LATE UPDATE: PTJ blogs about undergrad education
LATE UPDATE: PTJ blogs about undergrad education
Kindred Winecoff has a pretty sweet rebuttal to my ill-tempered rant of late March. A lot of it makes sense, and I appreciate reading graduate student's perspective on things. Some of his post...
Technically, "because I didn't have observational data."Working with experimental data requires onlycalculating means and reading a table. Also, thismay be the most condescending comic stripabout...
One of the few items recently that has caused me to emerge from my nothing-but-Friday-nerd-blogging temporary hiatus was this article on civilian war deaths by Michael Spagat and his collaborators....
Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann at the New America Foundation are keeping one of the most useful datasets on drone strike fatalities that I know of. They've been tallying reports of strikes since 2004. They limit their data to those reported by:"news organizations with deep and aggressive reporting capabilities in Pakistan (the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal), accounts by major news services and networks (the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, CNN, and the BBC), and reports in the leading English-language newspapers in Pakistan (the Daily Times,...
[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]In the latest issue of WIRED, Clive Thompson pens a great piece which echoes a sentiment I've touched on before: in a data-driven world it is critical that all citizens have at least a basic literacy in statistics (really, research methodology broadly, but I'll take what I can get).Now and in the future, we will have unprecedented access to voluminous amounts of data. The analysis of this data and the conclusions drawn from it will have a major impact on public policy, business, and personal decisions. The net effect of this could go either way--it can usher in...
[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the US Department of Energy is set to restate the data it collects on U.S. natural-gas production. The reason? The Department has learned that its methodology is seriously flawed:The monthly gas-production data, known as the 914 report, is used by the industry and analysts as guide for everything from making capital investments to predicting future natural-gas prices and stock recommendations. But the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the statistical unit of the Energy Department, has uncovered a fundamental...
Charli highlighted the recently published work of Sean Gourley in Nature on the patter of frequency and magnitude of attacks in insurgencies, so I wanted to cross-post my critique of this work to initiate a discussion here at Duck.The cover story of this month's Nature features the work of a team of researchers examining the mathematical properties of insurgency. One of the authors is Sean Gourley, a physicist by training and TED Fellow, and this work represents the culmination of research by Gourley and his co-authors—a body of work that I have been critical of in the past. The article is...
A physicist named Sean Gourley has created a model that he claims explains the power law distribution of deaths in insurgencies across a range of country contexts. Just published in Nature. The abstract is here. Check out his presentation on his original correlational findings from last May: Q&A about his new model here. I'm not sure I understand it well enough to comment, but I figured Duck readers would find it interesting, and I'm asking myself how I can get my hands on his data to look at whether it's broken down by category of victim...
Researchers associated with the Human Security Report Project have a new article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution contradicting a recent critique of corpse-counting techniques prevalent in the battle-deaths community. The original critique, authored by Obermayer, Murray and Gakidou (humorously referred to as OMG by the authors of this new rebuttal) compared war death reports from the World Health Organization's sibling survey data with battle-death estimates for the same countries from the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO) and concluded that battle-death estimating...
Earlier I blogged about the importance and absence of data disaggregating unintentional civilian deaths from total civilian deaths in wars worldwide. To get a preliminary handle on this question, I examined a dataset on civilian victimization developed by Alexander Downes at Duke University for his study on why governments target civilians in war. His dataset includes 100 interstate wars and runs from 1823-2003. It includes low, medium and high estimates for the number of civilian deaths for each party in each conflict, based on available secondary sources. It also includes a separate binary...
This is an important question from a legal and humanitarian perspective. In legal terms, targeting civilians is a war crime. Accidentally killing or maiming them in the pursuit of legitimate military objectives is, well, just too bad. So in judging government's records of compliance with the law, one needs to measure the difference. There are policy ramifications to such measurements as well. Over time, atrocities against civilians seem to be falling. But at the same time, some governments seem more complacent than ever about accidental deaths. The assumption behind the wiggle room in the...