Exposing the Link Between Cell Phones and Fertility 112
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!"
ruined (Score:2, Insightful)
why would you post this, you are throwing off his experiment
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Right; whoever reads this is bound by the Slashdot code of secrecy not to explain it to any media people (or other non aware "sheep") at pain of having a dihydrogen monoxide [dhmo.org] poisoning attempt. Trust me, if you do give the game away, wait two days and then demand your food is tested for DHMO. We will find you. It will be there. We will get it into all and everything you eat.
(posting as Anonymous so that nobody can trace my packets)
DHMO is very dangerous. (Score:1)
Don't joke about DHMO! It is very dangerous. It is now Long Beach police policy to shoot people if they point device that can spay DHMO at a officer, even if more than 40 feet away.
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Indeed, you can poison yourself by drinking DHMO! [wikipedia.org]
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I'm tempted to pour water all over your stuff and see how you feel about it then.
Or, for even more fun, submerge you in 10 feet of it.
Just because something is a natural part of the environment doesn't mean it won't cause massive problems if we change the amount.
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Ah yes, DHMO Fatal if inhaled [cfact.tv]
Non-aware? (Score:2)
I think the media is VERY aware. The media has an agenda, what that agenda is not the same for all media but you can see it clearly by how a story plays OR doesn't play. Girl in train is assaulted by 5 people, beaten with a hammer, 6th helps them escape by knocking out a window. The police description released to help find them says they got tinted skins, meaning in Holland and considering the area muslims. Now can you guys how few media happened to report this story at all and even if they did write down t
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When did 'Muslim' become 'racial data'? And perhaps more importantly, when the fuck did 'tinted skin' mean Muslim?
The reason the media didn't say the crime was done by 'immigrants' is the reason it always doesn't says that...because no one can fucking tell someone's an immigrant without knowing who they are. It's the same reason they don't say 'Their last name started with an R'.
Take your idiotic racist blather and conspiracy theories somewhere else.
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casual idjits dont read slashdot
Exactly. The idiots here put a lot of effort into it.
Re:ruined (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. If journalists don't even bother to look the topic up on Google and find this story, it proves the point.
Re:ruined (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Caveat lector.
Yeah, watch out, or he'll eat your liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
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And for normal readers, the error is just the same as anyone believing a rumor.
Wikipedia is an entirely useful place if you treat it as some random person telling you things. It's like if you went to a room with every human in it and stood up and yelled 'Does anyone understand quantum mechanics' or 'Does anyone know the winners of the 1994 Nobel prizes?' and someone came up to you and asserted that they did and told you about those things.
They're supposed to also be carrying the books to back up their cla
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If *YOU* RTFA, you would see that the article itself explains that the article isn't the honeypot, but the press release is:
But would the media turn a correlation-only finding into a causation-based health scare? To find out, I have released my mobile masts and births results as a press release. We'll see if anyone jumps to the conclusion that mobile phone radiation really can give conception a helping hand.
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No more having to wear a fucking rubber.
The Actual Press Release (Score:2)
http://bit.ly/fU1LY6 [bit.ly] (links to a PDF)
It went out on the 16th.
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In other news (Score:5, Funny)
.. a whopping 99.44 percent of hardened heroin addicts started out drinking milk!
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Re:In other news (Score:5, Funny)
Possibly unrelated, but there were also no atomic bombs before American women gained the right to vote.
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Also note that it already had been proven that the stork brings the babies (in Germany, both stork population and birth rates were going down for a long time, this is a clear correlation). So maybe cell phones attract storks. :-)
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And in other, other news (Score:2)
Even to prove a point it's a bad idea to sabotage your own credibility.
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Nearly 90% of violent criminals are known to carry the 'SRY' gene. Hitler, Stalin, Osama bin Laden and all 19 of the 9/11 terrorists are believed to have been SRY carriers. Even worse, the majority of the population in countries like Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan (but not the UK, France or Canada) have a copy of this dangerous gene! While the full results have not been released, it is thought that the genome sequence of Ozzy Osborne, which also revealed evidence of Neanderthal ancestry, contains SRY.
http://en. [wikipedia.org]
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Beer
The study is nonsense! (Score:5, Funny)
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They are causally related.
More adults cause the installation of more cell phone towers, and higher birth rates cause more adults.
So higher birth cause more cell phone towers, although with a 20 year lag or so. If a place has X births, and another place has 3X births, in 20 years the second place will have probably added 3X times more cell towers as the first added. (Obviously, other population-affecting variables could happen also.)
There is a logical error in using these results, to prove that though, be
I wish he wouldn't have admitted it immediately (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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anyone who reads the slashdot article (or the article it links to) first will not believe and propagate the honeypot article.
Or will propagate it because it's fake, if they want to see the experiment have certain results.
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Moreover, I couldn't even find the press release on the net, but now the re-posts of his blog entry about it have spread like wildfire. So anybody who even thinks to Google the topic will instantly see the story about how he's trying to trick journalists. This is an epic fail of an effort to do so.
I think that's part of the idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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It's well worth reading the comments under the Guardian article!
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Re: comments. Fuckin' amazin'! Even some of the people who RTFA didn't RTFA!!!
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I believe he's trying to be, as he would put it, a cheeky bastard.
