Deltoid

Daniel Davies has a new post on Lancet denial, with some particularly egregious examples. The worst example is by Harry of Harry’s Place whose “discussion” of the study is to make a statement that he must surely know to be false:

Dsquared is a serial bullshitter who has never given a straight answer to any question.

Davies also links to a transcript by Seixon of the Hitchens-Galloway debate, where Seixon touts his own debunking of the Lancet study. Seixon’s debunking fails because he makes basic errors in his statistics, but at least they are original, so let’s look at where he goes wrong:

Dr. Les Roberts removed 6 provinces from being in the sample. That means that every single household in those 6 provinces was purposefully given a probability of 0% of being chosen for the sample. This violates the principle of randomness, thus violating the principle of statistics that you have a random sample. … The study’s results are based on a biased sample. Resting upon this fact alone, the study’s results cannot be claimed to be accurate, nor should they be trusted as accurate. Dr. Les Roberts and anyone else cannot argue this simple point, because then they will have to take on the vast body of statistical literature and theory looming over the credibility of this study.

Unfortunately, Seixon does not understand sampling. The sample was not biased by the exclusion of six randomly chosen provinces since each household in Iraq was equally likely to be chosen by the sampling procedure. Seixon could just as well argue than all surveys are biased because after the sample has been randomly selected each person outside the sample has a 0% chance of being selected.

In response the study’s statement that “Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children.” Seixon offers this:

46% men, 46% children, 7% women, and 1% elderly. With this in mind, try to finish this sentence: Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were _ and __. In a world where scientists don’t try to hoodwink their readers, the correct answer would be “men” and “children”. Yet they chose “women” and “children”, even though out of the 4 groups, women were #3, and they put two groups into their sentence. I guess they were hoping no one was going to actually read the rest of the study and find out that they are misleading liars. Seriously, what is the point of misleading in this fashion? Could it be… a political agenda?

So even though the statement is true Seixon insists that it is a somehow a lie. The fact that seems to have escaped Seixon is that Roberts et al grouped women and children together because they are likely to be non-combatants.

Read it at decorabilia.

In his debate with George Galloway, Christopher Hitchens said:

If you really believe the crazed fabrication of the figures of 100,00 deaths in Iraq … you can simply go to my colleague Fred Kaplan’s space on slate.com. He’s a very stern and strong critic of the war, a great opponent of mine. We’ve had quite a quarrel about it. He’s a great writer about science and other matters. It’s a simple matter to show this is politicized hackwork of the worst kind. The statistics in that case have been conclusively and absolutely shown to be false and I invite anyone to check it. Everything I say has at least ten pages of documentation, which I am willing to share, behind it.

When Galloway asked Hitchens if he really was accusing the Lancet and researchers at Johns Hopkins University of crazed fabrication, Hitchens stood by his slander.

1. Kaplan’s criticism of the Lancet study was demolished here and here.

2. Kaplan seems to write mainly about war and not about science, but even if he is a great science writer, how does that make him a better authority on epidemiology than actual expert scientists publishing in a refereed journal?

3. Kaplan did not claim to have “conclusively” and “absolutely” shown the statistics to be false. Nor did he say that the study was a “crazed fabrication”. In fact, he wrote this:

   The problem is, ultimately, not with the scholars who conducted the study; they did the best they could under the circumstances.

   Hitchens is the one making the crazed fabrication here.

The tsunami and Katrina both left behind pools of stagnant water in which things have swarmed and multiplied and emerged to infect humanity. I’m referring, of cause, to clueless articles extolling the virtues of DDT.

The latest is by Henry Miller in the National Review Online.

