PJ Media

To warren joseph:

First, let me clarify that you’re dealing with two different Sams, so I’ll call myself Sam2. I wrote just one post about the need to see the data in more detail, not the personal comment about you.

I think your abusive response was triggered by the other Sam’s sarcasm, but it deserves a response to the part about my post. I can assure you that I read the Burnham study very carefully in its entirety. I found Figure 2 disconcerting. It is a colored map of Iraq and its governorates, with the colors specifying the rates of violent death per 1000 population per year, in three categories: low (<2), medium (2-10), and high (>10). It was impossible to determine from this what the actual breakdown was. To add up to 600,000 violent deaths, it could have been (for [ low: medium: high], based on the respective populations in Table 1) [50,000: 370,000: 180,000], or it could have been [0: 80,000: 520,000]. The latter extreme would say that nearly all the violence was in Anbar, Ninewa, Salah-al-Din, and Diyala provinces – a very different picture from the former extreme. I suspect that the real data may be closer to the latter than the former, and there might be outliers like the Fallujah cluster of 2004 fame. That’s why it would be useful to see the details.

I think the authors may themselves be a bit nervous about their results, and might look for ways to weasel out of sharing their data, despite their obligation to do so, even if they don’t intend to falsify it. Here’s an excerpt from an article on the controversy in the latest issue of Science:

“Neil Johnson and Sean Gourley, physicists at Oxford University in the U.K. who have been analyzing Iraqi casualty data for a separate study, also question whether the sample is representative. The paper indicates that the survey team avoided small back alleys for safety reasons. But this could bias the data because deaths from car bombs, street-market explosions, and shootings from vehicles should be more likely on larger streets, says Johnson. Burnham counters that such streets were included and that the methods section of the published paper is oversimplified. He also told Science that he does not know exactly how the Iraqi team conducted its survey; the details about neighborhoods surveyed were destroyed “in case they fell into the wrong hands and could increase the risks to residents.” These explanations have infuriated the study’s critics. Michael Spagat, an economist at Royal Holloway, University of London, who specializes in civil conflicts, says the scientific community should call for an in-depth investigation into the researchers’ procedures. “It is almost a crime to let it go unchallenged,” adds Johnson.”

So you see they are already changing their story, saying that the actual methods were not as described in the paper, and that they don’t even have a record of some of the details I wanted to see (eg, was one of their random “main streets” the main drag of Fallujah?). I think that a certain amount of healthy skepticism is justified. It is gratifying to see that the scientific community is indeed starting to clamor for details.

By the way, if I had never read any scientific study in my life, how would I know that many current papers include online supplementary data?