Also related: Spurious Correlations[0]. These are great and really drives home the idea that correlation neither equals or implies causation. At least one of these graphs implies that if the US wanted to reduce the number of drivers getting hit by trains, they simply just need to stop importing oil from Norway.
What variables are you correlating in that example? It seems to correlate just fine if your measuring energy inputed to heat the room vs work done by air conditioner.
There 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.
first, 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.
This 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.
Yes - 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.
An 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.
Is 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?).
I 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.
I'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.
Wow, 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 :)
You'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.
The 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.
> 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.
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).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/03/23/true-f...