Fact Or Crap?

Last night I was playing the game "Fact Or Crap?", which is a lot of fun.

And now I've taken a quick read of the anti-nuclear propaganda regarding Fukushima fallout which I posted on yesterday.

Crap.

It's just one big ecologic fallacy, where the match an arbitrary time frame with an increase in death rates (these are voluntary, and differences could account for the increase) represent  in a particular area (if you look, you can find an increase in death rates somewhere).  They then extrapolate this data for the entire U.S. population, even though the entire U.S. didn't exhibit the actual increase in death rate.

The authors make no attempt to discover or discuss possible causes besides fallout.

This is the type of "study" one can perform from their home office as they attempt to assemble data to fit a conclusion one would like to publish.   In real science, we follow real individuals, measure estimate the doses each individual receives, match against unexposed cohorts, and look for statistically significant differences in disease rate.

It's not worth the time to get into validating the specific numbers which may be accurate since the overall "study" design is so poor.