So you are saying you don't have any answers or estimates, but you're pretty sure the only study done to date is wrong. Well, that is very helpful.
Welcome to the real world. This ain't a real time sim where everything is neatly tallied up. I gave you the HONEST ("no one really knows for sure") answer, not a political answer, and not a mathematically unsound answer.
I don't need a counterstudy to debunk the Lancet study. It's METHODS were flawed based on well established theories of statistics. If I see a plane with a wing missing, I can declare the plane will not fly well without having to produce a more functional plane.
You keep saying it was "done scientifically" but it wasn't. The people involved clearly had an agenda. They made a good show of doing actual research, but most of it is just a fudge designed to befuddle gullible people. It takes more than a scientist and some numbers added togeether to be "scientific". Some care has to be taken with the method of the experiment or research. Biases have to be carefully removed. If possible, controls must be put in place.
Why do you think that? Data quality, poor statistical methods and the politically charged nature of the value.
What is your source? News articles, journals, blogs, etc. I think you just aren't searching very hard. Even Google returns thousands of hits on the topic.
What makes that source more reliable? My claim is that the values presented to date are unreliable. There are no truly reliable sources on this matter.
The Lancet study, as far as I know, is the most reliable study on the number of civilians killed. Do you disagree with this, Yes. It's like saying Coke is a better spermicide than Pepsi (old urban myth).
and if so, what is the most reliable study? There are none.
That was what I meant by biased samples. You go sample where people have died to survey. Oops, forgot the rest of the country. It's like trying to measure global warming, but only measuring temperature inside urban heat islands.
Given the disruption in Iraq, the flight of citizens in and out of stable/unstable zones, the quality of census data even in the best of times in these areas, and a host of other problems, I really don't trust any numbers now. It's like trying to punch fog.
There's a lot of people trying to yank the number one way or another, but they all stink of political agendas. For example, the lead investigator of the Lancet study requested that it be published right before the election.
The consensus I'm seeing is about 15,000 combined military and civilian deaths, with no real breakdown of the numbers into the separate categories. No, I don't trust that, either.
Piffle. Relativity was strongly opposed from the start. Albert Michelson *never* accepted it. It's a grand irony that the Michaelson-Morley experiment is sometimes mistakenly put forth as Einstein's inspiration for relativity. Henri Poincaré, Hendrik Lorentz, Ernst Mach are other big guns who opposed relativity from the start. Later, some very gifted folks like Herbert Ives, Alfred O'Rahilly, and Frederick Soddy continued to make criticisms.
Some scientists opposed relativity purely from jealousy over the fame Einstein achieved, especially when he published the general theory in 1916. Hence my continual admonition that scientitsts are human, and sometimes more so because they tend to get into a state where they cannot imagine they are wrong on anything. Trust me. I work with people who have "chieft scientist" on their door.
Heck, some people today oppose relativity, but they tend to be ever increasingly on the fringe, although I have a soft spot for Van Flandern. His heart seems to be in the right place even if his brain isn't.;-)
Geezus! If I could only make you see what a mass of strawmen and twisted logic your post is. Follow the link I posted. It answers most of your question.
Scientists are human beings. Remember that. I work on a daily basis with "chief scientists" and some of them are the most ideologically demented people I have ever met. There's a couple I'd be uncomfortable inviting into my home.
Another thing I love is the media giving air time to a "scientist" on some controversal science topic or another, and when you look the guy up, he's a political scientist at the Reginald Grover Policy Institute For The Utter Dissolution Of Anything To The Right Of Chairman Mao, or some such outfit.
Besides, political scientist is a redundant occupation. We already have people who can do that: they are called "psychiatrists".
Taking sides has already screwed up journalism pretty badly, it's a shame to see science going down the same path.
Going down? Sorry, pal, but as much as I love science, it's BEEN down that road from the start. Just about everything we accept as fact today about the Universe was resisted strongly (far past the point of rationality) by many in the existing scientific establishment of the day.
The image of the scientist as the unbiased paragon of clear thinking is urban myth.
