Slashdot Mirror
Exposing the Link Between Cell Phones and Fertility
ApharmdB writes "We frequently gripe about the poor quality of science reporting by the media. A Guardian blogger from the mathematics department at Queen Mary, University of London has made a honeypot press release to see how bad it can get. (Or maybe to have some fun trolling the media?) The statistic used is the strong link between the number of mobile phone masts in an area and the number of live births. Of course, there is no causal link because they are both instead based on a 3rd variable, the local population size. Slashdot readers can keep on eye on news sources over the weekend to see just how much traction the story gets and watch the train wreck in real-time!"
why would you post this, you are throwing off his experiment
.. a whopping 99.44 percent of hardened heroin addicts started out drinking milk!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
The numbers fail to take into account the impact of global temperatures on the local temperatures in the room where the babies are born, and completely ignores the impact of changes in the number of seagoing pirates on each of those factors. Completely irresponsible.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This guy should have let the "honeypot" article sit around and see what happens first, rather than having the explanation article AND have it be posted on slashdot. Doing this interferes with the experiment by making it less likely to be picked up - anyone who reads the slashdot article (or the article it links to) first will not believe and propagate the honeypot article.
-Bill
I'm pretty sure the article has no opinion on the link between the local population size and birth rate (where obviously the birth rate is proportional to the local population size). It means to test people's aptitude to incorrectly jump to a casual link between two related--but definitely not causally related--variables.
http://bit.ly/fU1LY6 (links to a PDF)
It went out on the 16th.
wot no sig
What I want to know is, why are families with autistic children so keen on living near highways? I think it's because they're hoping their kid gets run over.
Don't own a tin foil hat may be there's a hidden agenda. For instance: gullibility ?
Of course, there is no causal link because they are both instead based on a 3rd variable, the local population size.
Aha, but births cause population. This could be a vicious circle with cell phone towers boosting the birth rate which leads to a higher population which buy more cell phones leading to the construction of more towers.
There's strong evidence to show that the dinosaurs never developed cell phones, and they died out.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Don't joke about DHMO! It is very dangerous. It is now Long Beach police policy to shoot people if they point device that can spay DHMO at a officer, even if more than 40 feet away.
He doesn't want to make something that is difficult to check sources on. The biggest problem isn't journalists reporting on things that are hard to properly check. I mean you also walk a line between being extremely late in bringing things to people's attention or not bringing up an important story because there just inst' enough confirmation, and reporting something that isn't true. I agree in general that journalists today fall way too far on the side of just report everything you can't disprove.
However this is targeting a bigger problem: Journalists that don't even TRY. They find a story and just run it, they don't do any checking at ALL. This will expose people like that because it isn't as though this one will be hard to check up on, you can even find out what is going on on Slashdot (and probably other places). So any who get snagged by this are as lazy as it comes, and just publish whatever they find with zero additional checking.
That, I think, would be valuable to see.
If we see this reported at all in the Rupert Murdoch sector of the media, I predict it will be misinterpreted as a claim by anti-business liberal alarmist scientists that cellphones are bad for you.
The report says that the towers result in 17.6 more births. I guess you can credit modern medicine for keeping all of those .6 babies alive, but really, what kind of existence will they have?
I really wish journalists had to pass an introductory statistics course in order to "practice" their trade. One of the biggest bloopers that seems to come up over and over again in mainstream media, at least in the English-speaking press, are assertions that marriage makes men healthier, and makes them wealthier, and so on.
:)
Of course, that gets the direction of causality exactly wrong. Higher income and net worth is almost perfectly correlated with levels of health (Dutch study nailed this pretty well) and as any guy in a UK or American city will tell you, money is to marriage-crazed females what honey is to bees.
But the MSM can't take the necessary 45 seconds to think through correlation and causality. This statistical illiteracy in media has been a huge practical joke waiting to happen and I'm glad someone finally put out the plant. This should be awesome to watch unfold
Hello? Yeah, OK, how is babby formed? can you hear me? Just went into a tunnel...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
But causation causes correlation.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
They already know it's wrong. Most news is not factual, it is social (and usually aimed to entertain than inform). As long as it gets enough (uninformed) people reading, perhaps by reinforcing prejudices or exaggerating the faults of other ingroups then they will write down as many misleading things as they can. The illiteracy is a feature that will not go away because it serves too many purposes.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/12/17/each-cell-phone-tower-creates-18-babies-the-difference-between-causation-correlation/
as any guy in a UK or American city will tell you, money is to marriage-crazed females what honey is to bees.
So the money's actually created by the women? Is the husband like the bee keeper who periodically collects the money/honey for his own purposes?
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
The highway in this context means living within 1,000 feet of the heavily trafficked cross-town expressway.
The researchers theorized that the type and sheer quantity of chemicals distributed on highways are different from those on even the busiest city roadways.
at I want to know is, why are families with autistic children so keen on living near highways? I think it's because they're hoping their kid gets run over.
