Those people living in areas with higher numbers of mobile phone towers have more children, new research is showing (spreadsheet). Matt Parker at The Guardian's Notes & Theories blog did the analysis of publicly available data and found the correlation:
Could it be possible that mobile phone radiation somehow aids fertilisation, or maybe there's just something romantic about a mobile phone transmitter mast [aka tower] protruding from the landscape?
The data show that there is a very strong correlation between the number of cell phone towers and the birth rate in communities. For every additional phone tower, there are 17.6 more babies than the national average, Parker writes in his blog post
:
When a regression line is calculated it has a "correlation coefficient" (a measure of how good the match is) of 98.1 out of 100. To be "statistically significant" a pattern in a dataset needs to be less ...
