NORM GERAS writes a poem inspired by Wilfred Owen, and Harold Pinter.

HENRY MILLER:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is facing a revolt by its employees over new, draconian conflict of interest rules. They ban all consulting (paid or unpaid) for biomedical companies, restrict teaching and service on company boards, place severe limits on the acceptance of prizes, and prohibit senior staff members (and their families) from owning stock in drug, medical device or biotech companies. These are the kinds of strictures that in the past have been applied only to employees of regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and Securities and Exchange Commission.

The new restrictions — an exaggerated, bureaucratic response to congressional displeasure over revelations that a few NIH employees (out of a workforce of 17,500) had committed minor technical violations — could ruin one of the world’s premier medical research institutions.

That would be bad. And too much attention to appearance issues is a common problem.

THUNDER DOWN UNDER, II: Tim Lambert responds to his critics. And Lambert also faces a dilemma: “It’s like one of those movies where there is a real person and a fake person and you have a gun and you hafta shoot the fake one. How can you tell which one is the real Tim Blair?”

The one with the drink in his hand, is the way to bet.

UPDATE: Andy Freeman emails: “What is Lambert doing defending himself with a gun?”

THAT LIBERAL MEDIA notes the constant repetition of the debunked Lancet study claiming 100,000 civilian casualties in Iraq. Now that they can’t say the war was a failure, they’ll try to claim it wasn’t worth it.

UPDATE: Reader Dave Ujeio emails that it’s Fred Kaplan’s debunking that’s wrong:

Let me firstoff start by saying I love your blog. Though I do not always agree with the ideas presented, they are always thought provoking, and I appreciate that as truly rare in this day and age.

On a side note, I wanted to help a bit with the fact checking – we studied that piece in one of my courses. Slate has the statistical analysis of the piece wrong – though the confidence interval is 8000-194000, the median/mean in this case is actually far more likely to be true than either of the tails. These studies are conducted under the premise that the data fits a standard normal curve (imagine a mountain with low hills leading to a peak, then descending back to low hills.) 8000 and 194000 are the very end of the tails, and are
thus FAR more unlikely to occur than the instances in the middle of the curve. What is most likely, and in this study statistically significant at the 95% level is that 101000 civilians have died as a result of violence attributable to the war.

Another interesting part of the study is that though Fallujah came up in the sample, the authors purposely excluded it because it might bias the data in an unrepresentative way.

If my account of the study sounds wrong, please check with a Statistics professor – I am admittedly a lowly grad student, and I only got an A- in that class. However my understanding is that 8000, and for that matter 194000 would be extremely rare events were the study to be repeated 100 or 1000 times. The most likely (and most likely to be true) count is approximately 100,000 at the time of the study, (remember, excluding Fallujah.)

I am not saying that the war isn’t worth it – I think the number of civilian casualties is lamentable, and that is something you and your readers can debate. I just wanted to let you know that the debunking piece is almost certainly wrong.

I certainly don’t know, though I’m deeply skeptical of this sort of thing because so many of them (e.g., Marc Herold) have been wrong in the past. Meanwhile, reader Hugh Thorner nets out the analysis and pronunces the war a life-saver!

There’s no need to debunk the 100,000 civilian casualty figure being cited so often by war opponents. In progressive circles it’s an article of faith that pre-war sanctions killed 5000 Iraqis per month. Cost of the war two years later? 20,000 Iraqi civilians saved! And counting…

So there you are. And you should probably net out the number that Saddam was killing, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Debunking the debunking of the debunking:

Sorry to burst that grad student’s bubble, but there are a few problems with his debunking of the debunking of the Lancet article.

1) the distribution of probable dead is not normal. It actually probably resembles a Poisson distribution.

2) the study distribution’s 95% confidence range covers so much of the possible range as to be a nearly flat distribution (at least relatively speaking).

3) even if the statistics were acceptable, there are serious questions about the sampling, as pointed out in the original debunking.

4) the author of the original study is known to have biases related to the research.

