442 results for search: Stories and Videos on News cleantalkorg2.ru bbc news american news online news today in the world World News The New York Times World News Share Market
The task is a quantum of workflow
This post describes how we organize our work over ten years, twenty analysts, dozens of countries, and hundreds of projects: we start with a task. A task is a single chunk of work, a quantum of workflow. Each task is self-contained and self-documenting; I'll talk about these ideas at length below. We try to keep each task as small as possible, which makes it easy to understand what the task is doing, and how to test whether the results are correct.
In the example I'll describe here, I'm going to describe work from our Syria database matching project, which includes about 100 tasks. I'll start with the first thing we do with files we receive ...
How We Choose Projects
For more than 20 years, HRDAG has been carving out a niche in the international human rights movement. We know what we’re good at and what we’re not qualified to do. We know what quantitative questions we think are important for the community, and we know what we like to do. These preferences guide us as we consider whether to take on a project. We’re scientists, so our priorities will come as no surprise. We like to stick to science (not ideology), avoid advocacy, answer quantifiable questions, and increase our scientific understanding.
While we have no hard-and-fast rules about what projects to take on, we organize our deliberation ...
Scanning Documents to Uncover Police Violence
Administrative paperwork generated by police departments can hold evidence of police violence, but can present unique challenges for data processing.
Humanitarian Statistics
In late 2006, a statistical study of deaths that occurred after the invasion of Iraq ignited a storm of controversy. This Lancet study estimated that more than 650,000 additional Iraqis died during the invasion than would have at pre-invasion death rates, a vastly higher estimate than any previous. But in January, a World Health Organization study placed the number at about 150,000.
India
In 2009, as Indians debated institutional reform of their security forces in the wake of the previous year's Mumbai attacks, HRDAG issued a groundbreaking report about the human cost of suspending the rule of law during a violent counterinsurgency campaign in the Indian state of Punjab. Together with our partner Ensaaf, HRDAG released findings that cast substantial doubt on the Indian government's past explanations and justifications for disappearances and extrajudicial killings during the height of the Punjab counterinsurgency in the early 1990s. These findings contribute to an increasing body of knowledge that informs policy questions about the ...
Welcoming Our 2019 Human Rights Intern
Trina Reynolds-Tyler is HRDAG's 2019 Human Rights Intern.
Reflections: A Meaningful Partnership between HRDAG and Benetech
I joined the Benetech Human Rights Program at essentially the same time that HRDAG did, coming to Benetech from years of analyzing data for large companies in the transportation, hospitality and retail industries. But the data that HRDAG dealt with was not like the data I was familiar with, and I was fascinated to learn about how they used the data to determine "who did what to whom." Although some of the methodologies were similar to what I had experience with in the for-profit sector, the goals and beneficiaries of the analyses were very different.
At Benetech, I was initially predominantly focused on product management for Martus, a free ...
Contact Us
You may contact us via info @ hrdag.org or use this form.
Would you like to receive our newsletter?
Great! Please sign up here.
Find us on Mastodon
Follow HRDAG on Mastodon.
Employment with HRDAG
Please keep in touch by signing up for our newsletters and following us on Twitter @hrdag or Mastodon.
If you do not see a job listed here, please do not send your CV or résumé, as we do not file or save them, and we will only have to send you a sad “no thank you” letter.
Volunteering with HRDAG
Are you interested in volunteering your time to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group? We’re very flattered—but at this time we’re ...
A better statistical estimation of known Syrian war victims
Researchers from Rice University and Duke University are using the tools of statistics and data science in collaboration with Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) to accurately and efficiently estimate the number of identified victims killed in the Syrian civil war.
…
Using records from four databases of people killed in the Syrian war, Chen, Duke statistician and machine learning expert Rebecca Steorts and Rice computer scientist Anshumali Shrivastava estimated there were 191,874 unique individuals documented from March 2011 to April 2014. That’s very close to the estimate of 191,369 compiled in 2014 by HRDAG, a nonprofit that helps build scientifically defensible, evidence-based arguments of human rights violations.
Death rate in Habre jails higher than for Japanese POWs, trial told
Patrick Ball of the California-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group said he had calculated the mortality rate of political prisoners from 1985 to 1988 using reports completed by Habre’s feared secret police.
Welcoming Our 2021-2022 Human Rights and Data Science Intern
Larry Barrett has joined HRDAG as a Human Rights and Data Science Intern until February, 2022.
The Statistics of Mortality Due to Conflict in Peru
A key point is that human rights data collection prior to the TRC largely ignored violence by the Shining Path.
Reality and Risk in Our Mortality Study of the Peruvian TRC
HRDAG researchers and analysts at Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) estimated conflict mortality due to violence using Capture-Recapture methods.
Reflections: Growing and Learning in Guatemala
As a woman, mother and sociologist who is curious about the patterns of our political past in Guatemala, I feel privileged to know and work with the HRDAG team. Collaborating and learning from people like Patrick, Megan, Suzanne, Beatriz and Tamy has been an invaluable gift. I have discovered many things, both human and academic. For example, I’ve learned new ways of seeing what seemed everyday and simple, to discover that not only do the social sciences and statistics work hand in hand, but that they are critical for understanding Guatemala’s reality.
Twenty years ago, on 29 December, 1996, Guatemala made history by signing the Guatemala Peace ...
Lessons at HRDAG: Making More Syrian Records Usable
If we could glean key missing information from those fields, we would be able to use more records.
How Many People Will Get Covid-19?
HRDAG has authored two articles in Significance that add depth to discussions around infection rates.