andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-141 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Mike Spagat writes: Here is yet another debunking article I’ve written, this one in the latest issue of Significance. It shows the Lancet once again publishing spectacularly wrong information that has misinformed public discussion on a crucial issue with ongoing reverberations. For example, there is Tony Blair’s recent justification for the Iraq war offered in front of the Chilcot Inquiry in the UK quoted at the beginning of the paper. I haven’t had a chance to look at this one, but here’s a link to some related Spagat work.
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1 Mike Spagat writes: Here is yet another debunking article I’ve written, this one in the latest issue of Significance. [sent-1, score-0.774]
2 It shows the Lancet once again publishing spectacularly wrong information that has misinformed public discussion on a crucial issue with ongoing reverberations. [sent-2, score-1.492]
3 For example, there is Tony Blair’s recent justification for the Iraq war offered in front of the Chilcot Inquiry in the UK quoted at the beginning of the paper. [sent-3, score-0.98]
4 I haven’t had a chance to look at this one, but here’s a link to some related Spagat work. [sent-4, score-0.345]
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 141 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-12-Dispute over counts of child deaths in Iraq due to sanctions
Introduction: Mike Spagat writes: Here is yet another debunking article I’ve written, this one in the latest issue of Significance. It shows the Lancet once again publishing spectacularly wrong information that has misinformed public discussion on a crucial issue with ongoing reverberations. For example, there is Tony Blair’s recent justification for the Iraq war offered in front of the Chilcot Inquiry in the UK quoted at the beginning of the paper. I haven’t had a chance to look at this one, but here’s a link to some related Spagat work.
Introduction: Mike Spagat points to this interview , which, he writes, covers themes that are discussed on the blog such as wrong ideas that don’t die, peer review and the statistics of conflict deaths. I agree. It’s good stuff. Here are some of the things that Spagat says (he’s being interviewed by Joel Wing): In fact, the standard excess-deaths concept leads to an interesting conundrum when combined with an interesting fact exposed in the next-to-latest Human Security Report ; in most countries child mortality rates decline during armed conflict (chapter 6). So if you believe the usual excess-death causality story then you’re forced to conclude that many conflicts actually save the lives of many children. Of course, the idea of wars savings lives is pretty hard to swallow. A much more sensible understanding is that there are a variety of factors that determine child deaths and that in many cases the factors that save the lives of children are stronger than the negative effects that confli
Introduction: Mike Spagat sends in an interesting explanation for the noted problems with conflict mortality studies (a topic we’ve discussed on occasion on this blog). Spagat writes: This analysis is based on the fact that conflict violence does not spread out at all uniformly across a map but, rather, tends to concentrate in a few areas. This means that small, headline-grabbing violence surveys are extremely unreliable. There is a second point, based on the work of David Hemenway which you’ve also cited on your blog. Even within exceptionally violent environments most households will still not have a violent death. So a very small false positive rate in a household survey will cause substantial upward bias in violence estimates.
4 0.15289479 5 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-27-Ethical and data-integrity problems in a study of mortality in Iraq
Introduction: Michael Spagat notifies me that his article criticizing the 2006 study of Burnham, Lafta, Doocy and Roberts has just been published . The Burnham et al. paper (also called, to my irritation (see the last item here ), “the Lancet survey”) used a cluster sample to estimate the number of deaths in Iraq in the three years following the 2003 invasion. In his newly-published paper, Spagat writes: [The Spagat article] presents some evidence suggesting ethical violations to the survey’s respondents including endangerment, privacy breaches and violations in obtaining informed consent. Breaches of minimal disclosure standards examined include non-disclosure of the survey’s questionnaire, data-entry form, data matching anonymised interviewer identifications with households and sample design. The paper also presents some evidence relating to data fabrication and falsification, which falls into nine broad categories. This evidence suggests that this survey cannot be considered a reliable or
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Introduction: Mike Spagat sends along a serious presentation with an ironic title: 18.7 MILLION ANNIHILATED SAYS LEADING EXPERT IN PEER–REVIEWED JOURNAL: AN APPROVED, AUTHORITATIVE, SCIENTIFIC PRESENTATION MADE BY AN EXPERT He’ll be speaking on it at tomorrow’s meeting of the Catastrophes and Conflict Forum of the Royal Society of Medicine in London. All I can say is, it’s a long time since I’ve seen a slide presentation in portrait form. It brings me back to the days of transparency sheets.
