Great, so now drivers will start holding their phones over the passenger seat to use them, drawing their gaze even further from the road. Don't act like it won't happen.
In my (limited) experience, there is likely some bias inserted due to the review process. A reviewer is more likely to argue against a position that goes against what he or she believes is the cause or effect of something. However, I don't think that is a large cause of papers getting rejected, just added effort required of the author to iron out the finer details of the logic and arguments. There's plenty of competition in publishing, so if a journal or a reviewer gains a reputation for rejecting good science for bogus reasons, say goodbye.
That said, I can't discount the hypothesis that the added effort required of authors to publish unpopular ideas may significantly bias the publication rate. I highly doubt it could be strong enough for an effect as large as that reported here, though. And if you're the kind of author to go after and attempt to publish unpopular ideas, I think you're likely to want to stick in the fight until you get an accepted paper. But now I'm just speculating.
The original (implicit) claim is that when 97% of scientists agree on something, it must be right.
That's not my take-away; rather it's that if 97% of scientists believe something, it's likely to be right, I probably need a pretty good reason to doubt it, and, most importantly, it's reasonable to consider the consensus in legislation (I do not, however, want to get into a debate about what legislation is {effective | moral | whatever}
How many people do you know have been around the world to confirm that the world is round? On the grounds that a particular person has not done so, would you strongly object to that person making policies, for a family, organization, company, or government, that requires the world to be round for the policy make any sense? To me, that's the issue being discussed when we talk scientific consensus. We can't all do the science ourselves, but we must all (try to) agree on sensible polices for our societies that must be informed by the science. If we don't accept scientific consensus as a valid precursor to policy, where does that leave us?
Yeah, I don't know the patent landscape too intimately well (IANAL), but it woudln't surprise me if several annoying patents on obvious uses of beamforming were holding back some creative minds from commercializing cool things.
There are other approaches to focusing on sounds from specific directions and sounds with specific features. Looking at how the human auditory system does it is (broadly) my current line of research. With the standard multi-mic approaches, you need at least as many mics as independent sources to successfully separate them, but we as humans do a lot better than that with only two acoustic inputs.
Many hearing aids have directional mics. They're not always considered useful, because if you fix the directionality people miss sounds from other locations that they occasionally care about, and attempts at adaptive algorithms usually suck. Progress is being made, though. Some researchers are even trying to track the wearer's eye movements, or even use brain imaging (like EEG) to detect what location a user is trying to attend to.
The human auditory system can absolutely use timing difference to determine the location of sound. We are sensitive to interaural time differences as small as 10 microseconds. If you don't have access to that article, just search anywhere for "ITD JND" (stands for interural time difference just-noticeable-difference"
Your first paragraph appears to describe beamforming, methods of which have numerous patents.
In my mind, that only shifts the focus from "is there something wrong with this company" to "is there something wrong with this society (economy)? Doesn't it in some way make sense that relatively more resources could (theoretically) be used on solving new problems in better ways, rather than pushing existing products against somebody else's?
On the one hand, you're right, and calling it a "science project" and a s"science fair experiment" is playing with language.
On the other hand, since when should science encompass things only inside science class? Whether the experiment was "does the explosion really happen?" (as claimed), or "how will people react to this awesome explosion" (also likely), it's still no stretch to call it science. So the one thing I disagree with you on is this apparent dismissal.
But, I think overall you and I are in agreement. In my view there is are appropriate and inappropriate place to do such an experiment where you have an idea that the result might be something like an explosion. Maybe doing this type on one's own on school grounds is inappropriate -- though I'm sure there are arguments to be made on both sides for that statement. But does it deserve zero-tolerance, expulsion, and a criminal charge of a 15-year-old as an adult? I can't imagine anyone would think so (though, apparently, some do...)
You may be shooting yourself in the foot with this argument. The biggest issue there / then was monoculture, which apparently was forced due to the stark wealth divide causing little else but potatoes to be a feasible food source for many of the peasantry. It's quite a stretch to say that advancement of science and technology has anything directly to do with something like that famine.
On the other hand, current practices and policies with many scientifically altered crop seeds, the development of which is sufficiently in its infancy such that we do not have great diversity among them, are leading to potential issues with monoculture... so there's a valid concern there regarding the robustness of our food supply
Note that when you refer to the <insert-cause-here> crowd, you are referring to the loudest, most extreme and sensational activists in a very broad group of related interests, and it should be no surprise that there are many misinformed opinions in that crowd. If you care about the issue (and I'm not saying you do or should), you can look harder to find the better-reasoned arguments on many sides of the GMO debate.
