Soros Science

[popsjumper 2]

I agree. Science is self-correcting. It's the bastardized science (see billvon's post above) that gives "science" a bad name.

My reality and yours are quite different.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus.
Falcon5232, SCS8170, SCSA353, POPS9398, DS239

[popsjumper 2]

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It's when research is shut down or muzzled

Like the global warming skeptics that were muzzled from making a presentation at the Bali meetings?

O.

Was their research shut down by the government?

No, by the 'consensus'.

Oh, so my statement "It's when research is shut down or muzzled by the government" was either deliberately distorted by you, or your reading is highly defective.

Lame.

Lame. Again, your inability to acknowledge a valid comparison or an opposing viewpoint without distorting intent AND including derogatories is lame.

Your entertainment value is high. Your credibility is low.



Yeah, yeah, yeah...your next question is going to be, "What's so valid about the comparison?"

I'm waiting for you to develop your limited scope that will exclude it as valid and we can go with that.


To the OP:
Good stuff. It points out that anybody can do a "study" and use it to promote any viewpoint. Credibility becomes the major issue when viewpoints collide. What was that quote about manipulated statistics?

My reality and yours are quite different.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus.
Falcon5232, SCS8170, SCSA353, POPS9398, DS239

[kallend 2,146]

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It's when research is shut down or muzzled

Like the global warming skeptics that were muzzled from making a presentation at the Bali meetings?

O.

Was their research shut down by the government?

No, by the 'consensus'.

Oh, so my statement "It's when research is shut down or muzzled by the government" was either deliberately distorted by you, or your reading is highly defective.

Lame.

Lame. Again, your inability to acknowledge a valid comparison or an opposing viewpoint without distorting intent AND including derogatories is lame.

Your entertainment value is high. Your credibility is low.

Well, to have any CREDIBILITY, first you have to establish that it IS a valid comparison. Since his attempt required that he snip the original message in the middle of a sentence, it is pretty clear that he couldn't do that.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[lawrocket 3]

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It's when research is shut down or muzzled

Like the global warming skeptics that were muzzled from making a presentation at the Bali meetings?

O.

Was their research shut down by the government?

No more so that GW research is shut down by the Bush Admin. But - hasn't it been said that politics is controlling environmental policy instead of science, and that the GW advocates are being shut out in the US? I understand that the issue is NOT that the science is not out there, it's that the proponents believe that they are being ignored because of an underlying agenda. Politics merely decides which scientific opinion or opinions will get the most weight.

Personally, I have little problem with either. Politics is NOT based on science. It is based on feelings. Science may say that the crocodile will kill a wildebeast crossing the river. Politics may determine that there is an excess of crocodiles and wildebeast are endangered. The political decision may be to build a bridge for the wildebeast until their population numbers increase because, politically, we can't have the wildebeast herds too thin, despite what science would show.

Science would, of course, look at the effectiveness of the bridge policy in terms of wildebeast and croc populations, and the political beast will determine whether to keep the bridge or tear it down. And if the body politic in charge hates crocs, well, they will find the research that says that the crocs are doing fine while the wildebeasts have flourished. And when the pro-crocodile party comes in, there will be other research relied upon.

See, the link between politics and science is that politics determine which side of science has the weight of presumptions in its favor.

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[billvon 3,107]

>And if the body politic in charge hates crocs, well, they will find the research
>that says that the crocs are doing fine while the wildebeasts have
>flourished. And when the pro-crocodile party comes in, there will be other
>research relied upon.

Sort of. The place you can get into problems are words like "fine."

Science doesn't make moral judgments. It can determine what the relationship between predation and wildebeest levels are, and it can determine (with varying degrees of accuracy) what will happen if you do X.

It CANNOT decide that low numbers of wildebeests are fine, or that it's OK if a species goes extinct. It can merely quantify the odds of those things happening, and determine the likely results of it.

"Fine" "OK" "Oh my God we have to do something about those poor wildebeests!" are emotional reactions, and thus firmly on the political side of things.

(I think that's what you meant!)

[kallend 2,146]

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It's when research is shut down or muzzled

Like the global warming skeptics that were muzzled from making a presentation at the Bali meetings?

O.

Was their research shut down by the government?

No more so that GW research is shut down by the Bush Admin. But - hasn't it been said that politics is controlling environmental policy instead of science, and that the GW advocates are being shut out in the US? I understand that the issue is NOT that the science is not out there, it's that the proponents believe that they are being ignored because of an underlying agenda. Politics merely decides which scientific opinion or opinions will get the most weight.

