Deltoid

Back in 2003, Ayres and Donohue found some coding errors in Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime” data. They found that if you corrected his errors, Lott’s results went away. Lott’s reaction to this? Well, for four months he refused to admit to the existence of the errors. When he finally admitted to the errors, he changed his model to bring back his results, making a clumsy effort to try to hide the changes he made.

Fast forward to 2005. Now Foote and Goetz have found a coding error in a paper by Donohue and Levitt. The Economist reports:

But Messrs Foote and Goetz have inspected the authors’ computer code and found the controls missing. In other words, Messrs Donohue and Levitt did not run the test they thought they had—an “inadvertent but serious computer programming error”, according to Messrs Foote and Goetz.

Unlike Lott, they immediately admitted making the error. Nor did correcting the error make their results go away, though it did reduce the size of the effect. The Economist article has more on where that leaves their thesis, but what I find very interesting is Lott’s reaction to all this. He writes:

Personally, I think calling this a “programming oversight” is being much too nice. More importantly everyone who works with panel data knows that you use fixed effects.

Yes, he’s implying that they deliberately cooked their results. I think this tells us more about Lott’s approach to econometrics than it does about that of Donohue and Levitt. He must think that everyone else operates like he does.

Hello! And welcome to SMAI: Stupidest Man Alive Idol. Here’s how it works: our contestants perform for you, the audience. And then you, the audience, judge them and you can be as unfair as you like in your comments. Our contestants today are Donald Luskin and Tim Blair. Luskin goes first, with Brad DeLong providing the commentry:

A correspondent asks me if it isn’t time to surf on over again to Donald Luskin’s “Poor and Stupid” website, find some egregious offense against intelligent thought, and lay down another marker saying that Luskin is indeed the Stupidest Man Alive™, just in case there’s somebody out on the internet searching for information on Luskin who doesn’t already know.

Sigh. OK. It’s painful, though… Here’s the very first item

The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid : HMMM… Our friend John Grauel says:

You consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000.

The rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000(1). That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation’s Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq.

Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of Washington D.C.

If Donald Luskin were not the Stupidest Man Alive™, he would know that the DC figure of 80.6 is an annual figure, while the 60 figure is a monthly figure. 2112 deaths divided by 160,000 soldiers divided by 22/12 years gives an annual death rate of not 60 per 100,000 but 720 per 100,000.

But what is a factor of twelve to the Stupidest Man Alive™?

(1) Note: This “80.6″ itself appears to be about twice as large as the real number. But why am I not surprised?

Not bad, not bad. But let Tim Blair show you what an Aussie can do:

It’s a quagmire in California::

Recently released crime statistics show the homicide rate in California is 265 percent higher than the death rate suffered by U.S. and British military personnel in Iraq.

Let’s see, in 2004 there were 2,394 homicides in California and the coalition suffered 905 military fatalities in Iraq. Now 2394 is 165% (not 265%) more than 905, but 2.394 is the number of homicides, not the homicide rate. California has 230 times as many people as the number of coalition troops in Iraq so Blair’s comparison is out by a factor of 230. The homicide rate in California was 6.5 per 100,000 population, while 905 deaths amongst 160,000 coalition troops is a death rate of 565.6, which is a little bit more than 6.5.

Now you, the audience, get to judge. Who is the winner today?

Update: In a late move, Luskin has deleted his post. Contest management has ruled that you should consider this part of his performance.

After accidentally proving that he was using a sock on Wikipedia, Fumento is back for more. I think that putting a “(sic)” after misspellings is rather petty, but since Fumento does it when he quotes others, I’ve yielded to temptation and sicced all over his many spelling mistakes. Fumento begins:

There are lots of reasons people blog. One may be that nobody else would ever publish their material. Some of these people nevertheless fill a valuable nitch (sic) that just doesn’t appeal to outside publications; others are simply inept. The latter describes Tim Lambert and his Deltoid blogsite. An anti-American Aussie, he regularly displays his ignorance on a wide variety of issues, perhaps in the belief that quantity makes up for quality.

Anti-American? Huh? When have I ever criticised America about anything?