Someone posted above: GMO in crops such as tobacco has been around for that long but in food crops only since ~1994. But anyway,
There is plenty of documentation about nutrient density and pesticide residue in organic products. Just like any other subject this charged, you can find a study that says anything you like. But to claim there is no documentation is to discredit yourself. E.g., in 30 seconds I founda review of such studies with varying results along several dimensions: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-0394-0_7
Secondly, many of the more grounded concerns I have followed regarding current use of GMOs has little to do with direct health benefits (that's just an easy point to use by media to scare people) and more to do with mono-culture and the economic ramifications. While use of GMO does not necessarily imply these things, in practice it does and you can't separate them from each other in a practical debate
Lastly, to claim that all people who are against GMOs share a certain trait, like lack of knowledge in some field of science, is not a convincing argument. What do you know about my educational background?
Are you talking about hearing aids or cochlear implants here? Obviously there's a lot of work being put into both, but CIs arguably have a more difficult set of challenges to face if you want to talk about sounds signals other than speech, which is relatively well represented in the field for good reason. Music is always going to be a huge challenge with current CI technology due to the inherent limit of how many independent frequency channels you can stimulate (it's usually around 8, which is abysmal when it gets right down to it).
However, for either hearing aids or CIs, I'm not sure I get some of your criticisms too clearly. People singing has a very similar spectral shape to people talking, and hearing aids designed for speech are likely to treat those signals quite well. Do people change pitch with softer speech? Regardless, the frequency distribution of energy in speech is less about pitch and more about formants (vocal tract resonances), so I'm not sure why it should be different. Could you elaborate?
Frequency range for CIs is a huge issue because the electrode can only be inserted so far, meaning you can only stimulate the higher-frequency end of the auditory nerves in the cochlea. For hearing aids, there's often a cutoff at 5-8 kHz, which is pretty low compared to what could be amplified. However there are many factors to consider; for example: Many hearing-impaired patients have all but lost the ability to hear anything much higher than that, so amplification may not accomplish anything and in fact may interfere with hearing at other frequencies. However I am of the growing camp of researchers that thinks the benefits of providing higher-frequency amplification is often underestimated in the field.
There are hearing aids designed with music in mind. However I can't speak to how well they work. I know less about CIs but i don't see how with the current technology they can even be very music-focused in practice
Basically, I don't see why you can just call the efforts into hearing aids lazy. I'd appreciate more from you on this matter. Although I'll definitely agree that many of the efforts at "smart" algorithms including older noise reduction algorithms have been flops to varying degrees. That doesn't make the efforts lazy, nor does it invalidate current progress being made.
Lastly, Beethoven was just about completely deaf when he composed his 9th symphony, which is by no means shit.
Not quite direct to the auditory cortex, there are a lot of nerves and synapses between the auditory nerve and the auditory cortex. But this is just from someone who's been studying the peripheral auditory pathways for the past however long, so I may care a little more about those details than most:-) But, for example, there is a device called a auditory midbrain implant, that stimulates higher up in the signal pathway, but still far from cortex. Because of all the computations happening along the pathway, the differences are pretty huge when you start skipping stages.
But I wish I could mod you up for pointing out why this is very different from what "cochlear implant" means today. Not that anyone else is reading these comments anymore; I've gotten the impression that Slashdot has an attention span of about a day.
Makes sense. Don't like what you're getting out of government use of your tax dollars, therefore you applaud the rich for evading taxes, thereby shifting more of the tax burden onto yourself. Yeah, good one.
Doesn't regressive refer to the percentage of taxable income? So a flat tax is neither progressive or regressive. I guess it's regressive on expendable income, I just didn't think that meant you could call it regressive, but I could be wrong. A consumption tax, on the other hand, is argued to be regressive in that manner. I'd like to know the data, though, I feel like the wealthy spend plenty of money on luxuries, and would continue to do so, that would make a consumption tax progressive. I've just never heard anyone present arguments or data beyond "it's regressive" or "it's unfair", or the ever-popular bullshit line "a progressive tax punishes hard work".
I like progressive taxation, I think it makes sense, ideally, as a system to curb unstable growth of wealth. But I also keep coming back to the US LIibertarian party's "Fair Tax", which is I think a consumption tax after a certain allowance, just because it's simple and much harder to fuck with and play games with. Even a heavily progressive tax system is effectively regressive if there are loopholes to be exploited.
