ABSTRACT

The first really effective drugs for high blood pressure had been developed in the 1950s and worked by interfering with the hormones that the kidney produces to control the force of the heart. In the Framingham Study, the initial subjects were followed for years, measured every 5 years, note taken of work habits, lifestyle, food eaten, diseases encountered, socioeconomic variables, and many more. Even while using hundreds of thousands of women, the Harvard Nurses Study keeps accumulating more and more information about each one. All methods of dealing with big data require a vast number of mind-numbing, tedious, boring mathematical steps. In any large data set, there are bound to be inconsistencies, misclassifications, missing data—in other words, errors, blunders, and possibly lies.