Sunday, February 24, 2008

Stuff Happens...

Not to ruin the Oscar weekend, but Opinion Research Business (ORB) group, a market research company based in England has confirmed their earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003.

Methodology: Over the 2,160 respondents who answered the questionnaire, 20% said that there had been at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict which started in 2003. Within these households the average number of deaths was 1.26 people. The last complete census in Iraq conducted in 1997 indicated a total of 4,050,597 households. Based on this our data suggests a total of 1,033,239 deaths since March 2003.

Revised Casualty data here (word document).

Maybe these numbers are way off, like sampling errors inherent in most statistical interpolations. Even assuming that they are off by 50% (a very high error rate), the numbers are still staggeringly high - half a million human beings slaughtered.

1 comment:

Sujith said...

WOW! Is there something wrong with slaughtering human beings when there is nothing wrong with slaughtering animals, and guess what human beings are social animals. That would be the answer to this by the super powers.