It’s back to school time. Today there’s a fleet of yellow school buses on the road and the newspapers have been filled with stories of how to pack nutritious lunches and how to encourage conversations with your children and so on. Under the banner then of the well-known phrase “And what did you learn today” and as a testimony to lifelong learning, here goes my true story.
I am not a researcher but I have worked with many a talented person who was. I would hear them speak of ‘scrubbing data’ or ‘cleaning data’. My understanding of what it means is meagre but I get the concept. You take a bunch of information that is stored in a database and through some mysterious process you separate the wheat from the chaff as a farmer would put it, or you remove the extraneous bits and keep the solid data that can be used in your research.
I have discovered a new method for scrubbing data and am putting it out there for researchers to comment upon. Perhaps this eureka moment will save a lot of time for those who toil in the details of data.
Step one: You are the secretary. Using your laptop and a memory stick, take minutes at the Annual General Meeting of a local organization. No paper back up is needed. Good for the environment and efficient too. Save the minutes, the only record of the meeting, on your memory stick.
Step two: Stick the memory stick in your pocket after the meeting (you don’t want to lose it).
Step three: Do laundry. Washer and dryer. Find memory stick in drum of dryer after cycle is complete.
Step four: Sweat. Insert memory stick and find out….ta da!! It works!
Moral of the story, well actually two morals:
1. There is more than one way to scrub data.
2. Those high-efficiency (HE) front loading washers really are gentle on your belongings.
A true story.
Barb's True Stories 
I think Step Four was the contributing factor that resulted in success…doesn’t it always?
I think you just said it was pure luck.
You have horseshoes. If this makes no sense, ask Mick.
I know you have done research and as part of that community, your comment tells me my method of scrubbing data is unlikely to make any waves in that world. Particularly any waves where the water has had Tide added to it.
I have an old flash drive that I am tempted to try your system with to see if it will improve its performance.
Maybe we could do a multi-centred trial. We could make it double blind (i.e. closing both eyes when we put the drive in the washer) and then report the outcomes to a centralized database. Of course we would try to get published and that would mean using citations and references and bibliographies and well, don’t get me started for I have work to do and I am going to save it on my flash drive.
You are insane and I miss you guys.