The article certainly lacks a clear definition of what is meant by "it can output volumes of up to 120 decibels". I assume they mean something equivalent to a 120 dB SPL sound measured at the entrance to the ear canal.
Here's the thing. It's an implant placed on the round window of the cochlea. So we're talking acoustic/mechanical coupling of solids, not spherical wave radiation. Talking about placing this unit in the ear canal doesn't make sense and implies that you didn't RTFS...say it isn't so , Slashdot.
Also, even when talking about hearing aid receivers in an ear canal, you're not talking about free-field acoustics, but acoustics inside a squishy, non-uniform tube-like cavity. So no, you can't just move it closer to double the level.
TWhen a hearing aid goes wrong (and they often do)
[Citation needed]
You'll probably be able to take it off just like any other device. The implant will be driven by an external transmitter. Remove it, or switch it off, and no more sound.
It is capable of producing sounds up to 120 dB (assuming they meant dB SPL, or equivalent). This is not the same as 120 dB of amplification. (This is why those pesky letters SPL matter, and I'm surprised a Faunhofer report wasn't explicit). Of course, then the device could potentially detect a 0 dB SPL sound and amplify it to 120 dB, but that's really no different than any current technology, and it won't, and doesn't, happen.
So no, I have not seen anyone who wears hearing aids or cochlear implants scream and rip off their hearing aids or transmitters due to obscene amplification. Yes, I know plenty users of both (mostly young though).
Lastly, patients probably will have an off switch, and will also be able to take off the transmitters just like a CI user can.
The hair cells are inside the inner ear, later in the signal path than this device, and are responsible for turning the mechanical stimulus inside the inner ear into electrical signals. This device bypasses the outer ear and middle ear (depending on the placement of the microphone). Bypassing the hair cells means directly stimulating the auditory nerves, e.g. with electrical impulses such as is done by current cochlear implants.
Also, analog amplification does not imply no signal loss even within its 120 dB operating range (due to noise, nonlinear behavior, etc etc). It is also practically a guarantee that any end-product using this device will employ dynamic range compression, among other things, that will result in further loss of information in the signal. Regardless, it is still likely that the signal will amplified digitally by the external dsp, then transmitted finally as an analog signal to the implant. However that's not in the scope of this research, which focuses on the implanted device (just the final acoustic amplifier, one of many parts of a hearing aid system).
For 1, my best guess is that energy comes from an external transducer, coupled to a coil of the implant that can drive the actuator. Cochlear implants use this strategy (except they drive electrical impulses, not mechanical vibration)
Both 2 and 3 are handled by an external dsp. The implant piece is just the final acoustic amplifier / transducer; it is not driven by acoustical energy entering the ear, but by the signal being sent to it by the external device.
Actually, he stated a claim, that everyone knows such and such (regardless of the fact that such and such included the evaluation of a subjective opinion, his was still a factual claim). But since you didn't know what he was talking about, I take that as proof that he was wrong.
I'm still voting for "white tape that looks kind of like various 'caution' tapes cause handlers to treat the package differently (regardless of religious whatever)" - which several commenters point out could be addressed with a better control case using tape that looks similar to the Atheist tape but with no explicit religious bearing. The company supposedly expresses interest in a follow-up study using better control tape, larger sample sizes, and tracking data (TFA, comments sections), but their language (and motivation) make me doubt the study will actually be done.
I'm referencing TFA, in the green box just below the epilogue. (It's in image form, so you may have missed it if you searched for the text.)
As for proving the hypothesis (implicitly here that Atheist-branded packages get delayed due to religious sentiment of postal workers) you're very correct, this has not been proven by this study. The null hypothesis (that delivery successes and rates are identical regardless of the presence of the Atheist tape) has been disproven (within statistical certainty). That is all.
Intuitively, I find it unlikely that some division of cut-off is what caused the null hypothesis to be rejected, but I can't model that with numbers. Regardless, I think it's more likely that the tape caused suspicions, whether or not they were due to religious workers' distastes for atheists or simply because the tape might look suspicious to some folks, which caused processing delays for the branded packages.
Slashdot Mirror
Great, so now drivers will start holding their phones over the passenger seat to use them, drawing their gaze even further from the road. Don't act like it won't happen.
