100,000 Iraqi Civilians have died in current war

[Schrodinger's Cat]

Originally Posted by Beestie

Why would someone use "sampling techniques" instead of an actual body count? Besides, statistics should only be applied to recurring events as they tend to zero in on the liklihood of an outcome over a number of observations.

I think, for example, there is more than a 99% confidence interval that the winning lottery ticket was not, in fact, a winner. Over time, the "99% of the time the ticket will not be a winner" conclusion will be proven correct. But you can't take an average and apply it to a single observation. At best, its meaningless and at worst, its very misleading.

Its been my experience that when stats meets politics, hold your nose.

The pentagon refuses to do a civilian body count. A body count which comes from an Iraqi source would be automatically suspect. Thus, it was left to a highly respected researcher from an American university to investigate the true number of civilian deaths in the war.

In case you haven't noticed, private Americans are not exactly welcome these days in Iraq. Thus, westerners cannot just show up at Iraqi funeral homes and ask them how many war dead they are burying today. Even the Iraqi's who helped gather the data were frightened if it got out that they were working for an American researcher. Death certificates were requested (and supplied 63% of the time) of those households which answered positively to having a war inflicted death among its members in the past year.

I think possibly you are misunderstanding the principles of statistics. I"ll buy that lottery ticket which has a 95% chance of being a winner since you don't want it.

As for where are all the dead bodies? They buried them.