10-Year Cell Phone / Cancer Study Is Inconclusive 248
crimeandpunishment writes "A major international (retrospective) study into cell phones and cancer, which took 10 years and surveyed almost 13,000 people, is finally complete — and it's inconclusive. The lead researcher said, 'There are indications of a possible increase. We're not sure that it is correct. It could be due to bias, but the indications are sufficiently strong ... to be concerned.' The study, conducted by the World Health Organization and partially funded by the cellphone industry, looked at the possible link between cell phone use and two types of brain cancer. It will be published this week."
It's all relative (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's all relative (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people who have high cell phone usage also share other behavior. CEO use cells a lot and have high stress. Stress is a key factor in a lot of cancers. It's hard to track the roots of the problem.
Re:It's all relative (Score:5, Interesting)
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It could be caused by the stress of talking to people on the phone and perhaps some effect of the radio waves. Nothing has been proven.
Re:It's all relative (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:It's all relative (Score:4, Insightful)
You should probably consider the inverse-square law.
Cell towers transmit at higher power than cell phones, but only a minuscule portion of that reaches even a person standing at the base of the tower. With a cell phone against your ear, about half of the transmitted rf energy is going through your skull.
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It's difficult to be sure. The fact they could find neither a conclusive link nor disprove one indicates they missed something which is likely associated. While it's rather difficult prove a negative, you usually can do well enough.
My personal opinion is there's no direct link but since this is such a politicized issue people pretty much think what they want. The closest analogy I can think of is the vaccination/autism argument. The real
Re:It's all relative (Score:5, Insightful)
They did disprove it. However, the study author and the reporter really, really, really wanted to prove it so it was reported as "inconclusive".
Re:It's all relative (Score:5, Informative)
I always wonder when I get these "challenges" whether someone really doesn't understand how statistics work, so they are wandering around in a constant state of confusion (or worse, confident ignorance). Or whether they are all pedantic asses who are too lazy and/or stupid to have an independent thought.
I can think of trillions of examples of a causation without correlation. I'll stick to something related to this topic. People who use cell phones have different habits than those without. Perhaps, because people aren't tethered to the desk phone, when they take calls at a desk, they push away or are more likely to walk around. If the CRT radiation has a greater effect than the cell phone radiation, then you'll find a result that correlates cell phone usage with lowered cancer, even though cell phones cause cancer.
The short answer is "confounds." They are everywhere, and you eliminate as many as possible in a study, but you never know what you missed, and you find what you can, publish what you find, and if anyone else identified a confound that wasn't accounted for, they can re-run the study with that in mind to see if it had any effect.
But, that you can't think of even one possible solution to the question you asked means you are too narrow minded or too stupid to worry about. I'm just posting this for those that have reasoning skills left. It's like all the people here, especially when I see people talking about voting and balloting systems, where if they can't think of a solution to a problem, then it's somehow proof that the solution doesn't exist.
Re:It's all relative (Score:4, Insightful)
cell phone radiation isn't causing some massive epidemic of brain cancer
Even if there were a high percentage of brain cancers from phone users, how would you tell the difference between cancer caused by RF wave, which has no theoretical basis or past proven medical experience/documentation, or cancer caused by weird plastics, weird dyes, lead paint, weird petrochemical outgassing from the plastic phones, which has a reasonable scientific biological basis for causing cancer, and unfortunately plenty of medical experience/documentation?
Correlation Causation...
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Are you talking about brain cancer from the plastics and dyes in a cell phone? (Lead paint doesn't cause cancer.) I think brain cancer caused by the RF radiation (which does have an unproven theoretical basis) has a stronger argument behind it than getting brain cancer from touching a cell phone.
Regardless, it's easy to differentiate between them -- that's why people came up with the clever idea of control groups.
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I believe that if you make one short call a day, the energy your brain receives from that call will probably still be enough to make all the other network traffic negligible in comparison.