The six-year old U.S. outbreak of West Nile virus is a significant threat to public health and shows no signs of abating. … As of September 6, Louisiana ranked fourth in the nation in human West Nile virus infections; but with most of New Orleans still under water and a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, there are likely to be far more cases. …

The regulators who banned DDT also failed to take into consideration the inadequacy of alternatives. Because it persists after spraying, DDT works far better than many pesticides now in use, some of which are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms. Also, the need to spray other insecticides repeatedly — especially in marshlands and forests, where mosquito-breeding areas are large — drives up costs and depletes public coffers. … Pyrethroid pesticides, the most common alternative to DDT, are inactivated within an hour or two.

You can tell the deeply ignorant pro-DDT articles because the authors don’t mention or even seem aware that mosquitoes evolve resistance to insecticides. DDT’s persistence is only an advantage when it sprayed indoors and it stays where it is sprayed. Persistence is a big disadvantage when spraying outdoors because the insecticide is rapidly diluted and the mosquitoes get exposed to sublethal doses. This is perhaps the best method know for breeding insecticide resistant mosquitoes. That is why DDT is only used for indoor residual spraying. these days.

regulators should make DDT available immediately for mosquito control in the United States.

That would be pointless since malathion and pyrethroids are more effective without the disadvantage of resistance.

Second, the United States should oppose international strictures on DDT. This includes retracting American support for the heinous United Nations Persistent Organic Pollutants Convention, which severely stigmatizes DDT and makes it exceedingly difficult for developing countries — many of which are plagued by malaria — to use the chemical.

No it doesn’t. Malaria Foundation International was quite pleased with the Stockholm Convention writing:

The outcome of the treaty is arguably better than the status quo going into the negotiations over two years ago. For the first time, there is now an insecticide which is restricted to vector control only, meaning that the selection of resistant mosquitoes will be slower than before.

Also, there is a clear procedure that endemic countries may follow to use DDT, and having done so, they have the RIGHT at international law to use DDT, without pressure from the developed countries or international institutions who have in the past threatened them against doing so.

Miller also claims

The website of the Centers for Disease Control suggests several measures to avoid West Nile virus infection: “avoid mosquito bites,” by wearing clothes that expose little skin, using insect repellent, and staying indoors during peak mosquito hours (dusk to dawn); “mosquito-proof your home,” by removing standing water, and installing and maintaining screens; and “help your community,” by reporting dead birds.

Conspicuously absent from its list of suggestions is any mention of insecticides or widespread spraying. Anyone curious about the role of pesticides in battling mosquitoes and West Nile is directed to a maze of other Web sites.

Perhaps the Atlanta-based CDC officials don’t get out much. You don’t have to be a Rocket Entomologist to know that emptying birdbaths and the saucers under flower pots is not going to get rid of a zillion hungry mosquitoes.

IF you look at the CDC page that Miller refers to you can see the links that somehow escaped his attention. The second item under “Help Your Community” is “Mosquito Control Programs” which links to this page on the CDC’s web site which discusses spraying. There is also a prominent link to the CDC’s Guidelines for Surveillance, Prevention, & Control, which has much about insecticides and spraying. Maybe the CDC didn’t give spraying the emphasis that Miller would have liked, but that’s because it isn’t the magic bullet that Miller imagines it to be.

Hat tip: John Fleck.

Tim Blair’s blog is notorious because commenters are banned merely for disagreeing with him. However, in this post, Blair accuses Antony Loewenstein of cowardice because Loewenstein would not debate with an abusive phone caller. Blair refuses to accept Loewenstein’s stated reason (”He wants to shout and rant”) because:

That’s from someone who describes Australian Jews as “usually vitriolic, bigoted, racist and downright pathetic. Australian Jews, generally speaking, are incapable of hearing the true reality of their beloved homeland and its barbaric actions.”

Did Loewenstein really describe Australian Jews like that? Well, no. Blair has badly misrepresented Loewenstein with an out-of-context quote. Here’s what Loewenstein wrote, in context:

As a Jew who doesn’t believe in the concept of a Jewish state - a fundamentally undemocratic and colonialist idea from a bygone era - reception to such ideas within the Jewish community is usually vitriolic, bigoted, racist and downright pathetic. Australian Jews, generally speaking, are incapable of hearing the true reality of their beloved homeland and its barbaric actions.

