A Zombie Graph Lives on Courtesy of the Lancet

I've got a new article just out in The Conversation.  Here's the short version: The Lancet publishes a false graph The problems of the graph are exposed, several even in letters to the Lancet. The Lancet just leaves the graph up. A Washington Post reporter stumbles onto the false graph, thinks it’s cool and reprints it. …

Spewing Rancid Effluvia at Iraq Body Count – Part 1

This post follows up on this one. However, rather than calling it "A Debate about Excess Deaths - Part 2" I went with the above title which is  more descriptive of what's actually going on here.. In fact, it's bizarre that the Iraq Body Count (IBC)  database has been  dragooned into a debate about excess deaths.  IBC …

Secret Data Sunday – ABC News (in the US) Stonewalls over their Dubious Iraq Public Opinion Polls

Below is an email that I sent to Kerry Smith, the Senior Vice President for Editorial Quality at ABC news, back in November of 2016. She did not reply..   Dear Ms. Smith, I am a professor of economics specialized in the quantitative analysis of armed conflict.  I have a big body of work focused on …

Department of Corrections: Mike Spagat – Edition 2

I've just gone through and corrected this post. The present post is, therefore, a follow up to this earlier one which, weirdly, was about correcting the claim that Keynes had claimed that he always corrected himself when he's wrong.  It seems that Keynes didn't actually say this although he did correct himself when wrong. Anyway, I …

The Iraq Sanctions Myth Rears its Ugly Head at Scripps College

This unusually interesting article just appeared in the the Los Angeles Times (coming to me via Michael Shermer). The obvious angle is the spectacle of protesters at one women's college (Scripps) attempting to follow the  path of another (Smith) in disinviting a female commencement speaker (Madeleine Albright) who had shattered gender barriers in a male-dominated …

Department of Corrections: Mike Spagat Edition

Hello old friends.  Once again I need to apologize for neglecting you but I  plan to atone for my sins by flooding you with interesting stuff over the next few weeks. I've been reading the new book by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner on "Superforecasting".  It is spectacularly good and I will definitely come back …

Columbia Journalism Review does at least have an error correction mechanism

In this post and this post I criticized Columbia Journalism Review(CJR) for writing about Iraq war-death numbers without investigating the methodologies for the production of the numbers and for suppressing the uncertainty that surrounds the numbers. Yet I need to credit CJR for one thing - they do investigate errors and make some corrections.  My personal experience …