A rebuke from a conservative blog

Post #181,972 by Arkadiy 11/1/04 10:12:41 AM Reply	A rebuke from a conservative blog [link\|http://www.techcentralstation.com/102904J.html\|http://www.techcentr....com/102904J.html] >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Have a look at those confidence levels. Yup, 95%. That is, a one in twenty chance that the effect simply does not exist. Look at the relative risk ratios (leave out Falluja; I don't think anyone is really very surprised to see a higher mortality rate there): 1.1-2.3. It isn't just that it is an absurdly wide one (note, a relative risk ratio of 1 would mean no effect whatsoever) it is that if this paper was written to generally accepted statistical standards it would never have been published. With a 95% confidence level a relative risk ratio of anything less than three is regarded as statistically insignificant. Just to clarify that, by "insignificant" no one is stating that it is not important to those people who undoubtedly have been killed during the War. What is being said is that we don't have enough information to be able to say anything meaningful about it. "Statistically insignificant" means "we don't know". <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< -- This guy's ahead of his time! He's using quantum programming methods: in universes where invalid data is passed to this function, it does not return. Thus you are ensured that you will only have valid data after calling it. Optimally you'd destroy the universe on failure, but computers haven't quite advanced to that level yet. -- [link\|http://thedailywtf.com/archive/2004/10/26/2920.aspx\|The] Daily WTF
Post #181,978 by jake123 11/1/04 11:13:26 AM Reply	After all, the score's important. Too bad there's really no way to know how many people are being killed by the war over there. We have to extrapolate from anecdotal evidence. FWIW I don't think that the US forces are running around indiscriminately killing people... most of the time. However, it's a simple fact of life that air strikes kill people other than the ones that they're aimed at. According to IraqBodyCount.net, currently the Iraqi death toll stands at: Min 14219 \t Max 16352 Note that these are the numbers generated by monitoring media reports, so it is almost certainly a lower bound of the actual dead. Late last year a reporter from the Miami Herald was trying to find out about Iraqi dead from the US military. His article, posted 2003/09/05 says the following: I asked Pentagon officials: ''How many Iraqis have been killed in this war?'' The answers were given ''on background'' -- meaning that the Pentagon spokesmen requested anonymity. The spokesmen were honest. They clearly were following orders from the policymakers when they replied that the Iraqi fatality toll was simply not our concern. The reply to my first Pentagon call was: ``We don't track them (Iraqi dead).'' Weeks later I pursued the question and was told by a Defense Department official: ''They don't count. They are not important,'' meaning the casualty figures. ... On March 18, two days before the U.S. invasion, Barbara Bush had an interview with ABC-TV's Diane Sawyer. ''Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it's gonna happen?'' Mrs. Bush declared. ''It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?'' Maybe she is right, but I don't think so. If we do not know or care about the human cost of war for the winners and losers, America will be forever diminished in the eyes of the world. Nice to know what the Family Attitude to all that ugliness is. --\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton jake at consultron.ca \n [link\|http://consultron.ca\|http://consultron.ca] [link\|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca\|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] \n Kingston Ontario Canada [link\|news://news.consultron.ca\|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------
Post #182,030 by Ashton 11/1/04 2:51:55 PM Reply	.. and that's just the public, sanitized version
Post #182,752 by dmcarls 11/4/04 9:28:01 AM Reply	Another analysis with lots of links..... [link\|http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=6565\|http://www.zmag.org/...ID=15&ItemID=6565] "...this study remains the best estimate of Iraq deaths. Its finding are truly horrifying."
Post #183,952 by Ashton 11/12/04 9:12:26 PM Reply	But the DAMNING Truth is - (And given the unlikelihood of there ever being sufficient 'court acceptable stats' or there being -soon enough- an International Tribunal with the power to Force Worldwide Hearing of those stats - with assessed punishment as Can be meted out) ... The damning thing is - how execrably Few xenophobic fear-crazed Muricans give the slightest shit about Their dead, many more mained.. nor, it appears thus far - about the escalating number of Our dead, many more maimed ... while feeling safe within the compassionate arms/munitions of the Neoconman Cabal. Whether or not there ever was cosmic Karma, it shall have to be Invented, next. (I think the universe works this way, impervious to the spin of flacks & preachers. We'll see..)

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