Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
March 12, 2004
Dan from Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics has a problem:
I'm working in a fairly esoteric field in which there are very few existing academic papers (because it's a highly politically charged topic, I've decided not to discuss it here until I have at least have all the data…
March 10, 2004
Via Randy Barnett we learn that Lott's Bias Against Guns has been nominated for a Spooner award for the best book on liberty published in 2003. On the voting page they state:
only one vote per email address will be accepted
I predict that Lott's book will get a Lott of votes.
March 9, 2004
Seems that bloggers have a strong urge to post their scores for Bryan Caplan's Libertarian Purity Test. So here's a spot where you can post your score and find blogs with similar (or different) scores.
[Go here to see the table and the form.](http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin…
March 6, 2004
Last month I wrote about how junkscience.com and The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition were fronts set up by tobacco companies to oppose regulatioon of smoking. Chris Mooney published a very interesting article in the Washington Post on the use of the phrase "sound science" by other industry…
March 5, 2004
Andrew Wakefield published a study linking immunization injections with autism. The Lancet now says that it should never have been published because of a "fatal conflict of interest". At the time Wakefield was being paid to collect evidence to support possible compensation claims. Ten of his…
March 3, 2004
Say Uncle suggests that I am "anti-gun" and implies that I "favor more gun control in the US". I am not "anti-gun". Here is a picture of me (on left) with a gun. Unless you think that Lott is some sort of gun, criticizing him is not being "anti-gun". Nor do I favour more gun control in the US.…
March 1, 2004
Glenn Reynolds writes:
Here's another in a steady stream of reports along these lines:
76 million people own a gun in this country. And now more than ever, the number of women who are buying and learning to fire guns is increasing.
It is indeed one of a steady stream of reports. A steady…
February 28, 2004
Chris Mooney writes that he hasn't received an adequate response from Lott's webmaster about the changing files on Lott's website either.
February 27, 2004
Summary: Lott now claims that an incriminating file where he had been caught cooking his results was not meant to have been on his website and was only there because his webmaster screwed up. Unfortunately, his latest story is full of holes.
Way back in September last year I…
February 27, 2004
Allan Lichtman posts on spoiled ballots in Florida 2000. (Hat tip: Ralph Luker). He rightfully refers to Lott's claims about ballot spoiling as "bizarre". Lott claims:
African-American Republicans who voted were 54 to 66 times more likely than the average African American to…
February 25, 2004
Amazon has now deleted the first two of the three Lott reviews of Targeting Guns and edited the third one to remove the praise of Lott. However, while they deleted two, I found three more of his self-reviews. I've put all of his reviews together on this page. It's an impressive body…
February 23, 2004
After finding some clues on Amazon's Canadian site that revealed three more of Lott's reviews, I decided to check their other sites. On their German site I found the review below. This review seems to have also been deleted when the Mary Rosh review was deleted. I think that was…
February 22, 2004
When I saw the story about the Amazon.ca unmasking anonymous reviewers, I took myself over there to see what I could find. Well, they had fixed the glitch, but I noticed that for some reviews, the location given for the reviewer was different on the Canadian site. This difference lets me…
February 22, 2004
A study that found a link between antibiotic use and breast cancer has been in the news and sure enough Steve Milloy has attacked it, calling it "baloney". One interesting thing I've noticed about Milloy is the large number of people who independently come to the…
February 19, 2004
There has been quite a bit of reaction to my post on Milloy.
Michael Peckham writes "Milloy's criticism may be right some of the time, but only when it fits his preconceived anti-regulatory agenda. "
John Quiggin, at Crooked Timber and at his own blog observes that the link between…
February 19, 2004
Seems like everybody is trying out the Gender Genie, which analyses a piece of text and guesses the gender of the writer.
So I gave it Mary Rosh's writings to analyse. The verdict? Male. Well done, Gender Genie!
February 17, 2004
When I looked at the reviews of More Guns, Less Crime I wasn't sure that this review was written by Lott:
If you are interested in the facts, read this book, July 10, 2000 Reviewer: A reader from Miami, Florida A couple of friends of mine have been nagging me to read this book for a couple of…
February 15, 2004
Apparently, authors have been using reviews at Amazon.com to anonymously praise their own books and pan rival books. Who knew? It seems a glitch at Amazon's Canadian site revealed the names of all the anonymous reviewers. And yes, I checked and it's fixed now. I also checked Google's cache…
February 13, 2004
Apart from the one or two posts about John Lott I've also posted about ozone depletion denial, creationism and astroturf. All these topics, as well as Lott, come together in the person of Steve Milloy. Milloy runs a website junkscience.com that purports to debunk "junk science".…
February 10, 2004
A while ago I wrote how Lott had seriously misrepresented NCVS data and given dangerous advice when he claimed that in robberies and assaults passive behaviour "is by far the most likely to result in injury". Lott has now posted a response where he falsifies a table in an attempt to…
February 9, 2004
I wrote earlier about ozone depletion deniers John Ray and Sylvain Galineau. I've found another such denier and his name is John Lott. Lott wrote a positive review\* of Environmental Overkill, a book written by Dixy Lee Ray with Lou Guzzo. In his review, Lott calls ozone depletion an…
February 7, 2004
The Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed by Kimberley Strassel who writes about Bellesiles:
Mr. Bellesiles, when asked to explain, provided ever-more outlandish excuses: that his notes had been lost in a flood, that his Web site had been hacked, that he couldn't remember where…
February 6, 2004
Kevin Drum is rather annoyed than the LA Times has published an op-ed by Lott. Lott's argument is that if someone doesn't answer a question he can attribute to them whatever answer is most damaging to them. If we applied the same standard to Lott, then since he never…
February 5, 2004
I while ago I wrote on John Ray's claims that environmentalists were wrong about ozone depletion. I think it is quite clear that subsequent research has vindicated the concerns of scientists about ozone depletion. The refusal of Ray to admit that the environmentalists could possibly…
February 4, 2004
Helland and Tabarrok's paper 'Using Placebo Laws to Test "More Guns, Less Crime"' has been published in Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy. Their objective was to correct for serial correlations in the crime data. I explained earlier how, if crimes rates in adjacent…
January 30, 2004
Lott has on op-ed on gun carrying by professional athletes. As usual, he gets his facts about guns and crime wrong. Lott claims that NCVS data shows that guns are the safest means of self-protection:
Take robbery or assault. The Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey has…
January 26, 2004
Kevin Drum is dismayed that the Economist has printed a letter from Lott:
Contrary to your claims of the Americanisation of armed robbery in Britain, one could only hope that robbery in England and Wales was truly becoming Americanised ("You're history", January 3rd). The…
January 26, 2004
Glenn Reynolds approvingly links to another poll that he claims provides
More evidence that the British public is taking a tougher line on crime than the British government.
Of course, Reynolds yet again fails to take notice of the fact that it is yet another meaningless on-line poll…
January 23, 2004
Yet another columnist has demonstrated profound ignorance of opinion polling. Scott Norvell writes about the meaningless BBC phone-in poll (discussed earlier here and here):
Britain's chattering classes sure can get their knickers in a knot with the will of the people…
January 22, 2004
The Journalist's Guide to Gun Policy Scholars and Second Amendment Scholars is a site that provides journalists with a list of "credible, articulate scholars" to consult about gun policy questions. It used to contain a listing for John R. Lott Jr, who was available to give his…