Nature has a news story by Jim Giles on the criticisms of the study from IBC supporters.
Several researchers, including Madelyn Hicks, a psychiatrist at King's College London, recently published criticisms of the study's methodology in The Lancet (369, 101-105; 2007). One key question is whether the interviews could have been done in the time stated. The October paper implied that the interviewers worked as two teams of four, each conducting 40 interviews a day -- a very high number given the need to obtain consent and the sensitive nature of the questions.
The US authors subsequently said that each team split into two pairs, a workload that is doable", says Paul Spiegel, an epidemiologist at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Geneva, who carried out similar surveys in Kosovo and Ethiopia.
I don't think that the October paper implied that they had four people at each interview, but you'd hope that this finally puts the matter to rest.
Next we have the bogus "main street bias" argument:
Other arguments focus on the potential for 'main-street bias', first proposed by Michael Spagat, an expert in conflict studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. In each survey area, the interviewers selected a starting point by randomly choosing a residential street that crossed the main business street. Spagat says this method would have left out residential streets that didn't cross the main road and, as attacks such as car bombs usually take place in busy areas, introduced a bias towards areas likely to have suffered high casualties.
The Iraqi interviewer told Nature that in bigger towns or neighbourhoods, rather than taking the main street, the team picked a business street at random and chose a residential street leading off that, so that peripheral parts of the area would be included.
You just know that this isn't going to satisfy Spagat:
One researcher keen to see the numbers is Spagat. The 2004 survey used GPS coordinates instead of the main-street system to identify streets to sample, and when Spagat used the limited data available so far to compare the two studies for the period immediately following the invasion, he found that the 2006 study turned up twice as many violent deaths, suggesting that main-street bias may be present.
Do you think that Spagat mentioned that the difference is nowhere near statistically significant? And look what he wrote in his determined defence of the IBC's incompetent critique of Lancet 1:
The ILCS has a vastly larger sample than the Lancet one and is, therefore, a much more reliable work.
So a larger sample size for the ILCS means it's more reliable than Lancet 1, but somehow the larger sample size for Lancet 2 doesn't mean that it's more reliable than Lancet 1.
And if you think that Spagat is ever going to admit that his criticism is ill-founded, in that discussion he refused to admit that the IBC had made a mathematical mistake culminating in this comment from Danial Davies:
These are normal distribution. When multiplied by a fixed factor the lower and upper bounds of the confidence interval scale by the same factor
[Michael Spagat], this is a howler. This would be true if the number we were interested in was "X times the ILCS estimate", where X was a known scaling factor. But what we are interested in is "the correctly scaled ILCS estimate", of which "X times the ILCS estimate" is our best estimate of the expectation of. So X, our estimated scaling factor, has a sampling distribution of its own. It's not just a scalar that you can multiply by.
The last two sentences of the story are very depressing:
Since its completion, one interviewer has been killed and another has left Baghdad, although it is not known whether either case is linked to their involvement in the survey. Either way, the continuing violence in the country is enough for the remaining interviewers to say that they are not willing to repeat the exercise.
I suppose it shouldn't bother me any more than the other 600,000 or so killed, but it does.
Tim,
It's your blog so you maka da rules, but IMHO "MS" is entitled to his anonymity. He's not engaging in sock-puppetry, is he?
On the MSB thing, I noticed a slide in Burnham's presentation which seemed to suggest that the distribution of deaths across clusters wasn't so very different in Lancet II from Lancet I; Fallujah was once again the worst locality. (I'm a bit deaf so I may have that wrong.) If the data bears out that claim, then at least one of the contested issues will be settled.
This blog by Tim Lambert has reached a new low with this pointless attack on Michael Spagat. And Tim now puts the main street bias work in the "bogus" category. Yep, this is a "science" blog.
Robert Shone wrote:
MSB isn't bogus, but arguing for an overall bias effect of 3 surely is.
Seems to me there's a point. And their claims regarding "main street bias" certainly seem to to be bogus. So Robert's point? That's where points go missing, it seems.
Lancet Derangement Syndrome,
COMMENCE!
