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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (599252)	1/30/2011 4:18:17 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572777

Re: John Lott "John Lott's Unethical Conduct Posted on: February 1, 2009 11:47 PM, by Tim Lambert John Lott is embroiled in several controversial affairs: * he almost certainly fabricated a mysterious survey and certainly behaved unethically in making claims for which he had no supporting data * he presented results purporting to show that "more guns" led to "less crime" when those results were the product of coding errors * he pretended to be a woman called "Mary Rosh" on the internet in order to praise his own research and accuse his critics of fraud. * he probably was the person who anonymously accused Steve Levitt of being "rabidly antigun" The Mysterious Survey John Lott has claimed that he conducted a survey over three months in 1997 that found that in 98% of defensive gun uses the defender merely has to brandish the gun to break off an attack. It is almost certain that he never did a survey because: * nine published surveys give numbers ranging from 21% to 67% as to how often defenders shoot, far more than the 2% Lott claims * Lott claims that his survey found defenders firing in 2 out of 28 cases, which is 7%, not 2%. Nor is it possible that the weighting scheme Lott now claims to have used turned 7% into 2%. * no evidence that Lott ever conducted such a survey can be found * Lott has repeatedly changed his story about the source of the 98% figure, variously attributing it to "national surveys" and some particular polls, only publishing the story about the survey in 2000. * Lott made the 98% claim on Feb 6, 1997, well before his survey was completed. * Lott changed his story about the survey. * Despite extensive coverage on the net, in many papers such as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post, an ad in the alumni magazine and in the best-selling book Freakonomics, none of the eight students Lott claims conducted the survey have been heard from. * Lott claims to have "replicated" his survey with a new one that gives 95% brandishing, when in fact the new survey found only seven gun users (one of whom fired), far too small a sample to yield a meaningful brandishing number. (And if you correct his arithmetic you get 91% anyway.) * Lott was caught lying when he claimed "I have not participated in the firearms discussion group nor in the apparent online newsgroup discussions". Best writing by bloggers on this is by Marie Gryphon, Kieran Healy and Mark Kleiman. Best articles by journalists are those by Tim Noah and Michelle Malkin. An annotated copy of Lott's response to Malkin is here. More details about the problems with Lott's claims are here. Also recommended are Otis Dudley Duncan's comments on scientific ethics and on Lott and surveys. All of my posts on the mysterious survey. Coding errors in More Guns, Less Crime data In 1998, John Lott published a book entitled More Guns, Less Crime. In that book he presented statistical evidence that concealed-carry laws were associated with lower crime rates. My critique of his book is here. In 2002, Ian Ayres and John Donohue analysed a more extensive data set and found that, if anything, concealed carry laws lead to more crime. Lott responded with a new analysis that he claimed confirmed the "more guns, less crime" hypothesis. Ayres and Donohue's response (April 2003) was devastating—Lott's data contained numerous coding errors that, when corrected, eliminated the results and, this was the second time these sort of errors had been found in Lott's data scienceblogs.com

To: TimF who wrote (599252)	1/30/2011 4:23:01 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Respond to of 1572777

John Lott discredited by Michelle Malkin Michelle Malkin The other Lott controversy "For those few of us in the mainstream media who openly support Second Amendment rights, research scholar John Lott has been -- or rather, had been -- an absolute godsend. Armed with top-notch credentials (including stints at Stanford, Rice, UCLA, Wharton, Cornell, the University of Chicago and Yale), Lott took on the entrenched anti-gun bias of the ivory tower with seemingly meticulous scholarship. His best-selling 1998 book, More Guns, Less Crime, provided analysis of FBI crime data that showed a groundbreaking correlation between concealed-weapons laws and reduced violent crime rates. I met Lott briefly after a seminar at the University of Washington in Seattle several years ago and was deeply impressed by his intellectual rigor. Lott responded directly and extensively to critics' arguments. He made his data accessible to many other researchers. But as he prepares to release a new book, Bias Against Guns, next month, Lott must grapple with an emerging controversy -- brought to the public eye by the blogosphere -- that goes to the heart of his academic integrity. The most disturbing charge, first raised by retired University of California, Santa Barbara professor Otis Dudley Duncan and pursued by Australian computer programmer Tim Lambert, is that Lott fabricated a study claiming that 98 percent of defensive gun uses involved mere brandishing, as opposed to shooting. When Lott cited the statistic peripherally on page three of his book, he attributed it to "national surveys." In the second edition, he changed the citation to "a national survey that I conducted." He has also incorrectly attributed the figure to newspaper polls and Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck. Last fall, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren volunteered to investigate the claimed existence of Lott's 1997 telephone survey of 2,424 people. "I thought it would be exceedingly simple to establish" that the research had been done, Lindgren wrote in his report (posted online here). It was not simple. Lott claims to have lost all of his data due to a computer crash. He financed the survey himself and kept no financial records. He has forgotten the names of the students who allegedly helped with the survey and who supposedly dialed thousands of survey respondents long-distance from their own dorm rooms using survey software Lott can't identify or produce. Assuming the survey data was lost in a computer crash, it is still remarkable that Lott could not produce a single, contemporaneous scrap of paper proving the survey's existence, such as the research protocol or survey instrument. After Lindgren's report was published, a Minnesota gun rights activist named David Gross came forward, claiming he was surveyed in 1997. Some have said that Gross's account proves that the survey was done. I think skepticism is warranted. Lott now admits he used a fake persona, "Mary Rosh," to post voluminous defenses of his work over the Internet. "Rosh" gushed that Lott was "the best professor that I ever had." She/he also penned an effusive review of More Guns, Less Crime on Amazon.com: "It was very interesting reading and Lott writes very well." (Lott claims that one of his sons posted the review in "Rosh's" name.) Just last week, "Rosh" complained on a blog comment board: "Critics such as Lambert and Lindgren ought to slink away and hide." By itself, there is nothing wrong with using a pseudonym. But Lott's invention of Mary Rosh to praise his own research and blast other scholars is beyond creepy. And it shows his extensive willingness to deceive to protect and promote his work. Some Second Amendment activists believe there is an anti-gun conspiracy to discredit Lott as "payback" for the fall of Michael Bellesiles, the disgraced former Emory University professor who engaged in rampant research fraud to bolster his anti-gun book, Arming America. But it wasn't an anti-gun zealot who unmasked Rosh/Lott. It was Internet blogger Julian Sanchez, a staffer at the libertarian Cato Institute, which staunchly defends the Second Amendment. And it was the conservative Washington Times that first reported last week on the survey dispute in the mainstream press. In an interview Monday, Lott stressed that his new defensive gun use survey (whose results will be published in the new book) will show similar results to the lost survey. But the existence of the new survey does not lay to rest the still lingering doubts about the old survey's existence. The media coverage of the 1997 survey data dispute, Lott told me, is "a bunch to do about nothing." I wish I could agree." townhall.com