Yes.
I went and read the abstract.
BB’s summary is terribly flawed.
If this study starts with storms in the 1950s, it should account for some important facts:
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The first hurricane given a masculine name was Bob in 1979. There were 28 years of storms with only feminine names.
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Ever since Dan Rather superimposed a map of the coast on a weather radar screen to encourage people to evacuate Galveston as Carla approached back in 1961, people have been taking hurricane warnings more seriously.
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Building codes have changed so that new and remodeled buildings are better able to weather hurricanes and keep any occupants safer.
More modern hurricanes are just much less likely to be killers because we have better building codes, better forecasting and people take hunker down and evacuation orders more seriously. More modern hurricanes are also much more likely to have masculine names. I really don’t think the reason Katrina was so deadly had anything to do with the name “Katrina”. It had more to do with a guy named “George”.
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It’s a shame that Maggie isn’t still writing for BB.
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Why, did she write a 2014 story on Hurricane Names for Boing Boing?
Oh… she did…
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I echo the other commenters that this is a textbook example of bad science, bad statistics, and bad journalism. This specific instance has since been thoroughly discredited. Other commenters have posted excellent critiques of the original article; here’s one in a scholary journal as well: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212094715300517 .
See Andrew Gelman’s blog for more on the context around it
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Hah! I understood that reference!
Also, I quite remember the suppressed outrage of the German reporter when she witnessed the way he was flown in, to survey the damage, and flown out.
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UPDATE: Sorry about the oldnews: turns out this is three years old and has been widely contested, as Snopes put it.
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Hmmm. I’d say that currently, the human male is winning the “most dangerous gender” contest quite handily. Being more afraid of a human male is good sense for either gender, isn’t it?
I think the more interesting idea here is that, I assume, human males chose to give hurricanes “feminine” names in the first place.
I think it was just a tragic misunderstanding.
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shock shock horror horror
I see what you did there. 
Models can always be improved by labelling cases that don’t fit as “outliers”, and removing them.
“Tropical storms” were excluded from the analysis, because they didn’t provide the desired result.
Simpler analyses were abandoned because they didn’t provide the desired result:
the authors experimented with using the hurricane name as a binary variable (0 for a male name, 1 for a female name) and also tried, as an explanatory variable, “years elapsed since the occurrence of hurricanes… However, this variable was dropped for the main analysis as its effect was nonsignificant in all models.”
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Just start naming hurricanes things like Lance Grindhouse, Rex Thundercock, and Fist Punchmaster. Problem solved.
I was thinking of fantasy monsters.
- Hurricane Godzilla
- Hurricane King Kong
- Hurricane Sauron
- Hurricane Ungoliath
I think people would run for the hills as soon as there’s the slightest chance the hurricane might look in their direction.
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You know what? Screw people who actually need a scary name. Let’s sell the naming rights for storms to the highest bidder, and make some money for the tax-payers!
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Why not both: Hurricane Comcast.
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Naw. She’s having lots of fun, and reaching a much bigger audience, at the new gig.
One of biggest drivers for the original study’s conclusion was the relatively high death toll for Hurricane Sandy, and the fact that on a masculine-feminine 1-11 (11 being most feminine) scale, their study participants rated Sandy as a 9.
I don’t know who those study participants were but they clearly don’t watch baseball. Seriously, lots and lots of dudes named Sandy. Among the many other ways to play with the data that makes the effect disappear, I’d bet that properly ranking Sandy as a more gender-neutral name would also do the trick.
Hurricane United.
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Nobody will give Hurricane Kylo-Ren any amount of respect even though it’s classed at a category six and will hit the entire gulf and most of the eastern seaboard at the same time.
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