Mistaken Data

Hm. That does not look right.

Multiplication mistake leads to exaggerated plastic cautions

Mistaken Data / baseline, plastic, research

There was a brouhaha a couple months ago over research that suggested black…
Macy’s lost track of $154m in expenses because of poor metrics

Mistaken Data / Bloomberg, Macy's, money

For Bloomberg, Jeannette Neumann describes the accounting error:
For years, Macy’s Inc. touted…
Flawed Rotten Tomatoes ratings

Mistaken Data / bias, movies, ratings, Rotten Tomatoes, Vulture

Rotten Tomatoes aggregates movie reviews to spit out a freshness score for each…
Supermarket provides AI-driven meal planner and is disappointed by the internet using it to output weird recipes

Mistaken Data / AI, grocery, Guardian, recipes

A supermarket chain in New Zealand offered an AI-based recipe generator, and of…
Honesty research likely faked data

Mistaken Data / fake data, honesty, Planet Money

Research by Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino suggested that people were more honest…
Bias in AI-generated images

Mistaken Data / AI, bias, images, Lensa, MIT Technology Review, Stable Diffusion

Lensa is an app that lets you retouch photos, and it recently added…
Historical data

Mistaken Data / humor, xkcd

Randall Munroe provides another fine observation through xkcd.
I often wonder what our…
Google Maps incorrectly pointing people to crisis pregnancy centers

Mistaken Data / abortion, Bloomberg, Google, search

Davey Alba and Jack Gillum, for Bloomberg, found that Google Maps commonly points…
Looking for falsified images in Alzheimer’s study

Mistaken Data / Alzheimer’s, protein, science

Charles Piller, for Science, highlights the work of Matthew Schrag, who uses image…
Unreliable FBI crime data

Mistaken Data / Axios, crime, FBI, Marshall Project

The Marshall Project and Axios report that the FBI changed their reporting system…
Simpson’s Paradox in vaccination data

Mistaken Data / coronavirus, Simpson's Paradox, vaccination

This chart, made by someone who is against vaccinations, shows a higher mortality…
Scientists with bad data

Mistaken Data / fake data, science, Tim Harford

Tim Harford warns against bad data in science:
Some frauds seem comical. In…
‘Less than 10 percent’ outdoors

Mistaken Data / CDC, coronavirus, New York Times, outdoors

The CDC said that “less than 10 percent” of coronavirus cases were from…
Excel spreadsheet limit leads to 16,000 Covid-19 cases left off daily count

Mistaken Data / coronavirus, Excel, limitations

Microsoft Excel is useful for many things, but it has its limitations (like…
FDA commissioner corrects his misinterpretation of reduced mortality

Mistaken Data / absolute, coronavirus, FDA, relative

Talking about a possible plasma treatment for Covid-19, the Food and Drug Administration…
Algorithm leads to arrest of the wrong person

Mistaken Data / arrests, bias, facial recognition, police

Even though there was supposedly a person in the decision-making process and a…
Face depixelizer with machine learning, and some assumptions

Mistaken Data / bias, face, pixels

In crime shows, they often have this amazing tool that turns a low-resolution,…
Bad bar chart

Mistaken Data / annotation

Welcome to whose bar chart is it anyway: where the geometries are made…
Bad denominator

Mistaken Data / Atlantic, CDC, coronavirus, denominator, testing

With coronavirus testing, many governments have used the percentage of tests that came…
Poor comparison between two bar charts

Mistaken Data / Business Insider, comparison

A chart from Business Insider makes a poor attempt to compare the death…

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