Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
November 13, 2004
The fun continues in this comment thread. Highlights:
Michael Fumento:
The authors claimed to have come up with one set of numbers including Falluja, another without. But strangely, they never present the "without numbers." Lambert knows this because I told him directly. Anyway, it's…
November 12, 2004
Daniel Davies has an excellent roundup of the Lancet discussion.
I've added an update to my post about Gerard Alexander's attack on the Lancet.
Chris at Mixing Memory takes down another Lancet critique, this one by John Ray.
November 11, 2004
Fumento left a comment on my earlier post. Instead of discussing the Lancet article, he boasted how his column had been published in the on the web site of the Lake Wylie Pilot, which is a free weekly newspaper serving a town of 3,000 people. Hey, my little blog has a greater circulation…
November 8, 2004
The defective refutations of the Lancet study just keep on coming. First, we have Gerard Alexander writing in the Weekly standard:
But the study's researchers were sure to survey in Falluja, far and away the most violent city in post-invasion Iraq. Falluja turned out to be such…
November 8, 2004
John Fleck commented on my exchange with Fumento here and here. He responded to Fumento's silly charge that I "occupy the pitiful place of the harmless blogger who blogs because nobody in his right mind would punish (sic) him" with:
That's of course ad hominem, something of a poor…
November 7, 2004
One interesting feature of blogspace discussion of the Lancet study has been the comments from warbloggers, who, despite not even knowing what cluster sampling is, have been absolutely certain that the methodology of the study has been discredited. For instance, Arthur…
November 6, 2004
Yet another person has tried to refute the Lancet article. John Brignell dismisses the study just because:
A relative risk of 1.5 is not acceptable as significant.
Actually the increased risk was statistically significant. You won't find support for Brignell's claim in any…
November 5, 2004
The Anchorage Daily News has published a new version of Michael Fumento's attempt to debunk the Lancet study on deaths in Iraq. How does it differ from his previous attempt? Well his key argument was that their estimate was skewed by the inclusion of the Falluja cluster. But it is…
November 3, 2004
I wrote earlier how it seems that you must fail a qualifying exam before you can write on a topic at Tech Central Station. Now the errors in Fumento's critique of the Lancet study.aren't errors in epidemiology---they seem to result from not having read the study. Indeed, in comments…
November 2, 2004
Tech Central Station has published Tim Worstall's admission that his critique of the Lancet Iraq study was completely wrong:
Further to my article of Friday on this subject. I'm afraid I mangled the statistical argument. My inadequate knowledge of the subject led me to make an…
November 1, 2004
Earlier, I wrote how Joyce Lee Malcolm had doctored a quote from the Textbook of Criminal Law to make it appear that self-defence was illegal in Britain. She wrote:
Now everything turns on what seems to be "reasonable" force against an assailant, considered after the fact. As Glanville…
October 31, 2004
Sometimes I think that there must be a qualifying exam in order to write for Tech Central Station. Fail the exam and you're in. They seem to have exams in at least physics, economics, statistics, and epidemiology. Tim Worstall, the author of today's article seems to have failed both the…
October 27, 2004
Lott has responded to Media Matters criticism of his comments on Florida 2000. Lott writes:
Media matters makes it look like I was talking about "voter disenfranchisement" (which I assume includes the non-voted ballot issue) by adding into what I said the broader statement "[on voter…
October 27, 2004
Via Ralph Luker I find Andrew Ackerman's correction of a Boston Globe article that downplayed Michael Bellesiles' misconduct. The Emory panel rightly found Bellesiles guilty of falsification and other academic misconduct. It is disgraceful that the American Enterprise Institute…
October 26, 2004
Baseball's World Series is played over the best of seven games. The first
two games are played at the home field of one team (we will call
this one team A), the next three at the home field of team
B, and the last two at the home field of team A. Given that
teams are more…
October 25, 2004
Media Matters for America details Lott's latest bizarre claim about the 2000 election in Florida---on CNN Lott claimed:
I think a lot of the discussion about disenfranchising African-American voters, in particular I think it's been fairly sad, because I think there have…
October 22, 2004
Via Pandagon I find an appallingly innumerate article on polls by Michael Barone:
Blogger Steven Den Beste has prepared an interesting chart. Den Beste charges that pollsters "deliberately gimmicked" the results, "in hopes of helping Kerry." I don't agree with that at all. But he has made…
October 21, 2004
Orin Kerr writes writes about Wikipedia
My very tentative conclusion, based on a just few sample queries, is that I hope no one relies on Wikipedia for anything very important. Its entries seem to be a strange mix of accurate statements and egregious errors.
