If I were losing that many people to malaria I don't think I'd care much what the WHO had to say about it. I'd place an order for the stuff and spray away.
If the WHO wants to get dosed in DDT they can show up and complain about it.
As to studies... I have to believe they can do lab studies on it in the US. Use it in the open? No... but in a lab? Feed it to the rats? Sure. Why not? They take apart the cute little critters brains and feed them worse so why not a little DDT in the kibble?
Put it back in your pants hero boy. There is not, and never was, any WHO ban on DDT use to fight malarial mosquitoes, or any other disease vector. Notice the key words: "WHO approved". http://www.alibaba.com/product...
The anti DDT lobby could arguably be cited for much of the annual death toll to malaria which if deliberate would put them up there with the nastiest powers ever.
The kids getting sprayed with DDT in the face didn't suffer ill effects. Everyone has seen those old videos of the kids in the pool sprayed with DDT. And that is used as an example of hubris.
But... do they cite how many of those kids that got sprayed... In the face... actually suffered any kind of ill effects?
Nope. On that point they go dark for some reason. Which is odd because if there were ill effects you'd assume they'd cite them. It would have made their case stronger. But... nothing. Which contextually implies that they didn't cite it because actually there weren't any ill effects.
Does DDT harm eagles? Apparently. If I had to choose between eagles and millions of my own people annually... I'd fucking genocide the eagles. I mean... I'd try and keep the species going in a zoo or something. But I'm not sacrificing millions of people for some eagles.
Oh BS on the "anti DDT lobby could arguably be cited for much of the annual death toll to malaria " lie. If for no other reason, that there was never any ban on using DDT to fight malaria mosquitoes; it is only banned for commercial use, like cotton plantations. And, if you have any sort of understanding of resistance, you will realize that ending the 99% of DDT use (not exaggerating) that does not involve malaria will extend the effectiveness of the 1% of use which still remains, because you're not making resistant mosquitoes as a side effect.
And that's exactly what happened. DDT is not used in malaria fighting in places like Ceylon, which were covered in DDT saturated cotton plantations previously, and where the mosquitoes remain resistant. DDT is still used in places like South America, however, where cotton was never a big crop and mosquitoes didn't develop the same level of resistance.
But if you find you are having a problem with malarial mosquitoes around your house, get yourself 20 metric tons of DDT. http://www.alibaba.com/product...
"...the graphical and informational figures flunk every Tufte test, which is unfortunate" -- Says so much about the author of the post..06% increase in a data set of this size is compelling? It stinks when the data doesn't fit one's preconceived notions.That's one of the the beauties of science and why healthy scepticism is required.
Mm. Looking at their tables yet again I discover that the median number of visits for cardiology is 18. (total visits, not per hundred). That's the specialty with the highest number of visits. I think the next highest number was 10. Good grief.
PLOS is a for-pay journal publishing junk science that feeds the confirmation bias of the malcontents that inhabit places like Slashdot.
PLOS has its plusses and minuses. For those who really believe in Open Science and making the data available to the widest audience possible, it's a bold step forward. But there is also the perception that publishing in PLOS is one step above self-publishing; if your list of publications contains a lot of PLOS, you're viewed as a dud.
Note that during that study period sales at McDonalds across the nation were dropping. We thus can conclude that reduced sales at McDonalds leads to higher number of hospital visits.
Actually, you may have something; the paper states that the number of hospital visits went down over the period. Both nationally, and also in the fracking areas. If you wonder exactly how that leads to the conclusion "fracking linked to more hospital admissions" you're not alone.
You weren't wondering at all. If you were really interested you would have read the article. You're just trying to pick at this with your own personal agenda and you don't give a flying fuck what the facts are. A typical goose stepper.
He who steps with the goose must be careful of stepping on the goose's gifts.
from people being employed in the areas had nothing to do with more people going to hospitals
The proper experimental control is to take three regions that went from no fracking to fracking, and three other regions that went from no fracking-like revenue to a fracking-similar amount of fracking-like revenue so as to match the upticks in net employment.
Obviously for natural experiments, this is not always easy to pull off (and your detractors will necessarily claim you didn't succeed no matter how far you go).
So why don't you just cut to the chase and declare that all natural experiments are moist excrement? Is there any standard for a controlled natural experiment you'd actually accept? From the structure of your comment I suspect not, as you never once mention the caliber of controls actually used (which is, for maximal troll-seed efficiency, entirely beneath the notice of those who reject the entire category).
Done right, I view this as a form of agile econometrics. First you see what clears the fence under modest controls, before gold-plating round two.
On the other side, blanket cynicism is a crutch of the anti-progressive mindset.
Yes, but... they do have, not quite before and after with a control, but timed data over a period where fracking was increasing, to a different degree in the different areas. That's as good as before and after, in some ways better though more complex (as you say, controlling for income would be nice).
The big problem is that, given this, they found NO effect. And published anyway
If working on a drilling rig causes enough injuries to cause a statistically visible increase in hospital visits, you're looking at one of two things:
1) An incredibly small population.
2) An incredibly dangerous working environment.
In the case of #2, that's a working environment dangerous to the degree where they are definitely skipping required safety measures.
Ah, but there's a subtle point they mention in the discussion of limitations to the study: any added hospitalizations from the workers are added to the numerator of the rate, but the number of workers is not added to the denominator, which is just the permanent residents of the area. So you are essentially guaranteed to raise the hospitalization rate, just by that process.
