deaths in iraq

This post is some more notes on a reply to the badly flawed "Main Street Bias" paper. The authors claim that it is plausible that the Lancet paper's sampling scheme could have missed 91% of the houses in Iraq. (That is, their parameter n, the number of households in the unsampled area divided by the the number in the sampled area could plausibly be 10 or more.) The only support they offer for this is a reference to this analysis of Iraqi maps. To the right is a detail from their map. The red lines are main streets and the yellow are secondary streets. They assert that the blue areas are…
Debora Mackenzie, in the New Scientist reports on the AAPOR censure: AAPOR charges that by refusing "to answer even basic questions" about data and methods, Burnham is preventing other researchers from evaluating his conclusions. According to New Scientist's investigation, however, Burnham has sent his data and methods to other researchers, who found it sufficient. A spokesman for the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, where Burnham works, says the school advised him not to send his data to AAPOR, as the group has no authority to judge the research. The "correct forum", it…