Well, only way to find out what biases may exist is to look at the foundation of the report. Let's look at the "Best Walking" cities.

Tops on the list of what makes a place "fitness walker friendly" are safe streets, beautiful places to walk, mild weather, and good air quality.

Here are some of the specific criteria we used. Each criterion was weighted as heavy, medium or light in terms of importance.

• % of pop that walks for exercise
• Use of mass transit
• Parks per square mile
• Points of interest per squre mile
• Avg winter/summer temperatures
• % of athletic shoe buyers
Let's see. "Beautiful places to walk?" Boy, that's not subjective, is it? Parks per square mile? How could an Oklahoma, with far less land area than, say, a Texas or a California, ever be successful here? "Points of interest?" What's interesting to you isn't interesting to me. More subjective criteria. "% athletic shoe buyers" - so the only "legitimate" walkers are those who pay >$100 for a Nike swoosh on the side of their sneaks? And they say only that they weight the criteria as "heavy, medium, or light," but don't tell you which they decided get what assessment.

The point isn't to villify their survey, or to say that OKC or Tulsa is or isn't a good place to walk; its to point out that I can come up with a dozen subjective criteria, plop it on a blog somewhere, and trumpet as "The 10 Most <Whatever> List," and no one can dispute me. It doesn't mean anything.

As far as this survey goes, what about "miles of sidewalk per house?" or "miles of sidewalk per capita?" Or "average discretionary time for walking" per capita? Maybe they're relevant, maybe not, but the point is that saying a given city finished low on the "walking list" doesn't mean squat.

And that famous "fast food capital" survey? Take a moment and look at how the results are couched:

Last year, well over half (55 percent) of Oklahoma City fast-food patrons dined in establishments like McDonald's or Wendy's
Note that the result is taken from a subset of the population - 55% of Oklahoma City fast-food patrons **not** the entire population. It doesn't say anything about the absolute rate of fast-food consumption or rate of visitation. Maybe the pool of fast-food patrons is higher or lower here, or there, but the point is you can't make a conclusion based on these half-baked statistics. The previous "winner" was Greenvile, South Carolina, with a gasp-inducing rate of 59%! Horrors!

But let's look into those numbers a bit more deeply. First, a "heavy user" was someone who visited a fast-food joint for "burgers and fries" more than 12 times per month. What's special about 12? What about 11? Would the statistical percentages and/or "winners" have changed if the number was changed? Is going to fast-food for burgers and fries 11 times a month suddenly considered healthy? How do OKC and Greenville's numbers compare there? Don't know, because the authors arbitrarily deemed them to be irrelevant.

Wikipedia reports that Greenville, South Carolina has a population of 75,000, and the greater Greenville metropolitan area encompases close to 207,000. Oklahoma City's population is listed at 531,324 (core), an 1.17 million (metropolitan).

Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that 100% of the population in both cities is a "fast food customer," even though we know by the presentation of the data that's not the case. 59% of the "core" population works out to 44,000 people in Greenville, and about 292K in OKC. What we're finding out now is that we're comparing population bases that differ by a factor of about six. But since the authors chose not to tell us what those actual numbers are, we're left to draw the conclusions they intended for us to draw.

Are we the fast-food capital of the country? Only way to find that out is to determine a raw per-capita consumption rate of fast-food items. And that number is nowhere to be found in this article.

I'm not saying we do or don't consume too much fast-food. That's not the point. (I personally do not buy into the villain-food theology, but believe in moderation in all things. The idea of 12 trips to Mickey D's in 30 days makes me want to barf). The point is that we must be willing to analyze surveys for the ultimate purpose they are designed to serve.

Lastly, in that "Men's Fitness" article, they based their "fattest cities" list on things like "gym memberships" and "time spent in traffic." Heck, I'm dumb enough to believe that if you sell me a survey about "fattest cities" you've gone to the trouble of measuring average weight, standard deviations from the mean, and other statistical analyses, not my gym habits or my driving tendencies. I could be a member of 3 gyms and never visit them, and I could commute to-and-from work 100 miles a day but still run 5 miles every night. The point is that the criteria are arbitrary and meaningless, and the points of each predetermined. Men's Fitness wants men to lose weight; that's great. So what if I live in a city they think is "fat?" The Commonwealth group wants socialized medicine, so they put out a survey about "worst" health care. Someone wants to blame TV ads for making kids fat, so they release a study that shows a correlation, but not a causation and since no one bothers to understand the difference, some people start running around like a headless chicken thinking we suddenly have to "do" something about TV ads - completely igorning the fact that TV ads have zero calories.

Sorry to rant on about this, but I get so tired of junk science, junk surveys, and manipulated statistics based on arbitrary criteria that are then used to make or reinforce premediated conclusions. If you want to convince me of something as fact, give me factual, absolute research, not this claptrap our USA Today "Poll of the Day" graphic pseudeo journalistic subculture has inspired.

-soonerdave