That's controlled for by the randomness of the counties involved - both changes before and after drilling, and with no-drilling areas in the same region as controls
It accounts for the fact that having drilling rigs is going to increase hospital visits because it's inherently more dangerous? I would be surprised if the placement of any drilling rig did not raise the visits to hospitals.
It just seems like a really bad metric as the effects of Fracking, if in fact there were any, would take much longer to manifest.
Bingo on both points; they do mention them, however, where they discuss limitations of the study. They don't discuss the biggest limitation, however, which is that they didn't actually find any effect.
You should know by now that "peer review" is just a fancy word for having your buddies fawn over your crap.
Climate science and "Social Science" have perverted the peer review process into a politically correct old boys club.
Boldly expressed like somebody who doesn't have the faintest idea of how science, publishing, and peer review are done.
Your peers doing the peer review are your competitors in a cutthroat competition for ever more scarce research funding. It's like getting Chrysler and Ford to peer review GM.
I would be interested to hear your concept of how "having your buddies fawn over your cra" leads to getting more research money, though. Could it be you're confusing peer review with "having the corporate board set executive pay"?
That's controlled for by the randomness of the counties involved - both changes before and after drilling, and with no-drilling areas in the same region as controls (the control county had a drilling ban because it was in the Delaware River watershed). The admissions were largely not due to accidents - cardiology admissions were the strongest correlated. However, the authors don't identify the particular causative factors. They speculate, for example, that it might be diesel exhaust from all of the work vehicles that could be a causative agent. Another speculation is that the development of the industry has changed the demographics of drilling areas.
We really shouldn't be surprised that living next to industry in general isn't good for one's health, just from these sort of factors alone. Exhaust from heavy work vehicles, noise, dust, etc aren't famously conducive to good health. Even living next to a busy road is correlated with negative health effects.
A real problem with the study is, as they wrote, "Given that our modeling approach cannot account for within zip code demographic changes over the study period,". Curiously, while there were positive correlations between wells and health problems in most fields, there were negative correlations in gynecology and orthopedics. They remark "However, within the medical categories of gynecology and orthopedics, inpatient prevalence rates are expected to decrease each year by around 13–14% and 3–4%, respectively. Despite this surprising result, it is unclear why gynecology and orthopedics inpatient prevalence rates are decreasing each year. It is unlikely that these decreasing rates are related to the increased hydro-fracking activity." I'm surprised that they were allowed to get away with this - you shouldn't be allowed to credit increases to an industrial effect while just dismissing data (quite significant data) that doesn't match your hypothesis. There could be actually very useful information about the validity of their overall study and their conclusions in the reason for why gynecological inpatient cases are declining. For example, perhaps the demographics are changing to a lower percentage of women due to the arrival of the drilling industry. Men have shorter average lifespans and in particular a higher rate of cardiovascular disease.
To me, this is a really big hole in their study, and again I'm surprised it passed peer review with it there. But apart from that, I see no problem with the study, so long as people don't overinterpret the results. It's a very broad, generalized study focused entirely on correlation and not causation.
How is it controlled for by randomness? If you're randomizing a population for cardiology admissions, for instance, after you randomize you run a t-test or F-test or similar between your groups to demonstrate that there is NO significant difference in rates at the beginning of the intervention. In this case, the significant difference was there both before and after the introduction of the fracking. If there was any randomization (hard to argue there was, choice of area to do fracking in is NOT random), it would be classified as a failed randomization and need to be redone.
The funny one is, I personally "live near fracking sites" and laugh at how incredibly uneducated about fracking the standard anti-fracking person is. For example, most of what people call fracking sites are actually just gas wells with no active fracking happening. They don't seem to realize that fracking only happens for a few weeks at specific locations where the gas is hard to extract. Maybe a week when they first drill the well, and then some maintenance fracking when gas production slows down. It's not continuous.
They also notice the elevated methane levels in the air around here compared to LA, yet don't seem to realize that the cows around here that are missing in LA might possibly be a contributing factor to that. That and the methane levels around here are still 1/100th of what's considered a safe level.
Yeah, fracking has become a synonym for everything bad associated with oil and gas extraction. Much as gluten and/or GMO have become catchall terms for everything wrong with our agricultural industry.
Extraction sites tend to be located in under developed rural areas where income levels are lower than in highly populated urban centers. Although there are oil pumps scattered throughout some of the wealthy suburbs of LA that are hidden by clever landscaping. They could discover vast oil and gas fields under any large city but the costs to get at such a resource is astronomical. Energy resource extraction has always been dangerous, dirty, expensive, and controversial. But the fact is even those complaining the loudest against exploiting fossil fuels directly benefit from the oil,,gas, and petroleum products produced. The environment also takes a major hit when extracting the rare earth elements needed for building all of our modern day electronics. Everything from computers, cell phones, and cruise missiles. The toxicity emanating from these mining areas is almost as dangerous as a open nuclear waste landfill. The US closed down almost all of the rare earth element mines because the cost of satisfying the EPA requirements made it cheaper just to buy the rare earth elements mined in foreign countries.
An acre of oil field pays better than an acre of farmland. However, an acre of downtown Houston pays better than an acre of oil field.
The study authors say there was no fracking in 2007, and lots in 2011.