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And this small possible influence all the while people generally don't use BT headsets. They might do that, for a start.
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Too bad (Score:2)
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I was hoping that all those tools using blue tooth headsets were going to get prostate cancer as punishment.
Hmm... they would have to wear their headsets on the wrong head for that ;)
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Those not realising there are plenty of other places to keep your cellphone (also not quite so close to the body), certainly should.
No answer is sort-of an answer (Score:2, Insightful)
Cell phones cause so much cancer that ... the most widespread studies cant tell whether they cause cancer at all. That is good news for cell phone users.
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There's an even bigger difference between inconclusive and a strong positive result. If cell phones caused a huge number of cancers, studies would not be inconclusive.
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What you're saying is just not how statistics work. If the general population has a 1% chance of getting a specific type of cancer over 20 years, and a study found that people using cell phones seemed to have a 2% chance of getting cancer,
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It wan't about whether cell phones cause a huge number of cancers. It's about whether cell phones cause cancer at all, even in small numbers.
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Actually, it kind of does. If you have a null hypothesis "there is no link between cellphone use and brain cancer" then an inconclusive result would fail to disprove the null hypothesis and therefore affirm it. This is based on choosing a null hypothesis that is based on the sensible default position, which in this study is fine as long as you're the kind of person who is willing/capable of understanding that we are constantly bathed in all sorts of EM radiation of which cellphones only play a small part
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No, rejecting the hypothesis is a conclusion. An inconclusive study neither confirms nor rejects the hypothesis.
So each side calls success? (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, cellphone companies may try to take "we're not sure that it is correct" and declare no link to cancer.
whether or not there is any risk... (Score:2)
You have a much higher likelihood of developing cancer from UV light than from microwaves.
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>>You have a much higher likelihood of developing cancer from UV light than from microwaves.
Depends. It's probably better to be out in the sun than hiding inside in your parent's garage.
Forest Rangers have an abnormally low level of skin cancers, and they absorb as much UV light as anyone. (Hint: It's called a tan.)
Sunlight has lots of other benefits as well, not the least of which is you're probably exercising instead of playing WoW all day.
Sunlight is life-supporting in many ways (Score:2)
Sunlight has lots of other benefits as well, not the least of which is you're probably exercising instead of playing WoW all day.
Human skin synthesizes Vitamin D when exposed to the sun. Vitamin D is anti-cancer [sciencedaily.com], anti-rickets [wikipedia.org], anti-birth-defect, anti-flu (flu season takes place when the sun goes away for the winter), etc.
So basically, Vitamin-D is the Medical-Industrial Complex's worst enemy.
With that said, regular sunburns aren't good. It's usually best to stay out of the sun during the hottest parts of the day, approx. 12-2pm, and avoid sunscreen no matter what (which prevents the synthesis of Vitamin D).
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This is the substance that can't be patented, is free for most of the year, cures cancer, prevents the flu, etc etc. Vitamin D single-handedly makes high-priced medicine as archaic as bloodletting and quicksilver.
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This is the substance that can't be patented, is free for most of the year, cures cancer, prevents the flu, etc etc. Vitamin D single-handedly makes high-priced medicine as archaic as bloodletting and quicksilver.
What about the other 10 million things you can have go wrong with you which have nothing to do with Vitamin-D?
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It's definatelly better to be outside. Some people take "in the sun" too far though... And I would guess Forest Rangers aren't one of those; at least the equivalent in my place has sensible clothing, given the place they usually work in (plus - often trees). But those specific places are generally damn healthy, too.
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I would be very careful using the "why worry about X at all when Y is a bigger problem" argument. It is useful if you have to cho
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You have a much higher likelihood of developing cancer from UV light than from microwaves.
Citation needed. You're saying it's silly to investigate the likelihood of cell phones or microwaves causing cancer because you're more likely to get it from the sun. What is that based off of? Gut feelings about the relative likelihood?
