Friday, December 10, 2010

Lessons


Ugh. I learned a hard one yesterday. I was so close to being done with a manuscript I've been working on for a long time. As I was finishing up some minor edits and ran some stats to get some additional numbers. While doing so I noticed a few weird data points. I start looking more closely at the weird ones. Huh, that is strange. I go back to the original electronic data sheet to make sure there wasn't an error importing into the statistics program, but no, everything jives. I pull out the original data sheets and feel a surge of adrenalin run through my body. Wrong. The electronic data I have is wrong. This particular part of the project was done by an undergrad, and another undergrad finalized it for me. I never went back and triple checked the data. Dumb. Real, real dumb, to assume two separate set of eyes would take care of the errors. Not everything is wrong, but enough. Enough that I am now correcting the data and will have to redo the stats from scratch for this part of the paper. And if the results are different....
Oh, I can't think about that right now.
If I do I'll go crazy.
I'll think about that tomorrow.
-Scarlett