SPURIOUS correlation is a bane of science. Look hard enough for associations in a body of data and you will surely find some that are mere coincidence. So a study which claims to have discovered a link between the sex of the name given by meteorologists to Atlantic hurricanes and how lethal those hurricanes prove is one that most people would approach with a large shovelful of salt. But Kiju Jung of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues are, forgive the pun, deadly serious. They believe, as they write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that the relationship they have discovered—that hurricanes with feminine names are more dangerous than those with masculine ones—is real. The reason has nothing to do with the storms themselves, and everything to do with people’s reactions to them.The naming of Atlantic hurricanes began in 1950. From 1953 onwards they were given women’s names—probably because in those days most meteorologists were men—and then, from 1979, the names alternated between the sexes. Even women’s names, though, vary in their perceived femininity, so Mr Jung felt able to go back to the 1950s when conducting his analysis.First, he...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1nKblmz
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