So, many of you will have seen my Proud of Britain web site; as John Band put it,
Are you proud of Britain? Then visit the Proud of Britain website.
A bunch of disgraceful chancers, meanwhile, have set up a fake site promoting their authoritarian agenda. I'd recommend paying them a brief visit, and sending them your thoughts on their nefarious plans.
I have since received an Authentic Legal Nastygram from the Labour party over the use of their photo of smiling happy children about to be branded and registered in the Children Act database (a sort of junior National Identity Register) so that they can, as potential terrorists, be watched by the state. The threatening note ran as follows,
There is currently a photograph on the main page of the website, proudofbritain.net, which I believe you are author of. There has been no permission sought either from the photographer who owns the copyright nor the Labour Party who hold license on the image. You are currently in breach of copyright law and could be prosecuted for copyright theft. The photograph I am referring to is of a number of children, in school uniform holding a union jack flag.
The copyright holder has emailed you to request that you remove the image immediately, unfortunately, the email bounced back. If you receive this email, please remove the image immediately.
Melanie Onn
Constitutional and Legal Officer
Legal and Financial Compliance TaskforceTel: 020 7802 1220
Fax: 020 7802 1506
http://www.labour.org.uk
Sadly, unlike the last time a political party threatened to sue me Labour (or, at least, the copyright holder in the image) do actually have a case here so I've removed the image.
That said, the above letter is strikingly ignorant, even by Labour Party standards; as I've remarked before, there's no such thing as `copyright theft' and one cannot be prosecuted for infringement unless it is done on a commercial scale. This leaves one to wonder how it is that Ms. Onn came to hold the post of `Constitutional and Legal Officer'; of course, it's not as if the Labour Party doesn't make a habit of promoting the incompetent to positions they are unqualified to fill, as the continuing career of David Blunkett demonstrates.
(As an aside, I only noticed that I'd received the Threatening Note when the same woman wrote an actual paper letter to my ISP, since -- slightly embarrassingly -- my spam filter thought that the above letter was spam. When I checked through my spam folder for emails from the Labour party, what should I find but... an actual spam about their ID cards plan; a spam, moreover, which began with a vicious calumny, viz., that I am a supporter of their dangerous and stupid scheme. Spamming, of course, is illegal under the Communications Privacy Directive, and naturally I shall be filing a complaint.)
I can't be bothered to write anything interesting, so instead a brief ``'blogiversary'' post. Unfortunately it isn't a round number of years or months or whatever since my first post, so instead, here's to celebrate 81,000,000 seconds since I started this web log....
Naturally, no post this pointless would be complete without a graph:
and a table of statistics of equally limited value:
Next week I'll write a real post about ID cards or opinion polls or something. Meanwhile, have a nice weekend.
Just a brief update on the chip and PIN nonsense. Since I wrote that last page, I have asked Barclays, my bank, and Barclaycard, from whom I have a credit card, for `PIN suppressed' or `chip and signature' cards. (Briefly, the deal here is that the banks have somehow convinced the courts in this country that it is impossible for one person to know another person's PIN, and that therefore if a crook nicks your money by using your card, or a copy, and your PIN, your bank might well not refund you and might even have you thrown in jail.)
Anyway, Barclays (to whom I wrote) responded to my request by... sending me another copy of my PIN. So clearly they have a firm grasp of the technology.
Barclaycard, however, sent me a new `chip and PIN' card to replace my expired card, with a little note saying I should call them to confirm receipt. So I did, and explained that I wanted a non-chip-and-PIN card. After a couple of rounds of uncomprehending conversation, it was eventually explained to me that I could only get such a card if I was disabled (the point being that, e.g., many visually impaired people have trouble operating the PIN keypads and so can't be expected to use chip and PIN). ``Oh,'' I said (slightly unfairly), ``you're discriminating against me because I'm not disabled?''
Apparently they weren't, but didn't give any other credible reason for not giving me a PIN suppressed card. So I asked the chap to close my account. This provoked a slightly different tactic, viz., ``We could give you a chip and signature card, but shops wouldn't accept it if you're not disabled.''
Now, I've never run a shop, but it's always been my understanding that the aim of the game in retail is to separate the punter from their hard-earned cash. I shall be a little bit surprised if, having handed over my card and signed the slip, I am challenged as to my disability status, but we shall see. Anyway, and to my surprise, after I asked the Barclaycard chap, ``Have you asked them?'', he got bored of arguing this back and forth and (after a long pause during which he presumably consulted mission control) agreed -- on the proviso that it would be my own silly fault if shops refused my card -- to set my card up for chip-and-signature.