They then say (quoting):
"The inpatient rates are relatively stable from 2007â"2011 Indeed, the average overall inpatient prevalence rates for 2007â"2011 are, respectively, 15.18, 15.30, 14.86, 14.00, 14.25"
So the introduction of fracking did NOT increase hospital admissions. Indeed, over the four year that the economy in the area got a boost from fracking, people got healthier, according to the numbers in the study.
Then then do a bunch of gymnastics to discover, then obscure, the fact that oil wells tend to be located in more rural areas, and people's health tends to be slightly worse in those areas.
yes, bingo! i'm glad to see somebody interprets the data shown in the same way I do.
This is not a "correlation is causation" scam. This is a "researcher degrees of freedom" scam. If you look at enough different variables you'll get a statistically significant result by chance.
The summary and title are not entirely honest. They looked not at "hospital admissions" but at "hospital admissions by discharge code. From all of this they found statistically significant correlations with cardiology and neurology inpatient rates being deemed significant. What does this mean?
The only thing it can mean is "further study is needed". Instead of looking at everything under the sun, researchers will need to look specifically at these variables and control for potentially confounding factors, such as a set of doctors or a hospital that begins admitting cardiology patients that they ordinarily would have discharged for home monitoring.
When you look at this many potential variables and sift out any hits the opportunity for false positives is large. This sort of preliminary study can be an important first step in epidemiology. It can also be an important step in pseudo-scientific scams. This kind of study gives us "super-foods" that everybody has to have because of their supposed health benefits. The differentiating factor is the follow-up studies that are done. Standing on its own, this study is meaningless with regard to fracking causing anything.
No, they did a Bonferroni correction; this is a correction for multiple tests, i.e. looking at 25 different discharge code categories you can't use p.05 any more, because that means you'd find one bogus correlation out of every 20 tests. The Bonferroni version is.00096 for 25 simultaneous tests which I'll take their word for, meaning that you'd only expect to see a bogus correlation in basically 1 out of a thousand tests, which off the top of my head seems OK if you're only doing 25. This is the part where the post above suggests that "the statistical and medical data are compelling", I guess. But the actual question being asked is not compelling, as they have picked a time period where fracking increased greatly, but not showed any change in the rates of hospital admission over that time. Basically, they've just showed that places where we frack nowadays have had a lot of cardiology admits since before we started fracking there.
Thanks. I did see his link on Google but there was no mention to a specific "test".
Makes sense.
The ultimate Tufte test, of course, was at the Rogers Commission on the Space Shuttle Failure; Feynman dipping the O-ring in ice water and showing that it lost its resilience for a few seconds, vs the voluminous pages of tables and diagrams produced by engineers before the launch which had failed to communicate the same message, despite containing the data correctly describing the phenomenon with great precision.
They are trying hard to pull a 'correlation is causation' scam
Except that in this case we have an intervention study, as some areas started fracking activity while other did not. Therefore looking at data versus time will tell us something.
And I also not we have explanations for causation. I see two obvious: chemical leaks, and nocebo effect.
But I can't see where they really looked at data versus time, in the way we need to see; ie. we'd like to see increase in fracking (in any of a number of metrics) associated with increase in hospitalization rate. Ideally it would be a nice continuous function. At minimum, four numbers: baseline hospitalization rate before (b) and after (a) fracking, in places with (1) and without (2) fracking. We'd need to see that (a1-b1)> (a2-b2). I do not see that anywhere in the paper. In fact, they state explicitly that the hospitalization rate within any zip code did not change much over the 5 years, and that the fracking increased greatly. Given that time sequence, it's more accurate to say the hospitalization rate causes the fracking than the other way around.
Also, receiving a monthly royalty check from the gas company increases your disposable income, and means you can spend more on things like health care.
Similarly, as they said, fracking areas may have more temporary residents employed doing the fracking, which would raise the hospital admissions but not the denominator they used, which was the number of PERMANENT residents, thereby raising the admission rate.
My peer review is to not publish it. "the graphical and informational figures flunk every Tufte test, which is unfortunate" for sure; and when you plow through that and the equally befuddling verbiage, the actual evidence is pretty thin.
What I'd like to see but can't seem to find in the paper: that hospital admissions INCREASED in zip codes where fracking came in, more so than in those without, around and after the time fracking started. The evidence given, however, appears to be that hospital admissions are now more frequent in said zip codes, after 5 years of fracking. But it should be no surprise to anybody that there is variation in hospital admission by zip code; and we've known for decades that there seem to be disease clusters associated with certain geological types of area; that some of these regions might be frackable shale is equally possible in the absence of any time-related data
What is particularly shooting themselves in the foot:
"Fig 3 also shows that, within each zip code, the contribution by year was comparable, suggesting that within each zip code, the inpatient rates are relatively stable from 2007–2011 Indeed, the average overall inpatient prevalence rates for 2007–2011 are, respectively, 15.18, 15.30, 14.86, 14.00, 14.25. This indicates that on average, zip code overall inpatient prevalence rates were relatively stable or possibly declining from 2007 to 2011, which mirrors national trends." but
"In 2007, the majority of zip codes have no wells, but by 2011, the majority of zip codes have at least 1 well."
