Background When processing microarray data sets, we recently noticed that some gene names were being changed inadvertently to non-gene names. Results A little detective work traced the problem to default date format conversions and floating-point format conversions in the very useful Excel program package. The date conversions affect at least 30 gene names; the floating-point conversions affect at least 2,000 if Riken identifiers are included. These conversions are irreversible; the original gene names cannot be recovered. Conclusions Users of Excel for analyses involving gene names should be aware of this problem, which can cause genes, including medically important ones, to be lost from view and which has contaminated even carefully curated public databases. We provide work-arounds and scripts for circumventing the problem.

Materials for a series of learning lunches on news development topics. - learninglunches/databases at master · veltman/learninglunches

A paper used to justify austerity economics appears to contain an Excel error.

By James Kwak I spent the past two days at a financial regulation conference in Washington (where I saw more BlackBerries than I have seen in years—can’t lawyers and lobbyists afford decent p…

NYPL menu information, available as CSV.

This paper describes a protocol we have developed for teaching undergraduates to document the statistical analysis they do for empirical research projects in su

“What we’re really looking for is an [information technology] solution that will allow one to determine that the data that are being used to eventually lead to clinical trials are in fact the data obtained at the time of collection and that there haven’t been changes that people are not aware of,” she said.

Some truly frightening Excel metadata spreadsheets here.