tlambert | February 27, 2008Diane Farsetta has an excellent and comprehensive write up on the Lancet and other studies on deaths in Iraq. A few extracts:
Theoretically, the public health surveys and polls that have been conducted in Iraq -- at great risk to the people involved -- should help inform and further the debate. But the data is complicated by different research approaches and their attendant caveats. The matter has been further confused by anemic reporting, with news articles usually framed as a "he said / she said" story, instead of an exploration and interpretation of research findings.
These are the…
tlambert | February 26, 2008The latest story doing the rounds of the global warming deniers (Drudge, Andrew Bolt, etc), is this one from Lorne Gunter in the National Post:
Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.
If you are feeling a little bit of deja vu right now, it's because Gunter is making the same misrepresentation of Tapping's views that we saw in the Investor's Business Daily a couple of weeks ago.
Mind you, Gunter isn't just…
tlambert | February 26, 2008Mark Hoofnagle reviews a new group blog, Science-Based Medicine.
I must say I've loved much of the writing at the new blog Science-Based Medicine. These guys are fighting the good fight and presenting very sophisticated aspects of evaluating the medical literature in a very accessible way. In particular I'd like to point out David Gorski's critique of NCCAM and the directly-relevant articles from Kimball Atwood on the importance of prior probability in evaluating medical research.
The writng that Hoofnagle doesn't like are two poorly researched posts from Wallace Sampson, who uncritically…
tlambert | February 24, 2008Remember last year, when Exxon said that they would no longer fund organizations like the International Policy Network and the George Marshall Institute that misrepresent the science of global warming?
Well, they are still funding them. Also still on the list, are CO2science and the Center for Science and Public Policy.
Hat tip: Brian Schmidt.
tlambert | February 19, 2008Thanks to the Tobacco documents we've learned how tobacco companies have secretly funded astroturf organizations like junkscience.com, secretly paid for think tanks to run political campaigns for them, and even created their own astroturf scientific journal. The latest pile of astoturf to be uncovered is detailed in a new paper by Anne Landman, Daniel Cortese and Stanton Glantz:
'The multinational tobacco companies responded to arguments about the social costs of smoking and hazards of secondhand smoke by quietly implementing the Social Costs/Social Values project (1979-1989), which relied…
tlambert | February 18, 2008The two millionth visitor here came from California State University, Sacramento. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by.
tlambert | February 17, 2008Reader James reports that the DDT ban myth is repeated in a new book:
Over the last few decades, however, the WHO has discouraged
the use of DDT in member states â encouraged by environmentalists,
who have often massively overstated the negative effects of
DDT on human and animal health (Roberts et al., 2000). Until
recently, most Western aid agencies discouraged the use of DDT and
indoor residual spraying generally, and the WHO has provided little
financial assistance to those governments that wish to go down this
route.
They also run down bednets.
While bednets may have a role in…
tlambert | February 14, 2008John Tirman has an article in Editor and Publisher. Extract:
The charge, repeated in all these media, that the Iraqi research leader, Riyadh Lafta, M.D., operated "without U.S. supervision" and was therefore suspect is particularly interesting. Munro, in a note to National Review Online, asserted that Lafta "said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey," which he also had noted in the National Journal piece. When he interviewed me he pestered me about two anonymous donors, demanding to know if either were Arab or Muslim. A pattern here is visible, one which reeks of…
tlambert | February 14, 2008Michael Spagat is back with another attack on the Lancet study. Most of it is stuff we've seen before, like absurd assumptions he makes for Main Street Bias, and the false claim that Soros funded the study. But there is some new stuff, including this (L2 is the second Lancet study):
The above graphic shows results from three mortality surveys. The first is the Kosovo study of Paul Spiegel and Peter Salama: War and Mortality in Kosovo, 1998-99: an epidemiological testimony", published in the Lancet in 2000. This paper is cited in L1, L2 and the MIT paper that is a companion piece to L2.…
tlambert | February 13, 2008An open thread where you can discuss anything you like. Especially Canadian health care and the Israel Palestine conflict.
tlambert | February 13, 2008KÃ¥re Fog has examined the lists of alleged errors in An Incovenient Truth put out by Monckton, the CEI and so on and counted how many actual errors they found. The score: in the film and book combined there were 2 errors and 12 flaws. (Fog
defines a flaw as "a misleading statement which does not fully agree with the facts".)
For comparison, Fog lists 110 errors and 208 flaws in Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist".