If I'm reading this right, the areas having higher hospital admissions in 2011, and also have more wells, also had more admissions in 2007, although most of them had no wells then. ???? And the only time correlation they have is that more fracking overall correlates with fewer admissions over all. "National trends" OK, but wouldn't it be better proof if the places where fracking increased actually increased admissions? The best they can say here is that national trends suggest that fracking is not necessarily responsible for the reduction in admissions in those areas.
Similarly, "investigating the association between number of wells and inpatient prevalence rates and the association between well density and inpatient prevalence rates." They're ignoring the changes in well density over time vs changes in inpatient prevalence rate over time?
It's possible I am missing something, given the befuddled presentation (not being insulting here, been there myself, to present one's research in such a way as to make a compelling case is a form of fiction writing rather than historical reporting).
Credit to them for honesty regarding the limitations of the study in the discussion. I don't think they're trying to fudge anything.
BTW, I am not a Friend of Fracking or the petroleum industry in any form.
2.) Lowest bidder was the lowest bidder because they plan on using substandard materials.
3.) Resulting road falls apart in 4-5 years (or less).
4.) Go to 1.
There is no desire or advantage to build roads that don't need to be rebuilt very few years. The Free Market(TM) and your (and my) tax dollars at work. Everybody wins (road contractors, car dealers, repair shops, etc.) but the people who have to drive on the crappy roads.
Hey, who remembers the I-84 widening project in CT in the early 2000s, where the contractor installed the catch basins upside down? And the firm doing the inspection signed off on them, so the contractor wasn't liable for the costs of fixing it?
Ah, memories.
Bumpers are all but useless. My '68 Caprice had bumpers you could use to knock down light poles at 30mph. Not that I would have ever done such a thing. Sober.
Under the expensive but flimsy plastic bumper cover, however, is a nice metal beam which is quite good at stopping things from putting a crimp into the sheet metal. which is quite a bit better than what we had in the years between big solid bumpers, and when the gov decided to mandate minimum bumper requirements.
Here in Arizona we are laying a lot of rubber roads: more durable, quieter, and no more mountains of old tires. It's like driving on carpet. But in accidents, they can catch fire.
then you can use concrete tires which should last a long time.
Make highways out of silly putty. resilient enough to drive over, but self healing for potholes etc.
Make them deep enough and no worries about abandoned cars.
It's a frikkin meal plan, not a religion. Stop preaching at me.
And how. I'm going to catch more go die in a fire comments here, but a long time ago, I was told by a wise man that he considered vegetarians to be high risk people as far as being suitable for sensitive jobs.:full disclaimer - I tried vegatarianism for a while.
While I don't hold his opinion that vegetarians and vegans are mentally ill, In many ways, the concept of not eating meat products enters the arena of "This is good, this is bad" applied to eating, and life.
Someone perhaps a little high strung wants to be "good" The animal is cute or nice, therefore eating it is "bad'. Anything with a face is bad. And somehow the cow needs to give express written consent (just like the National Football league) for us to use her milk. Then trying to bring some consistency to their life, they start judging every single aspect of what they do, against some idealized goodness or badness. So some end up becoming full blown vegans, and imagine that their "goodness" makes them superior beings.
Which might be related to how damn annoying they are, just like those people who knock at my door wanting to talk about their version of Jesus. They start evangelizing about their superiority. We had one who single handedly blew up our office socializing with her constant lectures, and impossible to ever find a eating establishment that would suit, and luchtime lectures and glares if you had the temerity to eat a meat product at lunch. When she left, we had a going away party the day after she left town. Hamburgers and cheese fries and milkshakes all around.
Lest the paleo types feel too superior, they do much of the same.
But the news is. My eating cute little bunny rabbits doesn't make me evil. If I felt the need to make their death as cruel and painful as I could - yeah, that would be evil. Which is why I eat all manner of meat, but not veal - that shit ain't right.
All life is precious. Plant life is not all that far removed from animal life. Besides, it is a unchallengeable truth that the only life forms that do not kill or exploit other forms of life are chemoautotrophs. So we do what nature has meant for us to do.
A vegan, ruthlessly slicing through their food, cutting and boiling grilling and sautéing, causing death to living things, is not immune to this. They also kill. And eating those living plant organisms raw is like biting into a living animal. The live cells go into their mouths only to be dissolved by their digestive system in a strong acid solution. The only way they can avoid the fate of all living beings is to become a breatharian. Then after the inevitable happens, they will destroy no more living things. They will have achieved their goal.
Yes, people who refuse to eat birds and mammals and fish are a bit nuts, whereas people who refuse to eat cockroaches and earthworms and puppies are perfectly rational.
> People are so weird about food some times. I can
> mention liking veggie burgers in here, and some folk
> go nuts, like I'm a radical vegan.
This. I've never understood what it is with people obsessing over other peoples' dietary preferences and trying to impose their own or convince the other that they're wrong.
When I was vegetarian, I got grief from both meat eaters (Oh noes... how will I get all the right proteins?) and vegans (Don't you know that by eating cheese, you're still supporting the meat-industrial complex?). Plain old ova-lacto vegetarians are pretty chill now that I eat meat again. Vegans are still vegans. But now the "paleo" crowd attacks normal omnivorous people for not being level-20 prestige-class meat-eaters. And now there's the gluten-is-poison thing.
It's a frikkin meal plan, not a religion. Stop preaching at me.
