Secret Data Sunday: Why does it Matter?

Bernie Sanders made some useful comments last week about the attempt, ultimately successful, to prevent Ann Coulter from speaking at Berkeley: “What are you afraid of ― her ideas? Ask her the hard questions,” he concluded. “Confront her intellectually. Booing people down, or intimidating people, or shutting down events, I don’t think that that works in …

I’m tweeting

I finally started tweeting from @Michael_Spagat Please follow me! I plan to do more than just robo tweets of my blog posts.  For now I'm expecting to cover the usual subject matter of the blog plus Trump and probably a little Brexit.   But we'll see how it goes.  

Data Dump Friday

I suppose it will come as no surprise that I'm putting up a bit more Iraq public opinion survey data sponsored by the US State Department and obtained through a FOIA.  This time it's some polls from April of 2006. I'm unlikely to dump more data over the next three weeks because I'll be traveling …

Secret Data Sunday – The Iraq Child and Maternal Mortality Survey

Many readers of the blog know that there was a major cock-up over child mortality figures for Iraq.  In fact, exaggerated child mortality figures have been used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, both prospectively and retrospectively. Here I won't repeat the basics one more time, although anyone unfamiliar with this debacle should click …

Data Dump Friday Returns!

Hello again. I've loaded up the data page with more than 20 new public opinion surveys.  That's the good news. The bad news is that these are all surveys fielded in Iraq by D3 Systems and KA Research Limited.  So I expect them to be loaded with fabricated data.  Ultimately, I think the main value of …

New Paper on Accounting for Civilian War Casualties

Hello everybody. The radio silence was much longer than intended but blog posts should start coming fast and furious now.  I've got a lot I want to get off my chest as soon as possible. Let's get the ball rolling with a new paper I have with Nicholas Jewell and Britta Jewell.  (Well, to be honest, …