Lambert is perhaps best known for his embarrasing (sic) defense of the pre-election surprise paper in The Lancet that desparately (sic) tried to show that Americans had killed 100,000 civilians in Iraq. (At the time Human Rights Watch was using a figure of about 15,000 as was bin Laden himself!) Ever since I first chided him for thinking his blog had the least ability to support his Jihadist friends, he’s made it one of his missions in life to try to hurt me personally. He has a separate motive in that when I’ve posted responses on his website his traffic shoots up.

Actually, I’ve hardly been paying any attention to Fumento—I didn’t even know that he had started a blog until Tracy Spencer told me. And no, my traffic did not shoot up when when Fumento posted responses on my blog. Fumento seems a bit delusional about his importance.

So instead he merely claims I have posted on his website, using a false name. In blogging terminology, that’s called using a “sockpuppet.” He claims he’s compared my IP address to that of the alleged sockpuppet’s and they’re the same. Problem is, we have no more proof than his word and this is the word of not just anybody but of Tim Lambert. Conversely, when John Lott used his infamous “Mary Roush” (sic) sockpuppet, numerous people were able to confirm that Roush’s (sic) and Lott’s IP address were the same.

Actually, we just had Julian Sanchez’s word about the Lott/Rosh match, but more importantly, notice that Fumento once again has not denied being Tracy Spencer. If he isn’t Spencer, why doesn’t he say so?

At the same time, Lambert has accused me of rewriting my own Wikepedia (sic) entry. Actually he rewrote it; I struck it. Why? I don’t feel encyclopedia entries are the places for vendettas. It’s not appropriate in the Encyclopedia Brittanica (sic) nor is it in Wikipedia.

If you look at the history of the Fumento article you will see that I did not add the link to Deltoid and that while Fumento deleted it twelve times, I only restored it twice—others undid his other deletions. There seems to be a consensus there that the link is appropriate.

OK, that was silly enough but now Fumento really jumps the rails, arguing that I’m using sock puppets because …. oh heck, you can’t summarize his argument:

Among Lambert’s few friends is one named John Fleck whose blog is called inkstain.net. (Another type of stain comes to mind, but whatever.) Fleck writes of my “latest blubbering discussion with Tim Lambert.” But as I’ve said, Lambert’s pathetic efforts to lure me into “discussion” have failed. No discussion; ergo no blubbering discussion. But if Lambert had said that on his site it would have left his few readers scratching their heads, so Fleck posted it instead. Fleck, therefore, is a human sockpuppet.

Is it just me, or did Fumento leave out about 20 steps in his chain of reasoning there? In any event, for the record, I do not and have not told Fleck what to write.

But the next bit is the best. Fumento offers conclusive proof that I’ve used sock puppets: an evidence-free email from Joe Cambria:

Another Aussie who is part of a discussion group to which Lambert belongs e-mailed me the link to a thread in which he charges Lambert with using at least two different false names to post comments on his own website, “Kevin Donahue” and “Robert Johnson.” He directly and repeatedly confronted Lambert with this and Lambert repeatedly refused to respond, though he did respond to other aspects of the discussion.

Ah, so if you respond to other aspects of the discussion without denying the charge, then you have tacitly admitted it. Looks like Fumento has admitted being Tracy Spencer. And Fumento seems to have missed my comment in the thread he linked to:

Gee Joe, for someone who doesn’t take me seriously you sure spend a lot of time following me around and posting comments on various blogs and sending me long rants via email and making wild accusations about me posting under assumed names.

No, I haven’t been posting under assumed names. That’s your scam, not mine.

Update: After I pointed his spelling mistakes Fumento corrected some of them and made several other changes without noting that he had altered the post. I expected him to do this, so I saved a copy of the original post here. My favourite addition is this one:

Turns out when Lott’s IP address was correlated with Roush’s, he immediately admitted he and Roush were the same. This puts him far above Lambert, who when caught red-handed admitted to nothing.

Turns out that when Fumento’s IP address was correlated with Tracy Spenser’s, he admitted to nothing.