In science and especially health-related scientific questions, you test a hypothesis, you don't just assume. At some point someone thought the question of "could the sun's rays be causing cancer" was silly because obviously the sun, giver of all life, could not be causin
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You have a much higher likelihood of developing cancer from UV light than from microwaves.
No problem, just cover your head with tin foil, and stop worrying about UV light causing brain cancer.
And if you replace top of your skull with a transparent glass dome, don't be a cheapskate like I was, invest in glass with proper certified UV filtering! I mean, what's the point of transparent dome if you have to cover it with tin foil when going outside...
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The study says what nearly all other studies have said: we don't know.
No, it says that if there is an effect then it's so insignificant that we can't find any valid evidence for it. And I'm sure any effect that insignificant could be completely eliminated at minimal cost by wearing a tin-foil hat.
Problem with surveys (Score:5, Insightful)
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Put a lab monkey next to an active mobile phone
Don't forget to put a "control" lab monkey next to a Chinese made kids toy.
Polymerized plastics are vaguely believed to be safe, unless they're the scare tactic of the month like plastics containing BPA. Partially unpolymerized monomers are vaguely dangerous. Some of the initiators / mold releases / dyes / lead paints used in the plastic industry are downright hazardous. Basically, if its plastic, and it smells when it's new out the of package, its probably dangerous to your health. The only question is
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Why don't people do this instead. Put a lab monkey next to an active mobile phone and keep them there for several years. After that, dissect the monkey for any signs of cancer.
But that wouldn't let you rake in tens of millions of dollars of funding to keep yourself off the dole queue for the next decade (doesn't take a gaggle of scientists to feed a monkey every day).
Plus the 'animal rights' nutters would burn down your house.
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And there you go, you could easily spend millions for such a setup.
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Why don't people do this instead. Put a lab monkey next to an active mobile phone and keep them there for several years.
Are you crazy? Do you know how much the phone bill would be man???
After that, dissect the monkey for any signs of cancer.
Why? We have so many teenage girls permanently attached to their cellphones that it seems like a waste of a perfectly good monkey. Of course some of the dads might object if their angelic daughters were dissected, but hey you have to sacrifice for progress.
Don't be so dismissive (Score:2)
Still, you shouldn't discount a survey as a useful statistical tool. Especially for mapping trends over time. Most of what you dismiss as introduced biases is accounted for, and factored out. If you have ever read one of these types of studies they are careful to give results with various factors included as well as remov
Re:Problem with surveys (Score:4, Insightful)
> I have a problem with "medical surveys" in that they a prone to make correlation-causation errors.
No they aren't. The people who conduct medical surveys such as this are invariably qualified epidemiologists who don't need to be told the difference between correlation and causation by some guy on slashdot.
Now, the media reporting of such surveys quite often conflates correlation and causation; see:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174 [phdcomics.com]
The final stage, not illustrated in the above diagram, involves some guy on slashdot conflating the actual surveys with media coverage of said surveys.
Re:Problem with surveys (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that simple. You're ignoring statistics. You'd need a certain number of monkeys and some of them would have to be controls. If the effect is predicted to be small you may need thousands of monkeys. Animal rights groups would have a fit over this.
The monkeys would also have to experience the cellphone radiation in a similar way that humans would. The radiation would have to be emitted as if a cellphone were pressed up against their ear, and it would have to be intermittent as to simulate a human taking calls throughout the day.
Different cellphone systems run on different frequencies. If there was strong evidence to suggest that one caused cancer we couldn't necessarily assume that they all do, including future networks running on different frequencies. The same could be said about the power of the transmitter--different phones transmit at different levels of power, and future phones may be very different.
Some researchers believe that some cancers may take much longer than 10 years to show, so a thorough experiment may need to last 30 years or more. By the time good data is collected the cellphone networks would probably be using different frequencies and possibly lower power transmitters.
I'm sure there are other factors that I'm not even thinking about. Setting up a bulletproof experiment of this nature and getting solid results in a reasonable period of time is at least difficult and maybe impossible.
