Some of the issues would be hard for users to identify from the description.

Rating:
Strengths:: The material could be used directly by researchers. As a teaching tool it could be used to provide examples or initiate discussion in statistics, programming or more broadly science or journalism classes. It can also be used by students to write up a critique of any literature that uses statistics to back pu their point.
Concerns:: The material has not been created as a teaching tool. An instructor will have to guide students on how it can be used and connect it to the class that is being taught.

Rating:
Strengths:: The material format is very simple as a single web page with appropriate bookmark and external links. The headers and bulleted lists of items make it easy to read through.
Concerns:: Despite the index format many users would probably find themselves simply reading the whole document in linear fashion.