Hi Paul,

> No kidding. It kills me to see people misuse and misquote numbers (and especially statistics). I've had it happen a few times with some of the sales analysis reports I've designed. It bugged me enough that I created another report that basically explained what could, and what specifically could NOT be inferred from the numbers.

I was just recently dealing with an "old-customer" archive design (IS Dept said get those old customers and their paid-up invoices with no activity for 6 months completely out of the system and into another system that we can report on seperately).

The problem is that other customers and transactions from the same time period would still be there, setting up the possibility for someone in accounting to re-run old reports and get really bad numbers. I see disaster in the making there.

>But I see the same type of wild-ass conclusions being made on the news all the time. Logic 101 should be a required course for people.

Logic 101 would have to be *required* -- else how would you convince people logically that they needed it?