On the other hand, many of those have a full-time salary and can afford to wait for truth to come out in the end, which is different to running a business, where your income depends immediately on your credible reputation.

I’d be more than happy to spend a couple of weeks collaborating in research with you around Bridgend.

I’ve recently graduated in Psychology, so I’ve a reasonable understanding of research methods in the field. My family live in Bridgend, I’m about the same age as some of those who have died, so I’ve local knowledge. I don’t need paying, I’d be interested to do it for the experience, and I can work out my parent’s shed.

It’d probably take me a while to arrange access to a spectrum analyser, I’d have left the area by then, but if you can lend me one I could probably sort out a deposit or something, and I’ve family in Bridgend who know how to use them so I’d be more than happy to wander round for a couple of weeks and take some actual measurements for you. I’m fairly used to handling tricky electronic equipment.

I am completely serious about this. I realise I’m not a national newspaper columnist and my name isn’t going to provide instant credibility, but on the other hand I have got a few weeks to spare and I am on the ground.

If you are interested bung me an email, brainquack at gmail dot com.
Thanks.

Mr Coghill: What on EARTH are you doing? I have sat here and watched, in disbelief, your reputation dissolving as the threads progress. It is true that criticism of you and your position has become increasingly vicious and personal from some posters, which is a shame because this is an important debate. However, this is entirely of your making. You have provoked, provoked and provoked some more, in what can only be described as an ill-considered battle of words and will. You yourself have dismantled your credibility. Why?

It is clear that, for reasons known only to you, you will not be revealing any pertinent information about your study. Shame. Perhaps I may try asking you a different question: Why do you see fit to treat the general public with such contempt? The headline published by the Sunday Express surely has the capacity to have a profound affect on some people? There could well be people who, as I write, are considering moving house, away from a mast, based on that headline. Uncertainty playing on their minds. Under current economic conditions, considering such a move must be incredibly stressful. Would you sympathise with someone in this position? Can you, through this forum, help them to understand this headline better?

You have been given the opportunity to back-up your claims in a way that is beneficial to all involved, including yourself, and you have chosen, bizaarly, not to.

You have said yourself, in these threads, that you wish to bring the issues you are passionate about to the public, to try to urge authorities to take action. You see yourself as a modern-day John Snow. Do you not realise that your behaviour here has surely blown your chances? To succeed one must look after their reputation.

It might be a fun exercise to see how the distance from the centre to the perimeter of each plot converges to a single value for tesselating shapes with increasing numbers of sides: triangles, squares, hexagons… by extrapolation you could maybe get the circumference for an idealised circular plot, although the circle does not tesselate and therefore this method would not work directly.

While I don’t have a solid chain of reasoning, intuitively I suspect that this centre-perimeter distance for the plot is equal to the average distance from any point to the nearest mast, and not just the furthest possible distance you can be from a mast. For any given point, there are at most three neighbouring masts, forming an equilateral triangle. So the proof of this would involve demonstrating that the average of the distances from a point inside an equilateral triange to each vertex is a constant equal to some constant regardless of the position of the point.

Hmm, that means my talk of having to extrapolate from hexagons up makes no sense…

The scientific process in action…

By the way, Sockatume, would you mind me using your working (and the source of your numbers, if you could share them) for my classes? One group did spot the error in the original ‘average’ as described by Mr Coghill, but then I have been trying to train them, with varying success, in the scientific method and logical reasoning.

Ian H

“The quicker the Local Authority acts in this, as with the case of John Snow and the Old [sic] Street pump, the better.”

You seem to be comparing yourself to John Snow – one of the first people to apply spatial analysis to disease. If you would like to emulate his methods, perhaps you could provide a map of masts, houses and suicides (using one of the many available methods to anonymise addresses) to give us a sense of the distribution of suicides? If the suicides really are as obviously clustered as you claim, then we should all be able to see it, without any of us needing any maths. Of course, testing the significance of the clustering would need a little bit of effort, but any halfway decent Geographic Information System software would have all the tools to do it for you.

Each mast in Glasgow, if evenly distributed in the city, would have a plot 0.3km^2 around it. If the plots were hexagonal (to allow tesselation in my mental model while approximating uniformity) that would be hexagons 340m on the side, so for someone walking the perimeters of the hexagons that’s a distance of about 300 to 340m from the mast at any given time. This seems to me a reasonable measure of the maximum distance you could be from a phone mast, on average.

It’s also surprisingly close to the suicides’ distances, and about a third of Mr. Coghill’s esimate. As we’ve established, Bridgend has about the same population density as Glasgow, so we may expect the same cellphone tower density. Unless Bridgend’s remarkably patchy, then it appears that the suicides were actually further from mobile phone masts than average.

I just did the maths, and based on council estimates, the population density of Bridgend is nearly equal to that of Glasgow, with about 300m2 per person, or 10m between people. So I expect that the cellphone mast density will probably be pretty similar. For Mr. Coghill’s estimate to be correct, Bridgenders would have to get by on one tenth of the cellphone infrastructure that Glasgwegians use. Maybe they’re just not very talkative, or they don’t mind having gigantic blackspots?

He then took the mean of the distances between the suicides’ homes and the nearest mobile phone masts, and made his comparison.

Of course, you could argue that his only mistake was failing to consider the uneven distribution of phone masts, but that’s just the start of where he went wrong. He forgot the human part when calculating his average distance to a phone mast. Humans are unevenly distributed too! In fact, humans and phone masts are heavily clustered together. His value completely fails to account for the great swathes of country with few people or phone masts to be found, which barely feature in the mean. Perhaps he should’ve used a different kind of average?

In the interests of SCIENCE, I’ve done a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation like his, but instead of doing the entire country (which would be moronic, as discussed) I’ve elected to only use the surface area, population density, and cell phone mast density of Glasgow. In this way, we exclude areas of the country which have neither people nor mobile phone masts, and which therefore only exist to screw up the average. By my calculations, you are never more than three hundred metres from a mobile phone mast in that city, on average. A far cry from Mr. Coghill’s average, revealing the latter’s utter uselessness.

Alas I don’t have the Top Secret Data For Bridgend so someone else will have to do the maths for there to confirm, but I suspect it’ll say what we’ve come to expect given Coghill’s evasiveness. Even the most basic bit of forethought or hindsight would’ve revealed this mistake. It’s apalling.

www.badscience.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5575&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=30

nuff said.

But as he said, let’s stick to the data:

Mr Coghill, what value did you use as the average distance from a mobile phone mast and how did you calculate it?