9 ms·

Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth’s magnetic field (2013)

85 points by Luc 3y ago

anileated 3y ago
(2013)
jncfhnb 3y ago
Somewhat famous p hacking example iirc
- superb-owl 3y ago
  I was thinking this might be the case just based on the conclusion. But it doesn't seem to be retracted, and I can't find any evidence of a scandal.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    I don’t think it was noteworthy enough to cause a scandal. You can find scattered discussions on their p hacking. Nobody really cared though. The authors are pretty clear that they didn’t find what they were looking for and so they just tried whatever they could with the remaining data and landed on dog pooping orientation.
    - akiselev 3y ago
      They wanted tenure, they found dog shit. Their research is a tortured metaphor for their own career prospects. When I put it like that, it evokes more pity than outrage. Imagine what they had to go through to collect enough data.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  Do you know where I can find a succinct and good explanation of p-hacking? Last time I looked into it, I couldn't understand why it was seen as a problem.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    The p-value is supposed to measure how likely you were to get a result by pure chance. People use this as a measure of how strong the evidence published in some paper is, for example if you publish a result that has a 1% probability of being produced by pure chance it's probably worth looking into. The problem is if what you actually did wasn't one experiment, but 1000 simultaneous experiments. That happens quickly if you start looking for correlations in your data. The issue is that if you then use the same 1% threshold for significance, on average 10 experiments will clear that threshold by pure chance. Your statistical test has become worthless. That's fine if you account for it, but if you don't and just publish those 10 results that's called p-hacking. People hate it because it makes purely random results look as if they were significant.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    You set out to test an idea. Our statistical toolkit can’t prove the idea so we say “if I check out this idea and I think the results could only have happened by in my expected way by random chance 5% of the time, I’ll conclude I was correct. You do your experiment. You don’t find any evidence you were correct. So you test 20 other ideas. Lo and behold, 1 out of the 20 new unregistered ideas passes the test of seeming to occur with less than a 1 in 20 probability of occurring. Well duh. It would be weird if you didn’t find such an outcome. This particular study openly acknowledged doing this, and also did some creative binning of their numbers to help nudge the stats. You will always be able to find something. P hacking doesn’t mean the thing you found is false, but it is at best a sloppy estimate of something to explore further. The more egregious examples of p hacking is adjusting outliers and filtering out specific datapoints until you can make the data claim whatever you want.
    - groestl 3y ago
      Or, in the form of a comic strip https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/ (I have this in my head when p-hacking comes up)
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        A bit. But you can test 20 ideas. This is not so bad. We have tools to scrutinize such results like the false discovery rate and related concepts. The real problem is when you set out to test 20 things, and they don’t work, so you test 20 more things; and then much worse when you only tell us about the analysis that lead to the 1/40 that mattered. The thing about p hacking specifically is changing your analysis until it finds something that looks good. A lot of people don’t understand math and will do this and not understand that they’re gaming it. A lot of people will understand this and do it anyway because academia is soul crushing and they need to publish.
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
Discussed in 2020 (160 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276468 and 10 months ago (44 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32736851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32736851 A good blog post on the seeming ridiculousness of the claim: https://www.shapeoperator.com/2020/02/15/how-to-lie-with-units/ https://www.shapeoperator.com/2020/02/15/how-to-lie-with-uni...
micromacrofoot 3y ago
As a lifelong dog owner... this screams nonsense immediately. I'm skeptical that this could even be tested for properly.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  My doggo's GNSS is broken: he can't even decide where to go much less which heading.
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  Right? We walk on a big loop road, and my dog always poops parallel to the road, regardless of which direction the road is heading in that location.
1letterunixname 3y ago
Preregistration is one mitigation. Perhaps another could be a trusted, HIPAA-compliant third-party log service for raw data that's immutable with a blockchain-like hash and timestamp.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
swayvil 3y ago
A dowser recently told me that's how he dowses. By detecting kinks in the Earth's magnetic field. Thus he detects underground water, buried objects, disturbed earth, graves, cables, etc. He works for the state department of land management or somesuch. Apparently they all dowse there. They even have a preferred "dowsing rod". A retractable thing like a radio antenna attached to a swivelling handle. (According to the dowser rather overpriced)
- nonrepeating 3y ago
  I’ve seen one of these as well, in the hands of a state employee, exactly as you describe. There should be a word for the mass-produced normalization of superstition. Ouijification?
  - swayvil 3y ago
    Superstition? I think they're getting results. It works.
    - lelanthran 3y ago
      > Superstition? I think they're getting results. It works. Compared to what? I can almost guarantee that they aren't getting results any better than random chance. I mean, really, if dowsing is every proven to work under rigorous scientific conditions, there'd be a Nobel prize in it for someone, because we'd have a whole new field of scientific study that has never before in the history of mankind produced any evidence of it's existence.
      - swayvil 3y ago
        Unless it's weird. Weird stuff happens. I mean you're naysaying the testimony of hundreds of field researchers on the weight of, let's face it, mere convention. And these aren't necessarily dumb people. They value time and money just like we do It does depend on the sensitivity of the dowser after all. That sounds squishy, like psychology. Certainly less obvious than weights and measures. Who knows, maybe it takes a certain kind of person to do it.
eimrine 3y ago
Any service which register and share data on magnetic field changes? It might be useful for dog-owners not just to observe strange behaviour of the pet but to understand.
- defrost 3y ago
  Your National Geophysical Organisation maps all that on a regular basis. Broad area mag surveys are flown in grids 80m above the ground with nine nano-tesla senistive magnetometers (wing tips and tail boom each have three on cartesian axis). To produce a level map they also run local base stations to record the daily diurnal mag fluctuations to subtract and normalise. That gets feed into the IGRF (International Geomagnetic Reference Field) and|or WMM (World Magnetic Model) to create parameters for five year epoh predictions. On a smaller scale many archeology groups and or soil engineers run smaller tighter grids dragging skids of walking arrays across an acre or more to create sub ground imaging. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/international-geomagnetic-reference-field https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/international-geomagnetic... https://geomag.bgs.ac.uk/research/modelling/IGRF.html https://geomag.bgs.ac.uk/research/modelling/IGRF.html https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/world-magnetic-model https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/world-magnetic-model Here's some broad area airborne magnetic maps: https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/geological-survey/mesa-journal/previous-feature-articles/aeromagnetic-images-serving-geological-interpretation https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/geological-surve...
dieg0 3y ago
This must be the reason dogs feel earthquakes minutes before humans do. A couple weeks back I read an article here (HN) regarding earthquakes being linked to MF changes and solar storms. This aligns to that finding as well. Interesting!
troft 3y ago
[dead]
Name_Chawps 3y ago
Even if dogs were sensitive to Earth's magnetic field, why would they shit facing North/South? What would be the point?
- sandworm101 3y ago
  Prevailing winds? Weather is generally orientated east-west. So aligning north-south keeps one end from smelling the other.
jononomo 3y ago
This is an example of the creative power of Evolution at work -- dogs that did not align themselves with the Earth's magnetic poles when peeing were simply been eliminated from the gene pool by the unyielding machine that is the survival of the fittest.

