survey
sb admin | September 17, 2007 We want your opinion!
This survey attempts to access the opinions of bloggers, blog-readers, and non-blog folk in regards to the impact of blogs on the outside world. The authors of the survey (from ScienceBlogs.com) are completing an academic manuscript on the impact of science blogging and this survey will provide invaluable data to answer the following questions:
Who reads or writes blogs?
What are the perceptions of blogging, and what are the views of those who read blogs?
How do academics and others perceive science blogging?
What, if any, influence does science blogging have on…
tlambert | June 13, 2006Jim Lindgren has two posts about John Lott. First, on Lott's lawsuit against Levitt he concludes:
I think that Freakonomics is misleading in its juxtaposition of different studies, a juxtaposition that might bring one to conclude that the reason that the main More Guns, Less Crime research was not usually replicated in other studies is that there was some chance that a study was never done. Yet, to the extent that Lott's lawsuit is based on a failure to replicate being per se defamatory, I would think he has a difficult chance of winning.
I don't see the juxtaposition as particularly…
tlambert | December 17, 2005Stephen Dubner reports that Freakonomics is the 7th best-selling book for 2005. According to Nielsen BookScan, it is has sold 584,000 copies so far this year.
Freakonomics discusses the survey that Lott claims to have conducted in 1997, but that he appears to have fabricated. Lott says that eight Chicago university students made the phone calls for him. So why hasn't one of these students read Freakonomics and come forward to prove that Lott conducted a survey? You would think that students (or former students) from Chicago would be particularly likely to have read the book since Levitt is…
tlambert | August 2, 2005Under the title "Academics drag feet on giving out data" Lott quotes extensively from an article about the hockey stick by Steve Milloy. One part Lott doesn't quote is this:
Well, a scientist's refusal to provide colleagues with his data and methodology is suspicious.
Now, Milloy is being deceitful by implying that Mann, Bradley and Hughes hadn't published their data and methodology when they had already done so, but it is true that refusing to provide data and methodology is suspicious. As done by, to pick a name at random, John Lott. I guess that if Mann had claimed to have lost the data…
tlambert | March 11, 2005 When people raise questions about the mysterious 1997 survey, Lott's standard line of defence is: "the survey was replicated, and I obtained very similar results."
So how similar are the results? Well, Lott claims that the 2002 survey gave a 95% brandishing number, quite close to the 98% he claims he found in 1997. However, the 2002 survey does not give a 95% number and is too small for the number to be reliable.
Very little attention has been paid to the other result that Lott claims comes from his 2002 survey---an estimate that there were 2.3…
tlambert | December 7, 2004 In an email to a poster at The High Road forum Lott writes
"The actual data has been available on one of my websites at www.johnlott.org since February 2003. The Appendix of my book, The Bias Against Guns, goes through and discusses the data in depth. I talk about how the survey was done, the questions used in the survey, who did the survey, how it was weighted, etc. there. The www.johnlott.org website also has some downloads discussing the survey debate in general.
On this last point, Lambert has been extremely dishonest. For example, he has a long list of surveys but he lists the date…
tlambert | September 14, 2004 It has now been two years since I asked him for evidence that he had conducted a survey. The original email is here. In all that time, the only evidence for a survey that he has been able to come up with is David Gross's story.
tlambert | May 2, 2004 Last December I examined a posting by John Ray who dismissed ozone depletion as a "Greenie scare" using facts he seemed to have just made up by himself. Now he's back, attacking gun control. This time he's not using facts that he made up---he's using facts that Lott made up. He quotes from a review of More Guns, Less Crime by Thomas Jackson: "How strange it must be to be a liberal. Driven by slogans, blinded by superstitions, dazzled by fantasies, the liberal stumbles through life oblivious to facts. There is almost nothing the liberal thinks he…
tlambert | November 9, 2003 Lott is at it again. In a Tech Central Station column he claims: Over 90 percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon stops an attack.
I suppose we should be glad that rather than his 98% estimate based on a fictional survey, or his 95% estimate based on a survey that gives a different number, Lott is now advancing a number that actually comes from a survey that was really carried out. Unfortunately, his 90% number is based on a sample size of just seven gun users. This sample size is too small to produce any meaningful estimate, and it is…
tlambert | September 23, 2003 In a review of The Bias Against Guns, Pat Buchanan claims that Kleck's survey found that 11 out of every 12 times citizens use their guns in self-defense, they merely brandish them or fire a warning shot.
and that this was "confirmed" by Lott: Brandishing a gun stops crime 95 percent of the time, Lott learned.
