“Figure 1 looks like random variation to me” . . . indeed, so it does. And Figure 2 as well! But statistical significance was found, so this bit of randomness was published in a top journal. Business as usual in the statistical-industrial complex. Still, I’d hope the BMJ could’ve done better.

Gregory Hunter writes: The following article made it to the national news in Canada this week. I [Hunter] read it and was fairly appalled by their statistical methods. It seems that they went looking for a particular result in Canadian birthrate data, and then arranged to find it. Figure 1 looks like random variation to …