Deltoid

Today is Firefox Download Day! FF3.0 has just been officially released, and Mozilla is going for a world record number of SW DLs in 24 hours. Unfortunately their server has been SLAMMED, but apparently you can DL it here. (Don't know if it counts toward the record or not, but that is a Mozilla site, so maybe it does.)

Posted by: themadlolscientist | June 17, 2008 6:06 PM

Apologies for the repeat posting, but I am still hoping to get some feedback from the Deltoid community on my claim that most people are missing the big story in comparing L2 with IFHS. Summary: Using the same assumptions for L2 and IFHS (no adjustments for underreporting or for clusters that could not be visited) generates estimates that differ by more than a factor of 8: 601,000 to 72,000. Comments welcome. Also, my blog has two new transcripts (more coming) that Lancet fans may find interesting.

Posted by: David Kane | June 17, 2008 6:08 PM

I am still hoping to get some feedback from the Deltoid community

Maybe you should get your feedback from those guys over at Michelle Malkin's blog, like you did last time. After all, as we all know, they're good in this "critical inquiry" thing, they're on the right (Right) side of the debate, and they won't simply parrot right-wing talking points, no? Um wait...

Posted by: bi -- IJI | June 17, 2008 11:38 PM

p.s. Just passed 3 million DLs!

Posted by: themadlolscientist | June 18, 2008 12:36 AM

Regarding Vernon's piece... does anyone have an access to the mentioned Investors' Business Daily article about Natalie Grant?

Posted by: bi -- IJI | June 18, 2008 3:25 PM

In case Ian Mott wanders over from his Marohassy haunt...

It seems that I am blocked from leaving comment on Jennifer's blog, as any submission I attempt to post anywhere there simply disappears into the æther. Whether or not it has anything to do with the tenor of the World Wildlife Populations 'Plummeting' thread, or is simply a technical burp, I do not know.

However, just in case Ian Mott lurks here, this is the message that I tried to submit on several occasions:

Ian Mott.

I have returned from my travels, and then waited patiently for a week and a half more, for a decent response to the manifold questions above which you seem disinclined to properly answer (if at all).

I refuse to continue to dignify this thread with an ongoing tab in my Firefox window when I have so many more pressing uses for my online time. If you ever feel inclined to engage again you are welcome to find me at Deltoid. Tim Lambert has an ongoing Open Thread that is best for this purpose.

I am sure that you know how to find it...

I despair that Mott will actually read this, but at least I have put it out there. I can't be bothered with any further effort to engage him.

Now back to our regular programming.

Posted by: Bernard J. | June 19, 2008 11:49 AM

Marohassy is at her disingenuous best, imputing a causal ('driving') link between AGW and the serious global frog decline due to chytridiomycosis, and then presenting a paper that dissociates the two.

There was never any serious doubt that the two phenomena were separate, but she seems to think that it somehow strengthens her denialist stance to make a story out of it.

This is a twisting of the understanding of those in the herpetological field, and it leaves me feeling grubby indeed.

The 'good' news is that I can post to her blog again.

Posted by: Bernard J. | June 21, 2008 12:51 PM

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14184-war-death-estimates-should-be-tripled.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news7headdn14184

I haven't had time to read the report referred to in this article.

Here are the key paragraphs from the story:

Established methods for estimating the human cost of war typically underestimate by a factor of three, say researchers who have developed a more accurate method for assessing fatalities. ... Ziad Obermeyer and colleagues at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, Washington, looked at death toll estimates gathered by the World Health Organization for selected countries.

The WHO figures are extrapolated from telephone interviews in which individuals are asked about family members who have died and are considered more accurate. ... But the method suggests that one recent controversial mortality figure may be an over estimate. A survey published in 2006 put the death toll from the current Iraq conflict at over 600,000 - four times as high as previous studies had found.

But, based on eyewitness reports from the country and the revised method for correcting this figure, Obermeyer calculates that 184,000 people have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14184-war-death-estimates-should-be-tripled.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news7headdn14184

I have defended the Lancet reports in the past on the basis that most of the criticism was based on either faulty reasoning or unsubstantiated accusations of fraud and bias.

I have never considered the Lancet studies to be above criticism.

I welcome a discussion of this new report and I merely hope that it's conducted in a more civil and rational fashion.

However, I will await the response of others once they've read this report and the response from the authors of the Lancet report.

Posted by: Ian Gould | June 23, 2008 8:02 PM

Woohoo~ I just got banned from Free Republic.

My crime: posting facts.

(Read the ensuing discussion, seriously...)

Posted by: bi -- IJI | June 24, 2008 1:13 PM

(OK, I stand corrected on that. But it's still interesting that neither icecap.us nor Anthony Watts has said anything about the May 2008 global temperature as measured by HadCRUT. Well, nothing after Watts predicted that

HadCRUT will likely show a significant drop [for May 2008], I'm going to make a SWAG and say it will end up around 0.05 to -0.15°C.

Posted by: bi -- IJI | June 25, 2008 3:01 PM

I said:

Another online poll to crash.

Watts has bumped the post to a different URL. In case it moves again, here's a super-duper link that should lead to the poll.

Posted by: bi -- IJI | June 28, 2008 1:54 PM

Thanks, Bruce and Donald, for pointing at that Obermeyer, Murray and Gakidou paper in BMJ.

The main conclusion of that paper isn't terribly surprising: that contemporaneous passive monitoring systems tend not to do a very good job (though some appear better than others), and that, when carefully done, retrospective histories can do an okay job (though some appear better than others). What's kind of novel about this particular paper is that they compared retrospective histories (from general health surveys not specifically designed to uncover conflict mortality) against what some think is a very good collection of passive monitoring systems. I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the exact ratio of deaths from the two methods (though I can certainly understand why hacks might do that): look at Table 3 from the paper to understand why.

Posted by: Robert | July 2, 2008 12:26 PM

The Guatemalan case is pretty complicated. Patrick Ball and his group have been spent some time there working up their multi-source cross-referencing system. That technique is definitely not the standard passive monitoring approach. Also, in cases of ethnic genocide, you'd expect retrospective histories to work less well because it's sometimes difficult to find surviving family members who can be respondents to a survey. If you were trying to get an estimate of Jewish mortality in WWII Poland, a retrospective survey wouldn't be a good way to go.

Posted by: Robert | July 2, 2008 4:28 PM