The real deal.(have you heard?)

A friend's son rushed into his kitchen one day. "Mom!" he said, "There are millions of cats in the yard! "Millions?" his mother asked. "Well, thousands." "Thousands?" she asked. "Umm, hundreds." "Hundreds?" "OK, ours and a gray one," he finally said.

Kind of a "big hat, no cattle" situation: The numbers sound impressive, but the reality behind them may be much less so.

It's a lot like auto information. The mount of data available to car buyers through Web sites and publications has exploded. While we recommend that consumers gather as much as they can, a lot of the testing, reliability, and safety intelligence out there lacks the credibility and depth …