A common claim in aviation safety discourse is that the January 4, 2014 FAR 117 flight/duty/rest rule reduced pilot fatigue in U.S.
For 15 widely distributed North American bird species we compute the per-year count-weighted mean occurrence latitude in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) record over 1980–2020, using 5° latitude bins inside the North American longitude window (−170° to −50°). Based on 150,523,696 focal-species records, the cross-species median linear trend of the observed mean latitude is **−60.
Published claims that specific English words shifted in meaning across the 20th century are typically grounded in embeddings trained on the full Google Books "English" corpus, whose genre composition is known to change over time. We re-estimate drift on 20 canonical drifters from Hamilton et al.
Observational studies repeatedly find that people who take vitamin or dietary supplements have lower cardiovascular mortality, but randomised controlled trials of the same supplements typically do not replicate those benefits. The canonical explanation is *healthy-user bias*: supplement users differ from non-users on many unmeasured lifestyle and socio-economic dimensions that are themselves cardio-protective.
Pollsters are often accused of "herding" — adjusting methodology or timing so that their final estimates cluster near a perceived consensus, which would understate the true sampling variance and mis-specify the noise model that poll-of-polls forecasts rely on. We test this directly by comparing observed cross-pollster variance of the Democrat–Republican margin to a formal null distribution built from independent multinomial sampling at each poll's actual reported sample size, using the polls' own sample-weighted mean shares as the implied truth.
US wildfire structure losses rose from a 1999-2003 mean of 2,100.4 structures per year to a 2019-2023 mean of 6,385.
The Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) is the workhorse disproportionality measure in pharmacovigilance. Applied to the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), it typically compares a drug's share of reports for an event against the same share in the *whole database* — an implicit assumption that the non-drug reports are a fair comparator.
The claim that Tornado Alley is shifting eastward — from the Plains into the Mid-South and Southeast — has been widely reported since Gensini and Brooks (2018). We test whether that shift survives restriction to the subset of tornadoes whose detection is essentially independent of population density and radar coverage: tornadoes rated EF2 or stronger, which destroy frame houses and are recorded via damage survey regardless of where they occur.
Forward-citation counts are the dominant quantitative proxy for US patent impact, yet citations on US patents have two categorically different origins: **applicant** citations disclosed in the Information Disclosure Statement, and **examiner** citations inserted by the USPTO examiner after a prior-art search. We stream the full PatentsView `g_us_patent_citation` bulk file — 151,140,729 citation rows — and re-rank every US patent granted in a fixed patent-number cohort (numbers 7,200,000–7,400,000 ≈ May 2007–July 2008; N = 175,058 focal patents with ≥ 1 forward cite; 3,629,257 focal citations, of which 70.
A common narrative in US surface-water policy evaluations is that stream nitrate concentrations have declined since the Clean Water Act, consistent with reduced point-source loading and improved atmospheric controls. Because laboratory reporting limits for nitrate have fallen by roughly an order of magnitude over the same period — from ~0.
Raw counts in the FAA Wildlife Strike Database grew 451.5% between 1990 and 2018, implying a 5.
A prominent literature starting with Grassini et al. (*Nature Communications*, 2013) claims that yields of several major crop–country pairs have plateaued: a multi-decade period of roughly linear growth gave way, at an identifiable year, to a flat post-break regime.
The Elo formula predicts that a player rated 400 points higher than their opponent will win with probability approximately 0.909.
Analyses of the USA-National Phenology Network's (USA-NPN) Nature's Notebook dataset routinely report that first-leaf dates for common North American deciduous species have advanced by roughly 2-4 days per decade since the network's 2009 launch. Because the Nature's Notebook observer corps grew by roughly an order of magnitude over the same period, a skeptic can argue that the apparent trend reflects a composition shift in the contributing cohort rather than a within-individual phenological advance.
Cross-sectional (CS) aging curves — plotting mean performance against age across all active players — are the dominant descriptive tool in baseball sabermetrics. They are known to be contaminated by selective retirement: weaker older players leave the population, so the surviving mean at older ages is higher than any individual player's expected performance at that age.
A folk claim in vulnerability-management circles holds that CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog overrepresents older CVEs because the catalog was bulk-seeded with historical content when it launched on 2021-11-03. We test this claim directly on the full public catalog (N = 1,569 entries, catalogVersion 2026.
Pharmacovigilance teams routinely use disproportionality metrics — Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR), Reporting Odds Ratio (ROR), Information Component (IC), and Empirical Bayes Geometric Mean (EBGM) — to prioritize drug-event signals from spontaneous-report systems such as FAERS. Validation studies typically treat "event appears on the FDA drug label" as a single binary gold standard.
Clinical microbiology laboratories report rising resistance rates for many organism–antibiotic pairs, but the breakpoints that define "susceptible" and "resistant" are themselves periodically revised — and when they are lowered, a fraction of the existing minimum-inhibitory-concentration (MIC) distribution is reclassified as resistant overnight, without any underlying biological change. We re-apply the pre- and post-revision breakpoints to six canonical EUCAST / CLSI MIC distributions (86,534 *Escherichia coli* / ciprofloxacin; 24,124 *Klebsiella pneumoniae* / ciprofloxacin; 18,502 *Salmonella enterica* / ciprofloxacin; 11,997 *E.
Catch-weighted latitudinal centroids are widely used as a proxy for the geographic center of exploited fish populations under climate change. Because catch reflects both where fish are *and* where fleets choose to operate, catch-based centroid shifts conflate population redistribution with fishing-effort redistribution.
The 2017 Final Rule (42 CFR 11) clarified and expanded the reporting obligations that FDAAA 2007 had established for registered clinical trials at ClinicalTrials.gov.