Aron S. Spencer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, School of Management
New Jersey Institute of Technology

See, this is why I hate “studies” of this sort. Meanwhile, reader John Mattaboni wants more people to look at the numbers:

This needs to be debunked. It is as absurd as it is false. And unfortunately, the media are up to their old tricks: It’s being reported as “fact” on newscasts across the country.

Are we honestly to believe that twice as many non-combatants have died as a result of the liberation of Iraq as were American combatants in 8 years of VietNam? In a war designed and fought to minimize civilian casualties with things like GPS guided bombs?

Please, you have the power to unleash the internet on this wholesale fabrication with a call to factual arms. This fraud cannot go unchallenged or in 30 days from now, it will simply be cited as irrefutable “fact” that “George Bush killed 100,000 Iraqis.”

Most people, of course, will either believe such statements because they want to, or assume that, like so many expert pronouncements from war opponents, this is just another lie.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Read “read more” for more.

(more…)

PUBLIUS ON EGYPT: “It’s not often in the Middle East that you see consecutive protests every week against the government. Well… I would have said that a few years ago, anyway.”

WIRELESS LAPTOPS IN THE CLASSROOM: Ann Althouse reports on a discussion.

And, yes, the professor can tell when you’re surfing as opposed to taking notes.

A SWEETHEART DEAL for a U.C. Santa Cruz Chancellor? Just call it shrewd negotiation.

“DO TELL,” indeed.

ED RENDELL VS. LYNN SWANN?

JIM GERAGHTY is photo-blogging from Ankara.

EUGENE VOLOKH responds to his critics.

AUSTIN BAY IS LOOKING AT ASIA: “I think the emerging Asian triangle that bears watching is Australia-Singapore-India. Anglophiles may see a historical connection—once again former British colonies find common ground in economics and security.”

“NANOSTUFF” VS. NANOTECHNOLOGY: Howard Lovy has the scoop.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF CORDITE IS UP, with lots of gun-related blog entries. Meanwhile, there’s something rather different going on at Alphecca.

WAR CRITICS want to mark the anniversary of the war — there will be an “antiwar protest” at my local mall tomorrow and there are all sorts of events planned worldwide — but a proper way of marking the date would be with a mass apology to the Iraqi people, and to George W. Bush, for taking the wrong side at a crucial moment in history.

Sackcloth, ashes, and signs reading: WE WERE WRONG, SORRY WE TRIED TO BLOCK ARAB DEMOCRACY, and WRONG ABOUT AFGHANISTAN, WRONG ABOUT IRAQ — DON’T LISTEN TO US NEXT TIME would be appropriate.

I’m not expecting that. But at least some people are marking the occasion in suitable fashion. It may be premature to gloat, but it’s not premature to point out the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the “peace” movement, which has been apparent since the very beginning.

THE HARVARD FACULTY is beginning to realize that actions have consequences:

”I have been at two meetings so far today where all faculty are talking about is how it will be possible to get the business of the university done in this climate,” Mary Waters, who chairs the sociology department, wrote in an e-mail yesterday. ”We are all perceiving a slowdown in response time from the university, and we assume that this controversy is taking up a lot of energy that otherwise would go to moving forward things at the university.”

Harvard has done serious damage to its reputation — or, more accurately, a subset of the Harvard Arts & Sciences faculty has done serious damage to Harvard’s reputation. This was meant to be cost-free posturing, but it’s turned out to be a bit more than that — and if I were Larry Summers, I think I’d do my best to make sure that a lot of people felt the pain in as many ways as I could manage. It’s an educational experience that the Harvard faculty, apparently, needs.

A REPORT FROM BOLIVIA: Things sound rather bad.

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH TEXAS? A ban on sexy cheerleaders? It’s unAmerican!

RUINING CASTRO’S STREET CRED:

Cuban President Fidel Castro has criticized Forbes magazine for the “infamy” of listing him among the world’s richest people, with a net worth of $550 million.

“Once again, they have committed the infamy of speaking about Castro’s fortune, placing me almost above the queen of England,” Castro said in a speech to top officials of Cuba’s ruling Communist Party, military and police.

Heh. But Cuba has free health care! (Via ’08). More background here.