Lancet
tlambert | October 25, 2010The WikiLeaks Iraq archive, while incomplete, reveals many more previously unreported violent deaths in the Iraq war -- Iraq Body Count say that the archive reveals 15,000 people shot, blown up, had the heads cut off or killed in some other way that they had not recorded. So Tim Blair, who claimed that the Iraq Body Count was way way too high (and predicted that the coalition would suffer "below 50" casualties) has posted a correction. Ha ha, just kidding. Blair has a post claiming that the WikiLeaks archive, which is, as I have already noted, incomplete, proves that the Lancet study on…
tlambert | December 28, 2009Andrew Mack emails me to draw attention to his paper ("Estimating War Deaths: An Arena of Contestation" by Spagat, Mack, Cooper and Kreutz), which criticizes Obermeyer et al's paper Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia. I commented on Obermeyer et al in this post.
I agree with some of their criticism. The regression that used for correcting PRIO estimates of war deaths is wrong and the conclusion that they drew using this correction -- that there is no evidence that war deaths have decreased is unfounded.
I'm not persuaded by their general criticisms of survey…
tlambert | March 6, 2009As promised, the Lancet has published a correction to the 2nd Lancet study:
Burnham G, Lafta R, Doocy S, Roberts L. Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey. Lancet 2006; 368: 1421--28--The Methods section of this Article (Oct 21, 2006) stated that "Participants were assured that no unique identifiers would be gathered." Upon review, it was determined that a significant number of the surveys contained names of respondents and household inhabitants. This was a lapse in the authors' obligations to protect participants. However, to the authors' knowledge…
tlambert | February 26, 2009This post contains some more notes on a reply to the badly flawed "Main Street Bias" paper.
In my previous post I showed that the MSB papers was wrong to claim that it was plausible that the unsampled regions was 10 times as large as the sampled region. In this post I look at their model. Their model is wrong because it assumes that there is no main street bias in the sampled region and because of this they massively overestimate any bias in the Lancet sampling.
Let's start with a correct model of the situation. I've adopted their terminology where possible.
We have a population of size N…
tlambert | February 19, 2009This 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…
tlambert | February 4, 2009I asked Mary Losch (chair of AAPOR's Standards Committee) to comment on my previous post
I have read your entry and would note that the links you provided did
not supply the questionnaire items but rather a simple template (as
noted in the heading). The Johns Hopkins report provides only
superficial information about methods and significantly more detail
would be needed to determine the scientific integrity of those methods
-- hence our formal request to Dr. Burnham. The Hopkins website
refers to data release but, in fact, no data were provided in response
to our formal requests.…
tlambert | February 4, 2009The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) has put out a press release alleging that Gilbert Burnham (who is not a member of the AAPOR) violated the AAPOR's code of ethics. What did he do? Their press release states:
Mary E. Losch, chair of AAPOR's Standards Committee, noted that AAPOR's investigation of Burnham began in March 2008, after receiving a complaint from a member. According to Losch, "AAPOR formally requested on more than one occasion from Dr. Burnham some basic information about his survey including, for example, the wording of the questions he used,…