In my (limited) experience, there is likely some bias inserted due to the review process. A reviewer is more likely to argue against a position that goes against what he or she believes is the cause or effect of something. However, I don't think that is a large cause of papers getting rejected, just added effort required of the author to iron out the finer details of the logic and arguments. There's plenty of competition in publishing, so if a journal or a reviewer gains a reputation for rejecting good science for bogus reasons, say goodbye.
That said, I can't discount the hypothesis that the added effort required of authors to publish unpopular ideas may significantly bias the publication rate. I highly doubt it could be strong enough for an effect as large as that reported here, though. And if you're the kind of author to go after and attempt to publish unpopular ideas, I think you're likely to want to stick in the fight until you get an accepted paper. But now I'm just speculating.
The original (implicit) claim is that when 97% of scientists agree on something, it must be right.
That's not my take-away; rather it's that if 97% of scientists believe something, it's likely to be right, I probably need a pretty good reason to doubt it, and, most importantly, it's reasonable to consider the consensus in legislation (I do not, however, want to get into a debate about what legislation is {effective | moral | whatever}
How many people do you know have been around the world to confirm that the world is round? On the grounds that a particular person has not done so, would you strongly object to that person making policies, for a family, organization, company, or government, that requires the world to be round for the policy make any sense? To me, that's the issue being discussed when we talk scientific consensus. We can't all do the science ourselves, but we must all (try to) agree on sensible polices for our societies that must be informed by the science. If we don't accept scientific consensus as a valid precursor to policy, where does that leave us?
Yeah, I don't know the patent landscape too intimately well (IANAL), but it woudln't surprise me if several annoying patents on obvious uses of beamforming were holding back some creative minds from commercializing cool things.
There are other approaches to focusing on sounds from specific directions and sounds with specific features. Looking at how the human auditory system does it is (broadly) my current line of research. With the standard multi-mic approaches, you need at least as many mics as independent sources to successfully separate them, but we as humans do a lot better than that with only two acoustic inputs.
Many hearing aids have directional mics. They're not always considered useful, because if you fix the directionality people miss sounds from other locations that they occasionally care about, and attempts at adaptive algorithms usually suck. Progress is being made, though. Some researchers are even trying to track the wearer's eye movements, or even use brain imaging (like EEG) to detect what location a user is trying to attend to.
The human auditory system can absolutely use timing difference to determine the location of sound. We are sensitive to interaural time differences as small as 10 microseconds. If you don't have access to that article, just search anywhere for "ITD JND" (stands for interural time difference just-noticeable-difference"
Your first paragraph appears to describe beamforming, methods of which have numerous patents.
Absolutist much? I think you're reading way too much into what I said.
In my mind, that only shifts the focus from "is there something wrong with this company" to "is there something wrong with this society (economy)? Doesn't it in some way make sense that relatively more resources could (theoretically) be used on solving new problems in better ways, rather than pushing existing products against somebody else's?
she stated that she was doing a science fair experiment
And you believe that claim because...?
(Not that I agree with the school & police reaction, but that doesn't mean I'm going to suspend criticism on either side)
On the one hand, you're right, and calling it a "science project" and a s"science fair experiment" is playing with language.
On the other hand, since when should science encompass things only inside science class? Whether the experiment was "does the explosion really happen?" (as claimed), or "how will people react to this awesome explosion" (also likely), it's still no stretch to call it science. So the one thing I disagree with you on is this apparent dismissal.
But, I think overall you and I are in agreement. In my view there is are appropriate and inappropriate place to do such an experiment where you have an idea that the result might be something like an explosion. Maybe doing this type on one's own on school grounds is inappropriate -- though I'm sure there are arguments to be made on both sides for that statement. But does it deserve zero-tolerance, expulsion, and a criminal charge of a 15-year-old as an adult? I can't imagine anyone would think so (though, apparently, some do...)
You may be shooting yourself in the foot with this argument. The biggest issue there / then was monoculture, which apparently was forced due to the stark wealth divide causing little else but potatoes to be a feasible food source for many of the peasantry. It's quite a stretch to say that advancement of science and technology has anything directly to do with something like that famine.
