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Did anyone else hear our esteemed Minister of Defence on Radio 4 on Friday
morning?
Geoff "Has the war started?" Hoon may not know - or be told - much about
defence but he put John Humphrys right about the statistical analysis
suggesting an excess of 100,000 Iraqi deaths since Iraq was liberated by
Coalition forces.
He explained that the methodology was suspect. Apparently the method is to
count deaths in one area and then "extrapolate" to the whole country.
Obviously if you pick somewhere like Fallujah and do this the figure you
obtain is going to be skewed.
I am surprised that the statisticians involved did not realise this flaw -
so obvious now that Mr Hoon has pointed it out - and I am a bit disappointed
that no-one on this list subjected the original report - or presumably the
whole theory of cluster sampling - to such a searching critique either.
It is a great loss to statistics that, against all the odds, he kept his
current job after the Hutton and Butler reports butI hope that Mr Tony
continues not to trouble him overmuch with all that military stuff and he
has the time to continue to contribute to statistical theory in such an
incisive way.
John
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