RE: Bernie's original post raising the "reward" to $2500

[BERNARD L COHEN <blc+@PITT.EDU>]

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, John Jacobus wrote:



> Do other epidemiologist disagree with your

> conclusions?  What have been the results of your other

> award offers?



	--My conclusions are being evaluated by an NCRP committee with an

Epidemiologist as chairman.

	No one has ever applied for any of my reward offers. I hope people

understand the reason for my reward offers, as taken from the following

message posted in 1997:



What I need very badly is suggestions for not implausible specific

potential explanations for our discrepancy, in at least semi-quantitative

numerical terms, on which I can carry out calculations to determine if

they can resolve it, or can be modified to resolve it. As a possible

example, one might suggest that urban people smoke more frequently and for

unrelated reasons have lower radon exposures than rural people, both of

which are true. What I need is data for each of our 1601 counties on which

to do calculations to see if they resolve our discrepancy. You can make-up

the data, as long as you consider them to be not implausible. Since I need

these made-up data for each of the 1601 counties, it might be most

practical to give me a prescription for deriving these data. For example

you might say that the radon exposure for a rural person is x% higher than

for an urban person and an urban person is y% more likely to smoke than a

rural person. Since I know the average radon level in each county, the

fraction of people in each county who are urban and rural and the fraction

that smoke, I can then determine the predicted lung cancer rate in each

county from BEIR-IV for various values of x and y, and make comparisons

with the data.

 The only problem with this example is that I reported calculations

based on it in Section L of my paper and it did very little to reduce our

discrepancy. But you might not agree on how I did the calculation and

suggest an alternative method, or you can suggest some alternative

prescription for making up the data, perhaps utilizing random numbers or

anything else you can think of that will allow me to do calculations. Or

you can just present me with tables of numbers that you consider to be not

implausible.



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