On the other hand, current practices and policies with many scientifically altered crop seeds, the development of which is sufficiently in its infancy such that we do not have great diversity among them, are leading to potential issues with monoculture ... so there's a valid concern there regarding the robustness of our food supply
Note that when you refer to the <insert-cause-here> crowd, you are referring to the loudest, most extreme and sensational activists in a very broad group of related interests, and it should be no surprise that there are many misinformed opinions in that crowd. If you care about the issue (and I'm not saying you do or should), you can look harder to find the better-reasoned arguments on many sides of the GMO debate.
Someone posted above: GMO in crops such as tobacco has been around for that long but in food crops only since ~1994. But anyway,
There is plenty of documentation about nutrient density and pesticide residue in organic products. Just like any other subject this charged, you can find a study that says anything you like. But to claim there is no documentation is to discredit yourself. E.g., in 30 seconds I founda review of such studies with varying results along several dimensions: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-0394-0_7
Secondly, many of the more grounded concerns I have followed regarding current use of GMOs has little to do with direct health benefits (that's just an easy point to use by media to scare people) and more to do with mono-culture and the economic ramifications. While use of GMO does not necessarily imply these things, in practice it does and you can't separate them from each other in a practical debate
Lastly, to claim that all people who are against GMOs share a certain trait, like lack of knowledge in some field of science, is not a convincing argument. What do you know about my educational background?
Are you talking about hearing aids or cochlear implants here? Obviously there's a lot of work being put into both, but CIs arguably have a more difficult set of challenges to face if you want to talk about sounds signals other than speech, which is relatively well represented in the field for good reason. Music is always going to be a huge challenge with current CI technology due to the inherent limit of how many independent frequency channels you can stimulate (it's usually around 8, which is abysmal when it gets right down to it).
However, for either hearing aids or CIs, I'm not sure I get some of your criticisms too clearly. People singing has a very similar spectral shape to people talking, and hearing aids designed for speech are likely to treat those signals quite well. Do people change pitch with softer speech? Regardless, the frequency distribution of energy in speech is less about pitch and more about formants (vocal tract resonances), so I'm not sure why it should be different. Could you elaborate?
Frequency range for CIs is a huge issue because the electrode can only be inserted so far, meaning you can only stimulate the higher-frequency end of the auditory nerves in the cochlea. For hearing aids, there's often a cutoff at 5-8 kHz, which is pretty low compared to what could be amplified. However there are many factors to consider; for example: Many hearing-impaired patients have all but lost the ability to hear anything much higher than that, so amplification may not accomplish anything and in fact may interfere with hearing at other frequencies. However I am of the growing camp of researchers that thinks the benefits of providing higher-frequency amplification is often underestimated in the field.
There are hearing aids designed with music in mind. However I can't speak to how well they work. I know less about CIs but i don't see how with the current technology they can even be very music-focused in practice
Basically, I don't see why you can just call the efforts into hearing aids lazy. I'd appreciate more from you on this matter. Although I'll definitely agree that many of the efforts at "smart" algorithms including older noise reduction algorithms have been flops to varying degrees. That doesn't make the efforts lazy, nor does it invalidate current progress being made.
Lastly, Beethoven was just about completely deaf when he composed his 9th symphony, which is by no means shit.
Not quite direct to the auditory cortex, there are a lot of nerves and synapses between the auditory nerve and the auditory cortex. But this is just from someone who's been studying the peripheral auditory pathways for the past however long, so I may care a little more about those details than most :-) But, for example, there is a device called a auditory midbrain implant, that stimulates higher up in the signal pathway, but still far from cortex. Because of all the computations happening along the pathway, the differences are pretty huge when you start skipping stages.
But I wish I could mod you up for pointing out why this is very different from what "cochlear implant" means today. Not that anyone else is reading these comments anymore; I've gotten the impression that Slashdot has an attention span of about a day.
Makes sense. Don't like what you're getting out of government use of your tax dollars, therefore you applaud the rich for evading taxes, thereby shifting more of the tax burden onto yourself. Yeah, good one.
Doesn't regressive refer to the percentage of taxable income? So a flat tax is neither progressive or regressive. I guess it's regressive on expendable income, I just didn't think that meant you could call it regressive, but I could be wrong. A consumption tax, on the other hand, is argued to be regressive in that manner. I'd like to know the data, though, I feel like the wealthy spend plenty of money on luxuries, and would continue to do so, that would make a consumption tax progressive. I've just never heard anyone present arguments or data beyond "it's regressive" or "it's unfair", or the ever-popular bullshit line "a progressive tax punishes hard work".
