A note about "numbers"...

[Rat Faced]

Thats quite an admission from you J2... that US forces have killed more than 4x the number of innocent Iraqi's than the insurgents have...

[Busyman]

Thats quite an admission from you J2... that US forces have killed more than 4x the number of innocent Iraqi's than the insurgents have...

Where did he admit a number?

I did hear that our soldier's body is up to about 1825 though. I doubt that count can be fucked over.

With all that said, how many Iraqi civilians are dead?

How many homeless are there?

[whypikonme]

l guess one of the reasons for the discrepancies is the fact that the US government not only refuses to count civilian casualties, it also forbids them to be counted by their own forces.

[whypikonme]

Thats quite an admission from you J2... that US forces have killed more than 4x the number of innocent Iraqi's than the insurgents have...

I, like my colleague Busyman, am utterly baffled by your post, Rat.

U.S.-led forces accounting for 37 percent of the total, criminal violence 36 percent, and "anti-occupation forces/insurgents" 9 percent

When l went to school 4 x 9 was 36, near enough to 37 to warrant his remark.

[Busyman]

I, like my colleague Busyman, am utterly baffled by your post, Rat.

U.S.-led forces accounting for 37 percent of the total, criminal violence 36 percent, and "anti-occupation forces/insurgents" 9 percent

When l went to school 4 x 9 was 36, near enough to 37 to warrant his remark.

Really?

You can't just look at the numbers. You must look at it's the source.

You missed the whole point of j2's post quite obviously.

[whypikonme]

You missed the whole point of j2's post quite obviously.

l didn't miss anything, l merely pointed out where Rat Faced got his figures from, l find it strange you missed it.

[vivitron 15]

this is what i hate about the ways in which the media portray statistics in general...there is no rhyme nor reason to the numbers they use, and then, on seeing the numbers, they like to draw conclusions which are often completely pointless and irrelevant...

a good example of this was given in a first year lecture:

              People smoking                People not smoking
people          100 000                                50
with
cancer


people           100                                   100000
without
cancer

The conclusion? People who have cancer take up smoking.

From just the information presented, you cannot fault the argument - there is a cause and effect, and without knowing anything more, each is equally as valid...so "Cancer causes smoking".

This is why i cringe when papers use stats to "prove" something about asylum seekers or petrol prices:
Petrol in the uk was subjected to the highest tax according to one paper a few years back...there was 50p per litre going to the economy, up from 45p

However, the cost of the oil had risen to such a degree that the relative cost had dropped from 46% of the pump price going to the government to only 40%.

So here, the same stats, but two completely opposing sides..."proven" with these numbers.

[HeavyMetalParkingLot]

Thats quite an admission from you J2... that US forces have killed more than 4x the number of innocent Iraqi's than the insurgents have...

Sounds more like John Leno is saying this, not J2.

But why believe what John leno says, after all he is discussing the wide range of numbers that different people quote? Is he the only reporter that has access to the "real" numbers?

[Busyman]

You missed the whole point of j2's post quite obviously.

l didn't miss anything, l merely pointed out where Rat Faced got his figures from, l find it strange you missed it.

Again really?

I missed nothing. You said the remark was warranted but it was quite the opposite since the numbers and where/who they come from were the point of the article and therefore not an "admission" of anything by the topic starter.
Run-On

So you did not merely point out something. You said it was warranted.

U wa wong

-said the Chinese man

mmk?

[lynx]

Writing on Slate, Fred Kaplan translated that little tech*nical phrase between the parentheses: It means that the authors are 95 percent certain that war-caused deaths totaled somewhere between 8,000 and 194,000. Kaplan's conclusions: "The math is too vague to be useful."

Perhaps Fred Kaplan should go back to school and actually study statistics, it is far more complex than he oobviously realises. Far from being "too vague to be useful" it is the standard way of denoting statistical data, and what it points to is that the true figure is most likely to be around the median, in other words 98,000 which is the figure they quoted.

The Department of Hous*ing and Urban Development asked cities and counties get*ting federal aid for the homeless to provide statistically valid counts.

Naughty, I thought this article was complaining that statistics aren't valid. Or is it that only statistics that he doesn't like that aren't valid?

as blogger Megan McArdle pointed out a few weeks ago on Asymmetrical Information, that would mean that every single homeless person in America must have served in the armed forces, since 300,000 is about the total num*ber of the homeless.

Who the heck is she? And where did she get that figure from.

Sorry, but the whole article is bullshit. The lesson? Don't trust articles like this.

Don't you believe for one second that the coalition hasn't any idea of civilian casualties, no matter what you've heard to the contrary...

Newsflash:

Then why haven't they published them? Because it is far better to keep quiet and rubbish everyone else's figures, even if they just happen to be accurate.

Of course, the real question this article raises is - why do so many journalists detest statistics?

By and large, journalists tend to come from the group who were not too good at science at school. That's natural enough, they progressed into a career that used their skills and avoided the areas where they didn't excel. Then along comes statistics. It seems nice and vague, so it can't posibly be a science, they deal with hard facts and figures. They are going to like statistics, they can tell.

The problem is, statistics is a science, and it deals just as much with hard facts and figures. And when the journalists work that out (usually after it has turned and bitten them on the nose) they detest it with a vengeance, far more than the other sciences, after all they didn't try to trick them. Of course, that doesn't stop them using statistics when it suits their purpose, after all you can prove anything with statistics (the journalist who thought that one up probably got a medal from the other journalists). It gives them an excellent battlecry whenever they see figures that they don't like.