(As a brief comment, I'm not sure how this works. I'd understood that the chip was designed for offline verification, and hence it's not clear how it can be remotely enabled in this way. Perhaps during an online verification it can talk to Barclaycard and update its settings? Alternatively, the Barclaycard man may have been lying.)
If you're also unhappy with the idea of being screwed by the banks over chip and PIN, you might also want to read this. (I should say also that the chip and PIN scheme is marginally more `secure' than the signature scheme, in some vaguely useful sense, in particular because signatures frequently aren't checked, whereas the PIN is. But this fairly trivial technical advantage is nullified by the dishonesty of the banks and their success in hoodwinking the courts in this country over the supposed `impossibility' of fraud based on stealing a person's PIN.)
In other news: fine work by NO2ID on Wednesday, accompanied by a splendid own-goal by David Blunkett in the form of his comments about supermarket loyalty cards. (He's chosen not to have one, but thinks that they're more of a threat to privacy than his compulsory ID card scheme. Surely some mistake?)
A very brief comment on the recent presidential election in the United States. There has been some discussion of the differences between opinion poll estimates of the popular vote for the two main candidates, and the vote that they actually received. Anthony Wells has a short post on the topic and I'm sure many more can be found.
A peculiarity of US elections is the early publication of exit polls. There's a piece in Slate about this. Those who stayed up to watch the election coverage on television will have noticed how, early in the night, the Kerry campaign team were reported as being upbeat and the Bush team downbeat; this reversed later in proceedings. The reason, perhaps, was that exit poll data which became known early in the evening (US time) suggested that Kerry would win in critical states (by two points in Ohio and Florida, for instance) and, therefore, win the election; later, as real results came in, it seemed more likely that Bush would win, as he eventually did.
It is certainly true that the reported exit poll data look substantially different to the last reported pre-election polls: (significance: p-value < 0.0001)
(Pre-election polls from Andrew Tannenbaum's electoral-vote.com; exit polls as reported in Slate.)
I don't know enough about exit poll methodology to say anything very useful about this.
Next let us reach briefly into conspiracy theory territory.
A number of states in the United States use `Diebold' direct-recording electronic voting machines, which are touchscreen operated and lack paper receipts. These devices are manufactured by a company whose owners give money to the Republican party. Such machines are suitable only for people who do not care about keeping their elections honest, because it is impossible to audit their results. I have written before about how such devices are not appropriate for elections in this country (although unaccountably the government do not listen).
Suppose that pre-election opinion polls accurately (to within some margin of error) divine the voting intentions of electors. Suppose further that actual election results may be affected by fraud in certain states, but that opinion poll results are not.
In these circumstances, you would expect the distribution of differences between the lead of a candidate as reported in opinion polls to have approximately a zero mean for states which do not suffer from fraud, and to have a mean which differs significantly from zero where fraud has occured (assuming that all fraud is intended to give advantage to the same side).
Here is the plot of poll vs. election result discrepancies for states which use Diebold direct-recording electronic voting machines (per this list, but with the addition of Florida and Ohio, and the removal of California, to account for more recent developments):
States |
Mean discrepancy (% points) |
95% confidence interval (% points) |
---|---|---|
non-Diebold | -0.26 | -2.22 < d < +1.70 |
Diebold | +2.71 | +0.53 < d < +4.89 |
Note that positive numbers for the discrepancies mean that Kerry got fewer votes than predicted by the polls.
The two distributions -- for Diebold and non-Diebold states -- do differ significantly (p-value = 0.040, i.e. ``significant at the 95% level'', with the 95% confidence interval on the difference in means being 0.15 to 5.81). Therefore, on this very naive analysis, there is some evidence for voting-machine fraud in the recent US presidential election.
(Caveats: don't take this too seriously. In particular, it was done hastily for my own entertainment and I haven't checked the provenance of the polls from the Andrew Tannenbaum site or independently verified the types of voting machines in use in the various states. Plus, the implicit assumption above that polls should accurately predict electoral results even in states where the election is honest is... a bit of a leap. In particular methodology may differ from state to state or cultural differences between the states may bias the results of telephone polling. The states which use Diebold voting machines do not necessarily use them everywhere. Etc. etc. Wait for somebody to do the analysis carefully and properly before you go round to Diebold HQ with the pitchforks and the flaming torches. In my defence, this is probably more socially responsible than spreading rumours about electoral fraud -- I assume there are some -- and given that there is no other way to audit the results, I hope that there is further work on this issue. On the same subject, you may also want to read this piece about auditing the recent Venezuelan recall election, which suggests how such audits may be manipulated even where paper receipts are recorded.)
