Eye Rack

[jodawi]

Iraqi civilian toll since the invasion is estimated at 100,000.* That's about how many Kurds were gassed by Saddam in 1988.

(*Because the Bible clearly states "36 innocent unrelated eyes for an eye")

But still 50% of the US population won't think that Bush is a whacked-out fuck.


Who's holding a candle-light vigil for them?

Comments

[snippy]

There's a response at Chicago Boyz; I don't have enough background to evaluate it, do you?
Excerpt:
First, even without reading the study, alarm bells should go off. The study purports to show civilian casualties 5 to 6 times higher than any other reputable source. Most other sources put total combined civilian and military deaths from all causes at between 15,000 to 20,000. The Lancet study is a degree of magnitude higher. Why the difference?

Moreover, just rough calculations should call the figure into doubt. 100,000 deaths over roughly a year and a half equates to 183 deaths per day. Seen anything like that on the news? With that many people dying from air strikes every day we would expect to have at least one or two incidents where several hundred or even thousands of people died. Heard of anything like that? In fact, heard of any air strikes at all where more than a couple of dozen people died total?

Where did this suspicious number come from? Bad methodology.

From the summary:

Mistake One:

"A cluster sample survey was undertaken throughout Iraq during September, 2004"

It is bad practice to use a cluster sample for a distribution known to be highly asymmetrical. Since all sources agree that violence in Iraq is highly geographically concentrated, this means a cluster sample has a very high chance of exaggerating the number of deaths. If one or two of your clusters just happen to fall in a contended area it will skew everything. In fact, the study inadvertently suggests that this happened when it points out later that:
"Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters..."

In fact, this suggest that violent deaths were not "widespread" as 18 of the 33 clusters reported zero deaths. if 54% of the clusters had no deaths then all the other deaths occurred in 46% of the clusters. If the deaths in those clusters followed a standard distribution most of the deaths would have occurred in less than 15% of the total clusters.

And bingo we see that:

"Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja"

(They also used a secondary grouping system (page 2, paragraph 3) that would cause further skewing.)

[jodawi.livejournal.com]

1. "5 to 6 times higher than any other reputable source" - exactly what are these reputable sources? This study was done because there haven't been any reliable sources for this sort of information. The only existing estimates come from newspaper reports of deaths, which means if you don't get covered by a story, your death isn't counted. And Iraq is very dangerous for reporters right now... they don't just go wandering the entire country, reporting on little stories of little military accidents, unless they want to become one of the kidnapping stories.

2. "... Seen anything like that on the news? ..." Same as 1 above. "...several hundred or even thousands of people..." where the hell do they get that idea?

3. "...bad practice to use a cluster sample..." - did they have a choice? Iraq is dangerous, and they designed the survey to minimize travel and exposure to danger while still covering all regions of the country. "...If one or two of your clusters just happen to fall in a contended area it will skew everything..." which is why the 100,000 deaths figure *excludes* Falluja. It's rather disingenuous to attack them for statistical outliers when they exclude the outlier that would cause 2/3 of any skew.

and so on