And now, gluten free has somehow become a moral crusade.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were losing that many people to malaria I don't think I'd care much what the WHO had to say about it. I'd place an order for the stuff and spray away.
If the WHO wants to get dosed in DDT they can show up and complain about it.
As to studies... I have to believe they can do lab studies on it in the US. Use it in the open? No... but in a lab? Feed it to the rats? Sure. Why not? They take apart the cute little critters brains and feed them worse so why not a little DDT in the kibble?
Put it back in your pants hero boy. There is not, and never was, any WHO ban on DDT use to fight malarial mosquitoes, or any other disease vector. Notice the key words: "WHO approved". http://www.alibaba.com/product...
Yep.
The anti DDT lobby could arguably be cited for much of the annual death toll to malaria which if deliberate would put them up there with the nastiest powers ever.
The kids getting sprayed with DDT in the face didn't suffer ill effects. Everyone has seen those old videos of the kids in the pool sprayed with DDT. And that is used as an example of hubris.
But... do they cite how many of those kids that got sprayed... In the face... actually suffered any kind of ill effects?
Nope. On that point they go dark for some reason. Which is odd because if there were ill effects you'd assume they'd cite them. It would have made their case stronger. But... nothing. Which contextually implies that they didn't cite it because actually there weren't any ill effects.
Does DDT harm eagles? Apparently. If I had to choose between eagles and millions of my own people annually... I'd fucking genocide the eagles. I mean... I'd try and keep the species going in a zoo or something. But I'm not sacrificing millions of people for some eagles.
Oh BS on the "anti DDT lobby could arguably be cited for much of the annual death toll to malaria " lie. If for no other reason, that there was never any ban on using DDT to fight malaria mosquitoes; it is only banned for commercial use, like cotton plantations. And, if you have any sort of understanding of resistance, you will realize that ending the 99% of DDT use (not exaggerating) that does not involve malaria will extend the effectiveness of the 1% of use which still remains, because you're not making resistant mosquitoes as a side effect.
And that's exactly what happened. DDT is not used in malaria fighting in places like Ceylon, which were covered in DDT saturated cotton plantations previously, and where the mosquitoes remain resistant. DDT is still used in places like South America, however, where cotton was never a big crop and mosquitoes didn't develop the same level of resistance.
But if you find you are having a problem with malarial mosquitoes around your house, get yourself 20 metric tons of DDT. http://www.alibaba.com/product...
"...the graphical and informational figures flunk every Tufte test, which is unfortunate" -- Says so much about the author of the post. .06% increase in a data set of this size is compelling? It stinks when the data doesn't fit one's preconceived notions.That's one of the the beauties of science and why healthy scepticism is required.
Mm. Looking at their tables yet again I discover that the median number of visits for cardiology is 18. (total visits, not per hundred). That's the specialty with the highest number of visits. I think the next highest number was 10. Good grief.
PLOS is a for-pay journal publishing junk science that feeds the confirmation bias of the malcontents that inhabit places like Slashdot.
PLOS has its plusses and minuses. For those who really believe in Open Science and making the data available to the widest audience possible, it's a bold step forward. But there is also the perception that publishing in PLOS is one step above self-publishing; if your list of publications contains a lot of PLOS, you're viewed as a dud.
Note that during that study period sales at McDonalds across the nation were dropping. We thus can conclude that reduced sales at McDonalds leads to higher number of hospital visits.
Actually, you may have something; the paper states that the number of hospital visits went down over the period. Both nationally, and also in the fracking areas.
If you wonder exactly how that leads to the conclusion "fracking linked to more hospital admissions" you're not alone.
You weren't wondering at all. If you were really interested you would have read the article. You're just trying to pick at this with your own personal agenda and you don't give a flying fuck what the facts are. A typical goose stepper.
He who steps with the goose must be careful of stepping on the goose's gifts.
The proper experimental control is to take three regions that went from no fracking to fracking, and three other regions that went from no fracking-like revenue to a fracking-similar amount of fracking-like revenue so as to match the upticks in net employment.
Obviously for natural experiments, this is not always easy to pull off (and your detractors will necessarily claim you didn't succeed no matter how far you go).
So why don't you just cut to the chase and declare that all natural experiments are moist excrement? Is there any standard for a controlled natural experiment you'd actually accept? From the structure of your comment I suspect not, as you never once mention the caliber of controls actually used (which is, for maximal troll-seed efficiency, entirely beneath the notice of those who reject the entire category).
Done right, I view this as a form of agile econometrics. First you see what clears the fence under modest controls, before gold-plating round two.
On the other side, blanket cynicism is a crutch of the anti-progressive mindset.
Yes, but... they do have, not quite before and after with a control, but timed data over a period where fracking was increasing, to a different degree in the different areas. That's as good as before and after, in some ways better though more complex (as you say, controlling for income would be nice).
The big problem is that, given this, they found NO effect. And published anyway
If working on a drilling rig causes enough injuries to cause a statistically visible increase in hospital visits, you're looking at one of two things: 1) An incredibly small population. 2) An incredibly dangerous working environment.
In the case of #2, that's a working environment dangerous to the degree where they are definitely skipping required safety measures.
Ah, but there's a subtle point they mention in the discussion of limitations to the study: any added hospitalizations from the workers are added to the numerator of the rate, but the number of workers is not added to the denominator, which is just the permanent residents of the area. So you are essentially guaranteed to raise the hospitalization rate, just by that process.
