Deadlier than the male

摘要

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.