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If the effect is predicted to be small you may need thousands of monkeys. Animal rights groups would have a fit over this.
I suppose we could use thousands of animal rights group activists instead of monkeys. Kill two birds with one cellphone!
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Both experimental and non-experimental studies are useful for this kind of thing. Neither is perfect, neither is useless. One of the great advantages of non-experimental studies here is that you can get enough data to estimate the size of a relatively subtle effect with enough accuracy to be useful, while taking into account numerous other potentially interacting factors. As a practical matter, you can't run a study of thousands of monkeys using cell phones, even if it were a good idea (which it isn't).
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Because to perform such a test in a lab, we'd have to come up with a mechanism by which cell phones cause radiation. Since nobody's been able to do that, it's very hard to design a lab experiment.
On the other hand, one can just postulate that cell phones cause cancer and then survey a bunch of people to see if that's true. No mechanism nor pesky experimental design required.
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Whoops.
"which cell phones cause radiation."
should be:
"which cell phones cause cancer."
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> Well first, where do you find monkeys who use cell phones...
The high schools are full of them.
Oh noes...not radio! (Score:3, Insightful)
Have they done this study against other types of radio frequencies like cordless land-line phones? What about emergency services workers that carry radios on their hips until needed...are they being checked for hip-cancer? Doesn't Nike or some other shoe maker have a device that fits inside a shoe so people can listen to FM whilst jogging? Watch out for heel-cancer! The point being, why are cell-phones being singled out as possible culprits where then are so many other devices out there that use radio technology?
I think the media has way too much control over what is allowed to scare us into taking action. It seems that our efforts could be better directed toward something that actually makes sense. Let Mythbusters handle this type of shit.
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Cell phones get singled out because it is a multi-billion dollar industry that has "deep pockets" for tort lawyers to sue out of existence.
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1. Hype?
2. They have the highest frequencies.
By the way: I always find it stunning that they think a radiation that is literally 1000 times weaker than freaking visible light, and also not remotely as intense, is what could create cancer.
Hell, if that were the case, then we’d all die of cancer after a short time in the sun!
What it means (Score:2)
So you know what that means, right? We are all going to die horrible deaths. (Or at least some of us).
There, I have concluded the inconclusive study.
USA Today (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:USA Today (Score:4, Interesting)
Results for some groups showed cellphone use actually appeared to lessen the risk of developing cancers, something the researchers described as "implausible."
People with UNDIAGNOSED very early stage brain cancer might have problems functioning in society, equals less likelihood of cell phone ownership. Not implausible at all.
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What this statement, and the statements in the accompanying article mean is that the researchers clearly had a strong bias towards finding a positive result. It was quite clear that the authors don't understand what "inconclusive" means in this context.
There is a simple idea associated with this sort of study that wasn't mentioned at all - correlation does not imply causation. That is that even if a correlation WAS found it still doesn't imply that cell phone use causes brain cancer.
But the converse does no
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With these kinds of inaccuracies due to self-report, the question you need to ask is whether or not they're liable to introduce bias or just noise. In this case, I can imagine a source of bias (cancer patients may tend to recall more cell phone use than healthy people) contributing to the effect. Given the reported findings, this doesn't sound like a huge problem. Perhaps there are other reasons to suspect bias in the other direction, which would be more of an issue. But I haven't read the study yet (do
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I remember hearing a while back that exposure to a small amount of radiation increases health (or decreases cancer risk). A bit like an 'immunization'. Would make sense here.
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The article in USA Today has a nice little gem in it:
"The authors acknowledged possible inaccuracies in the survey from the fact that participants were asked to remember how much and on which ear they used their mobiles over the past decade. Results for some groups showed cellphone use actually appeared to lessen the risk of developing cancers, something the researchers described as "implausible.""
Now, I don't know why, but something about this statement seems kind of important.
How can something like this be "implausible". Is it only implausible because they cannot explain it?