We last saw Fumento blundering around in a field of rakes. Now read on. John Fleck commented on the situation:

The thing is, Fumento is, at times, a quite talented journalist. But then, over and over again, he shows himself to be a complete tool.

My first encounter with his work was a solid take-down in Reason of Gary Taubes’ New York Times Magazine piece on the wonders of the Atkins diet. I probably liked the piece because it fit my biases, but whatever. It was a solid piece of work.

And true to form Fumento managed to make a complete fool of himself with an evidence-free claim that Reason only ran Taubes’ reply because Taubes threatened to sue them. Nick Gillespie responded

I intend this to be my last few words on this matter. As a journalist and especially as an editor-in-chief, I’m used to being on the receiving end of all manner of wild, odd, and totally false accusations. However, Mike Fumento has set a new standard by calling me–the editor who just published a feature-length article by him and defended that article in a public letter–a liar.

In insisting that Reason ran Gary Taubes’ reply to “Big Fat Fake” because of threatened legal action, Fumento throws together an unconvincing case of conjecture that surely fails to convince anyone of anything other than Fumento’s own rather sad self-absorption. Why he cannot accept the simple truth in this issue is beyond me. On Feb. 20, Taubes contacted me after reading the article and told me he wanted to reply. I told him to go ahead and he sent me his response on Feb. 25. We posted it, along with a final response by Fumento, on Reason Online on March 4. Taubes and I never discussed anything of a legal matter. As I stated previously (quoting from a Feb. 27 email to Fumento), I decided to run Taubes’ reply at the length at which he submitted it because we could do so easily on the Web and because I thought the length and content of the reply helped Fumento’s case substantially.

Fumento’s bizarre behavior does not particularly interest me, even as a pathetic tragicomic spectacle, except insofar as it attempts to slag my reputation and that of Reason’s. We don’t cave in to nuisance writers–even, alas, when they have written for Reason–any more than we cave into “nuisance lawsuits,” real or imagined.

When properly edited and restrained from indulging in the sort of baseless invective he has displayed regarding this matter, Fumento is capable of producing good stuff, including “Big Fat Fake” in the March issue of Reason. Sadly, these days he seems more interested in spinning out e-mail accusations that have no basis in fact and only redound negatively to his own reputation. I wish him well in his new line of work.

Fleck also specifically denies Fumento’s charge that he is my sock puppet:

For the record, Tim Lambert has never told me what to write.

Fumento, meanwhile, has another post where he attempts a different defence against the sock puppet charge:

But a reader also wrote to me to note that, “An IP address isn’t proof of an individual’s accessing a web page. Depending on your ISP’s network configuration, the IP address a web server sees when you visit it might be shared with many other users who use the same ISP. About all a webmaster can do with an IP address is narrow down the ISP or organization from which the requests originated.”

Therefore assuming Lambert got two identical IPs from my name and that of another person, he must take into account the possibility the someone else who shares my address and knows me wants to post in support of me anonymously. That hardly makes me a damned dirty dog, does it? Why doesn’t Lambert think of such things?

Why doesn’t Fumento think of reading my post?

[His IP address is] a Comcast IP address and Comcast provides one IP address per household

Anyway, Fumento now has a sidekick, Xlrq, who we last saw furiously denying that Lott used sock puppets. Over at SayUncle’s Xlrq suggested that John Fleck was my sockpuppet. SayUncle pointed out

His IP is different and originates in New Mexico, like his site says.

For Xrlq, this pretty much clinched it: obviously Fleck must be my sock puppet:

Equally not-bright is maintaining a blog designed to make it look to the naked eye as though you’ve been blogging since March, 2003, when in fact your real entries only go back to October, 2005, and the rest are just dummy entries with bare subject lines. It also doesn’t seem terribly bright to say you are “this John Fleck,” while linking to the Albuquerque Journal home page rather than to the blog of the person you claim to be, which the real John Fleck obviously knows about but a cheap imitator might not.

It seems that Xrlq hasn’t worked out how to click on links to see Fleck’s postings. As for his second argument it seems that he is unaware of the existence of things known as “search engines” that would have enabled a “cheap imitator” to find Fleck’s blog.