Loewenstein did not describe Australian Jews as “usually vitriolic, bigoted, racist and downright pathetic”. That was his description of the Jewish community’s reaction to the suggestion that having a Jewish state was not a good idea. This is enormously different from the opinion that Blair attributed to him.

Update: Instead of correcting his post and apologizing to Loewenstein, Blair has added an update where he attempts to justify his doctored quote with this bit of chop logic from JF Beck:

Loewenstein states that the Jewish community’s reception for his ideas is “usually vitriolic, bigoted, racist and downright pathetic”. He is attributing these characteristics to those within the Jewish community. Thus, he is describing Jews in general as “usually vitriolic, bigoted, racist and downright pathetic”. He qualifies this statement with the following sentence wherein he specifies “Australian Jews”. It’s simple, really.

Let’s see: Australians will usually get angry and violent if you punch them in the face. Thus, by Beck Logic™ I am describing Australians in general as “angry and violent”. I don’t think so. This one isn’t even persuasive enough to make the list of common logic fallacies.

MediaLens has a two part article (part 1 part 2) on the shoddy press coverage of the Lancet study. They describe how Mary Dejevsky, senior leader writer on foreign affairs for the Independent dismissed the study because:

personally, i think there was a problem with the extrapolation technique, because - while the sample may have been standard for that sort of thing - it seemed small from a lay perspective (i remember at the time) for the conclusions being drawn and there seemed too little account taken of the different levels of unrest in different regions. my main point, though, was less based on my impression than on the fact that this technique exposed the authors to the criticisms/dismissal that the govt duly made, and they had little to counter those criticisms with, bar the defence that their methods were standard for those sort of surveys.

Whether the sample size is adequate is a technical question. Your lay intuition is not going to be a good guide to whether it is or not. You have to do the calculations. Or if you don’t know how to do that, get an expert to do them, or look at what experts have come up with in the past. And you can find out what they have come up with in the past by looking at what the standard practice is for conducting such surveys. So the author’s defence was complete. Unless you were prepared to believe the government spokespeople had uncovered a hitherto unknown flaw in survey methodology just when it happened to be politically convenient.

Medialens also examines the very different coverage given to an earlier survey by Les Roberts that found that war in the Eastern Congo had killed about 1.7 million people. Even though this was many times the number of deaths their later survey in Iraq found, the media reported the results in a straightforward fashion, without all the stuff about how the sample was too small and the estimate could not be trusted that greeted the Lancet study.

This, by the way, is my 57th post on the Lancet study. Read them all here.

Hat tip: Antony Loewenstein.

David Hardy writes:

USA Today reports, with customary horror, that 1,700,000 children are in homes with unsecured guns, and that one-third of American homes have firearms in them. It goes on to say 1,400 “children and teens” are shot to death each year, and pumps for laws on gun storage (i.e., to criminalize failure to store in various ways). “It’s a frightening problem,” says Michael Barnes, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a lobbying group that favors limiting gun ownership.

Let’s look at the figures. Actually, in 2003 762 Americans of all ages died in gun accidents, according to the National Safety Council. USA Today gets a higher number by including teens (i.e., up to age 20) and gang-banger homicides, which are hardly relevant to safe gun storage.

Economist John Lott calculated the actual number of child gun accidental deaths, and found it was about 30 per year — lower than the number that die of drowning in buckets.

However, if you look at the study cited by USA Today, you will see that the 1,400 deaths are for children under 18 and they do not include 18–20 year olds. Nor does it seem correct to ignore deaths by murder or suicide since easy access to a loaded gun by a child could certainly be a factor in such cases.

In any case it is not true that there were 30 child gun accidental deaths per year. WISQARS says that there 115 such accidental deaths for ages 0–17. Hardy can’t even blame Lott for this one, since Lott said that his figure was just for children aged 0–4.

