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!"
Not really. If journalists don't even bother to look the topic up on Google and find this story, it proves the point.
.. 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
Exactly. Two UK newspapers were found copying wholly wrong information off of Wikipedia.
Private Eye mentioned that a Times columnist edited the Wikipedia entry for "April 29th" right after the announcement for the date of the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. He added a fictitious story about Queen Victoria being rushed to hospital in Inverness after breaking a tow while fly-fishing at Balmoral.
The next day the Mirror and Telegraph reported it as fact.
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
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.
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?
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.