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same-blog 1 0.93389326 141 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-12-Dispute over counts of child deaths in Iraq due to sanctions
Introduction: Mike Spagat writes: Here is yet another debunking article I’ve written, this one in the latest issue of Significance. It shows the Lancet once again publishing spectacularly wrong information that has misinformed public discussion on a crucial issue with ongoing reverberations. For example, there is Tony Blair’s recent justification for the Iraq war offered in front of the Chilcot Inquiry in the UK quoted at the beginning of the paper. I haven’t had a chance to look at this one, but here’s a link to some related Spagat work.
Introduction: Mike Spagat sends in an interesting explanation for the noted problems with conflict mortality studies (a topic we’ve discussed on occasion on this blog). Spagat writes: This analysis is based on the fact that conflict violence does not spread out at all uniformly across a map but, rather, tends to concentrate in a few areas. This means that small, headline-grabbing violence surveys are extremely unreliable. There is a second point, based on the work of David Hemenway which you’ve also cited on your blog. Even within exceptionally violent environments most households will still not have a violent death. So a very small false positive rate in a household survey will cause substantial upward bias in violence estimates.
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Introduction: Mike Spagat sends along a serious presentation with an ironic title: 18.7 MILLION ANNIHILATED SAYS LEADING EXPERT IN PEER–REVIEWED JOURNAL: AN APPROVED, AUTHORITATIVE, SCIENTIFIC PRESENTATION MADE BY AN EXPERT He’ll be speaking on it at tomorrow’s meeting of the Catastrophes and Conflict Forum of the Royal Society of Medicine in London. All I can say is, it’s a long time since I’ve seen a slide presentation in portrait form. It brings me back to the days of transparency sheets.
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Introduction: Mike Spagat writes: Here is yet another debunking article I’ve written, this one in the latest issue of Significance. It shows the Lancet once again publishing spectacularly wrong information that has misinformed public discussion on a crucial issue with ongoing reverberations. For example, there is Tony Blair’s recent justification for the Iraq war offered in front of the Chilcot Inquiry in the UK quoted at the beginning of the paper. I haven’t had a chance to look at this one, but here’s a link to some related Spagat work.
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Introduction: One example we give to illustrate Benford’s law is the first digits of addresses. Javier Marquez Pena had a survey and, just for laffs, he looked the distribution of first digits: Cool—it really works! P.S. The y-axis shouldn’t go below zero, and I’d much prefer an L-type graphics box (par(bty=”l”)) rather than the square, but those are familiar problems with R defaults.
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Introduction: 9. Out of a population of 100 medical records, 40 are randomly sampled and then audited. 10 out of the 40 audits reveal fraud. From this information, give an estimate, standard error, and 95% confidence interval for the proportion of audits in the population with fraud. Solution to question 8 From yesterday : 8. Which of the following statements accurately characterize the National Election Studies? (Indicate all that apply.) (a) The NES began in 1960. (b) Since 1980, the NES has mostly relied on telephone interviews. (c) The NES typically has a sample size of about 1000–2000 people. (d) The NES uses a sampling design that ensures they get respondents from all fifty states and D.C. Solution: c. This is a purely factual question, not much to say here.
5 0.75308609 1675 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-15-“10 Things You Need to Know About Causal Effects”
Introduction: Macartan Humphreys pointed me to this excellent guide . Here are the 10 items: 1. A causal claim is a statement about what didn’t happen. 2. There is a fundamental problem of causal inference. 3. You can estimate average causal effects even if you cannot observe any individual causal effects. 4. If you know that, on average, A causes B and that B causes C, this does not mean that you know that A causes C. 5. The counterfactual model is all about contribution, not attribution. 6. X can cause Y even if there is no “causal path” connecting X and Y. 7. Correlation is not causation. 8. X can cause Y even if X is not a necessary condition or a sufficient condition for Y. 9. Estimating average causal effects does not require that treatment and control groups are identical. 10. There is no causation without manipulation. The article follows with crisp discussions of each point. My favorite is item #6, not because it’s the most important but because it brings in some real s
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