> Questions about this survey and the previous by Lancet,
> http://www.slate.com/id/2108887/
> http://www.casi.org.uk/analysis/2004/msg00477.html
> http://burkeophilia.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-report-on-deaths-in-iraq-new-study.html
Fred Kaplan does not understand confidence intervals (actually, I hope he does by now, but he certainly did not then). It is not a "dartboard". Does anyone still not understand this?
The questions from the Burkeophile are strictly irrelevant to the issue of whether an extensively peer-reviewed epidemiological study, which received widespread approbation from other experts in the field, and he doesn't even raise questions that are apt to his apologetic aims. Specifically, this Burke raises the issue of the pre-invasion interval, suggesting it should extend back to post-Gulf reprisals. He does not realise that a) the rate of bombing of Iraqi targets was much higher in the year before the invasion than at any prior time; b) the rate of infant mortality prior to the invasion was higher than at any previous time since 1970, at the start of the Iraqi government's massive process of socialisation programmes (this information is contained in Appendix E, so he might have bothered to properly read what he purported to be commenting on). He doesn't grasp either that the confidence intervals are actually narrower than the previous test, which excluded outliers. In short, while he seems eager to demonstrate a grasp of the lingo, a grasp of the logic he ain't got.
> Iraq Body Count vs. MediaLens,
> http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/defended/2.1.php
IBC complaining about the tactics of their opponents is a little bit rich given the fact that their chief researcher, Mr Sloboda, when interviewed on the BBC, compared opponents, specifically these opponents, to terrorists. _________________________________________________________________ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d