A new critique of the 2004 Lancet Iraq death toll study

This is too much too write a short blog about. The paper is too much for little me who only got a 'c' in statistics class! But I like the conclusions it draws and will slog through it to get a better understanding later. Thanks Michelle for finding this!

Michelle Malkin » Document drop: A new critique of the 2004 Lancet Iraq death toll study: "Remember that massively-publicized 2004 Lancet Iraq death toll study? It was cited in nearly 100 scholarly journals and reported by news outlets around the world. “100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq” blared the Washington Post in a typical headline.

There were attempts made by lay journalists to debunk the 2004 study (as well as the 2006 follow-up study that purported to back up the first). But none of those dissections comes close to a damning new statistical analysis of the 2004 study authored by David Kane, Institute Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. I read of Kane’s new paper at this science blog and e-mailed him for permission to reprint his analysis in its entirety here so that a wider blog readership could have a look. He has given me his permission and adds that he welcomes comments and feedback. He’ll be presenting the paper at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Salt Lake City on Monday — the largest conference of statisticians in North America.

Much of the math here is mind-numbingly complicated, but Kane’s bottom line is simple: the Lancet authors “cannot reject the null hypothesis that mortality in Iraq is unchanged.” Translation: according to Kane, "