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As an epidemiologist, I am interested in disease - and more specifically, who in a population currently has or might get that disease. What is their age, sex, or socioeconomic status? Where do they live? What can people do to limit their chances of getting sick? Questions exploring whether something is likely to happen or not can be answered with quantitative research. By counting and measuring, we quantify (measure) a phenomenon in our world, and present the results through percentages and averages. We use statistics to help interpret the significance of the results. While this approach is very important, it can't tell us everything about a disease and peoples' experiences of it. That's where qualitative data becomes important.

Scientists have typically justified excluding female animals from experiments - even when studying conditions that are more likely to affect women - on the basis that fluctuating hormones would render the results uninterpretable. However, according to Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, in Boston, it is entirely unjustified by scientific evidence, which shows that, if anything, the hormones and behaviour of male rodents are less stable than those of females. Shansky is calling for stricter requirements to include animals of both sexes in research, saying the failure to do so has led to the development of drugs that work less well in women.

hen the AP United States history students at Aragon High School in San Mateo California, scanned the professionally designed pages of www.minimumwage.com, most concluded that it was a solid, unbiased source of facts and analysis. They noted the menu of research reports, graphics and videos, and the "About" page describing the site as a project of a "nonprofit research organization" called the Employment Policies Institute. But then their teacher, Will Colglazier, demonstrated how a couple more exploratory clicks-critically, beyond the site itself-revealed that the Employment Policies Institute is considered by the Center for Media and Democracy to be a front group created by lobbyists for the restaurant and hotel industries. "I have some bright students, and a lot of them felt chagrined that they weren't able to deduce this," said Colglazier, who videotaped the episode last January. "They got duped."

How statistics, and research-design have changed the face of medicine. We tend to think of medicine as a science, but for most of human history it has been scientific-ish at best. In the first episode of a three-part series, we look at the grotesque mistakes produced by centuries of trial-and-error, and ask whether the new era of evidence-based medicine is the solution.

journalists often write about public opinion polls, which are designed to measure the public's attitudes about an issue or idea. Some of the most high-profile polls center on elections and politics. Newsrooms tend to follow these polls closely to see which candidates are ahead, who's most likely to win and what issues voters feel most strongly about. Other polls also offer insights into how people think. For example, a government agency might commission a poll to get a sense of whether local voters would support a sales tax increase to help fund school construction. Researchers frequently conduct national polls to better understand how Americans feel about public policy topics such as gun control, immigration reform and decriminalizing drug use. When covering polls, it's important for journalists to try to gauge the quality of a poll and make sure claims made about the results actually match the data collected. Sometimes, pollsters overgeneralize or exaggerate their findings. Sometimes, flaws in the way they choose participants or collect data make it tough to tell what the results really mean. Below are 11 questions we suggest journalists ask before reporting on poll results. While most of this information probably won't make it into a story or broadcast, the answers will help journalists decide how to frame a poll's findings - or whether to cover them at all.