That's controlled for by the randomness of the counties involved - both changes before and after drilling, and with no-drilling areas in the same region as controls
It accounts for the fact that having drilling rigs is going to increase hospital visits because it's inherently more dangerous? I would be surprised if the placement of any drilling rig did not raise the visits to hospitals.
It just seems like a really bad metric as the effects of Fracking, if in fact there were any, would take much longer to manifest.
Bingo on both points; they do mention them, however, where they discuss limitations of the study. They don't discuss the biggest limitation, however, which is that they didn't actually find any effect.
You should know by now that "peer review" is just a fancy word for having your buddies fawn over your crap.
Climate science and "Social Science" have perverted the peer review process into a politically correct old boys club.
Boldly expressed like somebody who doesn't have the faintest idea of how science, publishing, and peer review are done. Your peers doing the peer review are your competitors in a cutthroat competition for ever more scarce research funding. It's like getting Chrysler and Ford to peer review GM.
I would be interested to hear your concept of how "having your buddies fawn over your cra" leads to getting more research money, though.
Could it be you're confusing peer review with "having the corporate board set executive pay"?
That's controlled for by the randomness of the counties involved - both changes before and after drilling, and with no-drilling areas in the same region as controls (the control county had a drilling ban because it was in the Delaware River watershed). The admissions were largely not due to accidents - cardiology admissions were the strongest correlated. However, the authors don't identify the particular causative factors. They speculate, for example, that it might be diesel exhaust from all of the work vehicles that could be a causative agent. Another speculation is that the development of the industry has changed the demographics of drilling areas.
We really shouldn't be surprised that living next to industry in general isn't good for one's health, just from these sort of factors alone. Exhaust from heavy work vehicles, noise, dust, etc aren't famously conducive to good health. Even living next to a busy road is correlated with negative health effects.
A real problem with the study is, as they wrote, "Given that our modeling approach cannot account for within zip code demographic changes over the study period,". Curiously, while there were positive correlations between wells and health problems in most fields, there were negative correlations in gynecology and orthopedics. They remark "However, within the medical categories of gynecology and orthopedics, inpatient prevalence rates are expected to decrease each year by around 13–14% and 3–4%, respectively. Despite this surprising result, it is unclear why gynecology and orthopedics inpatient prevalence rates are decreasing each year. It is unlikely that these decreasing rates are related to the increased hydro-fracking activity." I'm surprised that they were allowed to get away with this - you shouldn't be allowed to credit increases to an industrial effect while just dismissing data (quite significant data) that doesn't match your hypothesis. There could be actually very useful information about the validity of their overall study and their conclusions in the reason for why gynecological inpatient cases are declining. For example, perhaps the demographics are changing to a lower percentage of women due to the arrival of the drilling industry. Men have shorter average lifespans and in particular a higher rate of cardiovascular disease.
To me, this is a really big hole in their study, and again I'm surprised it passed peer review with it there. But apart from that, I see no problem with the study, so long as people don't overinterpret the results. It's a very broad, generalized study focused entirely on correlation and not causation.
How is it controlled for by randomness? If you're randomizing a population for cardiology admissions, for instance, after you randomize you run a t-test or F-test or similar between your groups to demonstrate that there is NO significant difference in rates at the beginning of the intervention. In this case, the significant difference was there both before and after the introduction of the fracking. If there was any randomization (hard to argue there was, choice of area to do fracking in is NOT random), it would be classified as a failed randomization and need to be redone.
The funny one is, I personally "live near fracking sites" and laugh at how incredibly uneducated about fracking the standard anti-fracking person is. For example, most of what people call fracking sites are actually just gas wells with no active fracking happening. They don't seem to realize that fracking only happens for a few weeks at specific locations where the gas is hard to extract. Maybe a week when they first drill the well, and then some maintenance fracking when gas production slows down. It's not continuous.
They also notice the elevated methane levels in the air around here compared to LA, yet don't seem to realize that the cows around here that are missing in LA might possibly be a contributing factor to that. That and the methane levels around here are still 1/100th of what's considered a safe level.
Yeah, fracking has become a synonym for everything bad associated with oil and gas extraction. Much as gluten and/or GMO have become catchall terms for everything wrong with our agricultural industry.
Extraction sites tend to be located in under developed rural areas where income levels are lower than in highly populated urban centers. Although there are oil pumps scattered throughout some of the wealthy suburbs of LA that are hidden by clever landscaping. They could discover vast oil and gas fields under any large city but the costs to get at such a resource is astronomical. Energy resource extraction has always been dangerous, dirty, expensive, and controversial. But the fact is even those complaining the loudest against exploiting fossil fuels directly benefit from the oil,,gas, and petroleum products produced. The environment also takes a major hit when extracting the rare earth elements needed for building all of our modern day electronics. Everything from computers, cell phones, and cruise missiles. The toxicity emanating from these mining areas is almost as dangerous as a open nuclear waste landfill. The US closed down almost all of the rare earth element mines because the cost of satisfying the EPA requirements made it cheaper just to buy the rare earth elements mined in foreign countries.
An acre of oil field pays better than an acre of farmland. However, an acre of downtown Houston pays better than an acre of oil field.
The study authors say there was no fracking in 2007, and lots in 2011.
