Slashdot Mirror
A New Explanation For the Plight of Winter Babies
Ant passes along a Wall Street Journal report on research that turned up a new explanation for the lifelong challenges experienced by winter babies. "Children born in the winter months already have a few strikes against them. Study after study has shown that they test poorly, don't get as far in school, earn less, are less healthy, and don't live as long as children born at other times of year. Researchers have spent years documenting the effect and trying to understand it... A key assumption of much of that research is that the backgrounds of children born in the winter are the same as the backgrounds of children born at other times of the year. ... [Economist] Mr. Hungerman was doing research on sibling behavior when he noticed that children in the same families tend to be born at the same time of year. Meanwhile, Ms. Buckles was examining the economic factors that lead to multiple births, and coming across what looked like a relationship between mothers' education levels and when children were born." Here's a chart in which the effect — small but significant — jumps out unmistakeably.
... and all this time I was pissed because my birthday wasn't on xmass and I didnt get twice the presents. Wish i knew the kids were doomed to being dumbasses. Now I wear my summer birthday(suit) with pride.
yeah srsly, citing a Ph.D GPA? u r doing it wrong
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
grammer Nazi's:
'gra-mer nat-sees, n.
The kind of people who's goal in life are to point out you're mistakes.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
So you are telling me that Saturn is somehow connected to the S&P 500? Or that Sunspots are responsible for US GDP? How far are we allowed to take this? How different is this study to the two I've mentioned?
That is not what the study is saying. The author's of the study claim that it simply means that relatively more winter babies are born to unmarried and less educated mothers. The Wall street journal claims the study has found an explanation for the "lifelong challenges" of winter babies, as did the Slashdot summary. You've claimed something else? What will the tabloid newspapers claim? "Winter babies unhealthy, uneducated, unemployed?" How far do you think they'll go with it? When were you born?
This study has not proved anything. It hasn't even suggested anything. It offers no reasoned explanation for its finding, with even the authors leaving such matters (proms and spring break) to the speculation of the reader. Is this how we do and accept research? Crunching two sets of numbers, finding a 1.2% overall spread in figures and then declaring that people born in winter suffer from a lifelong plight, without even bothering to provide genuine reasoning or enlightenment. Is that ethical? Is it scientific? Is this how we uncover the world?
This is a position which I fundamentally reject. Stephen Hales and Thomas_Young established causative and quantitative links before statistics had even been invented. Correlation is neither a neccessary nor a sufficient condition to establish any relationship between two variables. We cannot understand the world by computing correlation coefficients between data sets. If we continue to rely on them in this way, our understanding of the world will be reduced to the tunnel vision seen in the Slashdot headline; "Winter babies weaker, sicker, poorer, less intelligent".
Theories are about more than finding linear relationships between variables. They are about obtaining a complete and comprehensive understanding of phenomena, on a qualitative and quantitative level. You do not need correlation studies to do this, and you certainly cannot present them as an end result in and of themselves. Yet that's what people do. Take a database, mix it all around, get r=0.2 and a range of 1% and just throw it out in a paper. Let people make whatever they want of it. And they do.
Correlation is not causation, and it is not the modern Oracle of Delphi, revealing great truths. It's more likely to mislead than inform. So why should we trust it now? Read up on Hill's criteria of causation and ask yourself; How many of these (minimal) conditions did the researchers in this study actually establish?
May the Maths Be with you!