Personally, I have little problem with either. Politics is NOT based on science. It is based on feelings. Science may say that the crocodile will kill a wildebeast crossing the river. Politics may determine that there is an excess of crocodiles and wildebeast are endangered. The political decision may be to build a bridge for the wildebeast until their population numbers increase because, politically, we can't have the wildebeast herds too thin, despite what science would show.

Science would, of course, look at the effectiveness of the bridge policy in terms of wildebeast and croc populations, and the political beast will determine whether to keep the bridge or tear it down. And if the body politic in charge hates crocs, well, they will find the research that says that the crocs are doing fine while the wildebeasts have flourished. And when the pro-crocodile party comes in, there will be other research relied upon.

See, the link between politics and science is that politics determine which side of science has the weight of presumptions in its favor.

Has anyone any evidence AT ALL that Soros exterted influence on the researchers to falsify their data?

I think we need to differentiate clearly between paying for research (someone has to pay, and everyone has some kind of agenda), and muzzling research which has been a deliberate policy of this White House.

oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1653

www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/scientific-integrity-in-the-news.html

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/09/POLARBEAR.TMP

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The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[JohnRich 4]

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Someone convince me that I should still have ANY faith in academia and the scientific method.

Soros is also a frequent contributor to anti-gun organizations, which use the same propaganda tactics.

And I heard a news item last week that a main editor from the "The Onion" is now going to work for MoveOn.org.

Truth be damned, as long as they get their way.

[lawrocket 3]

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Sort of. The place you can get into problems are words like "fine."

Exactly. The same as researchers stating that global warming will cause a global catastrophe.

We must, however, lookat "science" to ask, well, what kind of "science" is it? Is it "basic science," which is done without the thought of practical applications? Is it "applied science," which is seeks to determine how basic science can be used? Or is it technology, which is applied science for money?

As things move further away from "basic science" there becomes another element to it - application. How is the science applied? And with the applications of that science come political decisions.

Fermi demonstrated how a controlled fission reaction could occur - an application of basic science. On the basis of this knowledge, people applied this to build nuclear power plants. Science also demonstrated the risks of nuclear power, thus ending the new construction of new nuclear power plants by the 1980's.

Much science is involved in risk analysis and failure analysis. It is an application. What is DONE with these is a political decision. How the science is used is political.

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[mnealtx 0]

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>Like the global warming skeptics that were muzzled from making a
>presentation at the Bali meetings?

The 9/11 conspiracy theorists are muzzled too, I hear! Believe it or not, people often BAN them from presenting their theories at conferences of all sorts. Why, they wouldn't even allow any such representatives on the 9/11 commission! Censorship! Fraud!

Thanks for proving my point.

So much for that whole "peer review" thing, hmm? After all, "the science is settled", I believe you said?

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[billvon 3,107]

>After all, "the science is settled", I believe you said?

Fairly settled, yes. And despite what some political activists claim, it got that way by a very large number of people challenging the science and forcing the authors to defend their work. (And yes, that INCLUDES Bali; there were skeptics there as well.)

[mnealtx 0]

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>After all, "the science is settled", I believe you said?

Fairly settled, yes. And despite what some political activists claim, it got that way by a very large number of people challenging the science and forcing the authors to defend their work. (And yes, that INCLUDES Bali; there were skeptics there as well.)

Yes, I know skeptics were there - it's too bad they didn't get a chance to make their presentation to the various governments. I'm sure it was just an oversight that removed them from the schedule.

For all the howling above about "the government suppresses research", it seems that the GW proponents do a very good job of it too.

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[nerdgirl 0]

Tossing in 2 more pennies (to the nickel's worth I posted a few days ago):

I don't think I've ever used “consensus” or “settled” as equivalent to the “preponderance of the available evidence.”
If I have, that was imprecise & 'bad' of me.

Scientists are actually *really* comfortable with error bars and accustom to dealing with uncertainties (if nothing else limitations of instrumental resolution).

Policy makers (aka politicians), the media, and large percentages of the voting/pontificating public aren’t. They want black and white answers … sometimes when there aren’t.

The problem isn’t the science (or the peer-review system ), it’s how the science gets applied (or mis-applied) to policy or how the science/pseudo-science is politicized. Science is a process that generates data/information/results that can be used for good or for bad, depending on how the human (politician, lobbyist, pundit, corporate shill, venture capitalist, start-up CEO) uses it.

Bali was a diplomatic economic policy forum not a scientific conference. Does anyone really think that the US delegates were not fully briefed on the technical, economic, and whatever else challenges to anthropogenic climate change?

