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Originally Posted by Bluesman
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Outstanding! I am getting very close to doing my victory dance, but please keep punching. I was so hoping you would throw this one at me. You were very quick to post the link, I'm curious, did you read it, and check the references and so on?
One of the "experts" Kane sought the opinion of, and thanked in his paper was Tim Lambert. If you had checked the references, you would know that Tim Lambert completely trashed Kane's poor analysis. He can put it better than I:
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Here’s what I hope is a simple explanation. Suppose you are counting the average occupancy of cars on a freeway. You look at many cars as they pass and count the occupants and divide by the number of cars. You happen to do this on a weekday during rush hour. You can get the average number of occupants and the variance around that average, from which you can make an estimate of the average occupancy of all cars. No problemo.
You repeat that experiment on a weekend day, and there are more families in cars so the average occupancy happens to go up. However, just by chance, a bus comes by filled with weekend tourists.
The bus is Falluja. The Roberts team made two estimates, one including the bus, and one excluding the bus, and concentrated on the one excluding the bus; then concluded that even if you exclude the bus the average occupancy on weekends went up.
David Kane argues that, according to a model that treats the bus as if it were a car you find two things: 1) the average occupancy on weekends goes up, but 2) the variance goes up so fast that you can no longer exclude the possibility that the average occupancy during weekends went down even though all of your observations went up. In fact, David Kane’s model is so weird that it does not exclude the possibility that the average occupancy of all weekend cars is negative.
Most of us are saying that a model that allows for negative average occupancy is not a good model and should not be used to estimate the difference between the average occupancy on weekdays and weekends. But here’s the kicker: David Kane isn’t just saying that the Roberts team should have included the bus. He’s charging that the Roberts team excluded the bus (i.e., Falluja) because they wanted to hide the fact that, using his weird model that they didn’t use, you couldn’t exclude the possibility that the average car occupancy on weekends dropped.
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So even the experts that Kane relies on for his "analysis" completely disagree with him.
You remind me of an overweight prize fighter. You swing some big punches, hoping for the easy knockout, but when youre opponent out-classes you, you tiredly slog on, trying to delay your inevitable defeat.
Loving it.
I'll warm up for my victory dance now. I just need to find my "I just kicked a neocon's ass" T-Shirt.