Nor is Hardy correct when he says that USA Today pumps for laws on safe gun storage. As well as reporting Vernick’s support for such laws, they report an NRA spokesman arguing that education was a superior approach.

One of the few things that Andrew Bolt got correct in his original criticism of the Lancet study was the sample size, 988 households:

Its researchers interviewed 7868 Iraqis in 988 households in 33 neighbourhoods around Iraq, allegedly chosen randomly, and asked who in the house had died in the 14 months before the invasion and who in the 18 months after.

In a later article, Bolt got the number wrong:

Lancet surveyed 788 Iraqi households.

Since the two numbers differ in just a single digit Bolt’s erroneous 788 number looks like a simple typo, but when the mistake was pointed out to him, this is what he wrote:

Just to point out one of the false claims you make (that I claimed the Lancet study involved just 778 househods, not 988), here is a direct quote from my original article which analysed the Lancet survey: “Its researchers interviewed 7868 Iraqis in 988 households in 33 neighbourhoods around Iraq, allegedly chosen randomly, and asked who in the house had died in the 14 months before the invasion and who in the 18 months after.” In fact, on closer inspection of the survey, you will find that not all those households were considered when Lancet’s researchers worked out their final death toll. Excluded were households which refused to answer, were absent, and were in the highly atypical city of Fallujah. That explains the 778 figure. The ILCS survey asked respondents for any “war-related deaths” in their households, which is a far broader definition than you claim (and fairer than the one you’d prefer). The survey took into account not just deaths since the war, but during it as well - another mis-statement of yours. Just accept it, please. The claim that the US has 100,000 dead on its hands is preposterous. Or even a wicked lie.

(He says 778 rather than 788 in the passage above because the person he was responding to wrote 778 rather than 788 and Bolt did not pick up on the typo.)

But here is what the study said:

Five (0·5%) of the 988 households refused to be interviewed. In the 27 clusters with proper absentee records, we visited 872 households and 64 were absent (7%). No households were identified in which all the household members were dead or gone away, except in Falluja, where there were 23.

There were five households that refused to answer. There were 30 households in the Falluja cluster. The 67 absent households were not included in the 988 households. (This isn’t perfectly clear from the description above, but there were 872-64=808 households with someone home in the 27 clusters with absentee records and 6×30=180 households in the other six clusters. 808+180=988.) Subtracting 5+30 from 988 doesn’t get you even close to 788. Wrongly subtracting the 64 absent households as well doesn’t get you 788. I suppose it is possible that Bolt made a mistake in his arithmetic, but what are the odds that such a mistake would produce a number exactly 200 less than 988? It looks like his explanation may have been made up on the spot. To echo Bolt’s own language, his claim about the origin of the 788 number “is preposterous. Or even a wicked lie.”

The ancestor of this blog was my archive of Usenet and mail list postings about gun control. I created it in 1996 and updated it fitfully until I started this blog. Now I’ve folded it into this blog, so you can visit my archives from September 1993 and follow the raging debate about the frequency of defensive gun use. Each category in the archive has been turned into a category on the blog. For example, here are all my posts on Kellermann’s research.

There are posts with discussion from Eugene Volokh, Clayton Cramer and Mary Rosh, all of whom have also gone on to start blogs.

Tim Blair has a post where he has over seventy links to posts by John Quiggin that mention Kyoto. We can conclude that Quiggin is a very careful writer because it looks like Blair didn’t find any typos in all those posts. Stripped of his usual I-found-a-typo-therefore-you-are-wrong argument, Blair had to come up with something else. His substitute argument? Apparently he believes that the sheer force of this June 29 post had silenced Quiggin on Kyoto. Trouble is, Blair doesn’t seem to have noticed that Quiggin posted this and this in July. Or maybe Blair is unaware that July is after June.

Quiggin comments further here.