On Thu, 07 Jan 1999 23:27:40 GMT, csmkersh@flash.net (Sam A. Kersh)
wrote:

>mcculloch@mail.utexas.edu (Jim McCulloch) wrote:
>
>>.............all of Jim's rantings deleted.................
>
>From Cook, Ludwig & Hemenway:
>INSIGHTS
>Journal of Policy Analysis and Management
>Vol 16, No. 3
>pages 463-469
>1997

snippage

>            .... Kleck's and Gertz's DGU estimates do not
>	 appear to be artifacts of any particular computational or
>	 weighting decisions made in their analysis.  It there is any
>	 problem here, it is intrinsic to the method.."

Your quote from this article  is totally dishonest, Sam, assuming you
read the article.  The most charitable thing I can say, is that you
may not have read the rest of Cook, et al.'s article at all.  If you
had read it, you would have discovered that they made  the same
criticisms of Kleck as I did.  The rest of the article, after the last
sentence you quote above, is devoted to showing that there *is* in
fact a problem, and it is precisely *intrinsic to the method* employed
by Kleck.  The problem, of course, is the false positive problem, and
they devote extensive discussion to the their argument that the
problem is real, and that it "swamps the truth" in Kleck's survey, and
surveys like his.

Best regards,

--Jim McCulloch