I like progressive taxation, I think it makes sense, ideally, as a system to curb unstable growth of wealth. But I also keep coming back to the US LIibertarian party's "Fair Tax", which is I think a consumption tax after a certain allowance, just because it's simple and much harder to fuck with and play games with. Even a heavily progressive tax system is effectively regressive if there are loopholes to be exploited.
The article certainly lacks a clear definition of what is meant by "it can output volumes of up to 120 decibels". I assume they mean something equivalent to a 120 dB SPL sound measured at the entrance to the ear canal.
Here's the thing. It's an implant placed on the round window of the cochlea. So we're talking acoustic/mechanical coupling of solids, not spherical wave radiation. Talking about placing this unit in the ear canal doesn't make sense and implies that you didn't RTFS...say it isn't so , Slashdot.
Also, even when talking about hearing aid receivers in an ear canal, you're not talking about free-field acoustics, but acoustics inside a squishy, non-uniform tube-like cavity. So no, you can't just move it closer to double the level.
TWhen a hearing aid goes wrong (and they often do)
[Citation needed]
You'll probably be able to take it off just like any other device. The implant will be driven by an external transmitter. Remove it, or switch it off, and no more sound.
It is capable of producing sounds up to 120 dB (assuming they meant dB SPL, or equivalent). This is not the same as 120 dB of amplification. (This is why those pesky letters SPL matter, and I'm surprised a Faunhofer report wasn't explicit). Of course, then the device could potentially detect a 0 dB SPL sound and amplify it to 120 dB, but that's really no different than any current technology, and it won't, and doesn't, happen.
So no, I have not seen anyone who wears hearing aids or cochlear implants scream and rip off their hearing aids or transmitters due to obscene amplification. Yes, I know plenty users of both (mostly young though).
Lastly, patients probably will have an off switch, and will also be able to take off the transmitters just like a CI user can.
The hair cells are inside the inner ear, later in the signal path than this device, and are responsible for turning the mechanical stimulus inside the inner ear into electrical signals. This device bypasses the outer ear and middle ear (depending on the placement of the microphone). Bypassing the hair cells means directly stimulating the auditory nerves, e.g. with electrical impulses such as is done by current cochlear implants.
Also, analog amplification does not imply no signal loss even within its 120 dB operating range (due to noise, nonlinear behavior, etc etc). It is also practically a guarantee that any end-product using this device will employ dynamic range compression, among other things, that will result in further loss of information in the signal. Regardless, it is still likely that the signal will amplified digitally by the external dsp, then transmitted finally as an analog signal to the implant. However that's not in the scope of this research, which focuses on the implanted device (just the final acoustic amplifier, one of many parts of a hearing aid system).
(Sorry, I don't mean to be such a downer...)
For 1, my best guess is that energy comes from an external transducer, coupled to a coil of the implant that can drive the actuator. Cochlear implants use this strategy (except they drive electrical impulses, not mechanical vibration)
Both 2 and 3 are handled by an external dsp. The implant piece is just the final acoustic amplifier / transducer; it is not driven by acoustical energy entering the ear, but by the signal being sent to it by the external device.
Actually, he stated a claim, that everyone knows such and such (regardless of the fact that such and such included the evaluation of a subjective opinion, his was still a factual claim). But since you didn't know what he was talking about, I take that as proof that he was wrong.
Yup.
I'm still voting for "white tape that looks kind of like various 'caution' tapes cause handlers to treat the package differently (regardless of religious whatever)" - which several commenters point out could be addressed with a better control case using tape that looks similar to the Atheist tape but with no explicit religious bearing. The company supposedly expresses interest in a follow-up study using better control tape, larger sample sizes, and tracking data (TFA, comments sections), but their language (and motivation) make me doubt the study will actually be done.
I'm referencing TFA, in the green box just below the epilogue. (It's in image form, so you may have missed it if you searched for the text.)
As for proving the hypothesis (implicitly here that Atheist-branded packages get delayed due to religious sentiment of postal workers) you're very correct, this has not been proven by this study. The null hypothesis (that delivery successes and rates are identical regardless of the presence of the Atheist tape) has been disproven (within statistical certainty). That is all.
Intuitively, I find it unlikely that some division of cut-off is what caused the null hypothesis to be rejected, but I can't model that with numbers. Regardless, I think it's more likely that the tape caused suspicions, whether or not they were due to religious workers' distastes for atheists or simply because the tape might look suspicious to some folks, which caused processing delays for the branded packages.