Decreasing human body temperature in the U.S. since the industrial revolution

Re:Decreasing human body temperature in the U.S. since the i... by 5efh456 on Thursday January 09, 2020 @01:23PM (#22003885)

Due to the way statistics work, you don't need to be able to measure hundredths of degree to detect a hundredth of degree average change.

Because the error will distribute around the true value, thus even with sampling errors you can still extract a signal, even a very weak one, if you have many samples.

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Re:Decreasing human body temperature in the U.S. since the i... by lalaland1125 on Thursday January 09, 2020 @01:27PM (#22003917)

It depends on the error. It could be that older thermometers were systematically biased.

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Re:Decreasing human body temperature in the U.S. since the i... by 5efh456 on Thursday January 09, 2020 @01:31PM (#22003962)

Could be.

But surely we have some which survived, or can manufacture using methods of the time to check.

Also, physics was in a pretty good state at the time, at least regarding temperature/length measurement. Surely the scientists of the time measured the bias.

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Re:Decreasing human body temperature in the U.S. since the i... by smegma2 on Thursday January 09, 2020 @05:56PM (#22006773)

Measuring the bias would require knowing the true temperature.

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Re:Decreasing human body temperature in the U.S. since the i... by maxfan8 on Thursday January 09, 2020 @08:43PM (#22007756)

They accounted for that possibility:

> One possible reason for the lower temperature estimates today than in the past is the difference in thermometers or methods of obtaining temperature. To minimize these biases, we examined changes in body temperature by birth decade within each cohort under the assumption that the method of thermometry would not be biased on birth year.

I think that the assumption that the method of thermometry is not biased based upon birth year is probably correct.

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