85 points by Luc 3y ago

anileated 3y ago

(2013)

jncfhnb 3y ago

Somewhat famous p hacking example iirc

superb-owl 3y ago
I was thinking this might be the case just based on the conclusion. But it doesn't seem to be retracted, and I can't find any evidence of a scandal.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  I don’t think it was noteworthy enough to cause a scandal. You can find scattered discussions on their p hacking. Nobody really cared though. The authors are pretty clear that they didn’t find what they were looking for and so they just tried whatever they could with the remaining data and landed on dog pooping orientation.
  - akiselev 3y ago
    They wanted tenure, they found dog shit. Their research is a tortured metaphor for their own career prospects. When I put it like that, it evokes more pity than outrage. Imagine what they had to go through to collect enough data.
CoastalCoder 3y ago
Do you know where I can find a succinct and good explanation of p-hacking? Last time I looked into it, I couldn't understand why it was seen as a problem.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  The p-value is supposed to measure how likely you were to get a result by pure chance. People use this as a measure of how strong the evidence published in some paper is, for example if you publish a result that has a 1% probability of being produced by pure chance it's probably worth looking into. The problem is if what you actually did wasn't one experiment, but 1000 simultaneous experiments. That happens quickly if you start looking for correlations in your data. The issue is that if you then use the same 1% threshold for significance, on average 10 experiments will clear that threshold by pure chance. Your statistical test has become worthless. That's fine if you account for it, but if you don't and just publish those 10 results that's called p-hacking. People hate it because it makes purely random results look as if they were significant.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  You set out to test an idea. Our statistical toolkit can’t prove the idea so we say “if I check out this idea and I think the results could only have happened by in my expected way by random chance 5% of the time, I’ll conclude I was correct. You do your experiment. You don’t find any evidence you were correct. So you test 20 other ideas. Lo and behold, 1 out of the 20 new unregistered ideas passes the test of seeming to occur with less than a 1 in 20 probability of occurring. Well duh. It would be weird if you didn’t find such an outcome. This particular study openly acknowledged doing this, and also did some creative binning of their numbers to help nudge the stats. You will always be able to find something. P hacking doesn’t mean the thing you found is false, but it is at best a sloppy estimate of something to explore further. The more egregious examples of p hacking is adjusting outliers and filtering out specific datapoints until you can make the data claim whatever you want.
  - groestl 3y ago
    Or, in the form of a comic strip https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/ (I have this in my head when p-hacking comes up)
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      A bit. But you can test 20 ideas. This is not so bad. We have tools to scrutinize such results like the false discovery rate and related concepts. The real problem is when you set out to test 20 things, and they don’t work, so you test 20 more things; and then much worse when you only tell us about the analysis that lead to the 1/40 that mattered. The thing about p hacking specifically is changing your analysis until it finds something that looks good. A lot of people don’t understand math and will do this and not understand that they’re gaming it. A lot of people will understand this and do it anyway because academia is soul crushing and they need to publish.

