tlambert | March 28, 2005 After accusing the researchers and the Lancet of fraud and treason, Shannon Love is back with another accusation. The latest crime he accuses them of is rounding things off:
One easily graspable example in the Lancet study's dishonesty is the key sentence in the Summary, the one repeated in the media world wide, that pegs the "conservative" estimate at 100,000 excess deaths. The actual given estimate is 98,000. What pure scientific purpose is served by rounding the number up to 100,000? There is no technical reason for doing so. They chose that number because a big, round numbers stick in…
tlambert | March 27, 2005 William Connolley lists another ten global warming myths.
PZ Myers delivers a righteous smackdown to Paul from Wizbang for Paul's profoundly ignorant attacks on evolution. (Paul's responds by calling evolution a cult.) As well as having totally demolished\* the theory of evolution, Paul has also done for global warming:
Which is more plausible:
The established theory: CFC's (et al) don't destroy ozone at seal level, (or we would not have smog) they magically hold there electron stripping potential till they get to a higher altitude where they strip electrons off ozone and blah blah…
tlambert | March 25, 2005 Go and read this most excellent post by William Connolley debunking many of the popular myths about global warming.
tlambert | March 24, 2005 Daniel Davies comments on the current outbreak of Lancet denialism, including Shannon Love's latest effort which Love describes as a "Fisking". ("Fisking" is a term bloggers use for especially lame posts.) Love gets taken to bits in the comments to his post; I don't need to add anything.
From Glenn Reynolds
Reader Peter Malloy emails: "The inability to sense of irony among the anti-war left never ceases to amaze me. The way this group clings to the 100,000 deaths figure makes clear that they WANT it, desperately, to be true. This group of people, ostensibly against the killing involved…
tlambert | March 23, 2005 Lila Guterman writes in the Columbia Journalism Review about the dismal reporting of the Lancet study:
Last fall, a major public-health study appeared in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, only to be missed or dismissed by the American press. To the extent it was covered at all, the reports were short and usually buried far from the front pages of major newspapers. The results of the study could have played an important role in future policy decisions, but the press's near total silence allowed the issue to pass without debate. ...
Reporters' unease about the wide range…
tlambert | March 22, 2005 Andy S, last seen criticizing the Lancet study without reading it, has now read it. Sort of. He writes:
Of Iraq's 18 provinces only 12 were actually visited. ... Now clusters assigned to the unsurveyed provinces were replaced in the sample by selecting clusters in adjacent provinces as proxies. The net effect of this is that of the five provinces in northern Iraq only Ninawa and Sulaymaniya were surveyed. ...In a similar manner Iraq's three southernmost provinces were left unsurveyed.
Somehow or other the Northern Kurdish population and the Southern Shiite population were undersampled…
tlambert | March 20, 2005 If you haven't read my previous forty posts on the Lancet study, here is a handy index. All right, let's go.
First up, via Glenn Reynolds we have Andy S, who critiques the Lancet study despite not having read the thing. This is not a good idea, especially since he is relying on Kaplan's flawed Slate article. Andy has three comments:
Firstly the use of a scientific publication to make POLITICAL POINTS is reprehensible. This Lancet study was published just before the American Presidential Election and was clearly an attempt to make President Bush look bad just before he faced the…
tlambert | March 19, 2005 The Fourth Skeptics Circle is here. Lots of interesting posts. In particular I recommend Richard Rockley's "Five Apples"---he could almost be wrting about criticisms of the Lancet study.
tlambert | March 18, 2005Tim Blair has posted emails from Ted Lapkin and Andrew Bolt who object to a couple of my posts. Blair fails to provide links to the posts so that readers can determine whether Lapkin and Bolt have accurately described what happened.
Lapkin begins:
In November 2003, I argued in the pages of Quadrant magazine that the environmental movement is moral culpable for the deaths of 2 million Africans killed each year by malaria. In mid-February 2005, a left-wing blogger named Tim Lambert (Deltoid) accused me, and others, of participation in what he described as "The Great DDT Hoax". Without…
tlambert | March 18, 2005 In my previous post I noted that Tim Blair had posted:
Can I ask all timblair.net regulars to stop commenting here. This is exactly what he wants and you're only encouraging him.
In my comments someone also claiming to be Tim Blair posted:
You complete idiot. That comment wasn't posted by me. I suggest you ban the impersonator responsible.