CORRELATION != CAUSATION!!!1!11!eleven (Score:2)
This guy should have let the "honeypot" article sit around and see what happens first, rather than having the explanation article AND have it be posted on slashdot. Doing this interferes with the experiment by making it less likely to be picked up - anyone who reads the slashdot article (or the article it links to) first will not believe and propagate the honeypot article.
A lack of inaccurate articles (alleging a causal relationship between cell towers and high birth rates) may not be caused by the explanation and the posting to slashdot. Rather, it could be caused by a third factor: Nobody gives a damn what this guy says.
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Isn't explaining the hoax in the article itself going to prevent the media from taking up the story as intended ?
Crop circles [wikipedia.org].
Cause of living near highways found (Score:2)
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Where I come from highways tend to be fenced off[1], so it seems that an equally valid conclusion would be that retarded parents have retarded kids.
[1] Whether this is to protect people from traffic or vice-versa is unknown.
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Low-income living. (Score:2)
The highway in this context means living within 1,000 feet of the heavily trafficked cross-town expressway.
The researchers theorized that the type and sheer quantity of chemicals distributed on highways are different from those on even the busiest city roadways.
at I want to know is, why are families with autistic children so keen on living near highways? I think it's because they're hoping their kid gets run over.
More likely it's because they can afford the rent.
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well i did look at the study... it's data is about mothers within a certain range of a highway that give birth.
the correlation that it generates is that you should not live near a highway if you are pregnant because of some risk factors which might be Autism.
if the data is right or wrong is another story...
this kinda reminds me of the powerline near your home equal cancer issues.
may be ... (Score:1)
Causal link (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Bah, humbug. How can you hook up these days without a cell phone? You can't. There's your causal link.
Those liberal scientists are at it again! (Score:2)
If we see this reported at all in the Rupert Murdoch sector of the media, I predict it will be misinterpreted as a claim by anti-business liberal alarmist scientists that cellphones are bad for you.
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I would think the link to the number of *stillbirths* would be much more effective!
All those poor .6 babies! (Score:5, Funny)
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A half life.
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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?
Remember those 2.4 children that the average couple used to have?
Now it's worse.
And it's all because of cell phones.
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No, no, it's fine. Modern medicine can combine the 0.4 extra children from the average couple with the 0.6 from the towers to create a single, perfectly healthy baby.
Isn't technology grand?
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No, that's silly. If a couple has 17.6 more kids, then they'll just have 20 full kids instead of the weird partial 2.4 kids.
My favorite blooper: "marriage creates wealth" (Score:1)
Of course, that gets the direction of causality exactly wrong. Higher income and net worth is almost perfectly correlated with levels of health (Dutch study nailed this pretty well)
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They already know it's wrong. Most news is not factual, it is social (and usually aimed to entertain than inform). As long as it gets enough (uninformed) people reading, perhaps by reinforcing prejudices or exaggerating the faults of other ingroups then they will write down as many misleading things as they can. The illiteracy is a feature that will not go away because it serves too many purposes.
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as any guy in a UK or American city will tell you, money is to marriage-crazed females what honey is to bees.
So the money's actually created by the women? Is the husband like the bee keeper who periodically collects the money/honey for his own purposes?
Hello? (Score:2)
Hello? Yeah, OK, how is babby formed? can you hear me? Just went into a tunnel...
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Just went into a tunnel...
That'll do it.
Discover Magazine has fallen for it (Score:2)
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/12/17/each-cell-phone-tower-creates-18-babies-the-difference-between-causation-correlation/ [discovermagazine.com]
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But maybe - before posting that, you could *at least* RTLFP (read the last f*n paragraph):
"Parker is releasing his data as a press release, so keep an eye on your favorite (or least favorite) news organizations to see who bites on the sham cell tower-fertility connection."
Or, failing that, RTFURL (read the f*n URL):
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/12/17/each-cell-phone-tower-creates-18-babies- [discovermagazine.com] the-differ
Link to something scary (Score:2)
They should have linked the cell phone towers to *stillbirths* (which I assume would correlate just as well). Then the article would have gone everywhere!
I smell an opportunity. (Score:2)
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Definite causality (Score:5, Funny)
Every time my wife sees another tower going up, she says, "Well fuck me! They're putting up another one of those damned towers."
There's a lot to be said about... (Score:1)
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That's a serious problem in any study that looks at environmental factors for sickness.
Poor people generally live in much crappier conditions than non-poor, and have much poorer health.
Some of their poor health is almost certainly from their living conditions, but some of it is is instead from the poor nutrition, some from their lack of medical care, some from the less-safe jobs they work, and some is just from their general stress.
Often, looking at other countries can help, because the poor, while still
Cell Phones and Fertility (Score:1)
found so far (Score:1)
zmarter.com
esciencenews.com
tweetmeme.com
wn.com
topsy.com
tingly.com
scandalnews.com
and johornews.com
Yay!!! (Score:1)
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Gee. When you lie, people are misled. (Score:2)
If you want to see how much traction false media stories can achieve, just look at pretty much every second news item.
This is why discussion forums are so important; so that people from diverse backgrounds can network and compare notes and at least make an attempt to figure out what is really going on.
News stories are usually, I find, only valuable in terms of meta-information which can be used to extrapolate reality. Deliberately poisoning the mix with lame information is nothing new, the only difference
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But causation causes correlation.