When I've briefed HASC or SASC folks (staff not the elected committee members themselves … yet ) or folks from the OPCW, there’s zero to very little discussion of really hard-core science, e.g., pulling out the primary data. While there are a few technically competent to very good folks (e.g., Eryn Robinson & Arun Seraphin), the vast majority of the folks don’t have technical backgrounds, don’t have time for that level of detail, or occasionally just don’t care. Frankly, much of the discussion & the way I try to convey the concepts, is not that far away from how I do in this forum. (I’m also a big fan of properly-used PowerPoint – humans are visual creatures; if we were intelligent canines, we'd have 'stop-smells' instead of 'stop-lights' at intersections.)

At what point do the skeptics become prescient iconoclasts … or time-wasting kooks … or an ‘abrasive bitch’?

Are all y’all proponents of challenges to anthropogenic climate change as outspoken on the original research in this thread – the epidemiological modeling that estimated a much higher fatality value than the “consensus” figure? If not, how do you rationalize that?

VR/Marg

~~~~~ ~~~ ~~~~~

“So far, scientists have pursued the truth about nature while engineers have solved practical problems faced by society. Hereafter, scientists are expected to not only have specific abilities related to their research, but also have an ability to foretell the trends of future society...The crucial point is to create and maintain a sustainable society for our offspring. Science and technology must contribute to this.”
Ryoji Noyori, 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

[mnealtx 0]

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Has anyone any evidence AT ALL that Soros exterted influence on the researchers to falsify their data?

There's no evidence at all that Exxon, Mobil, etc have exerted influence on GW researchers, but yet you've asserted over and over that their research is suspect because of the source of the money.

Sauce for the goose is good for the gander, as well. Soros is known to be anti-war. QED, the original study is suspect (which has been known for a good while, now).

Oddly enough...the reports of bad data and incorrect statistics in the articles debunking the Lancet report never got any traction - *what* was being "shut down" or "muzzled" again?

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[Para_Frog 1]

Epidemiological violates the 6-syllable rule in SC.

You're banned.

- Harvey, BASE 1232
TAN-I, IAD-I, S&TA

BLiNC Magazine Team Member

[rushmc 23]

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Epidemiological violates the 6-syllable rule in SC.

You're banned.

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[nerdgirl 0]

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Oddly enough...the reports of bad data and incorrect statistics in the articles debunking the Lancet report never got any traction - *what* was being "shut down" or "muzzled" again?

Come on’ Mike – what “bad data” and what “incorrect statistics”?

Again, Soros' Open Society Institute funded MIT. MIT funded the Johns Hopkins Study. I agree that it should have been acknowledged in the Lancet article. There's a whole lotta conjecture being tossed around that doesn't appear to have any underlying evidence …
The statistical method used has been validated in other conflict settings (e.g., Africa ... & IIRC, the former Yugoslavia).

There was a tremendous backlash in the political punditry community that prompted reviews by the epidemiological community. Even President Bush commented on it: “not credible.”

Who sponsored the New England Journal of Medicine study published last week?
“Supported by United Nations Development Group Iraq Trust Fund, European Commission, and the WHO.”

The NEJM article by researchers from the World Health Organization (WHO) “Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006” (which is available free as full-text) supports the argument that the peer-review system works!

[intentionally silly]
Does this mean that the next time a recommendation comes out of the UN, the EC, or WHO, we’re all going to be behind it? [/intentionally silly]

“ABSTRACT: Background Estimates of the death toll in Iraq from the time of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 until June 2006 have ranged from 47,668 (from the Iraq Body Count) to 601,027 (from a national survey [the Johns Hopkins team – nerdgirl]). Results from the Iraq Family Health Survey (IFHS), which was conducted in 2006 and 2007, provide new evidence on mortality in Iraq.

“Methods: The IFHS is a nationally representative survey of 9345 households that collected information on deaths in the household since June 2001. We used multiple methods for estimating the level of underreporting and compared reported rates of death with those from other sources.

“Results: Interviewers visited 89.4% of 1086 household clusters during the study period; the household response rate was 96.2%. From January 2002 through June 2006, there were 1325 reported deaths. After adjustment for missing clusters, the overall rate of death per 1000 person-years was 5.31 (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.89 to 5.77); the estimated rate of violence-related death was 1.09 (95% CI, 0.81 to 1.50). When underreporting was taken into account, the rate of violence-related death was estimated to be 1.67 (95% uncertainty range, 1.24 to 2.30). This rate translates into an estimated number of violent deaths of 151,000 (95% uncertainty range, 104,000 to 223,000 [that’s the range that the WHO researchers are reporting – nerdgirl]) from March 2003 through June 2006.