They then say (quoting): "The inpatient rates are relatively stable from 2007â"2011 Indeed, the average overall inpatient prevalence rates for 2007â"2011 are, respectively, 15.18, 15.30, 14.86, 14.00, 14.25"
So the introduction of fracking did NOT increase hospital admissions. Indeed, over the four year that the economy in the area got a boost from fracking, people got healthier, according to the numbers in the study.
Then then do a bunch of gymnastics to discover, then obscure, the fact that oil wells tend to be located in more rural areas, and people's health tends to be slightly worse in those areas.
yes, bingo! i'm glad to see somebody interprets the data shown in the same way I do.
This is not a "correlation is causation" scam. This is a "researcher degrees of freedom" scam. If you look at enough different variables you'll get a statistically significant result by chance.
The summary and title are not entirely honest. They looked not at "hospital admissions" but at "hospital admissions by discharge code. From all of this they found statistically significant correlations with cardiology and neurology inpatient rates being deemed significant. What does this mean?
The only thing it can mean is "further study is needed". Instead of looking at everything under the sun, researchers will need to look specifically at these variables and control for potentially confounding factors, such as a set of doctors or a hospital that begins admitting cardiology patients that they ordinarily would have discharged for home monitoring.
When you look at this many potential variables and sift out any hits the opportunity for false positives is large. This sort of preliminary study can be an important first step in epidemiology. It can also be an important step in pseudo-scientific scams. This kind of study gives us "super-foods" that everybody has to have because of their supposed health benefits. The differentiating factor is the follow-up studies that are done. Standing on its own, this study is meaningless with regard to fracking causing anything.
No, they did a Bonferroni correction; this is a correction for multiple tests, i.e. looking at 25 different discharge code categories you can't use p.05 any more, because that means you'd find one bogus correlation out of every 20 tests. The Bonferroni version is .00096 for 25 simultaneous tests which I'll take their word for, meaning that you'd only expect to see a bogus correlation in basically 1 out of a thousand tests, which off the top of my head seems OK if you're only doing 25. This is the part where the post above suggests that "the statistical and medical data are compelling", I guess. But the actual question being asked is not compelling, as they have picked a time period where fracking increased greatly, but not showed any change in the rates of hospital admission over that time. Basically, they've just showed that places where we frack nowadays have had a lot of cardiology admits since before we started fracking there.
Thanks. I did see his link on Google but there was no mention to a specific "test".
Makes sense.
The ultimate Tufte test, of course, was at the Rogers Commission on the Space Shuttle Failure; Feynman dipping the O-ring in ice water and showing that it lost its resilience for a few seconds, vs the voluminous pages of tables and diagrams produced by engineers before the launch which had failed to communicate the same message, despite containing the data correctly describing the phenomenon with great precision.
They are trying hard to pull a 'correlation is causation' scam
Except that in this case we have an intervention study, as some areas started fracking activity while other did not. Therefore looking at data versus time will tell us something.
And I also not we have explanations for causation. I see two obvious: chemical leaks, and nocebo effect.
But I can't see where they really looked at data versus time, in the way we need to see; ie. we'd like to see increase in fracking (in any of a number of metrics) associated with increase in hospitalization rate. Ideally it would be a nice continuous function. At minimum, four numbers: baseline hospitalization rate before (b) and after (a) fracking, in places with (1) and without (2) fracking. We'd need to see that (a1-b1)> (a2-b2). I do not see that anywhere in the paper. In fact, they state explicitly that the hospitalization rate within any zip code did not change much over the 5 years, and that the fracking increased greatly. Given that time sequence, it's more accurate to say the hospitalization rate causes the fracking than the other way around.
Also, receiving a monthly royalty check from the gas company increases your disposable income, and means you can spend more on things like health care.
Similarly, as they said, fracking areas may have more temporary residents employed doing the fracking, which would raise the hospital admissions but not the denominator they used, which was the number of PERMANENT residents, thereby raising the admission rate.
My peer review is to not publish it. "the graphical and informational figures flunk every Tufte test, which is unfortunate" for sure; and when you plow through that and the equally befuddling verbiage, the actual evidence is pretty thin.
What I'd like to see but can't seem to find in the paper: that hospital admissions INCREASED in zip codes where fracking came in, more so than in those without, around and after the time fracking started. The evidence given, however, appears to be that hospital admissions are now more frequent in said zip codes, after 5 years of fracking. But it should be no surprise to anybody that there is variation in hospital admission by zip code; and we've known for decades that there seem to be disease clusters associated with certain geological types of area; that some of these regions might be frackable shale is equally possible in the absence of any time-related data
What is particularly shooting themselves in the foot:
"Fig 3 also shows that, within each zip code, the contribution by year was comparable, suggesting that within each zip code, the inpatient rates are relatively stable from 2007–2011 Indeed, the average overall inpatient prevalence rates for 2007–2011 are, respectively, 15.18, 15.30, 14.86, 14.00, 14.25. This indicates that on average, zip code overall inpatient prevalence rates were relatively stable or possibly declining from 2007 to 2011, which mirrors national trends."
but
"In 2007, the majority of zip codes have no wells, but by 2011, the majority of zip codes have at least 1 well."
If I'm reading this right, the areas having higher hospital admissions in 2011, and also have more wells, also had more admissions in 2007, although most of them had no wells then. ???? And the only time correlation they have is that more fracking overall correlates with fewer admissions over all. "National trends" OK, but wouldn't it be better proof if the places where fracking increased actually increased admissions? The best they can say here is that national trends suggest that fracking is not necessarily responsible for the reduction in admissions in those areas.
