Criticisms of Meadow's Law
Critics of Meadow's law state that it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics, particularly relating to probability, likelihood, and statistical independence.
At the trial in 1999 of solicitor Sally Clark, accused of murdering her two sons, Meadow testified that the odds against two such deaths happening naturally was 73,000,000:1, a figure which he obtained by squaring the observed ratio of births to cot-deaths in affluent non-smoking families (approximately 8,500:1).
This caused an uproar amongst professional statisticians, whose criticisms were twofold:
Read more about this topic: Meadow's Law
Famous quotes containing the words criticisms of, criticisms, meadow and/or law:
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“We are a meadow where the bees hum:
mind and body are almost one”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)