Dale Keiger's article on the Lancet studies is now online:
Newspapers the world over put the number in their headlines. Reporters tried to explain it, often bungling the job. To dismiss the research, critics seized on its implausibility, in the process frequently distorting its meaning. Political leaders dodged its implications by brushing it aside as the meaningless product of a discredited methodology. In a leading scientific journal, other scientists challenged how the study had been done.
More like this
The latest issue of the Walkley Magazine has an article I wrote about the media coverage of the Lancet study. They haven't made it available on line, so I've put a copy below the fold.
Imagine an alternate Earth. Let's call it Earth 2. On Earth 2, just like our planet, there was a Boxing Day…
In May I analysed the press coverage of the Iraq Body Count and found that the IBC numbers were usually misreported as the number of deaths and the IBC maximum was often reported as an upper bound on the number of deaths. I asked:
Why not contact reporters who get it wrong and set them right?
The…
If there's one thing I've been railing about for the last few years, it's how scientific and medical studies are reported in the lay press. It seems that hardly a week passes without my having to apply a little Insolence, be it Respectful or not-so-Respectful, to some story or another, usually as a…
by Dick Clapp
The publication of my article on mortality among IBM workers was the culmination of a two and a half year process. I obtained the data, which included information on the deaths of nearly 32,000 former workers who had died between 1969 and 2001, when I served as an expert witness in a…
With regard to the Iraqi MoH, you've got to wonder how well it's being run and how much of it's time is being dedicated to counting bodies when you read things like this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6341321.stm
I'm not saying for sure that their numbers are wrong, but this story opens the possibility that the Ministry is in dissaray and not doing its job properly.
This links in with other reports we've read though, about how the main Baghdad hospital is a journalist free zone except under escort.
This highlights the need for more studies.
1) My (unsuccessful) attempts to gain access to the underlying data continue. Wish me luck.
2) Thanks to Tim for providing links to such useful articles.
3) Can someone clarify whether the authors have ever released the exact number of houses skipped for safety reasons? That is, the procedure was to pick a random starting point but, if that seemed too dangerous, to start somewhere else. This is not unreasonable, but exactly how often did it happen?