Similarly, "investigating the association between number of wells and inpatient prevalence rates and the association between well density and inpatient prevalence rates." They're ignoring the changes in well density over time vs changes in inpatient prevalence rate over time?
It's possible I am missing something, given the befuddled presentation (not being insulting here, been there myself, to present one's research in such a way as to make a compelling case is a form of fiction writing rather than historical reporting).
Credit to them for honesty regarding the limitations of the study in the discussion. I don't think they're trying to fudge anything.
BTW, I am not a Friend of Fracking or the petroleum industry in any form.
The way roads are done in the U.S.:
1.) Award contract to the lowest bidder.
2.) Lowest bidder was the lowest bidder because they plan on using substandard materials.
3.) Resulting road falls apart in 4-5 years (or less).
4.) Go to 1.
There is no desire or advantage to build roads that don't need to be rebuilt very few years. The Free Market(TM) and your (and my) tax dollars at work. Everybody wins (road contractors, car dealers, repair shops, etc.) but the people who have to drive on the crappy roads.
Hey, who remembers the I-84 widening project in CT in the early 2000s, where the contractor installed the catch basins upside down? And the firm doing the inspection signed off on them, so the contractor wasn't liable for the costs of fixing it?
Ah, memories.
Hint: It worked for bumpers, why not for roads?
Bumpers are all but useless. My '68 Caprice had bumpers you could use to knock down light poles at 30mph. Not that I would have ever done such a thing. Sober.
Under the expensive but flimsy plastic bumper cover, however, is a nice metal beam which is quite good at stopping things from putting a crimp into the sheet metal. which is quite a bit better than what we had in the years between big solid bumpers, and when the gov decided to mandate minimum bumper requirements.
Here in Arizona we are laying a lot of rubber roads: more durable, quieter, and no more mountains of old tires. It's like driving on carpet. But in accidents, they can catch fire.
then you can use concrete tires which should last a long time.
Make highways out of silly putty. resilient enough to drive over, but self healing for potholes etc. Make them deep enough and no worries about abandoned cars.
It's a frikkin meal plan, not a religion. Stop preaching at me.
And how. I'm going to catch more go die in a fire comments here, but a long time ago, I was told by a wise man that he considered vegetarians to be high risk people as far as being suitable for sensitive jobs. :full disclaimer - I tried vegatarianism for a while.
While I don't hold his opinion that vegetarians and vegans are mentally ill, In many ways, the concept of not eating meat products enters the arena of "This is good, this is bad" applied to eating, and life.
Someone perhaps a little high strung wants to be "good" The animal is cute or nice, therefore eating it is "bad'. Anything with a face is bad. And somehow the cow needs to give express written consent (just like the National Football league) for us to use her milk. Then trying to bring some consistency to their life, they start judging every single aspect of what they do, against some idealized goodness or badness. So some end up becoming full blown vegans, and imagine that their "goodness" makes them superior beings.
Which might be related to how damn annoying they are, just like those people who knock at my door wanting to talk about their version of Jesus. They start evangelizing about their superiority. We had one who single handedly blew up our office socializing with her constant lectures, and impossible to ever find a eating establishment that would suit, and luchtime lectures and glares if you had the temerity to eat a meat product at lunch. When she left, we had a going away party the day after she left town. Hamburgers and cheese fries and milkshakes all around.
Lest the paleo types feel too superior, they do much of the same.
But the news is. My eating cute little bunny rabbits doesn't make me evil. If I felt the need to make their death as cruel and painful as I could - yeah, that would be evil. Which is why I eat all manner of meat, but not veal - that shit ain't right.
All life is precious. Plant life is not all that far removed from animal life. Besides, it is a unchallengeable truth that the only life forms that do not kill or exploit other forms of life are chemoautotrophs. So we do what nature has meant for us to do.
A vegan, ruthlessly slicing through their food, cutting and boiling grilling and sautéing, causing death to living things, is not immune to this. They also kill. And eating those living plant organisms raw is like biting into a living animal. The live cells go into their mouths only to be dissolved by their digestive system in a strong acid solution. The only way they can avoid the fate of all living beings is to become a breatharian. Then after the inevitable happens, they will destroy no more living things. They will have achieved their goal.
Yes, people who refuse to eat birds and mammals and fish are a bit nuts, whereas people who refuse to eat cockroaches and earthworms and puppies are perfectly rational.
> People are so weird about food some times. I can > mention liking veggie burgers in here, and some folk > go nuts, like I'm a radical vegan.
This. I've never understood what it is with people obsessing over other peoples' dietary preferences and trying to impose their own or convince the other that they're wrong.
When I was vegetarian, I got grief from both meat eaters (Oh noes... how will I get all the right proteins?) and vegans (Don't you know that by eating cheese, you're still supporting the meat-industrial complex?). Plain old ova-lacto vegetarians are pretty chill now that I eat meat again. Vegans are still vegans. But now the "paleo" crowd attacks normal omnivorous people for not being level-20 prestige-class meat-eaters. And now there's the gluten-is-poison thing.
It's a frikkin meal plan, not a religion. Stop preaching at me.
And now, gluten free has somehow become a moral crusade.