Before I rush out of the door, a very brief plug. If you live in Britain and you think that the government's plans for ID cards and a national database are a waste of money, a threat to civil liberties, will lead to a monumental cock-up, will put us more at risk from identity theft and terrorism than we are now, or any combination of the above, please sign the NO2ID petition against the proposals. And if you have a website, please link to the petition.
It will only take a minute or so to sign up and you don't even have to have your irises scanned or your DNA sampled.
You can also buy a range of fine NO2ID-branded merchandise courtesy of The Register; all profits go to fund NO2ID activity.
Most of my half-dozen readers will by now have heard about the research conducted by Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi and Gilbert Burnham, published in the current issue of The Lancet, estimating the number of civilians killed during the war against Iraq (so far). If you have not already done so, please read the paper; it is interesting, and will tell you much more about it than any number of `about the research' pieces in the newspapers or (god forbid) on people's web logs.
... Now you have done so, you will be familiar with the central conclusion of the piece, expressed by its authors as a quiet understatement:
In this case, the lack of precision does not hinder the clear identication of the major public-health problem in Iraq-- violence.
Very briefly, the way the study was conducted was to conduct surveys of clusters of households randomly assigned to bits of Iraq weighted by population. Each survey asked householders to record deaths of members of the household in a period prior to the invasion of Iraq and in a similar period after the invasion. From these data they estimated the death rate before and after the invasion, and from this formed an estimate of the total number of excess deaths from the invasion.
The authors acknowledge that, under current conditions, Iraq is not an easy country in which to conduct such a survey:
During September, 2004, many roads were not under the control of the Government of Iraq or coalition forces. Local police checkpoints were perceived by team members as target identification screens for rebel groups. To lessen risks to investigators,we sought to minimise travel distances and the number of Governorates to visit,while still sampling from all regions of the country.
-- and the survey certainly isn't as accurate as the ideal which could be expected in a country at peace. The headline figure -- of a conservative estimate of 98,000 deaths due to the war -- is the center of a 95% confidence interval which stretches from 8,000 to 194,000 deaths. (Note that this figure does not include information from Fallujah, an area which has suffered more violence than most and in which it was very difficult to do the survey. Including the figured from Fallujah increases the estimate by about 200,000 but broadens the confidence interval further.)
A number of commentators have argued that this wide uncertainty makes the study worthless. This is nonsense, but it is important to understand what it actually means.
Specifically, under the assumptions of the survey, the authors estimate that there is a 95% chance that the two limiting values they obtain enclose the true number of deaths. Loosely, you can turn this around and regard this as a 95% chance that the true value lies in the interval (and hence a 5% chance that the true number lies outside that interval). Further (if we assume a symmetric distribution, which is plausible), there is a 50% chance that the total number of deaths exceeded 98,000, and a 2.5% chance that it was less than 8,000.
To put this into English, it means `we're not sure exactly how many, but a hell of a lot of people almost certainly died'. Make up your own mind, but in my view the low estimates of the number of dead in Iraq should now be regarded with deep suspicion.
There have been several criticisms of this study, most of them rather silly. Tim Lambert and Daniel Davies on Crooked Timber discuss and rebut a variety of complaints. A few more criticisms should, perhaps, be added:
``I supported the war, and I don't believe that 100,000 people have died. Therefore the study must be wrong or biased or both.''
``100,000 is a lot more than the number of casualties estimated by the Iraq Body Count. Therefore it must be wrong.''
(Hilariously, this criticism seems to come from the same set of people who previously objected to the methodology of the Iraq Body Count people, apparently because they found too many casualties.)
Actually this discrepancy doesn't tell us anything about the relative accuracy of the two studies. The Iraq Body Count is counting civilian deaths reported by the news media, while the Lancet study is estimating the total number of excess deaths caused by the war. This is also the answer to a criticism made by a commenter on Crooked Timber, who wrote,
One criticism that you dont take on here is the observation that 100,000 people in a year and a half is 183 people a day. This would imply that there'd be some days when thousands of extra people died, which would surely have shown up in the news somewhere.
Well, no. That's not how newspapers work. Journalists report events -- they don't go out into the streets to count every dead body, especially when many of those deaths are the indirect consequence of violence. And in the places where violence is going on, there probably aren't a lot of journalists on the streets anyway.
