Mailman, tomo,
apologies for misattributing Mailman's Letby item last week to tomo. Bit of a Fawlty Towers thing.

.,
Good article, and the bit you quoted was the highlight for me too.

tomo,
The UK does seem to be a particularly serious basket case. Could be because you've already had your regime change (Benny Hill to warden Hodges) and are stuck with this mob for another four years. Canada and Australia have elections coming up and, (as an item of trivia that may have slipped by unnoticed) the USA appears to be waking up from a bad dream.

Here's an article that you might say puts the most positive spin on the COVID debacle. I.e. that the massive overreach has prepared the way for some Trumpian upheaval.

First time I've seen that point made. A different point I've seen a few times elsewhere is that four years in the wilderness allowed Trump's plans to gestate.

So one calamity prepared the people. Another calamity prepared the man. Two wrongs make a right?

Enjoyed the recent Econtalk with Daisy Christodoulou. It started with the effects of introducing video assistance for the referee in football games. The idea was to improve the accuracy of rulings, but the result was not so positive. The most graphic was stifling the spontaneous roar of the crowd when a goal is scored — the pause while the video is reviewed means no great roar, even if the goal is awarded.

The bit I liked best was how the hand-ball rule grew to 11x as many words, trying to turn the subjective definition into something that could be applied to a frame-by-frame video viewing. Reminded me of that Star Trek episode where they were in the holodeck, reproducing the table from Riker's dream. How many words would it *really* take to describe something in full detail?

There were quite a few other fun things in the talk (not all football-related). I'll be listening to it a second time.

“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,”

Can we borrow Russel Vought and set him to work on Whitehall ?

A Telegraph tale from the USA.

tomo,
I think it has become worse over time. At least there's an arguable proposition that it was just police laziness in the Evans/Christie case. But now, from the Letby Wikipedia entry:

During their investigation, Cheshire Police contacted Professor Jane Hutton, an expert in medical statistics, and signed a consultancy agreement with her. However, the Crown Prosecution Service instructed the police to drop this line of inquiry and Hutton's planned analysis never took place.

Mailman,
Agreed. Point was that the £200,000 would have meant far fewer people taking it further. It would still leave quite a pool of money to settle the deeply injured. The £75,000 offer meant a *lot* more people took it further. One way the money goes to the victims, the other way, it largely ends up in the pockets of lawyers.

tomo,
Abuse of medical statistics in legal cases? Say it isn't so! It feels no more than 25 years since Sally Clark was convicted on the back of some outrageous statistical ignorance.

We can be thankful the law always gets it right eventually, with occasional casualties along the way.

Sad to see that Sally Clark died from alcohol poisoning in 2007. Didn't know that.

I suppose the DOGE team has enough work ahead of it in the USA. Nice to fantasise about borrowing them to debulk Australia's bureaucracy.

Things that make you go hmmmmm...where else has statistics been abused to support a conclusion favoured by "scientists"??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAOjeSUZeq8

Statics in the Letby case.

Robert

yeah, dividing the "establishment" quoted amount by number of possible participants has been a tic of mine for a long time.

Process is the punishment some say....

Robbo,

I suspect that for those who lost their businesses, homes, marriages, friendships, family etc that 200k wouldn't even scratch the surface.

I wonder how many people took the 75k payout to avoid the scrutiny with having to relive everything while justifying every single cost to the exact decimal place? And I wonder if we will ever see the numbers of costs proposed by the claimants vs costs paid out after going through the scheme?

Sunlight is what is required. We need sunlight to shine a light on the true scale of the disaster this was! And prison sentences. Sunlight AND prison sentences!!