The New England Blackout
There are two things wrong with the reporter's conclusion:
- The variability among women in number of days between conception to birth
makes it quite unlikely that an increased number of births would be observed
on Monday and Tuesday exactly nine months after the blackout.
- A curious statistician found that a similar excess of births on Monday and Tuesday is actually observed more generally.
After some further detective work, he determined that doctors prefer to schedule induced labor and Caesarean operations at the beginning of the week,
which provides an explanation for the excess births on Monday and Tuesday.
[Source: Robert Abelson (1995), Statistics as Principled Argument. Hillsdale NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.]