tlambert | November 22, 2004 Our dog has developed a fear of traffic. Since we live on a busy street, this is a problem. It all started when he was crossing the street with Carmen and a car went through the red light without even slowing, passing less than a metre in front of him and smashing into the side of another car just a couple of metres away. After that he wouldn't cross the street at that intersection, which is sort of understandable, but his fear quickly grew so that he would freeze up walking on the footpath beside a busy road. Did I mention that we live on a busy road?
Naturally I searched my…
tlambert | November 21, 2004 Darp and Jess organized a get together of bloggers in Sydney last Friday. I wandered along and, well, there were a lot of people there. Despite having been to two previous such gatherings, the only bloggers I had met before were Jason Soon and c8to. I'm too lazy to link to everybody so I'm going to reward TimT's shameless link whoring by suggesting you go to his post and follow the links from there to all the photos and descriptions and more importantly, a whole bunch of interesting blogs you might not have seen before.
One anecdote: That evening, at dinner…
tlambert | November 20, 2004 The latest pundit to have a go at the Lancet study is Andrew Bolt. Like most of the critics, Bolt just does not have the statistical background to produce a competent critique. In Bolt's case this is even less excusable, since he had the benefit of the Economist's excellent article, but unfortunately Bolt does not seem to have understood it.
Bolt [writes](http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/dveathby.htm):
Just ask yourself: Have more than 180 Iraqis, mainly women and children, really died every day, on average, for the past 18 months, usually at the…
tlambert | November 19, 2004 From Kieran Healy I learn that Otis Dudley Duncan has died. It was Duncan who started the investigation into John Lott's mysterious survey. When Duncan first contacted me with his concerns, I found it almost impossible to conceive that someone would fabricate a survey rather then admitting to a careless error, but Duncan's insight into human nature has proven to be much better than mine. Although he preferred to stay out of the limelight, Duncan gave me the benefit of his wisdom on the Lott affair. If my writings on Lott's mysterious survey have been astute,…
tlambert | November 17, 2004 Tech Central Station has an article by Robert McHenry criticising Wikipedia for inaccuracy. Yes, this Tech Central Station. McHenry found an error in the Wikipedia article on Alexander Hamilton. Of course, within hours of his pointing out the error, it was fixed. Unlike the numerous and far more serious errors you see in Tech Central Station.
Incidently Tech Central Station is drafted by a lobbying company that works for Microsoft. And Microsoft Encarta is a competitor to Wikipedia. And McHenry was Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, another competitor to…
tlambert | November 17, 2004 Sadly, it looks as if Michael Fumento has retired from the field. All I can offer any folks suffering withdrawal symptoms is this thread. James M describes it like this:
I noticed a truly spectacular example of what I suppose is the unarmed kamikaze approach to debate carrying on in the comments boxes. Not so much being savaged by a dead sheep, as seeing someone punch themselves repeatedly in the face. It is painful to watch.
But yet, like a car wreck, you must look.
tlambert | November 17, 2004 Kevin Drum is displeased that the LA Times published another op-ed from John Lott:
The man is a fraud and the Times demeans itself by allowing him space on their pages.
tlambert | November 15, 2004 For someone who holds blogs in contempt, Michael Fumento sure spends a lot of time posting comments to blogs. Here he is again: (Hat tip: John Fleck, now the third site on a Google search for "Michael Fumento")
My writing on the Lancet article has been Fleck's obsession for over a week, and everything he says is wrong including this latest posting. First, simple subtraction tells you in 19 percent of the households death certificates were NOT used. But that's not the equivalent of 19 percent of the deaths. If a household said a bomb killed five family…
tlambert | November 15, 2004 The Site Meter counter just ticked over to 300,000 visits. I really appreciate all the visitors, especially the ones who have left comments.
tlambert | November 14, 2004 The Times Higher Education Supplement has produced a list of the world's top universities. They must have used a good methodology because UNSW came in at number 36. The United States dominated the list, with 20 out of the top 50 places. I wasn't quite sure exactly where all the American universities were, so I marked the locations on a map of the United States that I found here. Probably most of my readers already know where they all are, but I thought I'd share the map with you.
tlambert | November 13, 2004The fun continues in this comment thread. Highlights:
Michael Fumento:
The authors claimed to have come up with one set of numbers including Falluja, another without. But strangely, they never present the "without numbers." Lambert knows this because I told him directly. Anyway, it's in the study---or rather, it's NOT in the study.