More likely it's because they can afford the rent.
Matt Parker finds future references to his blog dwindling to zero.
Even to prove a point it's a bad idea to sabotage your own credibility.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
This guy should have let the "honeypot" article sit around and see what happens first, rather than having the explanation article AND have it be posted on slashdot. Doing this interferes with the experiment by making it less likely to be picked up - anyone who reads the slashdot article (or the article it links to) first will not believe and propagate the honeypot article.
A lack of inaccurate articles (alleging a causal relationship between cell towers and high birth rates) may not be caused by the explanation and the posting to slashdot. Rather, it could be caused by a third factor: Nobody gives a damn what this guy says.
I think the media is VERY aware. The media has an agenda, what that agenda is not the same for all media but you can see it clearly by how a story plays OR doesn't play. Girl in train is assaulted by 5 people, beaten with a hammer, 6th helps them escape by knocking out a window. The police description released to help find them says they got tinted skins, meaning in Holland and considering the area muslims. Now can you guys how few media happened to report this story at all and even if they did write down the police description?
But is the agenda left-leaning? Maybe BUT the non-reporting of skin tone of crimes leads those who think immigrants are to blame for everything to assume any crime reported without mention of race are immigrants. Not all crimes are done by immigrants but now people think they are because they assume the media is hiding it.
So what is the real motive of the media in hiding facts?
Could it be that the press reports on non-stories to bury stories they don't want to pay attention to? Far easier to publish a non-story like this then to deal with the backlash of reporting on crimes with racial data. Fill the newspapers with fluff, nobody bombs your offices for fluff.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I would think the link to the number of *stillbirths* would be much more effective!
They should have linked the cell phone towers to *stillbirths* (which I assume would correlate just as well). Then the article would have gone everywhere!
Available for a limited time only!
iProgenyProtector
200 lbs of the finest German lead will encase your iPhone so that your future children will be protected. iProgenyProtector will ensure that harmful EM radiation do not leave the Bauhaus inspired design.
FAQ
Why is the iProgenyProtector so hard to move?
The iProgenyProtector is proactive in ensuring your future offspring. As such it limits your calls only to where you place the iProgenyProtector. Fewer calls means more children!
Wouldn't being encased in all that lead make it hard to send any receive any signals?
After numerous investigations is appears that customers have merely been holding it wrong. Please curl up in a ball and squeeze into the case to make a call.
Available now for $1999 in dark grey and medium dark grey. White will be available in 2011--Er--2012
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Every time my wife sees another tower going up, she says, "Well fuck me! They're putting up another one of those damned towers."
Have gnu, will travel.
Isn't explaining the hoax in the article itself going to prevent the media from taking up the story as intended ?
Crop circles.
Have gnu, will travel.
.. non-hypothesis-based data analysis. Take, for instance, some health data that was overlaid with GIS data at a health authority I worked at a few years back. One of the more curious combinations that popped up was the fact that there were a higher number of Leukemia cases in households that lived under high power electricity lines. We were all about to unanimously blame the cancer on the long-period-exposure to EMF, when someone who lived in the area brought up a good point... properties under the lines were less expensive that those properties away from the lines, and therefore more attractive to lower-income families - the very same lower income families whose eating habits are generally lower on the nutrition scale. ie: higher carbs & fats, with less roughage, antioxidants, etc, which all helps to contribute to poorer health.
"Yes, I have a Disaster Recovery Plan. It's called my Resume"
You're holding it wrong
So far I have found the honeypot release reprinted or linked to the guardian article at:
zmarter.com
esciencenews.com
tweetmeme.com
wn.com
topsy.com
tingly.com
scandalnews.com
and johornews.com
I can only hope at all the idiots driving around with cell phones glued to their heads will become sterile.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
They are causally related.
More adults cause the installation of more cell phone towers, and higher birth rates cause more adults.
So higher birth cause more cell phone towers, although with a 20 year lag or so. If a place has X births, and another place has 3X births, in 20 years the second place will have probably added 3X times more cell towers as the first added. (Obviously, other population-affecting variables could happen also.)
There is a logical error in using these results, to prove that though, because, right now, cell towers are the result of birth rates 20-60 years ago.
Although, if you did that study, people obviously wouldn't come to the erroneous conclusion the study is trying to get people to leap to. (They would, instead, come to an even more erroneous one that cell phone radiation travels backwards in time to cause more fertility.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
If you want to see how much traction false media stories can achieve, just look at pretty much every second news item.
This is why discussion forums are so important; so that people from diverse backgrounds can network and compare notes and at least make an attempt to figure out what is really going on.
News stories are usually, I find, only valuable in terms of meta-information which can be used to extrapolate reality. Deliberately poisoning the mix with lame information is nothing new, the only difference here is that in this particular case, we've been let in on the starting point of the corruption.
-FL