thank you for the comment and the link. I am glad to find someone who seems to be more familiar with this data set than I was before working with it. If you have some insight on the soda tax question, I would love to hear it. It seems strange that counties would have sales taxes for soda either in the retail store or in a vending machine but not in both. Any thoughts?

Thank you for your note. The data that was available to me contains only a snapshot and no time series data – hence the caveat about drawing definitive conclusions from it. You are welcome to download the workbook – just scroll to the bottom of the graph in this post: http://pharma-bi.com/2010/03/beware-of-creative-analytics-lies-damned-lies-and-statistics/ and download it from there.

BTW, your post about public opinion and health care reform looks very interesting IMHO, with complicated and far reaching legislation like Health Care Reform, hype and polarized political talk should be expected. It’s a good thing that we no longer live in a TV soundbite world and that we now have the internet to help us cut through the polarizing rhetoric.