8 ms·
Storks Deliver Babies (p= 0.008) (2000) [pdf]
- jeffmh 5y agoI only see the first page when I click the article link. I found the full text online here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Matthews-2/publication/227763292_Storks_Deliver_Babies_p_0008/links/56f138d708aec9e096b316c9/Storks-Deliver-Babies-p-0008.pdf?origin=publication_detail https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Matthews-2/publi...
- zinekeller 5y agoSomething wrong with your reader? It loaded normally for me.
- irrational 5y agoIt didn’t work for me either. Safari on iOS.
- renewiltord 5y agoThank you. I had the same problem on Chrome on ios.
- jeffmh 5y agoInteresting. Must be a WebKit issue - I’m running safari on iOS
- apollo1213 5y agoI cannot view it directly in firefox. A direct view link in browser: https://docmadeeasy.com/v/266959716 https://docmadeeasy.com/v/266959716
- 6gb 5y agoReminded me of this: https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- okl 5y agoRelated: "The ASA Statement on p-Values: Context, Process, and Purpose" - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2016.1... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30324223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30324223
- bruce343434 5y agoIs it just me or is this article unreadable due to the atrocious typesetting? All the letters overlap.
- TYMorningCoffee 5y agoMy Firefox built in pdf viewer does not overlap the letters. Download the pdf and try another viewer.
- dang 5y agoPast related thread: Storks Deliver Babies (p= 0.008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700606 - Oct 2020 (58 comments)
- ajuc 5y agoThe confounding variable is how developed a country is. It negatively influences both stork pairs (storks in Europe mostly live in old-style individual farming countryside) and birth rates.
- pyuser583 5y agoThe confounding variable is how large a country is (both size and population - two variables that are themselves related). The papers “birth rate” is absolute: thousands of births per year in that country. It should be number of births per woman of childbearing years. Likewise, the number of stork pairs is the absolute number in the country. It should be absolute number per square kilometer, or per square kilometer of stork habitat. A geographically larger country will (generally) have more people and more storks. Edit: there are also some outliers heavily influencing things: Poland and Turkey have tons of storks. Belgium, Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland don’t seem to have native storks.
- ajuc 5y ago> Poland and Turkey have tons of storks. Belgium, Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland don’t seem to have native storks. This is the development factor I wrote about :) Storks in Europe live in symbiosis with individual farmers. As countries switch from millions of small farmers to thousands of massive industrialized farms - stork populations dwindle. This is how it looks like: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stary_Brus#/media/Plik:Stary_Brus_centrum.jpg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stary_Brus#/media/Plik:Stary_B... Almost every house has its stork nest, people provide the scaffolding for the nest (usually on the house roof or on powerline pylons). Storks eat small rodents, insects and other pests (for example whenever farmers are plowing storks go behind the tractor and eat larva that are uncovered).
- ncmncm 5y agoThat corporate farms fail to provide stork nestage is a fail.
- 5y ago
- chinchilla2020 5y agoA hypothesis test allows us to say we rejected the null hypothesis. It doesn't prove anything else besides that.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jdrc 5y ago
- Sindisil 5y agoRelated: Lack of pirates is causing global warming: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/03/23/true-fact-the-lack-of-pirates-is-causing-global-warming/?sh=24e341713a67 https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/03/23/true-f...
- sharkweek 5y agoHah! I love this kind of stuff REPORT: Average human has less than two arms
- bryanrasmussen 5y agowell, sure, after sharkweek!
- qznc 5y agoThere are no humans with three or more arms. Most humans have two arms. A few humans have one or zero arms. Thus, the mean/average number of arms should be between 1.9 and 2.0 but surely less then two. (The median number of arms is two though)
- anotheraccount9 5y agoProve it.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agofirst, I am aware of the stats so the lecture was a waste. second, the posters name was sharkweek, if you went in the water during sharkweek you probably wouldn't have two arms, this is what is known as a joke based on an eponysterical name. third, you are also incorrect in your statement that there are no humans with 3 arms https://www.google.com/search?q=baby+born+with+three+arms https://www.google.com/search?q=baby+born+with+three+arms
- qznc 5y ago
- unhammer 5y agoAnother good resource on how (not) to mess up statistics is https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/ https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/
- tapland 5y agoI doubt storks care about national borders and this should probably be repeated using birth rates in general areas around stork populations ;)
- xiphias2 5y agoI wouldn’t trust this article. How can only be 1 pair of storks in Belgium, while 5000 pairs in Hungary? I think the article needs better peer review before I accept the fact that storks deliver babies.
- shalmanese 5y agoYou're right, the only thing we can logically conclude from this study is that the number of storks known to humans correlates with birth rates, leading to the obvious conclusion that countries which are better at finding storks are also better at having procreative sex, probably due to the close similarity between the two behaviors.
- missedthecue 5y agoBeing a bird watcher is a prophylactic?
- Koffiepoeder 5y agoI'm happy to inform you that nowadays the storks in Belgium are sort of returning. There's two successful breeding programs happening: one in "Het Zwin" and one in "Planckendael". It is sadly true that the stork used to be quasi-extinct over here. Outside of these breeding programmes I've never seen one around.
- xiphias2 5y agoWow, that's crazy. I lived in Hungary and I saw them in every village all my life, they are always so cute, I'm glad they are back, hopefully there will be more babies born as well :)
- hedora 5y agoAlso, the argument that the Covid vaccines are safe and free of tracker chips is completely lacking. At least we can all agree that it doesn't convincingly argue that horse dewormer is dangerous.
- jmmcd 5y agoThis is rather silly (and not in the way intended). The goal of the paper is to demonstrate a strong linear correlation which arises without a trivial confounder (such as age influencing both reading age and shoe size in children). However, the confounder in the case of storks (country land area influences number of storks and absolute number of births) IS trivial.
- OJFord 5y ago> One candidate for a potential confounding variable is land area: readers are invited to investigate this possibility using the data in table 1.
- jmmcd 5y agoYes - to be clear, the author knows this is the confounder. That's why it was silly of the author to claim that the paper would describe a correlation without a trivial confounder.
- hedora 5y agoLand area isn't well-correlated with the other three columns in the table.
- jmmcd 5y agoYes it is! I calculated R = 0.58, 0.81, 0.92, respectively. These will be highly significant, comparable to the p-value in the headline. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QTEB7KF1PXBV_TjgBsuVTQ0OPldV9yiJ3_lYvTZEdeQ/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QTEB7KF1PXBV_TjgBsuV...
- keitmo 5y agoMy mom was an OB/GYN nurse for several decades. She worked in Active Labor for many years with a nurse named Alice Stork. This Stork did indeed deliver thousands of babies.
- samplatt 5y agoAn acquaintance of mine was a team manager for a government-welfare phone-support entity. The other two managers' names were D'eath and Bludd. My friend married a man named Paine. So the phone-support teams were managed by Blood, Death, and Pain. It's one of the most wonderful matchups I've ever seen.
- flobosg 5y agoSounds like a case of nominative determinism! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
- woolion 5y agoIs this concept often mentioned in mainstream media? This is mentioned a lot around here. My hypothesis is that a "hn-bias" makes commenters more likely to mention it because they learned here that there is an explicit concept to arrange these funny coincidences, and moreover there is some quantitative work that has been done on the subject. But it could be a variant of frequency illusion/Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (what would be its name?).
- noduerme 5y agoThe fusion of hydrogen into helium E = 0.008 mc ^2. Coincidence? I think not.