The worst case (and sadly common) is when bad science and bad journalism go hand in hand. The classic case is where a study finds an increased risk of disease X when using chemical Y. The change was from 1 in a million to 2 in a million... data noise. But the grant seekers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H researchers publish anyway, and the media breathlessly proclaims "Chemical Y causes a 100% increase in disease X!"
This happens over and over again. You hear it a lot on the news capsules they do on the radio (and a lot of people hear). Any group with who knows what agenda can issue a press release and the media just parrots it.
Another recent case is the report by The Lancet that US troops have killed 100,000 civilians. This number is being reported everywhere as a recorded facts, as if there's a book somewhere with every name dutifully recorded. The Antibushites use it as if it were an article of faith and an unimpeachable fact, despite that every other estimate made everywhere else is an order or two of magnitude lower.
If you download the actual report, however, you see it's just complete bullshit. It was a statistical analysis, extrapolated from 63 (yes, sixty three, and a biased sample of 63 at that) death certificates, and the 95% confidence interval, even with their data massaging, ranges from 8000 to 192,000.
From the report itself: "We obtained January, 2003, population estimates for each of Iraq's 18 Governorates from the Ministry of Health. No attempt was made to adjust these numbers for recent displacement or immigration."
Translation: our data has no connection with reality at all! In engineering, we call that a "wild ass guess" or, at other times, a "proposal."
So, yeah, it sucks when journalists can't report real science well, but that's a much lesser problem than journalists reporting poor science poorly. I've seen various activists hold press conferences and spout all sorts of fantasy figures, and not a single reporter questions any of them. No one asks "how were these figures obtained". They just scribble it down and regurgitate it later.
This is just one of many reasons I hope for the ELE asteroid. Humanity's capacity for self delusion is depressing.
Can someone remind me why I want to see a pirate copy of a movie shot with a handheld camera in the first place?
I watched one once. The keyword there is one. It was really pointless. Not exactly a high fidelity experience. I guess if some people really desire the cinematic equivalent of a crack whore, each to his own.
Far better to just wait and copy the DVD from Netflix.;-)
- Jack X-wings.
- Go tagging around Mos Isley.
- Pimp out droid hos.
- Sell midichlori-crack to children.
- Pop caps into ewok ass.
- Collect a bevy of Sith Dominas who will rape Jar Jar repeatedly in the ass with strap-on light sabers.
- Two words: Yoda tossing.
- Have non-consensual sex with the space princess or reasonably priced sex slave of my choice.
- Roll everything I see up into a big Katamari ball, and bounce it off young Anakin's head.
- Four words: My fist, Jedi face.
- And, oh, I dunno... sex and stuff.
How many of your digital memories will still be around 50 years from now/
Who gives a shit? I'm 39, and too mentally ill to attract a wife, so no kids. What am I going to leave behind? A collection of snotty and angry online postings? I just want to retire early and pursue my long denied hobby of global agitation.
And why doesn't the posting preview here work reliably with Firefox?
My problem is playing GTA:San Andreas at the same time. Every now and then in GTA I think I can start rolling the cars and pedestrians up into a big ball.
Here's the survey I want
on
Halo 2 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
How many of the people standing in line endless hours for this game voted last Tuesday?
"We are going to try to be much crisper in decision-making," Miller said in an interview. "It is about having clarity of mission and purpose."
Oh! Gosh! Is that what's it's all about? Thinking clearly? Damn! And here I was wasting my time with muddled thinking and piffly nonsense! Argh! Damn my simian decended brain! Why can't I be a being of pure knowledge like our glorious MBA annointed masters?
And this guy probably makes 20 times my salary despite the fact that my job involves deep knowledge of the universe and has actually contributed to my employer's bottom line.
Shit like this makes me want to go out and stab 20 people at random.
AOL is apparently dividing into four units...
I warned you! I warned you all! All you consultants with your 6 sigma plans and your lean production theories and your total quality management architectures! You have unleashed this process upon us, with your fishbone diagrams and SIPOC charts and homogeneity of variance tests!
Four units?! And next month it'll split into 16 units, and then 64, then 256... By the 2008 presidental election battle between Hillary Clinton and Billy Graham, it'll fill the Known Universe with its foul stench! Doomed are we! Doomed, I tell you!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sending my ED-209 after you, dammit!