Apparently Xlrq’s claim caused great amusement at the Fleck household, with his daughter posting this:

Any sockpuppet with a newspaper circulation of over 100k and a blog that dates back to 3 years ago really deserves at least some recognition. I mean, even if dad–err–Fleck is just Lambert’s dummy, I think by this point he’s developed a fairly distinct and unique personality and therefore has a right to his own opinion. If someone puts so much effort in developing a character, after all, that character tends to develop their own persona, likes, dislikes, etc, and will sometimes even become an alter-ego of that person. (Actually, that’s just me trying to throw more wood on the fire of the whole “Fleck doesn’t exist” argument, which has made for amusing stories at my house)

I suppose I have the same IP address as Fleck so my opinion doesn’t really count, but I can definately verify that he exists. He helped make me born and stuff. (Would this make me, too, a puppet of Lambert’s?)

Does Xrlq make a perfect sidekick for Fumento or what?

Update: Xrlq responds

Lambert has a known history of not only of lying about right wing figures generally, but specifically of the very lie he’s telling about Fumento now. The guy is such a pathological liar, he even tells lies that are easily disproven, such as denying that Fumento ever denied his allegations, in a comment thread to the every entry in which Fumento did in fact deny these allegations Lambert denies he denied. Similarly, if you follow his latest trackback to your “just because” thread, you’ll see he’s lying about me, too, claiming I based my “Fleck may be a sock puppet” comment on other comments that did not exist at the time, and conveniently leaving out the subsequent comment in which I conceded that Fleck clearly was not a sock puppet.

Firstly, anyone can examine Fumento’s post and see that he didn’t deny that posted as Tracy Spenser. Secondly, the comments on SayUncle’s post occured in the order in the listed in my post above. One hour after SayUncle posted fairly conclusive evidence that Fleck was not my sock puppet, Xlrq claimed, using ridiculousl;y flimsy evidence that Fleck was too my sock puppet. Thirdly, I didn’t mention his concession since it wasn’t relevant to my point: that it was beyond stupid to make the charge in the first place.

Skeptics’s Circle 23 is out.

Steve Levitt has a post with a detailed response to Foote and Goetz’s paper. They construct a new, better, measure of abortions under which more abortions are associated with less crime. They conclude:

The results we show in this new table are consistent with the impact of abortion on crime that we find in our three other types of analyses we presented in the original paper using different sources of variation. These results are consistent with the unwantedness hypothesis.

In comments to Levitt’s post Steve Sailer raises objections that do not impress me in the slightest but Daniel Davies makes a good point here:

Finally and most importantly, this is about as far from a double blind trial as you can get. I’ve written in the past about the perils of data mining in econometrics, and to be honest, all that is lacking in the series of changes to the data and the model that the Freakonomics blog presents is a phalanx of dwarves singing “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It’s Off To Data-Mine We Go”. What has happened here is that Levitt and his research assistant have sat down in the knowledge that a perturbation to their model doesn’t deliver their result, and decided to have a think about what kinds of alterations to the data ought to be made.

You don’t need to suggest any intentional dishonesty to say that it is somewhat unsurprising that the outcome of the brainstorming session on “What sort of changes ought one to make to this data, in an ideal world?” was a dataset and model in which the result that Levitt is famous for was present. Even if Levitt and Ethan Lieber had sat down at a table with no computer on it, starting with a blank sheet to discuss the changes to make and not touching the model until they had finished, I would still guess that it would be the easiest thing in the world for someone who was intimately familiar with the dataset to subconsciously put his thumb on the scales. And I don’t think this is what they did; colour me cynical but I would bet quids that lots and lots of iterations of different possible changes to the data were tried. I note once more that there is no accusation of intentionally cooking the books here; medical science certainly doesn’t insist on double blind trials to protect them from unscrupulous doctors.

I think that there’s a general issue here which is endemic to the territory that Levitt chooses to operate in. By their nature, political debates are debates. One side produces arguments, the other side produces counterarguments and so on, so iteratively. This is an environment which is absolutely poisonous to datasets. By the time you’ve been through two or three iterations of a “controversy” like this it’s more or less impossible to pick a model without failing even the most homeopathically weak version imaginable of a double blind criterion. This is why I now say that we’re simply never going to know the truth (by which I mean, even the simple statistical truth about the existence of a comovement, much less the truth about the underlying causal hypothesis) about abortion and crime in the period 1976-2000. Stick a fork in this dataset, it’s done.

