ABSTRACT
This paper is a good example of a project that produced something that none of us could have done alone.
Beth Osborne Daponte is a demographer who had been working at the Census Bureau before she came to Carnegie Mellon. At the Census Bureau, she had the job of producing population estimates for Iraq. Since this was just after the First Gulf War, this entailed estimating the civilian and military casualties of that war. Her estimates were higher than those of the Defense Department and enraged Dick Chaney, then President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense. After an acrimonious fight involving human rights organizations, lawyers and various levels of the federal bureaucracy, she came to CMU.