Sounds to me like they knew what they wanted the report to say before they began the study. All they wanted was sufficient proof before hitting the 'publish' button on the report. They never found it so it is labelled "inconclusive" which really means, "we shall try again".
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People who talked more time would be more exposed to it than someone who used it once a month to wish granny happy birthday.
Why would anyone wish their granny a happy birthday once every month?
Too late (Score:2)
Our small, family business produces ceramic dielectric resonators which are individually made, by hand, with love and intention to absorb harmful emanations and rebroadcast the energy in neutral to beneficial ranges.
Charmion McKusick, Biomagnetic Research
(Good thing they rebroadcast bad waves into good waves, or they'd be violating some law)
But then again, people will believe what they will
what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Science isn't inconclusive. There is statistically significant, or not. In this case, not.
Test another hypothesis or test again if data looks fishy.
A huh. (Score:2)
pffft.
The conclusions of their 10 year study were crystal clear. "Send us more money to do another 10 year study."
"the indications are sufficiently strong... to " (Score:2)
... to ask for more money for 'further research'.
Re:Limited study (Score:5, Insightful)
How silly.
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Re:Limited study (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Limited study (Score:5, Funny)
No, you get a smoother, more natural bass and just generally a warmer...uh, sorry, wrong thread!
Statistical significance (Score:5, Insightful)
To get statistical significance, you don't need to sample the entire population. Beyond a certain number for a certain confidence level, you don't get very much more.
Exactly right.
There was no statistical significance, which means that the cancers (or absence there of) were distributed over cell phone users and non-users (controls) with no preference for either group.
Normally this would be the end of it.
But by the way the reporter worded it (Inconclusive) and (to a lesser extent) the way the Researcher phrased it, indicates a clear predilection toward finding a positive correlation, which they could not do.
The takeaway is not that the study "inconclusive". The scientific takeaway is that there is yet again no evidence of correlation between cancer and cell usage.
Its over. The absence of evidence destroys this theory. Time to move on.
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I don't care what they found or didn't found - I'm still not buying a god damned radiating device to hold up beside my head. I only have about two or three million grey cells left, and if there's a very very very very VERY small chance that the radiation might kill a couple hundred of them, IT ISN'T WORTH IT!!!
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Re:Statistical significance (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not so sure. Cancer is a funny thing, and "cell-phone use" is kind of a broad behavior. I have seen so many items get shifted from the "causes cancer" to "inconclusive" to "completely safe" category and then back again, that I've got something of a jaundiced eye toward "moving on" based upon one study.
Even if you remove the obvious data-cooking by the industry, there actually were studies in the 50's that showed that the connection between cigarette smoking and cancer was "inconclusive". Better-designed studies, honest studies, showed later that the connection was real. We see this back and forth with dairy products and cancer in women, with certain chemicals in insecticide, with the ground water near industrial sites, with thalidomide. Sometimes it takes a whole bunch of studies before causal relationships are exposed. Sometimes, it takes a lawyer digging up studies done by the companies themselves and then supressed.
A few days ago, there was discussion here about h. pylori and ulcers. The first studies done by the Australian researchers came up inconclusive. Twenty years later, they got the Nobel Prize for later studies that proved the connection was there. Now, nobody has to suffer with ulcers any more, and ulcer surgeries are practically unknown.
No, you don't "move on" because of one study or maybe even ten studies. Science doesn't just drop an issue because of one researcher's findings. The reason this issue with the cell phones is even being looked at is because when you've got entire populations holding microwave transceivers next to their noodles day in and day out, you want to make sure it's really safe.
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I'm not so sure. Cancer is a funny thing, and "cell-phone use" is kind of a broad behavior. I have seen so many items get shifted from the "causes cancer" to "inconclusive" to "completely safe" category and then back again, that I've got something of a jaundiced eye toward "moving on" based upon one study.