Best,
D
Spagat et al were claiming Main Street Bias in the Lancet study results -- and pulling a "bias factor" out of thin air, as it were -- before they even had a clear understanding of the actual sampling methodology used in the study.
Great piece today by Mickey Z that says it all - the Iraq 'war' didn't begin in 2003 but in 1990, when virtually the entire civilian infrastructure of the country was bombed out of existence. This was followed by the sanctions of mass destrcution that 70 US Congressman called 'infanticide masquerading as policy' back in 1999, and which left hundreds of thousands dead excluding the toll inficted by the Gulf War and the latest illegal war. And in the background of this utter devastation is the IBC, lashing out at all and sundry who claim the carnage is a lot higher tha their western media-derived underestimates, and a number of academics (like Spagat) who somehow ignore all of the above points entirely.
For me, its hard to take the mainstream media seriously these days: on the BBC the other day a reporter in Darfur talked about seeing the Sundanese government 'flouting international law' (which it clearly does and is committing hideous atrocities) but you can bet that the BBC never once talked about the US and UK 'flouting international law' which both countries do with alarming regularity. There was a BBC reporter a few weeks ago saying that unless the US could provide better security in Iraq, the Sunnis and Shia would 'lose confidence in the US and its government' (this had me on the floor: I didn't know whether to laugh or cry). There was an article in the Independent newspaper in London a few months ago that was headlined, 'Even when our foreign policy is benevolent, it appears condescending and exploitataive'. Again, there are stacks of eidence to refute this hilarious assumption of our basic 'benevolence', but we are bombarded with similar nonsense every day by our state-corporate media. We've also recently been reading the news that Serbian henchmen like Mladic and Karadic might soon be rounded up for the war crimes tribunal in the Hague (which they certainly should be for their wretched role in the Srebrenica massacre) but nary a mention is ever made of the civilian leaderhsip in the US and UK for their role in even far vaster crimes aganst humanity in Iraq (this vile scum should also be in the dock).
It never ends, this mendacious propoaganda of the 'nobility' of 'our' side and of our proxies, and the evils of 'officially designated enemies'. Our crimes are forever forgotten, downplayed, or just ignored altogether, whereas crimes of official enemies are highlighted, emphasized, and endlessly repeated, even in cases where the evidence is fragmentary.
Mickey Z's piece is here: http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=12230§ionID=72
Jeff,
Here's a good George Galloway* lashing back at our pompous Senators trying to shift blame away from themselves and asking where he got the money that he used to try to overcome sanctions. The vid contains good tactics for dealing with their sort (and the sort who posts in comments): where's your evidence? Where's your evidence? Where's your evidence?
The em-ess-em does our societies a great disservice.
Best,
D
*Very long vid.
Here's a Patrick Cockburn article about the difficulties of press coverage in Iraq. We all thought that anyway, but it's good to hear it confirmed for the 100th time from one of the best reporters there.
Also, Cockburn says that because of the lack of coverage, the British and American governments can get away with claiming that areas are peaceful when they're not.
http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick03032007.html
Difficulties of press coverage in Iraq?
That's a convenient excuse. The medai in general and American media in particular have literally been "in bed with" (embedded with) the US military from the very start in Iraq. For them to now claim that they can't do their job because of "difficulties beyond their control" is just so much BS.
Real journalists like Dan Rather (as opposed to hotel journalists who hang out in hotels in the green zone and report what is fed to them by the DOD) managed to cover the Vietnam war under difficult circumstances. Why is it that today's "journalists" can't do the same? After all, it is their job. No one forced them to choose this profession.
I don't think it's a convenient excuse, JB--from what I've read Iraq has been one of the most dangerous wars for journalists. Normally the insurgents in other wars are happy to have reporters come and see things from their viewpoint--in Lebanon Hezbollah is eager to give their spin to journalists. In Iraq a journalist risks having his head cut off.
I don't let the mainstream press off the hook--for the most part I don't think they've shown the slightest interest in US-caused casualties, something I'd be complaining about if the Lancet papers had never existed. Presumably as of now (even according to L2) the majority of deaths are inflicted by Iraqis, but this wasn't always the case.