I focused on “civilians” in this post, because I was interested particularly in the claims about 30 civilians being the cut off on the amount of collateral damage allowed before a sign off from someone higher on the chain of command is required.

The major point was, you can find a couple dozen articles on “x militants killed” for any number for X that you choose. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing unique about 30 in that regard.

Aren’t militants and civilians, at least ostensibly, different categories?

I am by no means any sort of statistician — I wouldn’t trust the reliability of that graph to show anything beyond a lack of support for the “30 deaths” rumor going around. At this point I’m inclined to say that, if anything, there is only a very small effect happening, with strikes killing 31 or 32 people being reported as 30. It is just way too easy to cherry pick news stories that report N deaths, so I don’t think the long lists of military operations that kill exactly 30 people have any significance.

I still wonder a little about the 7 result, though. It is high enough where I am not sure it can be dismissed as coincidence, but I can’t think of any possible significance it might have, aside from some quirk in how Google results are tallied.

I’ve posted about your graph at my livejournal, and there’s some discussion of whether the number of google hits gives meaningful information.