By the numbers at Consumers Union.(Have You Heard?)

Eaters of chicken and readers of major news media may be forgiven for feeling confused. CONSUMER REPORTS told you that 83 percent of the 525 chickens we tested for our January issue carried bacteria that could make you very sick. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose job it is to keep our cacciatore clean, labeled our study "junk science," without even learning our methodology. "There's virtually nothing or any conclusion that anyone could draw from 500 samples," said a USDA spokesman.

So wrong. The USDA failed to consider how deeply our team of statisticians and scientists is involved in designing and analyzing our studies. We didn't pluck 525 chickens out of thin air. We factored in statistical confidence levels and our previous chicken analyses and told shoppers in 23 states exactly how many chickens of which brands to buy in which stores on what day of the week.

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That's par for the course at CONSUMER REPORTS. Here are a few of the other ways our statisticians ensure that our work is objective and scientifically sound:

Paint by numbers. Outside our headquarters and on the roof are racks with row upon row of wooden boards, each colored with up to nine paints or stains. There they stay for years to test weathering. But the character of the wood can vary slightly from board to board and throw off the results. So before a brush is dipped, our statisticians design a random pattern of the paints, using each sample more than once. Then they help ...