There’s nothing that annoys me more than science reporters who don’t understand that correlation doesn’t imply causation.
Then again, psychiatrists - heck, the whole medical profession - aren’t particularly good at statistics. Take this study
Stress from high housing prices and sporting failures is shrinking Sydneysiders’ brains, compared to those of their counterparts in Melbourne, an imaging study shows.
Royal Melbourne Hospital neuropsychiatrist Dennis Velakoulis and his team scanned the brains of 20 Sydneysiders and 20 Melburnians to look for differences in brain structure.
Did the researchers responsible control for the most obvious factor causing brain shrinkage in Sydney - excessive exposure to Ray Warren? Or was this taken into account, and the reporter simply omit to mention it?
Either way, what a joke…
Yes Robert, this is very bad science.
At the very least, you would expect some comparative measurement of Melburnians and Sydneysiders’ brains over time.
Who knows, in the past Sydneysiders’ brains may have been even smaller comparatively, and they may indeed be catching up with Melburnians’ brains.
So this may in fact be a very good news story for Sydneysiders.
Apologies if I point out the obvious, but it is April 1st….
I would have expected the researchers to have taken account of the effects of atmospheric moisture and rainfall patterns. Everyone knows that Melbourne gets much more rain than Sydney and this could be expected to show up in a greater volume of grey matter in Melburnians’ brains due to greater moisture content.
P.S. I know that the Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian Bureau of Statistics claim that Melbourne gets much less rain than Sydney. The scandalous use of taxpayers’ money to support the propagation of such a lie is second only to the theft of taxpayers’ money for funding of the CSIRO and bodies like the IPCC to spread lies about so-called global warming.
What Chris said.
I’d be more interested in a study of Adelaide brains anyway (which I suspect would be bigger than those from either Sydney _or_ Melbourne). (removes tongue from cheek.)
In other April 1st news, Andrew Bolt announced his candidacy for Higgins:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/an_announcement_from_the_seat_of_higgins/
Yes, Chris, your calendar reading skills are on the money.
They’ve got the causation the wrong way ’round. They don’t have shrunken brains ’cause they’re Sydneysiders. They’re Sydneysiders ’cause they’ve got shrunken brains.
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What’s that song?
An example I always enjoy using to illustrate correlation not implying causation is that there is (or was, the last time I checked) a 0.75 correlation between the all-Australian mean annual rainfall and my fastest time running around the Tan in Melbourne in the year concerned.
(As with many spurious correlations, this one can be blamed on a single outlier - in the severe drought year of 2002 I was injured for almost the whole year).
Don’t be concerned about Andrew Bolt: he’s the joke that just keeps on giving, all year round.
More interesting are these penguins
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml;jsessionid=BMK0SWHVASNJLQFIQMFSFFWAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2008/04/01/npenguin101.xml&site=5&page=0
where the sample size far exceeds 20.
Hi Robert,
Paul N - what you’ve forgotten is the Mr Potato-head factor. Melbournians brains are well watered, lush havens of growth :-p
Brain size probably results from Melbournites having electrically powered brains (induction from the Trams), while all Sydneysiders have are the stray hydrocarbons from another jam on the F3
It is a pretty funny article.
I thought that was a myth. That Sydney actually got more rainfall but people thought it rained more in Melbourne because it rains more often.
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Just not as much.
True Adrien.
Or least it used to be - who knows anymore in this brutal and pulverising ice-age?
That’s right FDB. That’s why we need to keep those 4WDs running 24/7.
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Poor Graeme. I’m sure this isn’t what he wanted to be when he grew up.
Another lump of easy coal in the Melb v Syd locomotive. Starve it of attention and we may just start to get the media we think we deserve.
The ABC of all bodies…