John Fleck:
A quick refresher on where the Lancet study's authors included the "without Falluja" numbers. It's in the paper's abstract. That's the thing that comes right at the beginning: "We estimate that 98,000 more deaths…
tlambert | November 12, 2004Daniel Davies has an excellent roundup of the Lancet discussion.
I've added an update to my post about Gerard Alexander's attack on the Lancet.
Chris at Mixing Memory takes down another Lancet critique, this one by John Ray.
tlambert | November 11, 2004 Fumento left a comment on my earlier post. Instead of discussing the Lancet article, he boasted how his column had been published in the on the web site of the Lake Wylie Pilot, which is a free weekly newspaper serving a town of 3,000 people. Hey, my little blog has a greater circulation than that.
Eye Doc linked to Fumento's attack on the Lancet, so I left a comment explaining what was wrong. Fumento replied:
Tim Lambert is on a personal Jihad to debunk my debunking. I did not say death certificates were not used, they were. But so was alleged personal recall. That…
tlambert | November 8, 2004 The defective refutations of the Lancet study just keep on coming. First, we have Gerard Alexander writing in the Weekly standard:
But the study's researchers were sure to survey in Falluja, far and away the most violent city in post-invasion Iraq. Falluja turned out to be such a wild statistical outlier that they offer two estimates, one with Falluja included and one with it kept out. But questions about just how representative the sample sites were go deeper than this. The researchers selected their survey sites households for such unclear…
tlambert | November 8, 2004 John Fleck commented on my exchange with Fumento here and here. He responded to Fumento's silly charge that I "occupy the pitiful place of the harmless blogger who blogs because nobody in his right mind would punish (sic) him" with:
That's of course ad hominem, something of a poor refuge in any argument. But it's worse than that. It's plain dumb in this age of Dan Rather and Little Green Footballs for a writer of Fumento's stature to expect us to think he wins the argument because his work is published in mainstream media.
Sure enough, Fleck got an email…
tlambert | November 7, 2004 One interesting feature of blogspace discussion of the Lancet study has been the comments from warbloggers, who, despite not even knowing what cluster sampling is, have been absolutely certain that the methodology of the study has been discredited. For instance, Arthur Chrenkoff admits:
I'm not a statistician
but none the less concludes that Shannon Love had demolished the study. (Daniel Davies deals with that "demolition").
Or Michael Totten at Instapundit, who is certain that the study uses very bad methodology. Bill Trippe sent him a correction:
Did…
tlambert | November 6, 2004 Yet another person has tried to refute the Lancet article. John Brignell dismisses the study just because:
A relative risk of 1.5 is not acceptable as significant.
Actually the increased risk was statistically significant. You won't find support for Brignell's claim in any conventional statistical text or paper. To support his claim he cites a book called Sorry, wrong number!. Trouble is, that book was written by.... John Brignell. Not only that, it was drafted by... John Brignell. Brignell is a crank who dismisses the entire field of modern…
tlambert | November 5, 2004 The Anchorage Daily News has published a new version of Michael Fumento's attempt to debunk the Lancet study on deaths in Iraq. How does it differ from his previous attempt? Well his key argument was that their estimate was skewed by the inclusion of the Falluja cluster. But it is perfectly clear from the report that Falluja was excluded from their estimate. Fumento knows this because he responded to my post with a comment, and he specifically asked questions about the inclusion of Falluja in the comments to his TCS article. In his new version he…
tlambert | November 3, 2004 I wrote earlier how it seems that you must fail a qualifying exam before you can write on a topic at Tech Central Station. Now the errors in Fumento's critique of the Lancet study.aren't errors in epidemiology---they seem to result from not having read the study. Indeed, in comments at TCS, Fumento seems to be asking for help to find out what it said:
You imply rather strongly that you've read the report. If so, please inform us of what the extrapolation was that DID NOT rely on the Falluja cluster. I'm waiting.
and then:
I asked the wrong question. I meant to say how…
tlambert | November 2, 2004 Tech Central Station has published Tim Worstall's admission that his critique of the Lancet Iraq study was completely wrong:
Further to my article of Friday on this subject. I'm afraid I mangled the statistical argument. My inadequate knowledge of the subject led me to make an argument that is incorrect. I stand by my contention that there is something fishy about this study (leaving aside the politically motivated timing of its publication, something the author has been clear about himself) yet have to admit that I have not found it, leaving me with…