However, much of this seeming chaos is spurious, caused by obscuration of dust in dark foreground neutral material rather than by the actual distribution of ionized material.
The relationship between children and marital stability may also be spurious, caused by common factors of marital satisfaction (Figure 3; marital satisfaction affects both the presence of children d and the stability of the marriage).
However, the discovery could not be verified and was later deemed to be spurious, caused instead by background radiation.
Like most astronomers of his day, Galileo did not recognise that the apparent sizes of stars that he measured were spurious, caused by diffraction and atmospheric distortion (see seeing disk or Airy disk), and did not represent the true sizes of stars.
In addition to these substantially spurious causes of misclassification, there also is the intrinsic misclassification rate of any questionnaire-based instrument.
These variants could be truly population specific and result from natural selection, genetic drift and recent mutations, or they could be spurious, caused by the limitations of the method of analysis employed in the GWA studies.
The collaboration built heavily shielded, ultracold detectors that can specifically identify and reject many types of spurious interactions caused by natural radioactivity and the high-energy particles arriving from space called cosmic rays.
Skeptical scientists questioned Dr. Belli closely on whether his team might be seeing a spurious variation caused by an incorrect subtraction or a background that varies with the season for unrelated reasons, such as changing levels of natural radioactivity.