“Conclusions Violence is a leading cause of death for Iraqi adults and was the main cause of death in men between the ages of 15 and 59 years during the first 3 years after the 2003 invasion. Although the estimated range is substantially lower than a recent survey-based estimate, it nonetheless points to a massive death toll, only one of the many health and human consequences of an ongoing humanitarian crisis.”

{Pssst … what statistical method do you think the Johns Hopkins epidemiologists used for the Lancet study? Hint: The same one as used in the last week’s NEJM study … but the data is refined and they have (may) have a better result … which is likely to still be less than perfectly precise. The peer-review system is working!}

But don’t take my word for it:

“‘Assessment of the death toll in conflict situations is extremely difficult and household survey results [emphasis - nerdgirl, that's the method] have to be interpreted with caution,’ said [NEJM] study co-author Mohamed Ali, a WHO statistician who provided technical assistance for the survey. ‘However, in the absence of comprehensive death registration and hospital reporting, household surveys are the best we can do.’

“‘Our survey estimate is three times higher than the death toll detected through careful screening of media reports by the Iraq Body Count project and about four times lower than a smaller-scale household survey conducted earlier in 2006,’ added Naeema Al Gasseer, the WHO Representative to Iraq.”

Horrible irony: “This article is dedicated to our colleague and coauthor Louay Hakki Rasheed, deputy director of the Iraqi Central Organization for Statistics and Information Technology, who was killed on August 2, 2007, on his way to work in Baghdad.” It wasn’t a traffic accident either.

In the public health community, the NEJM study is being examined/critiqued, e.g., the NEJM study notes that "Of the 1086 originally selected clusters, 115 (10.6%) were not visited because of problems with security [e.g., too dangerous to visit – nerdgirl]. These clusters were located in Anbar (61.7% of the unvisited clusters), Baghdad (26.9%), Nineveh (10.4%), and Wasit (0.8%)." The WHO authors extrapolated from Iraq Body Count data, which is the lowest of the discussed figures. The researchers for the Lancet study *did* go into those areas. Regardless, mathematically it’s quite a feat to get to the 600,000 figure filling in those areas. More data gives a fuller picture – yeah!

In the end, fewer dead people is a good thing!

VR/Marg

p.s. ParaFrog … you must have missed the “Quaternary, Quinary, Senary” escapade.

Attached Figure: “Percent Distribution of Violent Deaths among Provinces and the Number of Violent Deaths per Day from March 2003 to June 2006, According to Three Data Sources.” Burnham, et al are the authors of the Lancet study.

Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying

[mnealtx 0]

That's my point - the pundits were pointing out the errors in the Lancet study... and there was very little reportage on it.

Plenty on the 600k figure, though.

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[nerdgirl 0]

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That's my point - the pundits were pointing out the errors in the Lancet study... and there was very little reportage on it.

What errors specifically?
What lack of reporting?

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Plenty on the 600k figure, though.

When the study was published – immediately before the Congressional elections – yes.
Because it was so dramatically different/higher than the previous estimates.
And, weren’t the pundits challenging it on political grounds rather than technical ones?
What evidence do you have to support the assertion that there was a lack of reporting on the pundit’s criticism, especially when the President was commenting on it?
And weren’t the epidemiologists reviewing the methods and not finding any gross errors? I would argue the latter was where the under-reporting occurred.

I would be willing to bet that most of the political pundits couldn't tell the difference between a Monte Carlo estimate and least squares fit.

Both teams reported statistically significant ranges (back to issue of uncertainties) w/in 95% confidence interval (CI).
Within that 95% CI, the WHO goes to 223,000; the Johns Hopkins University low is 392,979.
I want to know how they rationalize the significant figures.
Incorporate in the missing data due to the undercount of the WHO team not going into the “dangerous areas” of high conflict, i.e., Anbar, Baghdad, Nineveh, and Wasit, and the figures are starting to look a lot closer.

The JHU folks did a survey and statistical analysis in 2004 too, which got very little reporting. In that study of the first 17 months of OIF, reporting 98,000 excess deaths … the 95% CI was 8000 to 194,000.

Regardless, the peer-review system is working. Research that generated a figure that appeared anomalously high was re-visited (under sponsorship of the UN) and the re-estimation appears to be more valid.

In the end, less dead people is good.

VR/Marg

Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying