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 …

Fake Data and the War in Iraq

Here are the slides from a talk I gave yesterday at RHUL's PIR department. It pulls together many threads that I've developed on the blog but I won't give the links here since they are embedded in the document.

The Hurricane Maria Death Toll Numbers: An Extension of my Piece in The Conversation

I just published a piece on the Hurricane Maria death toll numbers.   Space is always limited with such pieces so I'll extend it a little bit here. Excess deaths estimates tend to have really wide uncertainty intervals and the Harvard study on the Hurricane Maria death toll is no exception.  The reason for such extreme …

My Free Online Course is Ready and About to Launch!

Hello everyone. I haven't posted for a while, mainly because I've been completely swamped writing with creating my free online course  which launches on Monday.   The course is on exactly the sort of material I cover on the blog so if you're following the blog you should seriously consider signing up for the course.  It's …

Accounting for Death in War: Separating Fact from Fiction – Registration is now Open!

I will be teaching a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and registration is now open! Here is the link Please sign up. I'll provide more information as the launch date nears.  

A Debate about Excess War Deaths: Part II

My rejoinder (with Stijn van Weezel) to Hagopian et al is out. Hooray!   See this earlier post for background. Please have a read.  It's short and sweet.  Here's the abstract: Spagat and van Weezel have re-analysed the data of the University Collaborative Iraq Mortality Study (UCIMS) and found fatal weaknesses in the headline-grabbing estimate of 500,000 excess …

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 …

A Debate about Excess War Deaths: Part I

I just got page proofs for a new paper on excess deaths in Iraq that I've written with Stijn van Weezel. This new paper is actually a rejoinder to a reply to an earlier paper I wrote with Stijn which was, in turn, a critique of a still earlier paper.  In short, Stijn and I have …

Data Dump Friday is Back Again: More Iraq Opinion Polls plus a film of Lions Hugging a Woman

Here's the film you're looking for. Also, after being lazy for more than a month I've started uploading the remaining Iraq opinion polls at our old friend, the conflict data page.

Open the Door to all the Hidden Election Polling Data

The UK House of Lords has issued a call for evidence on the effects of political polling and digital digital media on politics.  Submissions are due next week so maybe someone out there wants to dash something off....or maybe someone would be so kind as to give me feedback on my proposal.  Below I give a …