Shielding of Electrosmog: Some Observations (part 9)

The effectiveness of orgonite as a method of protecting against cell phone RF EMR. Today I stick some bigger lumps to my phone and extend the survey period.

In part 8 of this series I took a bit of a detour to explain a little about effect size. My reports are riddled with probability values a.k.a. p-values, and you’ll usually see them stuffed in brackets like this… (p<0.001). Sometimes they’ll look like this… (p=0.456). What these are trying to convey to folk is the likelihood that any interesting difference or perturbation we might see in a table of summary statistics or a slide is genuine and not some random fluke of nature. There’s a nominal level of ‘genuineness’ that pervades science that is set at something called the ‘95% level of confidence’, which is a fancy way of saying we are 95% certain that the effect we are looking at is genuine and not some fluke. Bear in mind that when we express this we are also expressing a degree of doubt (nominally 5%) that we might have jumped to the wrong conclusion. We can push things further by opting for 99% confidence or even 99.9% confidence, but there will always be a degree of error in our assumption.

On the other end of the scale we might calculate a p-value of, say, p=0.700 and declare lack of statistical significance. In this situation we’re only 70% confident of an effect being genuine, and might be tempted to declare the result as meaningless given that there is a 30% chance of it arising by fluke. Again we can fall foul of reality, and especially so if sample sizes are too small and variation large. On the other hand if sample sizes are huge we’ll go around discovering everything is statistically significant even though differences observed might not hold any real world value. This is where effect size comes in, for this anchors us in reality. A study that concludes statistical significance for an effect that is impossibly small has little value other than to boost your publication count.

So… we left-off strapping a small bit of orgonite to my Motorola G23 and were left wondering where this had any impact on the levels of emitted RF EMR. Rigorous statistical significance tests suggested not, but our eyeballs suggested something interesting may be going on. Then we had that effect size analysis suggesting two small buttons of orgonite might offer some modest shielding. Today, therefore, I’m going to strap two sizeable lumps of orgonite to my phone and see what this brings…

Method

Yer kitchen table method as before. Here’s the gear used…