``The pre-war infant mortality rate reported by this study is far below that from other statistics; therefore we can't trust this study.''
This one's much more interesting. The Lancet study reported an infant mortality rate of 29 per 1,000 live births (95% confidence interval 0 -- 64), as compared to a UNICEF estimate of 107 per 1,000 live births. (For comparison, the value for the UK in 2003 is 6 per 1,000 births.)
This suggests that the samples they took were not representative of this segment of the population.
Two immediate comments: firstly, the UNICEF figure has no error estimate, and so is difficult to compare to the new estimate; secondly, the old Iraqi régime may have inflated infant mortality figures to support the argument that sanctions were responsible for a large rise in infant mortality. (I can't justify the latter argument -- it's just a hypothesis; in any case, the Coalition Provisional Authority quoted a similar figure, 108 deaths / 1,000 births, in June this year.)
One other possibility: the researchers counted the numbers of births and deaths among the interviewed samples over a fixed interval. This will only give an accurate estimate of the infant mortality rate if the birth rate doesn't vary substantially (a child who dies during the survey period may have been born before it). However, to explain the discrepancy, a large increase in the birth rate in the immediate pre-war period would be required, and there's no reason to suppose that had happened.
This issue, unlike most of the others, is a bit troubling. But the bulk of the deaths estimated by this study occurred among adults, not children, so -- unless this is evidence for a wider problem -- this doesn't affect the basic conclusion; in any case, the survey compared the households' pre- and post-war circumstances using the same methodology, and it is the ratio of pre- and post-war mortality rates from which the estimate for the total numbers of deaths was derived.
Another source of criticism of this research has been 10 Downing Street. Last Friday, the Official Spokesman complained that,
Firstly, the survey appeared to be based on an extrapolation technique rather than a detailed body count. Our worries centred on the fact that the technique in question appeared to treat Iraq as if every area was one and the same. In terms of the level of conflict, that was definitely not the case. Secondly, the survey appeared to assume that bombing had taken place throughout Iraq. Again, that was not true. It had been focussed primarily on areas such as Fallujah. Consequently, we did not believe that extrapolation was an appropriate technique to use.
This is -- I've searched in vain for a politer way to put it -- crap.
Almost all national-level statistics are based on extrapolation (or, more accurately, sampling). Are we supposed to believe that (say) the Census or (for another example) Government research showing public support for ID cards are worthless because they did not count each individual living person in the country?
The implication that no casualty figures could be accurate unless they are derived from a `detailed body count' is also absurd, especially given that Coalition forces have refused to conduct any such research; in any case, a `body count' would severely underestimate the total number killed -- partly because many bodies will not be recovered (for instance, those killed when bombed buildings collapse), and partly because it's now impossible accurately to count the bodies of those who have already died and been buried.
Further, the survey did not treat `Iraq as if every area was one and the same', as even a cursory inspection of the paper will tell the reader. Similarly, the survey did not `assume that bombing had taken place throughout Iraq'; instead, samples were taken at numerous locations in order to account for the geographical distribution of damage (many of the sampled areas were unbombed, as you would expect). Specifically, as I have remarked, the headline number excludes Fallujah, because of the high concentration of bombing and difficulties of conducting the survey there.
And yesterday, the Official Spokesman was at it again, repeating the same false statements and adding some new stuff to confuse the lobby journalists:
Asked to explain further the Government's previous concerns and doubts about the methodology applied in the ``Lancet'' article about the number of Iraqi deaths, the PMOS replied because it relied on the extrapolation technique assumed, that Iraq was uniform in terms of intensity of conflict. It wasn't. The article also assumed that bombing was general throughout Iraq, which was not the case. The Iraqi Department of Health had issued figures that showed over a 6 month period there were about 3,000 deaths, which was a long way short of the figures quoted in the ``Lancet''. The Iraqi DOH measured those figures by the number of people who came into hospitals throughout Iraq, and it was very difficult to rely on any such figures quoted in the ``Lancet'' with any certainty.
So: the Iraqi Department of Health counted the number of people who came into hospitals and then died. And they got a different figure from a survey which attempted to estimate the total number of people who died, whether in or out of hospital. Quelle fucking surprise. It's -- at the risk of pointing out the obvious -- a war zone! People who get hit by a LASER-guided bomb don't have time to go to hospital before they die! Of course the fucking numbers differ.
