[extropy-chat] IRAQ: Weapons pipeline to Syria

[Stephen Van_Sickle]

--- BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> See the complete pdf report file at:
>
<http://image.thelancet.com/extras/04art10342web.pdf>
> (Registration not required)
>  
> They tried to interview 30 clusters of 30 households
> (assuming an
> average of 7 people in each household) (n-6300), but
> they encountered
> various implementation problems. (Hardly
> surprising!) But it was still
> quite a large survey.

Yes, I got that much.  Why clusters, though?  It seems
to be a common technique, but I am not familiar with
it.  It also seems to me that the clusters were chosen
in urban areas, which would seem to skew things
higher.

But the real clincher was right there in the abstract,
which I did not read carefully enough until this
morning.  It seems that the calculation they used for
the 100,000 estimate had a 95% confidence level range
of from 8000-194000.  Now, this seems to me a bit like
saying Bush will will with 51% of the vote, plus or
minus 40%.  This is enough for me to conclude, in the
absence of a better explaination, that the whole study
is meaningless.

If anyone can explain to me why it is not, I'd love to
hear it.  I'd hate to think the Lancet would be this
blatantly, well, dishonest.

steve