Republicans spent much of the 1997 appropriations season battling the administration over its plan to use statistical sampling, a technique that uses data from the traditional head count to estimate the number of those who did not respond to census takers.

CNN: By Juliana Gruenwald, CQ Staff Writer

The rover will spend the rest of the spring drilling and sampling the site, in search of organic compounds, then head for higher ground.

NEWYORKER: The Martian Chroniclers

The reason for this seemingly dotty result is that the errors from scientific sampling are easier to quantify (and minimise) than those arising from an imperfect head-count.

ECONOMIST: Statistics