My own experience is that Wikipedia is…
October 21, 2004
There seems to be some confusion about McKitrick's latest attempt to refute global warming. For instance, Andrew Sullivan thinks that McKitrick's famous degrees-radians screw up is part of this latest attempt. However, McKitrick claims to have refuted global warming in several different…
October 18, 2004
In this column, Richard Muller claims that McKitrick and McIntyre have shown that the hockey stick graph is an "artifact of poor mathematics". If you have been following the global warming debate this claim should look familiar, because McKitrick and McIntyre made the same…
October 17, 2004
Steven den Beste has looked at a graph of polls of voting intentions and decided:
In September, I think there was a deliberate attempt to depress Kerry's numbers, so as to set up an "October comeback". Of course, the goal was to engineer a bandwagon.
This seems rather…
October 14, 2004
Earlier, Glenn Reynolds accused me of spinning because I wrote that "the [Australian] election was not about Iraq---it was hardly an issue.". Now he approvingly links to a piece by Greg Sheridan
Labor did not buy a single ad on Iraq. Nor did Latham mention his troops-home-by-…
October 13, 2004
The grandly named EnviroTruth web site has section that purports to debunk "myths" about climate change. The "myths" include the usual false claims such as satellite measurements don't show warming, but "myth" number 11 is pretty funny.
Here's "myth" 11:
Those Who Question Whether Human…
October 13, 2004
Glenn Reynolds, in a heroic leap, has apparently concluded that the election in Australia really was a referendum on Iraq and folks who don't think so must just be spinning.
One of those spinning must be Prime Minister John Howard, who told CNN that Iraq "wasn't the dominant factor"…
October 12, 2004
Tim Blair continues to insist that the election was about Iraq. I'll look at his arguments in a moment, but first let's look at what everybody else says about this.
Tom Allard and Mark Metherell in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Iraq flared briefly after the Jakarta bombings---most…
October 11, 2004
The relentless spinning of the result of the election in Australia continues. In the New York Post John O'Sullivan's headline is "Bush wins again". I didn't even know Bush was running in the election here. O'Sullivan also writes:
Al Qaeda has received a serious setback, Kofi Annan a…
October 10, 2004
The warbloggers have been attempting to spin the result of the election here to their advantage. Cori Dauber claims that the election "was a referendum on Australia's participation in Iraq", and Glenn Reynolds claims that it was "in no small part as a referendum on the war…
October 8, 2004
For reasons similar to those given by Tim Dunlop, Jason Soon and John Quiggin, I'll be voting Labor in the election today. Not that it makes a difference, since I live in Kingsford Smith, a safe Labor seat.
I hope that I'm wrong, but I don't think that Labor will manage to win the…
October 4, 2004
Readers may remember Pat Michaels, who authored a paper one that "disproved" global warming by deliberately removing almost one-third of the satellite data from his analysis and co-operated with Ross McKitrick on another paper that managed to "prove" that global warming wasn't happening by mixing…
October 1, 2004
I see that the Sydney Morning Herald is now publishing funky conspiracy theories. Alan Anderson informs us that Kyoto is nothing but a Euro-commie plot:
Of course, everyone who is familiar with the Kyoto Protocol knows what it really is: a brazen attempt by the EU to compensate…