I don’t think that the situation is as hopeless as that. Foote and Goetz have access to the same data and tools so we can see if they can come up with another measure of abortions that makes the results go away. Another possibility is that Donohue and Levitt present the results for a whole slew of alternative formulations of the abortion measure so we can see if their results are sensitive to the particular way that it is defined.

Fumento has now made three posts on his blog and a whole pile of comments on other blogs in response to my revealing his use of a sock puppet. He has called me a liar, claimed that I am insane and falsely accused me of using sock puppets myself. What he hasn’t done is deny that Tracy Spenser was his sock puppet. I wonder why not?

This comment from Fumento is pretty funny:

Meanwhile, since I made my first post on Lambert’s Vendetta.com my site has been swamped with vile fake trackbacks for non-existent pornographic URLs. None before that posting; about 40 a day now. Coincidence? I find it unlikely.

It’s, umm, a little paranoid for Fumento to blame me for any spam his blog gets. And his traffic must be really pathetic if 40 hits a day swamps his site. But the funny bit is this:

trackbacks for non-existent pornographic URLs

How does he know they linked to non-existent porn sites? No wonder Fumento sounds so frustrated.

Update: Fumento’s sidekick Jeff “Xrlq” Bishop claims that Fumento has denied being Spencer. Where? Xrlq is keeping that part a secret. He also falsely claims that I haven’t denied the charge that I forged the Tracy Spencer comment. I have denied it (see second sentence of this post), but again, for the record, I did not forge the comment. It was posted by someone with the same IP address as Fumento.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports

Asked about the Iraqi death toll, Bush said about 30,000 Iraqis have been killed since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

It was the first time Bush has publicly offered such an estimate. His aides quickly pointed out the president was not offering an official estimate.

“There is not an official US government estimate,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. He said the 30,000 figure was based on “public estimates cited by media reports.”

Ohio Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich demanded the Bush administration release all information it has on the number of Iraqi civilian deaths.

“It is far past time for this sort of admission from this White House,” he said.

Bush’s figure for the death toll among Iraqis was in the range given by Iraq Body Count, a US-British non-governmental group, which currently says between 27,383 and 30,892 civilians — rather than all Iraqi citizens — have been killed in Iraq since the invasion.

Its figures are based on media reports, which often fail to capture all deaths in the country. Other estimates, including one done by scientists and published in the medical journal Lancet, put the civilian death toll as high as 100,000.

Note that it’s been over a year since the Lancet study and violence in Iraq is just as bad, so the best estimate is now much more than 100,000.

Peter Baker in the Washington Post writes:

The Iraqi death toll has been the subject of considerable debate. A group of British researchers and antiwar activists called Iraq Body Count estimates civilian casualties between 27,383 and 30,892, not counting Iraqi troops or insurgents, by tabulating incidents reported in media and human rights reports. Iraqi authorities have said that roughly 800 people die a month in violence there, a rate that if typical over the course of the conflict would come to 25,600.

An epidemiological study published in the British journal the Lancet last year estimated 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months since the invasion based on door-to-door interviews in selected neighborhoods extrapolated across the country, an estimate that other experts and human rights groups considered inflated.

Brad DeLong comments:

This is, I think, somewhat depressing. Baker wants to be adversarial–in a way that Harris would call “liberal” and “biased,” and would not like. Baker is outraged at the way in which the White House has pretended ignorance as a way of avoiding answering questions about the impact of the war on civilian Iraqis. Baker wants to use the fact that Bush has a “30,000 civilian Iraqis dead” number in his head as a knife to pry open this particular oyster.

The problem, however, is that Baker is underbriefed. He knows that the Lancet published an article last year but he doesn’t really know what the study said. He doesn’t make the point that the Iraqi Body Count estimate that tabulates only reported casualties is–if the individual reports are accurate–to understate total casualties because there are, inevitably, unreported casualties. He doesn’t say who the “Iraqi authorities” who report 800 a month are, or why anybody should trust their estimates.