Even if you remove the obvious data-cooking by the industry, there actually were studies in the 50's that showed that the connection between cigarette smoking and cancer was "inconclusive". Better-designed studies, honest studies, showed later that the connection was real.
Yes, because this study was by the World Health Organization. They always do studies that favor Western and American corporations. Obviously a flawed study, nothing but a whitewash from the conspirators [who.int] at the WHO.
Re:Limited study (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. Sampling can give accurate results even when sampling a small percentage of the total population. If U.S. political polls select a sample size of between a few hundred and a thousand out of 300 million with only 3% error, it sounds reasonable that 13,000 would be a good sample size of a population 20 times that, giving the same margin of error.
Also remember that, assuming the sample is chosen well (it is a good cross-section of the population and not confined to one specific subgroup), the benefits of adding additional samples drops off. It is essentially logarithmic: at first, adding samples is a huge benefit: after a certain point, the incremental gain from one additional sample is only a tiny fraction of the first samples.
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If U.S. political polls select a sample size of between a few hundred and a thousand out of 300 million with only 3%..."
I'm not so sure those percentages are accurate. You'll often see different polls differ by much more than that (far more often than 5% of the time or whatever the confidence level is).
I have a suspicion that the math works out with a lot of "if a1 through aN are true, then..." and then no one going to the trouble of working out how likely each of those is to actually be true because they're hard to measure.
Certainly actual elections tend to fall well outside the +/- 3% accuracy claimed by many of the elect
Re:Limited study (Score:4, Informative)
If U.S. political polls select a sample size of between a few hundred and a thousand out of 300 million with only 3%..."
I'm not so sure those percentages are accurate.
They look accurate to me. From me undergrad stats classes, I seem to recall that to get 5% confidence level out of population of 10k, one needed a sample of around 850. For populations of 1000k, the sample size only went up by a few tens (perhaps to 900). Sampling is not linear, and it drops off the higher you go - IIRC (and I think I do), their is very little difference in the sample size for a population of 100k as there is for twenty times that number.
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Certainly actual elections tend to fall well outside the +/- 3% accuracy claimed by many of the election-day pollsters.
Because for many of those pollsters accuracy isn't main goal; swaying people, untill the last minute, to vote for the "winners" is.
Re:Limited study (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not so sure those percentages are accurate. You'll often see different polls differ by much more than that (far more often than 5% of the time or whatever the confidence level is).
Election polling is just especially difficult, since what counts is if you actually vote and who you vote for, neither of which have been determined at the time of the poll and could change. Election polling isn't simply an opinion poll, but is obviously supposed to reflect the population of people who will actually vote on election day. The polls have differing models of selecting "likely voters", and will thus have numbers that differ more than the margin of error for any single poll. In other words, taking the margin of error for a single poll and comparing it among multiple polls is invalid, since the differing polls used different means of sample selection.
Certainly actual elections tend to fall well outside the +/- 3% accuracy claimed by many of the election-day pollsters.
I guess I haven't found that to be true if you mean "tend to" is more than 50% of the time. Sure, you're going to find some that are outside of the 3% error bars, but you'd also expect that to happen, statistically speaking.
Re:Limited study (Score:5, Informative)
The principle is correct, but you're failing to take into account the probability of an the respective events. Given that winning 60% of the vote is considered a landslide, you can think of asking someone whether they're voting Republican or Democrat as a coin flip with a small bias in one way or the other. Because the race is so close, a few extra republicans or democrats in your sample won't produce a huge error in your estimate.
On the other hand, a brain tumor can be thought of as a rare event. If the true incidence rate of brain cancer is five occurrences per thousand people over ten years, and your sample of 1,000 people has six incidences, you have a sample error of 20%. It's because of this that a small variation in the numbers can produce a large error. Therefore if you want to accurately assess the rate of cancer, you need a much bigger sample size.
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Absolutely, the sample size is inversely relative to how close the differential result is to the 'noise floor'.
