Twitter pet behavior reports as a possible precursor of earthquakes (2009)

Re:Twitter pet behavior reports as a possible precursor of e... by cperciva on Saturday October 17, 2015 @12:06AM (#10403348)

Remember, if you throw 20 darts at random, one of them is probably going to be significant at the p < 0.05 level.

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Re:Twitter pet behavior reports as a possible precursor of e... by ZeroFries on Saturday October 17, 2015 @12:14AM (#10403365)

Can you explain what you mean by that?

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Re:Twitter pet behavior reports as a possible precursor of e... by Afforess on Saturday October 17, 2015 @12:18AM (#10403372)

0.05 significance has a 1 in 20 chance of being randomly occurring (1 / 0.05 = 20) and a result of statistical noise rather than evidence of a pattern. This is why reproducibility is important in science - future trials and tests will fail to reproduce the exact pattern of events needed to produce the statistical noise and so the null hypothesis will be accepted instead.

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