Am I the Last Person to Learn Mick Jaggers Mouth has Shrunken?
To the editor: I am disappointed that the Minnesota Star-Tribune appears to have chosen to syndicate Mr. Fumento’s science column. While his dated Mick Jagger and Baghdad Bob references may entertain some of your readership, his transparent innumeracy can only misinform and mislead. To highlight a few of the more egregious examples with which the column is riddled: 1) Fumento asserts that the study’s author’s [sic] “split the difference” between the endpoints of the confidence interval as if any intervening value were equally likely. This utterly mischaracterizes the nature of statistical estimation and seriously misleads your readers. 2) Fumento asserts the researchers may have pre-determined the outcome “by cherry-picking”. However, the paper delineates the sampling method explicitly (see endnote). This patently misleads readers about the rigorousness of the study. 3) Fumento claims that Iraq’s baseline death rate of 5 per 1,000 must be inaccurate, because it is below the US rate. He
