Spagat and Kane

i wrote an answer to Kane and took a closer look at some analysis of Spagat of the Lancet study of iraqi violent deaths over at Deltoid.

i ll post it here again:

1) I think that the underlying data that L2 relies on is fraudulent. That is, I think that the interviewers made (some) stuff up.

why accuse Burnham of making false statement then?

why bother with the main street bias at all?

and why don t you simply present sonme evidence of this "fraud"?!?

sorry David, but among the few persons making stuff up here, you are quite a special one!

===

the other rather "special" person is Spagat. while follwing some links about the "main street bias", i hit this presentation given by him in december 2007:

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Households%20in%20Conflict%202007.pdf

my eyes got caught by page 7, showing a Baghdag map:

This map seems to suggest that large attacks
in Baghdad could be biased toward residential cross-streets to main streets ... Attacks since May 2003 in which more than 10 people were
killed.

now obviously a rather big color point on an arial map of a city will end up somewhere around a "main street".
notice how he is playing with the word "residential", without again knowing ANYTHING about te palces the attacks occur in. (am i the only one who got familiar to the term "MARKET BOMBING" by watching news in iraq?!?)

this is a pretty lame attempt to establish a link between the location of the bombings and people living CLOSE to the place where it occured.

but this sentence is even more absurd:

Note that incidents of this size almost certainly cover over half of all deaths.

note that this sentence obviously is total NONSENSE, as a simple look at any list of violent deaths in iraq will show you:

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/incidents/page1

http://icasualties.org/oif/(qb52ieexlryn5f45zlljy0e4)/IraqiDeaths.aspx

actually you willstruggle hard to find a single day, on which events with 10+ casualties cover 50% percents of the daily deathtoll.

Spagat could have known this, by simply taking a look at his map: if the Spagat map did really represent over 50% of the deaths in Baghdad since 2003, the place would be a paradise!!!