What's going on here, then? I am not sure, and indeed am having trouble untangling my cynicism about others' competence from my cynicism about others' honesty. But my best guess: part of this is misdirection -- the idea, I think, being to try to convince journalists who may be too lazy to check the story properly that It's Not Quite As Bad As They Think; as for the rest, well, the charitable explanation is that the Downing Street press office doesn't know any statistics and doesn't know anyone who does. The more cynical explanation is that this is simple and shameful dishonesty, a feeble attempt to discredit a study which suggests that the war against Iraq has killed the very people it was supposed to save by the tens of thousands.
This is one of the most disappointing pieces of government information I've seen since -- not coincidentally -- that crap they put out about `weapons of mass destruction'. A sad business, all in all.
Moving on, many supporters of the war have been embarrassed by this study, apparently because they do not understand what a war is. For the avoidance of doubt, the fact that one hundred thousand people may have been killed as a result of the late unpleasantness does not necessarily mean that the war was a mistake or `wrong', any more than the fact that a third to one half that number were killed in a single day in Dresden in February 1945 made the war against the Nazis a mistake or `wrong'. (Of course, the civilians killed in Dresden were killed deliberately, whereas -- charitably -- most of those killed in Iraq have been killed recklessly.)
It may tell us more about the conduct of the war (is it really a good idea to supress an insurgency by dropping five hundred pound bombs on urban areas, even if they are LASER-guided?); but in my opinion it is more telling that many apologists for the present war -- usually the first people to compare Saddam to Hitler and Iraq in 2003-4 to Germany in 1939-45 -- have confused these two issues. In wars, people die, often by mistake and often in large numbers. The case the war apologists have now to make is not about the exact numbers of deaths -- later, we will better know how many died, but for the moment 98,000 is the best estimate available -- but whether the deaths were necessary.
And, frankly, it doesn't look very good so far, does it?
Lastly, as a brief comment on the conduct of the war, I will draw your attention to this film taken from an F16 flying over Fallujah in April. (Don't pay too much attention to the commentary on that page, but the video is linked from there; sadly it's in the proprietary -- and rubbish -- Microsoft `Media Player' format, but `xine' will play it.)
Channel 4 News covered this footage, which shows a pilot guiding a bomb towards a building, presumably under instructions from a forward air controller on the ground. While the bomb is falling, a crowd of people appears in the street adjacent to the building and the pilot asks whether he should direct the bomb onto them. The person on the ground tells him to, and he does.
There is some controversy about whether the people bombed -- from a rough count there are thirty to forty people on the video -- were combatants or not. You can read about that in the sites I've linked to. That's not what I want to draw your attention to, though. Here are some frame grabs from the video (lousy quality, sorry). First, a general view from before the crowd emerges, to give a sense of scale:
Note cross-hair, showing the original target of the bomb, designated by a LASER shining from the 'plane onto the ground. The pointing of the LASER can be changed as the bomb is falling, allowing the target of the bomb to be altered. The street in the center of the picture is quite wide -- about 40 meters, judging from the size of the people in the second picture, and it is surrounded by two- and three-storey buildings.
Here is the crowd of people. By this stage the pilot of the 'plane is steering the bomb towards them. For those who can't play the video, the dialogue between the pilot and ground controller ran,
Pilot: I got numerous individuals on the road. Do you want me to take those out?
(As an aside, remember that the controller on the ground may have a much better view of proceedings than the pilot -- these people may have been running towards his position shooting at him, for instance, and we would not be able to tell that from the video.)
Note the counter at the lower right of the picture, reading `000:11' -- that is the time before the bomb hits the ground.
And here is the cloud of debris about a second after the explosion.
Bearing in mind the width of the street and the nature of the surrounding area, consider this:
Most everything will be severely damaged, injured, destroyed, or killed within 20 meters of a 500-pound bomb blast....
Safe distances for unprotected troops are approximately 1,000 meters for 2000-pound bombs and 500 meters for 500-pound ones. Even protected troops are not entirely safe within 240 meters of a 2,000-pound bomb or 220 meters of a 500-pound bomb.
During the war proper -- before the `Mission Accomplished' stunt -- the Americans dropped about 18,000 guided bombs. (This ignores a further 10,000 or so `dumb' bombs.) As a brief estimation exercise, if all of those were dropped in urban areas with a population density of 5,000/km² (probably an underestimate), then for a uniform distribution of targets we'd expect around 100,000 casualties from bombs with a 20-meter lethal radius. That's certainly an overestimate (even the US Air Force no longer bombs at random) but the order of magnitude is... suggestive.
This is all done with wwwitter.
Copyright (c) Chris Lightfoot; available under a Creative Commons License. Comments, if any, copyright (c) contributors and available under the same license.