A complete list of the errors in AIT:
F, B p174: "We´ve had 30 so-called new diseases that have emerged in just the last quarter century." Diseases referred to in the…
tlambert | February 12, 2008Kim Larsen has an extensive story on DDT and malaria in onEarth. An extract:
DDT proponents are generally reluctant to acknowledge the complicating and protean factor of mosquito resistance. Entomologist May Berenbaum finds this galling. An expert on insecticide metabolism, Berenbaum is director of the entomology department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Read the entomological literature of the 1950s," she said in a telephone interview. "Way before Silent Spring, scientists were already trying to understand resistance. That's what insecticide toxicology was all about back…
tlambert | February 11, 2008Neil Munro has had another go at the Lancet studies. This time he has gone on right-wing talk shows to attack Riyadh Lafta.
On Glenn Beck he claimed
This study -- the guys in this study have not shown the forms and the date and the sheets collected by the surveyors who worked for an Iraqi without U.S. supervision. This particular Iraqi was once employed by Saddam Hussein, where he produced crummy scientific papers as part of Saddam`s effort to lift economic sanctions in the 1990s.
On Mike McConnell he elaborated (search for "neil munro" at the link):
The strange thing is that the entire…
tlambert | February 10, 2008At Malaria Matters, Bill Brieger suggests that a new report offers a "revisionist malaria history":
A new report on the implementation of Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) by the World Health Organization begins with the following 'historical' perspective: "In the 1950s and 1960s the WHO led malaria eradication campaign eliminated the risk of malaria infection for about 700 million people mainly in Europe, Asia and Latin America within a period of about 20 years using IRS as a major tool. In the 1980s, following the global consensus to replace malaria eradication campaign by a long term control…
tlambert | February 9, 2008The latest story doing the rounds of the global warming deniers (Drudge, Instapundit, Andrew Bolt, etc), is this one from the Investors Business Daily:
Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.
Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last…
tlambert | February 7, 2008John Mashey points me to a video of Naomi Oreskes' talk on "The American Denial of Global Warming":
The first part ("TRUTH") outlines the history of climate science
research, and the unpoliticized acceptance thereof that lasted until the
early 1990s. The second part "DENIAL" describes the George C. Marshall
Instiute's role in creating confusion and politicizing the issue, using
tactics from the cigarette wars.
Naomi knows her topic well, and is a lively speaker - I heard an earlier
version of this about a year ago, and this talk is well worth watching.
TRUTH
00:00 Introduction
02:00 Frank…
tlambert | February 1, 2008
The World Health Organization has a new report showing dramatic decreases in malaria in Rwanda and Ethiopia following the large-scale distribution of long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) and artemisinin-combination therapy drugs (ACTs) :
Our investigation showed that declines of malaria cases and deaths
were dramatic in Rwanda and Ethiopia (>50%) and occurred within 12-24
months of nationwide 11 distribution of LLINs and ACTs. In fact,
declines in in-patient cases and out-patient laboratory-confirmed
cases occurred within 60 days of nationwide distribution in Rwanda
(Figure 4). In both…
tlambert | January 31, 2008In a paper claiming that safe-storage gun laws increase crime and do not decrease accidental deaths, Lott and Whitley:
The Cummings et al., supra note 15, research provides evidence of a
23 percent drop in juvenile accidental gun deaths after the passage of
safe-storage laws. Juvenile accidental gun deaths did decline after
the passage of the law, but what Cummings et al. miss is that these
accidental deaths declined even faster in the states without these
laws. While the Cummings et al. piece examined national data, it did
not use fixed year effects, which would have allowed them to test…
tlambert | January 30, 2008I wouldn't have thought that it was possible to be more wrong than Neil Munro's prediction of the result of the Iraq war:
The painful images of starving Iraqi children will be replaced by alluring Baghdad city lights, smiling wages-earners and Palestinian job seekers.
But in a piece scare-mongering about the Y2K problem Munro predicted that Al Gore would be a big loser from the Y2K problem: (National Journal , 20 June 1998)
Loser:
Vice President Al Gore, who fretted about global warming, legal authorities and campaign finance laws while missing the biggest technology problem facing the…
tlambert | January 30, 2008Tanta writes:
I cannot make anyone stop responding to pointless or nuisance comments. You have to want to restrain yourself, because you understand that the only way to get rid of them is to fail to give them the attention they want. A "troll" is not just someone whose comments you disagree with, or even just a nasty or badly-worded comment. A troll is someone who does not, under any possible set of circumstances, care what you think about him or his comments. He merely wants attention. Negative attention will do. The more you disagree with him, the more he is able to tell himself that he is…