It got made up

When reading papers talking about the statistics of something or another. I find it difficult to understand how some people can use extremely complex statistics and yet miss over the fact that their standard deviations are way out of character for what the average is. If you have a test that is standardized to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 50 and you report a test with a mean of 180 and a standard deviation of 200 or more, then I think it's more than likely that you're missing value is defined as 999 and you forgot to tell your stats program that.

So in this case, is it worse that they reported way-off-base results? Or would it be worse if they had just made it up and made up closer-to-understandable numbers? And how on earth did reviewers not catch this?

7 dirtiest jobs in IT

7 Even More Dirty Jobs in IT

As a dedication to this, I'd like to start posting my more ridiculous stories of working in IT. I'll start with one from college. I was working the computer help desk (it paid well and had good hours) during a campus-wide blackout. No power on campus, but of course we had the old school phones that still worked. I got a call from a student in a computer lab saying that none of the computers were working in the computer lab in her dorm. When I asked her if the lights were on, she said that the power was off and so the lights didn't work. Further, she had a computer in her room that wouldn't work because there was no power in the building. But she didn't make the leap that the power being off in the building was the reason that none of the computers in the computer lab would turn on.