Oh no! It's like one of those movies where there is a real person and a fake person and you have a gun and you hafta shoot the fake one. How can you tell which one is the real Tim Blair? What to do, who to ban. Is there some characteristic that…
tlambert | March 17, 2005 So I was reading this thread on John Quiggin's blog when the discussion turned to Tim Blair's policy of banning any dissenters from commenting on his blog. (See here for an example of the sort of comment that will get you banned.) Now Blair doesn't have to support comments from people that disagree with him, but there are free commenting systems available, so I set up Haloscan so that people could comment without being banned. I also wrote a little CGI proxy script that people could use to add links to the Haloscan comments under each of Blair's posts.
Tim Blair got rather upset,…
tlambert | March 15, 2005 Apparently the Lancet report is so disturbing to some pro-war folks that they are now denying its very existence. Here's Tim Blair, listing stories that he believes progressives have invented:
Poor progressives. All they have is Lancet reports, Ayad Allawi killing people, the menace of depleted uranium, plastic turkeys, oil pipelines in Afghanistan, Jewish media conspiracies, another Stalingrad in Baghdad, Bush's dumbness, harsh Afghan winters, the massive influence of Jeff Gannon, and looted Iraqi museums. They never get to invent any stories at all.
I sent him a copy of the report in the…
tlambert | March 14, 2005 Two more lazy and ignorant pundits have been spotted spreading the hoax about a non-existant DDT ban. In the New York Times Nicholas Kristof writes
Environmentalists were right about DDT's threat to bald eagles, for example, but blocking all spraying in the third world has led to hundreds of thousands of malaria deaths.
There is no ban on the the use of DDT against malaria. It is still used for that purpose. This fact is not a secret. Kristof just hasn't bothered to find out the truth.
Writing in London's Daily Telegraph, Dick Taverne perpetrates this howler:
DDT is another good…
tlambert | March 12, 2005 A large group of public health experts has criticized the coalition for their continuing failure to count the civilian casualties in Iraq. In an editorial in the British Medical Journal Klim McPherson writes:
Public access to reliable data on mortality is important. The policy being assessed---the allied invasion of Iraq---was justified largely on grounds of democratic supremacy. Voters in the countries that initiated the war, and others---not least in Iraq itself---are denied a reliable evaluation of a key indicator of the success of that policy. This is unacceptable.
Instead the UK…
tlambert | March 11, 2005 When people raise questions about the mysterious 1997 survey, Lott's standard line of defence is:
"the survey was replicated, and I obtained very similar results."
So how similar are the results? Well, Lott claims that the 2002 survey gave a 95% brandishing number, quite close to the 98% he claims he found in 1997. However, the 2002 survey does not give a 95% number and is too small for the number to be reliable.
Very little attention has been paid to the other result that Lott claims comes from his 2002 survey---an estimate that there were 2.3…
tlambert | March 7, 2005 In Lott's latest piece he is once more complaining that the media doesn't report defensive gun use. Mark Wilson intervened to try to stop a shooting rampage in Texas. Unfortunately, the shooter was wearing body armour and Wilson was shot and killed. The police eventually killed the shooter (full story).
Lott concedes that Wilson's bravery was widely reported, but also writes:
For example, in about 30 percent of the multiple victim public school shootings that have captivated Americans' attention starting in 1997, people used guns to stop the attacks before…
tlambert | March 4, 2005Radagast has put together the third edition of the Skeptics' Circle. Lots of good reading there. Thanks, Radagast!
tlambert | March 2, 2005 By considering bogus criticisms of the Lancet study it is possible to gain an appreciation of the concept of the infinite. No matter how many you've seen, someone can always come up with a new one. I give you Rob, who writes:
In an attempt at firmer confirmation, the interviewers asked for death certificates in 78 households and were provided them 63 times.
So out of 7,000+ people questioned they only asked for proof in 78 instances? And only received proof in 63 percent of those instances? Seems like they should have been taking better care to…
tlambert | March 1, 2005Lott and James Glassman have a piece in the New York Post arguing that felons should not be allowed to vote. Well, I can't claim to know anything about the issue (for that, see Kevin Drum and Julie Saltman), but this is John "98%" Lott and James "36,000" Glassman, so you just know their numbers are going to be dodgy. And sure enough, in the first paragraph we find:
A bill to guarantee that millions of convicted murderers, rapists and armed robbers can vote.
That sounded like a lot to me, so I thought I'd check. I found a table giving a breakdown of felony convictions by crime…
tlambert | February 28, 2005 I wrote earlier about how tobacco company documents, released as apart of the Tobacco Settlement Agreement proved that Philip Morris created junkscience.com to argue that environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) was harmless. Those documents also tell the story of how they set up a scientific journal controlled by tobacco-friendly editors so that research finding that ETS was harmless could be published. In 1987 Philip Morris cam up with a plan (details in this document) to:
Establish a genuine scientific journal on indoor air quality. The journal could be…