No, they're not. Alot of data is flawed though, based on assumptions that usually aren't true... Go on the ground yourself and see what makes a difference though. You can't sit on your computer in a 1st world country and think you know what happens in the 3rd world...

that's actually incorrect. The correct quote is "the plural of anecdote is data".

http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-an...

I take the opposite view of this statistician, because it reminds us that NO data are free of some level of collection bias. Keep in mind I'm an experimentalist, and not a data analyst.