Data Organization in Spreadsheets Karl W. Broman & Kara H. Woo Pages 2-10 | Received 01 Jun 2017, Accepted author version posted online: 29 Sep 2017, Published online: 24 Apr 2018 1. Introduction 2. Be Consistent 3. Choose Good Names for Things 4. Write Dates as YYYY-MM-DD 5. No Empty Cells 6. Put Just One Thing in a Cell 7. Make it a Rectangle 8. Create a Data Dictionary 9. No Calculations in the Raw Data Files 10. Do Not Use Font Color or Highlighting as Data 11. Make Backups 12. Use Data Validation to Avoid Errors 13. Save the Data in Plain Text Files ABSTRACT Spreadsheets are widely used software tools for data entry, storage, analysis, and visualization. Focusing on the data entry and storage aspects, this article offers practical recommendations for organizing spreadsheet data to reduce errors and ease later analyses. The basic principles are: be consistent, write dates like YYYY-MM-DD, do not leave any cells empty, put just one thing in a cell, organize the data as a single rectangle (with subjects as rows and variables as columns, and with a single header row), create a data dictionary, do not include calculations in the raw data files, do not use font color or highlighting as data, choose good names for things, make backups, use data validation to avoid data entry errors, and save the data in plain text files.

Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Join us Monday for a CORE Talk seminar and discussion featuring Michael Barnett's work on the link between length of hospital stay and insurance policies. Register here:
www.coretalks.org

LAST CALL for Submissions for the PARC Aging Retreat! Penn AGING researchers are encouraged to submit a brief abstract to the 2026 PARC Aging Retreat "USA at 250 Years: Aging Healthily" on May 1, 2026!
Details: aging.upenn.edu/events/retreat

"The skills they don’t replicate—at least not yet—are the ones that were always the hardest [...]: knowing which questions matter, developing taste for what makes a research design credible, understanding an institutional setting deeply enough to know where the data is lying to you...."

Susie Wiles, Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Has Breast Cancer

Breast cancer mortality dropped 58% from 1975 to 2019.

Localized, early detected breast cancer has a 99% 5 year survival rate.

Modern mammogram tech was developed by NASA for telescopes.

Last year, RFK Jr. cancelled 87 research grants on breast cancer.

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/u...

Writing out a conversation I’ve been having a lot at this conference:

Things in US science are far, far worse than people know.

Far worse than even other scientists know.

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Every Friday, I open the NIH Guide TOC to find multiple early cancellations of funding opportunities--and virtually never anything new.

Attention (And Money) Is All You Need: Why Universities Are Struggling to Keep AI Talent Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

There are many great AI researchers at universities, but they pay a VERY steep price to be able to stay in academia & publish openly “The top 1% of publishing industry scientists now earn $1.5 million more annually than comparable academics, a fivefold increase since 2001” www.nber.org/papers/w34964

The usefulness of useless knowledge Politicians aren’t the best judges of the merits of scientific research

I like this piece from @timharford.ft.com but it largely makes the case for ‘blue skies’ type research as it may become useful later.

There is a different argument I think we don’t make enough: it is part of the human endeavour to understand the nature of our world www.ft.com/content/0d60...

The is the federal government telling news stations to provide favorable coverage of the war or their licenses will be pulled.

A truly extraordinary moment.

We aren't on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT.

Act like it.

COMMENT 02 February 2026 Does AI already have human-level intelligence? The evidence is clear The vision of human-level machine intelligence laid out by Alan Turing in the 1950s is now a reality. Eyes unclouded by dread or hype will help us to prepare for what comes next.

Nature published another pile of trash

i am trying to catch up on some of my reading but this one is getting under my skin so here’s a thread highlighting why this piece is either ill-informed or intentionally ignorant of a wealth of knowledge from embodied cog sci and related fields

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The US Administration has embarked on a large, unprecedented program of excluding lawful, highly-skilled workers and students from the United States.

I talked with the brilliant @gracesegers.bsky.social at @newrepublic.com about the broad economic ripple effects.

newrepublic.com/article/2073...

As controversial decisions mount, FDA shuns public advisory meetings The FDA is cutting back on public advisory committee meetings, even as the public and other stakeholders seek more transparency.

Despite recent controversial decisions, the FDA has stopped holding advisory committee meetings — which bring together regulators, companies, patients, and a panel of independent advisors to publicly discuss complex regulatory matters. I dug into why:
www.statnews.com/2026/03/09/f...

🎉March/April Pulse Highlight🎉

Where @lsgeriatricem.bsky.social talks about her Fulbright experience in Australia!

issuu.com/saemonline/d...
Pages 66-67

@saemonline.bsky.social
#emergencymedicine #saem #agem #geriatricmedicine #emergencydepartment

The data also reinforce a message that should be clear: American leadership in science and medical research requires far more than getting across the line on top-line budget negotiations and will require continued vigilance to track how HHS treats applications and existing awards.

The plot is only part of the story.

The data do not include lost science via terminations, freezes, stalled payments, and award delays. The collapse in awards rates will lead to job loss, gaps in research programs, and drive scientists to spend more time writing grants rather than doing science.

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.

What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.

Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

This is not just cursed, its monstrous. The digital resurrection of a historian who died in January of this year, all so Grammarly can get some more clicks and engagement from students and/or scholars and/or others.

It feels so wrong on so many levels, these ghosts enslaved to AI forever

Luigi Guido speaking on The Economic Costs of Ambiguous Laws

Would love to learn more here if you have references to what Claude is doing around fact verification.

LLMs reporting on their own reasoning are generally not particularly reliable. Would absolutely be possible to incorporate other models on top of an LLM, although the state of the science there is in flux. But at that point, it's not an LLM, it's some kind of composite model?

"Structurally indifferent to truth is a good line" is a good line. Also worth noting that not all models are, just that LLMs weren't even designed to have a concept of truth. One of many ways the "AI" moniker distracts.

The critique of unmeasured confounding is often levied in a lazy/broad way. It is trivially true in any observational study. But if the critic can't think of a plausible such confounder and posit a reasonable direction/magnitude of its bias then they're not doing productive science.

Anakin-Padme meme. Anakin: Additionally, we considered the confounders c1, c2 and c3. Padme: And you included all of them in a single model, right? Padme: And you included all of them in a single model, right?

Psychologists following a third-variable control strategy that may be best described as "sequential."

Join NYT's @jeneeninterlandi.bsky.social, Dr. Jonathan Mannheim, and me on Monday, March 2nd at 1pm ET, Live on Substack as we discuss the human cost of the administration's war on US science.

Link to Live: open.substack.com/live-stream/...
Info below:
insidemedicine.substack.com/p/speaking-o...

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

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The impact is already hitting science agencies hard. The NIH—the world's largest public biomedical research funder—has had to rely on leftover stopgap funds.

New grant awards have slowed to a trickle — exacerbating the effects of a record-long shutdown in October.

(h/t @jeremymberg.bsky.social)

That's right. Worse than Pointless
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/o...

It’s possible to hope the ayatollahs regime will fall one day and Iranians be free and be dismayed by our country bombing Iran with no probable cause , with no public debate , and no congressional authorization.

There were HUGE differences between patients who did and did not receive the AI stethoscope. Patients were 20 years older (64 vs 44), 3.5x more likely to have hypertension (53% vs 15%) and 4x more likely to have kidney disease (13% vs 3%)

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