In this respect, your first example is slightly flawed. As the expected determinant gets closer to the noise floor (ie. if the margin for a Republican or Democrat victory is going to be 0.01%, or 50.01% vs 49.99%), then a much greater sample size is needed to maintain confidence in the resultant prediction.
As you say, 60% is a landslide. So if that is the expected result, then a few percent error e
Re:Limited study (Score:4, Insightful)
Here are some additional details for those of you so inclined.
Consider a simple binary choice question. This is easily modelled by the binomial distribution which has well understood distributions. (Other distrbutions may be relevant but the principles remain pretty constant across them all.) The standard deviation is given by sqrt[np(1-p)] where n is the sample size and p is the probability of the observation you are interested in (the mean is np so in what follows I will be dividing by n to talk about percentages if you are taking notes). For example, are you male? If the true p is, say, 75% then you need a sample size of approximately 833 to get a 95% confidence interval (2 s.d.) of +/- 3%.
You might also note that the closer the true p is to 50%, the larger the sample size needed. If the true p is 50% you need a sample size of approximately 1100 for the same confidence interval. Furthermore, if you want to get it within 1%, the sample size goes up dramatically - to 10,000.
The population size is pretty much irrelevant. The population matters for ensuring that your sampling is truly random, but political pollsters can use the same sample sizes in Australia (pop ~20 million) as in the US (pop ~300 million) for similar accuracy. (Sampling bias is the reason that political polls can be out by so much - if you call households during work hours you are going to get a very different sample of people than if you call at dinner time.)
Re:Limited study (Score:4, Informative)
It really seems silly when, in America at least, age-adjusted rates of brain cancer have fallen or held steady since the 1990s. From the National Cancer Institute [cancer.gov]:
It would seem to me that falling cancer rates are no reason for assuming that widespread cellphone use has been a health concern.
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I mean that if cell phones cause cancer, you would expect the rate of cancer to raise along with the use of cell phones. Instead, cancer rates have fallen or stayed the same for 20 years.
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So from 1990 to 2002 cancer rates decreased slightly, while cellphone usage increased significantly? It looks like cellphones are actually a cure for cancer!
Two chicks at the same time, here I come!
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It could still be a general drop in cancer rates, but a specific rise in the rates for people who use cellphones (in certain conditions, given that pretty much everyone uses them these days?). Looking at simple numbers like that is inconclusive
Re:Limited study (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, unless the needed data is already available somewhere, gathering more data costs more money. As someone else mentioned in a sibling post, there are diminishing returns when increasing your sample size. Eventually the cost of the data will exceed the benefit to the certainty of your results.
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Oh yes. Nearly forgot - 2/10 (needs a better username)
Also, I suspect GP was being sarcastic and your detector (or possibly mine) was broken
Re:"Survey"? (Score:5, Insightful)
And even if there is some correlation, people need to put it in perspective.
The last time I talked to a flat-earth-er about their fear of cell phones causing cancer, they had a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
Now that, Alanis Morrissette, is irony.
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And a extremely-high-powered radiation source (>1000x that of cell phones, with incredibly high intensity) aimed right at their faces: THE SUN! THE FUCKING SUN! ;)
Oh, and outside there were at least a 1000 cars driving around.
WTF? (Score:2)
Seriously, what the hell kind of comment is that? How does this idiocy get modded up?
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I'm guessing they did it properly. From TFA:
"The study received 19.2 million euros ($24.4 million) in funding, around 5.5 million euros of which came from industry sources. It analysed data from interviews with 2,708 people with a type of brain cancer called glioma and 2,409 with another type called meningioma, plus around 7,500 people with no cancer.
Participants were from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Britain. ($1=.7872 Euro) (Ed
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+1 Insightful, came here to say the same thing.
DNA doesn't break until you get into the UV-light range of electromagnetic waves, cell phone frequencies are orders of magnitude away from being able to do it....but don't let the pesky facts get in the way of anecdotes and scaremongering.