Buchanan doesn't seemed to have noticed that Lott's 95% brandishing number, far from confirming Kleck, contradicts Kleck's 11/12. Buchanan also got the number from Kleck wrong. Kleck found that 84% involved brandishing or a warning shot and…
tlambert | September 19, 2003 Over at the History News Network, a die hard Bellesiles supporter who posts under the name "Benny Smith" has attacked James Lindgren for, get this, his "ill-fated attempt to defend" Lott. Here's Smith's version of what happened: After serious questions arose regarding a survey that Lott claimed to have done, Lindgren interviewed "at length" a man who claimed to have been interviewed by Lott for the survey. Lindgren pronounced him credible and the Washington Times in a follow-up article credited Lindgren when it said the matter of whether…
tlambert | September 14, 2003It has now been one year since I asked him for evidence that he had conducted a survey. The original email is here.
tlambert | September 2, 2003Otis Dudley Duncan has sent me some comments on the attempts by pro-gun folks to dismiss criticism of Lott as some sort of payback for Bellesiles:
I have gone out of my way to remark that the Bellesiles case is not helpful for evaluating Lott's work. My statement is in section 4 of the essay on Lott and surveys on your site.
Moreover, while I may have heard rumors about Bellesiles' writing earlier, I am willing to testify under oath that the first thing of his I read was his article in Guns in America: A Reader, ed. by Jan E. Dizard et al. (1999). This was after my considerable…
tlambert | August 14, 2003 Lott has a letter in the 26 July Columbus Dispatch replying to an earlier letter from Paul van Doorn. Lott repeats his claim from his 21 July letter: Yet, in the very same issue, another paper appeared by professors Plassmann and Whitley, who examined three additional years' worth of data and found "annual reductions in murder rates between 1.5 and 2.3 percent for each additional year that a right-to-carry law is in effect. The total benefit from reduced crimes usually ranges between about $2 billion and $3 billion per year."
Once more he pretends that he never miscoded his data…
tlambert | July 3, 2003Science has printed a letter from Lott (subscription required) responding to Science's editorial suggesting that the AEI should deal with Lott the same way that Emory dealt with Bellesiles: Donald Kennedy's editorial "Research fraud and public policy" (18 April, p. 393) alleges that I made up a computer hard disk crash when challenged about the loss of data on a 1997 survey. Unfortunately, Science did not contact me about these allegations. I have provided editors with statements from nine different academics, verifying the hard disk crash. Four of them were coauthors who also lost data with…
tlambert | June 13, 2003Lott has an interview on strike-the-root.com. He repeats some of the false claims discussed here earlier, such as his claim of a 440% increase in handgun crime in Sydney. He also claims: Ninety-five percent or so of the time, simply brandishing a gun was sufficient to stop an attack.
It is appalling that rather than admit to being wrong, Lott continues to spread false information about what works when defending yourself with a gun. Thiscould actually endanger people's lives by giving them false impressions about what works and what doesn't work. John Lott, on radio…
tlambert | June 8, 2003Tom Spencer thinks that the latest information on David Gross might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
tlambert | June 5, 2003The Minneapolis Star Tribune has a story about David Gross, who, after all this time, is the only witness to Lott's 1997 survey who has ever been found: A major player and legal consultant on Minnesota's new gun-permit law is a former board member of the National Rifle Association who was fired from the Minneapolis city attorney's office for opposing gun buy-back programs and carrying a gun to work.
He also acknowledges shooting a deer in his back yard in St. Louis Park with a .357-caliber Magnum handgun for eating his raspberries, pointing a rifle at a…
tlambert | May 30, 2003David Glenn's article on academic blogging in the Chronicle of Higher Education mentions the role of blogs in the investigation of Lott's conduct.
William Sjostrom writes "Lott always releases his data." But Lott has not released the data for his 1997 survey.
tlambert | May 13, 2003[Note: This is a copy of a document found at this link on John Lott's website on May 13, 2003. I have added critical commentry, written in italics like this. Tim Lambert ]
With some recent attacks on me in a variety of places from the Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune to numerous other places, I thought that I should send out some responses for those who might be interested.
A) There have been many claims that I didn't conduct a survey in 1997 that was reported in one sentence on page 3 of my book, More Guns, Less Crime. In the attached MSWord file, I present the complete statements…