According to the National Audit Office only a quarter of the claimed savings were fairly represented while the second efficiency programme launched just last year is "cutting services to claim efficiencies" - and has "acute" measurement problems.

BBC: In full: Cameron's economy speech

As estimates can be biased due to problems of omitted variables, endogeneity, or measurement errors, it is necessary to rely on a broad range of estimators.

FORBES: Data in New World Bank Report Shows that Large Public Sectors Reduce Economic Growth

This spurious doubling of estimates is attributed to serious miss-location problems at many NOAA recording sites, along with erroneous post-measurement data adjustments which exaggerated temperatures upwards between 1979 and 2008.

FORBES: Gullible Warming: A Contrived Crisis That Is Too Good To Waste

In an election fraught with ironies, here is one more: Al Gore , the putative inventor of the Internet, when faced with the perfect test of his belief in empirical solutions to the world's problems, immediately threw out objective, electro-mechanical vote counting in lieu of the most subjective of measurement schemes--teams of politically biased observers peering at increasingly mangled paper ballots.

FORBES: Computing Desire