It’s worse than that. Other experts do not consider the estimate to be inflated. Lisa Guterman called

about ten biostatisticians and mortality experts. Not one of them took issue with the study’s methods or its conclusions.

Nor is it true that human rights groups consider the estimate to be inflated. Mark Garlasco of Human Rights Watch was pressed for a comment by the Washington Post. He said that he had not read the study but that the estimate seemed inflated. He changed his mind after reading the study and talking to statisticians about it.

To my knowledge, none of the Washington Post’s reporters who have written about the study have tried reading it and talking to statisticians about it. It is not as if these journalists have to understand statistics—they just have to talk to someone who does. It’s just pathetic

Democracy Now has an interview with Les Roberts about his survey. Roberts comments on Bush answering a question about Iraqi deaths:

I guess, politically, he has to downplay this issue, but for him to say a number, that of the eight estimates out there is probably the lowest one, really is not a strategic thing to do in terms of winning hearts and minds in Iraq. Secondly, I’m even more struck that here a year after our study came out, the first time the President has been asked about this was not by a reporter, but by someone from the public when he took a question.

Regular readers will be familiar with the rest of his comments, but there is this extra point: the death rate seems to have increased since the survey was conducted.

Iraqi Body Count has actually found a higher rate per day after than before, and another surveillance system, which has since gone defunct for lack of funding, called the NGO Coordinating Committee in Iraq, found something similar, but as far as us following up on the ground, no, that hasn’t happened.

It is frequently claimed that the World Health Organization opposes the use of DDT against malaria. Even if we just confine ourselves to articles at Tech Central Station, the claim has been made by Paul Driessen, Nick Schulz, Roger Bate, Tim Worstall, Duane Freese, James Glassman, Richard Tren and John Luik.

Of course, given TCS’s track record, you’d be well advised to check to see what the World Health Organization actually says about DDT. Here is the full text of the RBM Partnership Consensus Statement on Insecticide Treated Netting:

The RBM Partnership has received questions enquiring whether nation-wide application of indoor residual insecticide (house) spraying (IRS) for vector control might be a better option for malaria prevention in countries in the WHO Region for Africa (AFRO), rather than insecticide treated nets (ITNs).

In Africa, ITNs and IRS are both very effective for malaria vector control. There is mixed evidence concerning the relative cost-effectiveness of these two interventions: in some cases IRS appears to have been more cost-effective than ITNs, while in other cases the reverse was found. It is not therefore possible to make any generalized assertion, for the region as a whole, that either of these interventions will normally be more cost-effective than the other.

In any case, the choice between these two interventions depends not only on short-term epidemiological impact, but also on considerations of feasibility and sustainability in the long term and at the large-scale, and on the availability of appropriate delivery systems.

For example, in some countries, especially in Southern Africa and in the Horn of Africa, proportions of the population are exposed to unstable or epidemic malaria. In these circumstances, IRS has some important advantages: it has rapid and reliable short-term impact, and it can be targeted to the communities at highest risk, on an annual basis and in response to changing transmission patterns. IRS is, on the other hand, relatively demanding in terms of the logistics, infrastructure, skills, planning systems and coverage levels that are needed for a successful and effective operation. Nevertheless, such systems have been successfully and effectively maintained for many years in some African countries, especially those that contain large populations exposed to unstable malaria. Every effort should be made to sustain these systems in the future.

However, in most countries of Africa south of the Sahara, the vast majority of the rural population is exposed to stable malaria and the systems needed for large-scale IRS do not exist. In these countries, the critical question is not whether one intervention is slightly more powerful than the other, but which of the two offers better prospects of achieving high nationwide coverage and long-term sustainability. In these circumstances, ITNs have important advantages. As well as being less demanding than IRS in terms of infrastructure and organization, ITNs allow vector control resources to be targeted toward those most at risk in stable endemic settings, i.e. pregnant women and young children, hence best use can be made of initial resources. ITNs protect people who use them, and they also have community level benefits, giving protection to people without nets in nearby houses. These benefits are thought to increase incrementally with coverage, across all coverage levels, and will contribute to early gains in equity as programmes scale up. The minimum coverage at which ITNs might have a significant community effect at programme level is not yet established. ITNs can give protection of longer duration than IRS since a net in good condition gives reduced but still significant protection to the user even after the insecticide has worn off. This advantage will be further strengthened by the emerging development of Long Lasting Insecticidal Net (LLIN) technology, which greatly extends the effective life of the insecticide.