Nice to see the comedic perceptions of /. readers is firing on all cylinders.
It's the Longhorn manual.
Get over yourself. I'm supposed to spend the rest of my week educating you? There's a point to an online argument where it gets old.
You are so wrong it would take week to explain how much. Keep drinking the Kool-Aid, toots. It'll all be over and done with soon.
Welcome to the real world. This ain't a real time sim where everything is neatly tallied up. I gave you the HONEST ("no one really knows for sure") answer, not a political answer, and not a mathematically unsound answer.
I don't need a counterstudy to debunk the Lancet study. It's METHODS were flawed based on well established theories of statistics. If I see a plane with a wing missing, I can declare the plane will not fly well without having to produce a more functional plane.
You keep saying it was "done scientifically" but it wasn't. The people involved clearly had an agenda. They made a good show of doing actual research, but most of it is just a fudge designed to befuddle gullible people. It takes more than a scientist and some numbers added togeether to be "scientific". Some care has to be taken with the method of the experiment or research. Biases have to be carefully removed. If possible, controls must be put in place.
We're spending WAY too much time on this. :-)
How many civilians are dead? No one really knows.
Why do you think that? Data quality, poor statistical methods and the politically charged nature of the value.
What is your source? News articles, journals, blogs, etc. I think you just aren't searching very hard. Even Google returns thousands of hits on the topic.
What makes that source more reliable? My claim is that the values presented to date are unreliable. There are no truly reliable sources on this matter.
The Lancet study, as far as I know, is the most reliable study on the number of civilians killed. Do you disagree with this, Yes. It's like saying Coke is a better spermicide than Pepsi (old urban myth).
and if so, what is the most reliable study? There are none.
Sort of my POINT, actually.
True value: no one knows.
Given the disruption in Iraq, the flight of citizens in and out of stable/unstable zones, the quality of census data even in the best of times in these areas, and a host of other problems, I really don't trust any numbers now. It's like trying to punch fog.
There's a lot of people trying to yank the number one way or another, but they all stink of political agendas. For example, the lead investigator of the Lancet study requested that it be published right before the election.
The consensus I'm seeing is about 15,000 combined military and civilian deaths, with no real breakdown of the numbers into the separate categories. No, I don't trust that, either.
Piffle. Relativity was strongly opposed from the start. Albert Michelson *never* accepted it. It's a grand irony that the Michaelson-Morley experiment is sometimes mistakenly put forth as Einstein's inspiration for relativity. Henri Poincaré, Hendrik Lorentz, Ernst Mach are other big guns who opposed relativity from the start. Later, some very gifted folks like Herbert Ives, Alfred O'Rahilly, and Frederick Soddy continued to make criticisms.
Some scientists opposed relativity purely from jealousy over the fame Einstein achieved, especially when he published the general theory in 1916. Hence my continual admonition that scientitsts are human, and sometimes more so because they tend to get into a state where they cannot imagine they are wrong on anything. Trust me. I work with people who have "chieft scientist" on their door.
Heck, some people today oppose relativity, but they tend to be ever increasingly on the fringe, although I have a soft spot for Van Flandern. His heart seems to be in the right place even if his brain isn't. ;-)
Scientists are human beings. Remember that. I work on a daily basis with "chief scientists" and some of them are the most ideologically demented people I have ever met. There's a couple I'd be uncomfortable inviting into my home.
Another thing I love is the media giving air time to a "scientist" on some controversal science topic or another, and when you look the guy up, he's a political scientist at the Reginald Grover Policy Institute For The Utter Dissolution Of Anything To The Right Of Chairman Mao, or some such outfit.
Besides, political scientist is a redundant occupation. We already have people who can do that: they are called "psychiatrists".
Going down? Sorry, pal, but as much as I love science, it's BEEN down that road from the start. Just about everything we accept as fact today about the Universe was resisted strongly (far past the point of rationality) by many in the existing scientific establishment of the day.
The image of the scientist as the unbiased paragon of clear thinking is urban myth.
