Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
April 11, 2005
We bought a house a few years ago. It was our first entry into the real estate market and it was quite scary. Most houses in Sydney are sold by auction, and this seemed to be a way to coax buyers into paying more than they could afford. We saw a house that my wife really wanted, and while…
April 11, 2005
Australia's own version of Baghdad Bob offers the following comments on the Lancet study (slightly paraphrased):
"The Lancet, they always depend on a method what I call ... stupid, silly. All I ask is check yourself. Do not in fact repeat their lies."
The Lancet is all about lies! All they tell…
April 9, 2005
Chris Mooney has posted a transcript of a talk he gave at Rutgers on way that a misguided balance in science reporting between mainstream science and fringe beliefs misleads people.
Michael Duffy has presented a radio program on climate change that doesn't have that problem. He has a range of…
April 8, 2005
I've added gravatars to the comments. You can have a little icon (your gravatar) that represents you next to each comment you post. All you have to do is upload your icon at the Gravatar site and enter your email when you leave your comment. I don't display your email---it is…
April 6, 2005
Via William Sjostrom I find that Mike Adams has distilled Lancet denialism down to its essence. He quotes from the New Scientist's description of the Lancet study:
"The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by coalition forces has lead to the death of at least 100,000 civilians, reveals the first…
April 2, 2005
Via commenter JoT we have an interview with Les Roberts about his study. Roberts mentions how surprised he was that was a such a large increase in violent deaths. From his previous studies in other war situations he expected that there would be an increase in deaths, but mainly from indirect…
April 1, 2005
The Fifth Skeptics Circle is here. The link to Mike Huben's pre-blogging blog brought back memories with this eulogy for Steve Kangas. Before there was the Lancet study there was Kellermann et al's NEJM study that found that owning a gun was associated with a three-fold increase in the risk of…
March 31, 2005
The Lancet has published two letters on the Iraqi Mortality Study. In the first letter, Stephen Apfelroth claims that cluster sampling is an invalid methodology. This criticism was dealt with way back in November. Apfelroth is wrong. Cluster sampling is a widely used methodology and all the…
March 30, 2005
Alastair Mackay (AMac in comments) has posted his criticism of the Lancet study at Winds of Change. Unlike many of the critics, Mackay actually knows some statistics, so he cannot find fault with the methodology. All he can do is try to make a mountain of a molehill by criticising the way the…
March 29, 2005
The latest folks to spread the DDT hoax are Kopel, Gallant and Eisen. They claim:
[Malaria] is a disaster manufactured by First World political correctness; DDT prohibition is scientifically indefensible, and is responsible for millions of deaths every year.
However, as explained in my posts on…
March 28, 2005
After accusing the researchers and the Lancet of fraud and treason, Shannon Love is back with another accusation. The latest crime he accuses them of is rounding things off:
One easily graspable example in the Lancet study's dishonesty is the key sentence in the Summary, the one repeated in the…
March 27, 2005
William Connolley lists another ten global warming myths.
PZ Myers delivers a righteous smackdown to Paul from Wizbang for Paul's profoundly ignorant attacks on evolution. (Paul's responds by calling evolution a cult.) As well as having totally demolished\* the theory of evolution, Paul has…
March 25, 2005
Go and read this most excellent post by William Connolley debunking many of the popular myths about global warming.
March 24, 2005
Daniel Davies comments on the current outbreak of Lancet denialism, including Shannon Love's latest effort which Love describes as a "Fisking". ("Fisking" is a term bloggers use for especially lame posts.) Love gets taken to bits in the comments to his post; I don't need to add anything.…
March 23, 2005
Lila Guterman writes in the Columbia Journalism Review about the dismal reporting of the Lancet study:
Last fall, a major public-health study appeared in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, only to be missed or dismissed by the American press. To the extent it was covered at all,…
March 22, 2005
Andy S, last seen criticizing the Lancet study without reading it, has now read it. Sort of. He writes:
Of Iraq's 18 provinces only 12 were actually visited. ... Now clusters assigned to the unsurveyed provinces were replaced in the sample by selecting clusters in adjacent provinces as proxies.…
March 20, 2005
If you haven't read my previous forty posts on the Lancet study, here is a handy index. All right, let's go.
First up, via Glenn Reynolds we have Andy S, who critiques the Lancet study despite not having read the thing. This is not a good idea, especially since he is relying on Kaplan's flawed…
March 19, 2005
The Fourth Skeptics Circle is here. Lots of interesting posts. In particular I recommend Richard Rockley's "Five Apples"---he could almost be wrting about criticisms of the Lancet study.
March 18, 2005
Tim Blair has posted emails from Ted Lapkin and Andrew Bolt who object to a couple of my posts. Blair fails to provide links to the posts so that readers can determine whether Lapkin and Bolt have accurately described what happened.
Lapkin begins:
In November 2003, I argued in the pages of…
March 18, 2005
In my previous post I noted that Tim Blair had posted:
Can I ask all timblair.net regulars to stop commenting here. This is exactly what he wants and you're only encouraging him.
In my comments someone also claiming to be Tim Blair posted:
You complete idiot. That comment wasn't posted by me. I…
March 17, 2005
So I was reading this thread on John Quiggin's blog when the discussion turned to Tim Blair's policy of banning any dissenters from commenting on his blog. (See here for an example of the sort of comment that will get you banned.) Now Blair doesn't have to support comments from people that…
March 15, 2005
Apparently the Lancet report is so disturbing to some pro-war folks that they are now denying its very existence. Here's Tim Blair, listing stories that he believes progressives have invented:
Poor progressives. All they have is Lancet reports, Ayad Allawi killing people, the menace of depleted…
March 14, 2005
Two more lazy and ignorant pundits have been spotted spreading the hoax about a non-existant DDT ban. In the New York Times Nicholas Kristof writes
Environmentalists were right about DDT's threat to bald eagles, for example, but blocking all spraying in the third world has led to hundreds of…
March 12, 2005
A large group of public health experts has criticized the coalition for their continuing failure to count the civilian casualties in Iraq. In an editorial in the British Medical Journal Klim McPherson writes:
Public access to reliable data on mortality is important. The policy being assessed---…
March 11, 2005
When people raise questions about the mysterious 1997 survey, Lott's standard line of defence is:
"the survey was replicated, and I obtained very similar results."
So how similar are the results? Well, Lott claims that the 2002 survey gave a 95% brandishing number, quite close…
March 7, 2005
In Lott's latest piece he is once more complaining that the media doesn't report defensive gun use. Mark Wilson intervened to try to stop a shooting rampage in Texas. Unfortunately, the shooter was wearing body armour and Wilson was shot and killed. The police eventually killed the shooter (…
March 4, 2005
Radagast has put together the third edition of the Skeptics' Circle. Lots of good reading there. Thanks, Radagast!
March 2, 2005
By considering bogus criticisms of the Lancet study it is possible to gain an appreciation of the concept of the infinite. No matter how many you've seen, someone can always come up with a new one. I give you Rob, who writes:
In an attempt at firmer confirmation, the…
March 1, 2005
Lott and James Glassman have a piece in the New York Post arguing that felons should not be allowed to vote. Well, I can't claim to know anything about the issue (for that, see Kevin Drum and Julie Saltman), but this is John "98%" Lott and James "36,000" Glassman, so you just know their numbers…
February 28, 2005
I wrote earlier about how tobacco company documents, released as apart of the Tobacco Settlement Agreement proved that Philip Morris created junkscience.com to argue that environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) was harmless. Those documents also tell the story of how they set up a…