In high transmission and stable endemic malaria settings of Africa south of the Sahara, facing a choice of methods to implement and scale up, RBM strongly recommends that countries and RBM partners focus preventive vector control efforts on increasing coverage of insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) rather than investing in the creation of new large-scale IRS programmes.

So WHO says about DDT spraying: “Every effort should be made to sustain these systems in the future.” So they don’t oppose DDT use where it is the best option, they just think that it is not the best choice in some parts of Africa. TCS gets it wrong yet again.

Stephen Dubner reports that Freakonomics is the 7th best-selling book for 2005. According to Nielsen BookScan, it is has sold 584,000 copies so far this year.

Freakonomics discusses the survey that Lott claims to have conducted in 1997, but that he appears to have fabricated. Lott says that eight Chicago university students made the phone calls for him. So why hasn’t one of these students read Freakonomics and come forward to prove that Lott conducted a survey? You would think that students (or former students) from Chicago would be particularly likely to have read the book since Levitt is a professor there.

I wrote earlier about a particularly dumb argument against global warming–the argument that an unusually cold day shows that global warming just isn’t happening. Well, there doesn’t seem to be an argument dumb enough that someone can’t make it dumber. Take it away, Tim Blair:

Comical protest news from Montreal:

Thousands of people ignored frigid temperatures to lead a worldwide day of protest against global warming.

Was it unusually cold that day in Montreal? Well, no. December 3 was slightly warmer than the average December day in Montreal.

Wait, there’s more!

Global warming protests cure global warming. Further scientific evidence of this phenomenon from Montreal, which lately was host to 10,000 global warm-mongers:

Record snowfall overnight forced the cancellation of 200 flights at Montreal airport, school closures and caused havoc on roads.

More than 41 centimetres of snow fell on Friday, Andre Cantin, a spokesperson for Canada’s meteorological service said.

The storm will go down in history as one of the biggest snowfalls in a single day in Montreal in December, beating a record of 37.8 centimetres (15 inches) on December 27, 1969.

As it happens, December 16, the day of the snowstorm, was also warmer than average for December. Oops.

Update: I must have struck a nerve because Blair has now responded twice to this post. The first response was that it was just a joke so the temperatures don’t matter and then he changed his tune: Dec 3 was a whole 1.9 degrees cooler than the average Dec 3 temperature. Shock Horror! It’s another Ice Age!

David Kane asked Les Roberts for the data for the Lancet study. He CC’d it to me, so here it is.

In his latest op-ed Lott continues his misrepresentations about crime in Australia and England:

The British government banned handguns in January 1997 but recently reported that gun crime in England and Wales nearly doubled in the seven years from 1996 to 2003. Since ‘96, the rate of serious violent crime has soared by 88 percent: armed robberies by 101 percent, rapes by 105 percent and homicide by 24 percent.

Before the law, armed robberies had fallen by 50 percent from 1993 to 1997 — but as soon as handguns were banned, the robbery rate shot back up, almost back to 1993 levels. The crooks still had guns, but not their victims.

Australia’s 1996 gun-control regulations banned many types of guns and the immediate aftermath was similar. Crime rates averaged 32 percent higher in the six years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2002) than in 1995. The same comparisons for armed robbery rates showed an increase of 74 percent, reversing a previous decline.

Lott, of course, has cherry picked his numbers. He carefully picks his numbers to avoid mentioning the dramatic decline in violent crime in England since 1996. As for Australia, note the use of the word “immediate” so he can avoid mentioning the recent large reductions in armed robbery which is now below what it was when the law was passed. And he’ll never admit that the firearms murder rate has halved since the law was passed.

