Return To Math Basics Urged

I meant to highlight it last month when a panel of Math experts recommended that schools abandon "New Math" and return to teaching Math basics. Tim Blair (curtsy: ninme) chronicles the urgency of this reform by taking apart a preposterous study.

The actual number of Iraqi deaths recorded in Lancet’s latest study is just 547.
Extrapolating from that figure, the study’s authors estimate: "... that as of July, 2006, there have been 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war."
Let’s put Lancet’s number in perspective:
* It is larger than the total number of Americans killed during combat in every major conflict, from the Revolutionary War to the first Gulf War.
* It is more than double the combined number of civilians killed in the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
* It is a larger number than were killed in Germany during five years (and 955,044 tons) of WWII bombing.
Remember: Lancet came up with this via a survey that identified precisely 547 deaths (as reported by the New York Times).

Or, as he puts it in a later post:

Lancet’s number of documented deaths in Iraq, upon which the respected medical journal based its Iraqi mortality study, is but a mere 0.0835% of Lancet‘s estimated post-invasion death total. The “estimate” part of Lancet’s equation is 99.9%.

Yes, but remember: with New Math, the idea is the important thing.