This is truly amazingly bad reporting on what can only be described as a preliminary, exploratory epidemiological study No, your cell phone isn't trying to kill youpic.twitter.com/HhFVzDizvF
You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more
To do this, we have to quickly go over confidence intervals
When we compute a confidence interval, we are basically saying that there's a decent chance that the true value lies between 2 points
If the confidence interval crosses 1, it means that there's no statistical difference between the result and what we'd expect to find purely by chance If the confidence interval is very wide, it means that there is so much variance in the result that it might not be true anyway
These are the tests behind that headline. Confidence intervals are in the little red squares Notice anything strange?pic.twitter.com/HU0a4dOFAE
The first one is 1.00-2.17 That is ~technically~ significant, but really only just. This is likely to be a meaningless result
The second is 1.38-3.03. This is a more robust result, but it's still bordering on insignificance given the sample size
So the headline finding, the one that is being used to scare everyone about how terrifying light is... ...probably isn't true And it gets worse
This is the conclusion. It's the closest you can get to saying "we found nothing at all" without actually coming out and saying itpic.twitter.com/sRD9NO3Pgb
Note to journalists: when a scientists hedges this much in a conclusion, there's a good chance the findings were not significant at allpic.twitter.com/Uahhl1pLvS
Is that what the authors claim?
No! I'm getting to that, the authors were pretty straightforward about how their study is interesting and innovative and might mean nothing at all
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.