On September 15 the government released a report "Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures" reporting on a survey "conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's [sic] (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)" http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad362.pdf The objective of the survey is to get information on public health concerns, fertility, sexually transmitted disease, etc. However I bring it up here because it contains the most glaring examples I have yet seen of published inconsistency. It's the well worn story that males have many more "sexual partners" than females. Interested people should look at the report. For example, Tables 10 and 11 of the survey show that the median number of partners "in lifetime" for males over forty is 8 while that for females is 3.8. To immediately recognize the inconsistency imagine the same survey with but with the words sexual partners replaced by spouses. For more of the same look at Figure 6 on page 6. More inconsistency: when men and women are asked for the number of partners over the past 12 months, Tables 1 and 2, the numbers come out the same, within epsilon. . As I said, this is an old story. See the following from New York Review of Books ten years ago by Richard Lewontin. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=1923 The authors are aware of the problem and suggest explanations on pages 12 and 13 some of which are, well, amusing. "Some researchers have suggested that some of this difference is due to a small percentage of men who report very large numbers of partners," Another "explanation" is that women my have partners over age 44 who were not polled in the survey (this would of course skew it in the other direction). Is this an example of innumeracy in high places? Lewontin writes in http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1871 "The willingness of both social and natural scientists to recognize contradictions in their findings, and then to ignore them when it is convenient, is a serious disease of inquiry." David The authors