As a techie and journalist, I'm all for more open government and the movement to put more government data online. But at the same time I find some of these site

As a techie and journalist, I'm all for more open government and the movement to put more government data online. But at the same time I find some of these sites, particularly from this list Data Masher, somewhat disturbing. For those unfamiliar with it, Data Masher allows you to combine two data sources with simple operators (+,-, etc.) and create maps and tables with the results. But how informative is this, really? Does dividing"Violent Crime rate per 100k pop" with the "percent of households with firearms" result in any sort of useful statistic? No, since violent crimes covers a broad swath of criminal activity, including rape and aggrevated assault, which may or may not involve a gun. I would argue presenting this manner of dis-information as having any kind of factual validity is just irresponsible. It also seriously irks me that most, if not all, of the data provided lacks any kind of study details, even basics such as margin of error or sample size. Unless I'm seriously missing something, there is no way to measure the accuracy or validity of these statistics other than to say "Oh, well that data's from the CDC so it must be accurate." After all, the government IS always right. Not good enough.