tlambert | February 27, 2005 According to this profile, Miranda Devine (last seen making stuff up in an attempt to debunk the Lancet study), once worked for the textile physics division of CSIRO. So she should know that one purpose of peer review is to weed out scientific papers that are inaccurate or where the conclusions are not properly supported by the evidence offered. She went on to write an opinion column where accuracy and supporting your claims are not important, so perhaps that explains why in her latest screed she seems to believe that peer review is a tool to silence dissent. Devine takes on the…
tlambert | February 26, 2005 Ted Lapkin has objected to my reference to him in my post on the Great DDT Hoax. In his email he writes:
I would very much prefer, if possible, to keep things on an informal basis rather than a legal one. Thus this whole misunderstanding can be cleared up by a retraction and apology on your blog. In that event I would see no need to pursue matters further.
I offered to post his argument as to why he felt that I was wrong, but he declined, saying that it was a private communication. I have posted the paragraph above because I don't think threats are entitled to privacy…
tlambert | February 25, 2005R.J. Rummel has a response to my earlier post on the Lancet study. Unfortunately he still does not understand what the researchers did.
In his original post Rummel claimed the pre-invasion statistics came from Saddam's Ministry of Health. In fact, they come from the survey the researchers conducted. Despite my explanation, Rummel now argues:
However, then there is Figure 1, which is unreadable except for its description that lists the data as crude mortality per year before and after invasion. For the before, I can only guess that the Ministry…
tlambert | February 25, 2005 The Tangled Bank is a showcase of blog posts on biology, medicine or natural history. The latest compilation is here.
tlambert | February 24, 2005 King at SCSU Scholars has updated his post attacking the Lancet study with a response to my post. He admits error on one point, but on the rest he has the nerve to accuse me of bringing biases rather than facts to the debate. To see who is bringing facts and who is bringing biases let's look at one of the points he contests:
King originally claimed (my emphasis):
They also chose both to change their list of randomly sampled areas so they didn't have to drive as much; this meant they stayed close to Baghdad and the Sunni triangle, probably oversampling high-…
tlambert | February 24, 2005In today's Sydney Morning Herald Miranda Devine has a go at the Lancet study, writing
The British medical journal The Lancet published a paper last October (timed deliberately, its authors admit, before the US presidential election), estimating that 100,000 more Iraqis died than would have been expected if the war had not happened. Since then, this figure is constantly, unquestioningly cited as an article of faith.
And yet the research has been criticised enough by credible people to have doubt cast on what is, after all, only an estimate based on…
tlambert | February 23, 2005 Via Chris Brook and Anthony Cox, I find that Melanie Philips took the same combination of ignorance of science and utter certainty that the scientists are wrong that she used to "prove" that global warming was a scam and conducted a grossly irresponsible scare campaign against vaccination. On this issue, for once, Tech Central Station is on the side of the angels, with several articles debunking the scare.\* My favourite one is by Iain Murray, who writes:
[A Cardiff University report] examined the public's understanding of the issues surrounding the MMR vaccine, which has been…
tlambert | February 22, 2005 Last week Kyoto came into effect. Apparently that was the signal for columns by a whole bunch of pundits who have two features in common: 1. they are manifestly ill-equipped to understand the science and 2. they are utterly certain that there is no such thing as global warming.
Our first pundit is Michael Duffy in the Daily Telegraph informs us:
The truth is we have no control over global warming, and in any case it's not a problem at all.
The myth holds that carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere is increasing, due mainly to industrial activities, and this…
tlambert | February 20, 2005 King at SCSU Scholars has had another go at the Lancet study. King writes:
Many of Saddam's dead were not murdered in the presence of witnesses; there is no indication that the authors of the study charged Saddam with a death for a missing person.
It doesn't matter whether the death was witnessed or not, if the family concluded the the person was dead it was recorded. Missing people are missing and not necessarily dead. And of course people go missing after the invasion as well.
It was noted in the IHT that the authors sought death certificates to verify…
tlambert | February 19, 2005 Realclimate has a good explanation of the latest battle in the hockey stick wars. It looks to me like McIntyre & McKitrick's claim (that the hockey stick is the product of an erroneous calculation) is not correct. That doesn't mean that the graph is correct of course, since the proxies the graph is built on may not measure temperatures very well.
In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal systematically misrepresents the whole affair:
In 1998, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published a paper in…
tlambert | February 19, 2005 King at SCSU Scholars demonstrates that he doesn't understand what the Lancet study did:
The point is that the cost of U.S. intervention isn't the total loss of life since March 2003 but the difference between what we know has been lost lives since then and what would have been lost had Saddam Hussein stayed in power. (Economists would call this, indelicately, the "marginal cost".) If that marginal cost is negative, then we would argue perhaps that the intervention was a net benefit.
