Childmortality.org Recognizes Reality in the DRC

Loyal readers will recall my bold prediction that childmortality.org would bow to reality in 2015 and explicitly recognize that child mortality rates have steadily decreased in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during the war (which began around 1999).  (Well, actually an insider told me this would happen so perhaps this prediction wasn't so bold.) The 2014 …

New Work on Targeting Civilians in War

Here are the slides from a presentation that I gave last Friday together with my former PhD students Uih Ran Lee and Piotr Lis at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research.

Don’t Mention the Methodology

Two recent Andrew Gelman posts connect together for me. The first is on the Open Science Collaboration paper that attempts to replicate 100 important psychology experiments and succeeds for less than half of them. The second is on "Being polite vs. saying what you think." What is the connection between the two posts? Well, the Open Science team …

Event in London this Friday the 18th

Will you be in London this Friday and looking for something to do? If so, why not stop by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research for a presentation featuring me with my former PhD students Uih Ran Lee and Piotr Lis: "Civilian Targeting: The Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Targeting Civilians in Africa It starts …

A Must Read: Steven Pinker Marks to Market

Steven Pinker's master work, The Better Angels of our Nature, found very long-term declines (going back to pre-history) in a broad array of violence indicators.  The book is mercifully long although it doesn't reach the lofty standards of the John Cage Organ Project.  Those of us craving further fixes can briefly binge on the annual updates …

Rushing from Syria to Sudan

I've opened several recent posts with something like "Here's a nice article but it comes up short in a particular way that I'd like to discuss."  Please take such formulations at face value and don't imagine that I'm stretching to find something polite to say.  I'll tell you directly when I think I see a terrible article. This article is terrible. All …

Darfur: Building Numbers out of Sand

Two days ago we discussed the claim of 300,000 excess deaths caused by the war in Darfur.  I suggested that a possible source for the 300,000 figure is this study. But there is another possibility. A quick google of Darfur 300,000 leads us to a UN official pulling this number out of his ...errr....armpit: John Holmes, the …

What Exactly has Omar al-Bashir Wrought in Darfur?

This is the first of two posts on Darfur. Here is a nice article by Rick Gladstone about efforts to bring President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan before the International Criminal Court (ICC).  Everything I know about al-Bashir suggests that he as an outstanding candidate to be prosecuted by the ICC. But this paragraph raises a …

Big Wars since World War II

A sharp reader responded to this recent post by asking for a list of wars since World War II that are bigger than the one in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). I gave a list in a comment but avoided providing numbers because I wanted to explain where the numbers come from before hurling them …