Letting more law-abiding citizens own guns may actually save police lives. Many countries, from Britain to Brazil, have learned this the hard way. There are also a large number of peer-reviewed academic studies showing that letting private citizens own guns reduces violent crime, and some work finds that gun crime falls even faster than overall violent crime.

Well, a large number of studies by Lott at any rate. A National Academy of Sciences panel reviewed all those studies and concluded:

There is no credible evidence that “right-to-carry” laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime.

The Washington Post continues its sorry record on the Lancet study with this piece by Sarah Sewall:

The Lancet study relied on a door-to-door survey of Iraqi households in 33 neighborhoods. The surveyors asked for details of deaths in the months before and after the invasion and found a significantly higher death rate after. But the approach was flawed. War is not like a pandemic; it comes in pockets. And the study itself qualified its conclusions, acknowledging that the figure could range enormously between 8,000 and 194,000.

Sewall fails to present any argument, any argument at all, why war “comes in pockets” means that random sampling is flawed. The only thing I can guess she is driving at is the known problem with cluster sampling when the deaths are also clustered. But in that case you are likely to underestimate the number of deaths. And she fails to mention that values in the middle of the confidence interval (like 100,00, say) are much more likely than values at the ends. What is really disappointing here is that Sewall is a lecturer at Harvard and surely has access to the expertise that would let her write a more informed piece if she took advantage of it.

This short piece by Bill Marsh in the New York Times isn’t much better. Marsh writes:

A 2004 study estimated that 100,000 Iraqis had died but figures from a group called Iraq Body Count are more often cited because they are based on media reports, not projections. Since many deaths are unreported, that tally is undoubtedly low.

It’s good that he points out that the IBC number is undoubtedly low, but the reason he gives for people citing it rather than the Lancet estimate doesn’t make sense. Figures for deaths in the Congo or Rwanda or Bosnia that get cited aren’t based on media reports but on estimates like the Lancet study. What on earth could be the important difference between Iraq and those other places that leads to a different standard for reporting war-related deaths? What could it be?

But the really bad thing about Marsh’s piece is the grossly misleading graph. He presents a graph showing how “the President’s number compares with estimated deaths in recent conflicts”. But why compare a number that is “undoubtedly low” with estimated deaths in other conflicts? Surely you should compare estimated deaths (ie the Lancet number) with estimated deaths? Or if you really wanted to compare tallied deaths in Iraq, you should compare with tallied deaths in the other conflicts. For example, the graph shows the estimated 200,000 deaths in Bosnia and not the 102,000 Bosnian deaths that have been tallied..

Furthermore, the graph gives an estimate of 180,000 deaths in Iraq Internal Violence 1998-1991 and I just can’t find this figure in the source Marsh gives. His source has 150,000 dead Kurds in the period 1961–1993 and 25,000 dead Shia from 1979 to 1998, so things just don’t add up. In any case, the basis for these estimates is much less solid than the Lancet number, but oddly enough, you don’t see the Lancet skeptics dismissing these numbers.

Finally Andrew Cockburn in the LA Times, in a rare event for a US newspaper, does a good job of covering Iraqi deaths:

Columbia professor Richard Garfield, one of the team members and study authors, told me this week that by now the number of “excess deaths” in Iraq “couldn’t possibly be less than 150,000.” But, he added, “there’s no reason to be guessing. We ought to know better.”

After seeing yet another ignorant column about how banning DDT killed millions and millions and millions of people. I’ve been inspired to create DDT Ban Myth Bingo to make reading these stupid articles more interesting. Just tick the box when they use the bogus argument next to it. Get four in a row and win! If you get to the end and you haven’t got four in row, you still have a chance to win—there’s one box you can tick if they don’t mention DDT resistance by mosquitoes.

I’ve also included links to refutations of each argument. And if you liked this game, you can also play Global Warming Skeptic Bingo.

Get your 24th Skeptic’s Circle here.

Here’s Silas with his Christmas present. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers.

Blogging is likely to be light to non-existent this week because I’ll be in Perisher on holidays. It’s a National Park so poor Silas can’t come and has to stay home with the house sitter.