But that is what the study measured: the change in the death rate. If…
tlambert | February 18, 2005 Via Suki Lombard I discover that the Australian government's position on Iraqi deaths because of the war is that the Lancet estimate of roughly 100,000 excess deaths is an exaggeration and we have no idea how many have died and no plans to find out. Govt seeking no information on civilian toll in Iraq war:
PETER VARGHESE: I can't give you a number, no.
JOHN FAULKNER: You can't even hazard a guess?
PETER VARGHESE: Well I wouldn't want to hazard a guess. I mean, that's the whole point.
JOHN FAULKNER: You've got no idea? And no one's made...
PETER VARGHESE: I cannot give…
tlambert | February 18, 2005 Roy Eccleston has an article on blogs in The Australian. He is startled to find that thanks to blogs, some Americans believe an entirely false story about how Diana Kerry interfered in the Australian election, based on a contrived reading of an story that Eccleston himself wrote. He writes (my emphasis):
"You're Australian aren't you," said a bystander, listening to our conversation."So what do you think about John Kerry's sister interfering in your election campaign?"
I was stunned. Here was a particularly well-informed American - he not only knew Australia had held…
tlambert | February 18, 2005John Quiggin is donating $1 to Medecins Sans Frontieres for each comment he gets on this post. Go and leave a comment! The money will aid the The Global Fund to fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Your comment might even help pay for some DDT spraying! (Though insecticide treated netting is usually the better option.)
tlambert | February 17, 2005Orac has done a wonderful job of organising a slew of links to skeptical blogging into the Skeptics' Circle. (We're talking about the good kind of skepticism here, not global warming/ozone depletion/evolution sceptics.)
However, I must take issue with one small thing. Orac names Penn and Teller as heroes of the skeptic fellowship. They're not. Last year, an alert reader noticed that their show on Safety Hysteria cited as an expert none other than Steve Milloy. (In an obvious attempt to hide from my scrutiny access to their website is blocked from Australia, so I've linked to…
tlambert | February 16, 2005Anti-environmentalist writers frequently claim that after DDT had all but eliminated malaria from Sri Lanka, environmentalist pressure forced Sri Lanka to ban DDT, leading to a resurgence of malaria:
Roger Bate in Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking writes:
Some developing countries imposed a complete ban on the pesticide, as Sri Lanka did in 1964, when officials believed the malaria problem was solved. By 1969 the number of cases had risen from the low of seventeen (when DDT was used) to over a half million.
Walter Williams in in…
tlambert | February 16, 2005 Supporting sources for this post on the resurgence of malaria in Sri Lanka despite DDT spraying.
From Malaria: Principles and Practice of Malariology edited by Wernsdorfer and McGregor (1988) Chapter 45 "The recent history of malaria control and eradication. by Gramiccia and Beales pages 1366-1367
In Sri Lanka, after the minimum of 17 cases in 1963, the incidence increased markedly and practically unimpeded, reaching 537 700 registered cases in 1969. There were still 400 700 cases in 1975. Malaria in Sri Lanka was known to produce epidemics at three to five year intervals…
tlambert | February 15, 2005 There has been a flurry of bloggers pretending to be females. Via Jason Soon we have the exposure of Libertarian Girl, who was actually a guy. Another faker recently exposed was Hot Abercrombie Chick. And the winner of the NetGuide award for Best Personal Blog for 2004 was "Natalie Biz", who was really "James Guthrie, a Wellington man, happily married with children".
Libertarian Girl says that when he had a blog as himself, he got no links or comments, but by pretending to be a pretty girl he instantly got to have a popular blog. Now I don't think that means that…
tlambert | February 14, 2005 Chris Mooney has an excellent article on how "balanced" coverage of scientific issues can misinform readers:
Moreover, the question of how to substitute accuracy for mere "balance" in science reporting has become ever more pointed as journalists have struggled to cover the Bush administration, which scientists have widely accused of scientific distortions. As the Union of Concerned Scientists, an alliance of citizens and scientists, and other critics have noted, Bush administration statements and actions have often given privileged status to a fringe scientific view over a well-documented,…
tlambert | February 13, 2005
William Connolley has an interesting post on a new reconstruction of temperatures over the past 2000 years. It's the blue line in the graph to the right. It suggests that things were colder in the past than the hockey stick reconstruction (MBH in the diagram). The usual suspects will no doubt try to argue that this somehow disproves anthropogenic global warming, despite the finding that temperatures since the 90s are unprecedented.
Louis Hissink warns about the dangers of shifting the axis of rotation of a spinning hard disk:
Never ever move a hard drive that is…