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

Discussed in 2020 (160 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276468 and 10 months ago (44 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32736851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32736851 A good blog post on the seeming ridiculousness of the claim: https://www.shapeoperator.com/2020/02/15/how-to-lie-with-units/ https://www.shapeoperator.com/2020/02/15/how-to-lie-with-uni...

micromacrofoot 3y ago

As a lifelong dog owner... this screams nonsense immediately. I'm skeptical that this could even be tested for properly.

1letterunixname 3y ago
My doggo's GNSS is broken: he can't even decide where to go much less which heading.
stronglikedan 3y ago
Right? We walk on a big loop road, and my dog always poops parallel to the road, regardless of which direction the road is heading in that location.

1letterunixname 3y ago

Preregistration is one mitigation. Perhaps another could be a trusted, HIPAA-compliant third-party log service for raw data that's immutable with a blockchain-like hash and timestamp.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

swayvil 3y ago

A dowser recently told me that's how he dowses. By detecting kinks in the Earth's magnetic field. Thus he detects underground water, buried objects, disturbed earth, graves, cables, etc. He works for the state department of land management or somesuch. Apparently they all dowse there. They even have a preferred "dowsing rod". A retractable thing like a radio antenna attached to a swivelling handle. (According to the dowser rather overpriced)

nonrepeating 3y ago
I’ve seen one of these as well, in the hands of a state employee, exactly as you describe. There should be a word for the mass-produced normalization of superstition. Ouijification?
- swayvil 3y ago
  Superstition? I think they're getting results. It works.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > Superstition? I think they're getting results. It works. Compared to what? I can almost guarantee that they aren't getting results any better than random chance. I mean, really, if dowsing is every proven to work under rigorous scientific conditions, there'd be a Nobel prize in it for someone, because we'd have a whole new field of scientific study that has never before in the history of mankind produced any evidence of it's existence.
    - swayvil 3y ago
      Unless it's weird. Weird stuff happens. I mean you're naysaying the testimony of hundreds of field researchers on the weight of, let's face it, mere convention. And these aren't necessarily dumb people. They value time and money just like we do It does depend on the sensitivity of the dowser after all. That sounds squishy, like psychology. Certainly less obvious than weights and measures. Who knows, maybe it takes a certain kind of person to do it.

eimrine 3y ago

Any service which register and share data on magnetic field changes? It might be useful for dog-owners not just to observe strange behaviour of the pet but to understand.

defrost 3y ago
Your National Geophysical Organisation maps all that on a regular basis. Broad area mag surveys are flown in grids 80m above the ground with nine nano-tesla senistive magnetometers (wing tips and tail boom each have three on cartesian axis). To produce a level map they also run local base stations to record the daily diurnal mag fluctuations to subtract and normalise. That gets feed into the IGRF (International Geomagnetic Reference Field) and|or WMM (World Magnetic Model) to create parameters for five year epoh predictions. On a smaller scale many archeology groups and or soil engineers run smaller tighter grids dragging skids of walking arrays across an acre or more to create sub ground imaging. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/international-geomagnetic-reference-field https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/international-geomagnetic... https://geomag.bgs.ac.uk/research/modelling/IGRF.html https://geomag.bgs.ac.uk/research/modelling/IGRF.html https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/world-magnetic-model https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/world-magnetic-model Here's some broad area airborne magnetic maps: https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/geological-survey/mesa-journal/previous-feature-articles/aeromagnetic-images-serving-geological-interpretation https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/geological-surve...

dieg0 3y ago

This must be the reason dogs feel earthquakes minutes before humans do. A couple weeks back I read an article here (HN) regarding earthquakes being linked to MF changes and solar storms. This aligns to that finding as well. Interesting!

troft 3y ago

[dead]

Name_Chawps 3y ago

Even if dogs were sensitive to Earth's magnetic field, why would they shit facing North/South? What would be the point?

sandworm101 3y ago
Prevailing winds? Weather is generally orientated east-west. So aligning north-south keeps one end from smelling the other.

jononomo 3y ago

This is an example of the creative power of Evolution at work -- dogs that did not align themselves with the Earth's magnetic poles when peeing were simply been eliminated from the gene pool by the unyielding machine that is the survival of the fittest.