The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 3

We now return, after a long hiatus, to our discussion of matching violent events across datasets.  Before diving into the details we want to remind readers about what we’re doing here and why it’s important. The immediate context is a discussion of major flaws in this paper by Carpenter, Fuller and Roberts (CFR) that claims …

My Second Free Online Course Has Just Launched!

After a long silence I'm back. Over the last few months my time has been eaten up by the preparation of a new free online course: Survival Statistics: Secrets for Demystifying Numbers Please have a look! Now that this is up and running I plan to do few regular blog posts in the near future.  …

Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 7

Today I return to Peru.  If you're not up to speed on this discussion please go back to post 1 of the present series. I could include this post in either this series, this series or this series.  But I think it works best within my first Peru series because the present post covers an …

The Statistical Estimates of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are Really Bad: Part 3

This post continues my series on Silvio Rendon's rejoinder to the reply of Daniel Manrique-Vallier and Patrick Ball (MVB) to Silvio Rendon's critique of the statistical work of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). OK that's complicated so how about this? The present series covers a second paper by Rendon that definitively shreds the TRC's …

L’Affaire Burnham: Ten Years Later

I just gave this presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) in Toronto. The title of the talk is taken from Richard Kulka's Presidential Address to AAPOR.  Back in 2009 AAPOR censured Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins University for refusing to disclose basic information about his methodology for …

The Statistical Estimates of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are Really Bad: Part 2

Back to blogging after diverting my energy in recent weeks to putting out a few fires. I'll assume here that you've read the first post of this new series.  So you know that overfitting is a terminal problem for the Shining Path (SP) estimates published in the statistical report of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission …

The Statistical Estimates of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are Really Bad: Part 1

Silvio Rendon's powerful rejoinder on the statistical work of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is finally out. This is a big development so I'm starting a brand new series to cover it.  Of course, this new series is related to the earlier one.   But I'll strive to make the present series self-contained so you can start here if …

The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 2

This is my second post with Josh Dougherty of Iraq Body Count (IBC).  We asserted in the first one that Carpenter, Fuller and Roberts (CFR) did a terrible job of matching violent events in Iraq, 2004-2009, between the IBC dataset and the SIGACTs dataset of the US military and its coalition partners. In particular, CFR …

New Report on the Relationship between Drone Strikes and Suicide Attacks in Pakistan

I've just published a report with my PhD student Luqman Saeed and Iain Overton, the executive director of Action on Armed Violence, one of the NGO's that I serve on the Board of. The above link goes to a short summary of the report which, in turn, links to the full report.  So here I'll …

The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 1

I argued in an earlier post that matching deaths across lists is a nontrivial exercise that involves a lot of judgement and that, therefore, needs to be done transparently.  Here is the promised follow up post which I do jointly with Josh Dougherty of Iraq Body Count.  In fact, we’ll make this into another multi-part …