The paper's authors, Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, are careful to exclude confounding causes as best they can.
Laszlo Garamszegi, of the Do? ana Biological Station in Spain, studied patterns of malarial infections in birds to avoid confounding human factors in determining the epidemiology of a closely related parasite.
Psychologist Nina Strohminger at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study, says she wants the effect to be real but cannot rule out some unknown confounding variable.
KAMPALA, UGANDA With these more positive Beatitudes in mind, we can turn with greater understanding to those Beatitudes that might strike us at first as a bit confounding or counterintuitive.