Study links cell phones, tumors

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Is there any significance to this study?

The way these conclusions are made, is that a statistical significance test is applied to the data, and anything that has below 5% significance is accepted (or rather, anything above 5% is rejected). The meaning of this 5% significance is that you perform the experiment 100 times, and if the real answer to the question you are asking is that there is absolutely no relations between the two sets of data you are measuring (in this case cell phone use and a certain kind of tumor) then you can expect to get results showing that the data sets are related with 5% significance or below in about 5 out of those 100 experiments.

Basically it means that 5% of scientific papers reporting on experiments showing relations between two phenomena are wrong: they report there's a relation where there's no relation. that's 5% of all experiments conducted, not out of those published: Most of the experiments that don't show 5% or lower significance are not published.

If you perform a study where you compare 10 pieces of unrelated data, you would have 45 pairs of data to compare, and even if there is absolutely no relation among the data collected, probability theory assures you of 2-3 papers you can publish on significant relations you found among this data.

Posted by: hadaso   Posted on: 10/15/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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