Matt Parker
speaker
278 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2010
last heard 8 Jul
Matt Parker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's amazing if it happens to you but it's not amazing that it happens in general.
So what I did was I took all the data on the number of mobile phone transmitter masts in each county in the United Kingdom, and then I showed that it has an extremely strong correlation to the number of births in these same regions.
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In fact, Mr Speaker, the average reduction in spending power for 2011-2012 is 4.4%.
Yes, I thought I would put together a press release that's completely factually accurate about correlation but has no real causal link and see if any media outlets picked it up.
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So what I did was I took all the data on the number of mobile phone transmitter masts in each county in the United Kingdom and then I showed that it has an extremely strong correlation to the number of births in these same regions.
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In fact, it's so incredibly close that for each additional mobile phone mast in an area, you get on average another 17.6 births.
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And my favorite example of this was I checked, and in Swansea, which has 149 masts, they have 2,581 births.
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Swindon has 10 more masts and an additional 178 births.
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It really is a phenomenal link between the two.
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Our instinct is to think that one is causing the other.
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In this case, if you do think about it a little bit, the population size in all these areas controls both those variables.
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So there's a third factor which controls both of them.
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Well, so far, pretty much nothing, which is good.
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It's not as entertaining as if people had picked it up, but it looks like people realise that there is no actual story here, which is fair enough, because I am just some random guy.
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I sent it out without any university affiliation.
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I haven't got a publication record.
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It's just a strange finding that...
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that I sent to generic media outlets.
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It even includes a joke in the last line.
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We could have made this much more insidious, but it seems that most people spotted it was ridiculous.
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Showing 201–220 of 278 · page 11 of 14
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