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 …

Secret Data Sunday – AAPOR Investigates the Trump-Clinton Polling Miss Using Data you Can’t See

The long-awaited report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) on the performance of polling in the Trump-Clinton race is out.  You will see that this material is less of a stretch for the blog than it might seem to be at first glance and I plan a second post on it. Today …

I’ve Done Something or Other and Say that 470,000 People were Killed in Syria – Would you Like to Interview Me?

Let's go back to February of 2016 when the New York Times ran this headline: Death Toll from War in Syria now 470,000, Group Finds The headline is more conservative than a caption in the same article which reads: At least [my emphasis] 470,000 Syrians have died as a result of the war, according to the …

Article on the Colombian Referendum

Please have a look at this new article on Colombia's peace referendum that I've just written with my long-time co-author Neil Johnson. The point is that there are many sources of statistical error in the counting process for the referendum to the point where it would be more reasonable to call it a draw than …

Mismeasuring Deaths in Iraq: Addendum on Confidence Interval Calculations

In my last post I used a combination of bootstrapping and educated guesswork to find  confidence intervals for violent deaths in Iraq based on the data from the Roberts et al. survey.  (The need for guesswork arose because the authors have not been forthcoming with their data.) Right after this went up a reader contacted me and …

Mismeasuring War Deaths in Iraq: The Partial Striptease

I now continue the discussion of the Roberts et al. paper that I started in my series on the Chilcot Report.  This is tangent from Chilcot so I'll hold this post and its follow-ups outside of that series. Les Roberts never released a proper data set for his survey.  Worse, the authors are sketchy on important …

Comments Down Below!

Hello everybody. This is just a quick note to say that there were some interesting comments that appeared on my last two post on Chilcot (here and here).  I've just replied to both. While I'm at it I have a question for Bill Kirkup (who made one of the comments).  Can he give us a …

Chilcot on Civilian Casualties: Part 5

This post continues my coverage of the three reports (one, two, three) written by UK government experts on the Roberts et al. 2004 article claiming that the 2003 invasion of Iraq caused a very large number of deaths.  According to the abstract of the paper: We estimate that 98,000 more deaths than expected (8,000-194,000) happened after the …

Chilcot on Civilian Casualties: Part 4

In October of 2004 The Lancet published a paper by Roberts et al. that estimated the number of excess deaths for the first year and a half of the Iraq war using data from a new survey they had just conducted.  (Readers wanting a refresher course on the concept of excess deaths  can go here.) …

Dispute Resolution by Mutual Maiming

I'm puzzled by the following sequence of events.  (This story has a very clear summary.) The UN issues a report entitled "Children and Armed Conflict".  The report highlights quite a few groups for committing grave abuses against children.  The "Saudi Arabia-led Coalition"  in the war in Yemen is on this UN blacklist.  The report fingers …