This happens over and over again. You hear it a lot on the news capsules they do on the radio (and a lot of people hear). Any group with who knows what agenda can issue a press release and the media just parrots it.
Another recent case is the report by The Lancet that US troops have killed 100,000 civilians. This number is being reported everywhere as a recorded facts, as if there's a book somewhere with every name dutifully recorded. The Antibushites use it as if it were an article of faith and an unimpeachable fact, despite that every other estimate made everywhere else is an order or two of magnitude lower.
If you download the actual report, however, you see it's just complete bullshit. It was a statistical analysis, extrapolated from 63 (yes, sixty three, and a biased sample of 63 at that) death certificates, and the 95% confidence interval, even with their data massaging, ranges from 8000 to 192,000.
From the report itself:
"We obtained January, 2003, population estimates for each of Iraq's 18 Governorates from the Ministry of Health. No attempt was made to adjust these numbers for recent displacement or immigration."
Translation: our data has no connection with reality at all! In engineering, we call that a "wild ass guess" or, at other times, a "proposal."
Here's further anaylsis: http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/002543.html
So, yeah, it sucks when journalists can't report real science well, but that's a much lesser problem than journalists reporting poor science poorly. I've seen various activists hold press conferences and spout all sorts of fantasy figures, and not a single reporter questions any of them. No one asks "how were these figures obtained". They just scribble it down and regurgitate it later.
This is just one of many reasons I hope for the ELE asteroid. Humanity's capacity for self delusion is depressing.
Umm... how much software do vegetables need?
I watched one once. The keyword there is one. It was really pointless. Not exactly a high fidelity experience. I guess if some people really desire the cinematic equivalent of a crack whore, each to his own.
Far better to just wait and copy the DVD from Netflix. ;-)
I'm on it.
Let's just say it doesn't really require that much work these days.
I just can't enough of that. Honest.
conversational, semi-edgy style
Translation: Usenet readers will feel at home.
I want to:
- Jack X-wings.
- Go tagging around Mos Isley.
- Pimp out droid hos.
- Sell midichlori-crack to children.
- Pop caps into ewok ass.
- Collect a bevy of Sith Dominas who will rape Jar Jar repeatedly in the ass with strap-on light sabers.
- Two words: Yoda tossing.
- Have non-consensual sex with the space princess or reasonably priced sex slave of my choice.
- Roll everything I see up into a big Katamari ball, and bounce it off young Anakin's head.
- Four words: My fist, Jedi face.
- And, oh, I dunno... sex and stuff.
Yeah. Those of us with other computers wondered why anyone would buy a Vic 20.
When someone shows me a picture of their widdle PWECIOUS baybee, I wonder how tall a building over which I could drop kick the stupid, drooling thing.
I hate happy people. :-(
Who gives a shit? I'm 39, and too mentally ill to attract a wife, so no kids. What am I going to leave behind? A collection of snotty and angry online postings? I just want to retire early and pursue my long denied hobby of global agitation.
And why doesn't the posting preview here work reliably with Firefox?
My problem is playing GTA:San Andreas at the same time. Every now and then in GTA I think I can start rolling the cars and pedestrians up into a big ball.
How many of the people standing in line endless hours for this game voted last Tuesday?
"I can feel it. I can feel the cosmos."
Oh! Gosh! Is that what's it's all about? Thinking clearly? Damn! And here I was wasting my time with muddled thinking and piffly nonsense! Argh! Damn my simian decended brain! Why can't I be a being of pure knowledge like our glorious MBA annointed masters?
And this guy probably makes 20 times my salary despite the fact that my job involves deep knowledge of the universe and has actually contributed to my employer's bottom line.
Shit like this makes me want to go out and stab 20 people at random.
AOL is apparently dividing into four units...
I warned you! I warned you all! All you consultants with your 6 sigma plans and your lean production theories and your total quality management architectures! You have unleashed this process upon us, with your fishbone diagrams and SIPOC charts and homogeneity of variance tests!
Four units?! And next month it'll split into 16 units, and then 64, then 256... By the 2008 presidental election battle between Hillary Clinton and Billy Graham, it'll fill the Known Universe with its foul stench! Doomed are we! Doomed, I tell you!