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La importancia de la estadística

Patrick Ball (2018). La importancia de la estadística. Ibero. La revista de la universidad Iberoamericana. August-September 2018. © 2018 Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México. Pp. 50-51.

Patrick Ball (2018). La importancia de la estadística. Ibero. La revista de la universidad Iberoamericana. August-September 2018. © 2018 Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México. Pp. 50-51.


Syria 2012 – Modeling Multiple Datasets in an Ongoing Conflict

The struggle between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime and opposition forces has generated extensive global press coverage, but few accurate estimates of casualties. In January 2013, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a report on the number of conflict-related killings in Syria. The UN report is based on statistical analysis conducted by HRDAG scientists Megan Price, Jeff Klingner and Patrick Ball. This chapter examines HRDAG’s findings which compared information from a database collected by the Syrian government with six databases compiled by Syrian human rights activists and citizen ...

PredPol amplifies racially biased policing

100x100-micHRDAG associate William Isaac is quoted in this article about how predictive policing algorithms such as PredPol exacerbate the problem of racial bias in policing.


Why It Took So Long To Update the U.N.-Sponsored Syria Death Count

In this story, Carl Bialik of FiveThirtyEight interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball about the process of de-duplication, integration of databases, and machine-learning in the recent enumeration of reported casualties in Syria.
New reports of old deaths come in all the time, Ball said, making it tough to maintain a database. The duplicate-removal process means “it’s a lot like redoing the whole project each time,” he said.


Lancet Study Estimates Gaza Death Toll 40% Higher Than Recorded

“Patrick Ball, a statistician at the US-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group not involved in the research, has used capture-recapture methods to estimate death tolls for conflicts in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.

Ball told AFP the well-tested technique has been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached “a good estimate” for Gaza.”


Nonprofits Are Taking a Wide-Eyed Look at What Data Could Do

In this story about how data are transforming the nonprofit world, Patrick Ball is quoted. Here’s an excerpt: “Data can have a profound impact on certain problems, but nonprofits are kidding themselves if they think the data techniques used by corporations can be applied wholesale to social problems,” says Patrick Ball, head of the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group.
Companies, he says, maintain complete data sets. A business knows every product it made last year, when it sold, and to whom. Charities, he says, are a different story.
“If you’re looking at poverty or trafficking or homicide, we don’t have all the data, and we’re not going to,” he says. “That’s why these amazing techniques that the industry people have are great in industry, but they don’t actually generalize to our space very well.”


Colombian Key in Guatemala Forced Disappearance Case


Benetech’s Human Rights Data Analysis Group Publishes 2010 Analysis of Human Rights Violations in Five Countries,

Analysis of Uncovered Government Data from Guatemala and Chad Clarifies History and Supports Criminal Prosecutions
By Ann Harrison
The past year of research by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) has supported criminal prosecutions and uncovered the truth about political violence in Guatemala, Iran, Colombia, Chad and Liberia. On today’s celebration of the 62nd anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, HRDAG invites the international community to engage scientifically defensible methodologies that illuminate all human rights violations – including those that cannot be directly observed. 2011 will mark the 20th year that HRDAG researchers have analyzed the patterns and magnitude of human rights violations in political conflicts to determine how many of the killed and disappeared have never been accounted for – and who is most responsible.


HRDAG To Join the Partnership on AI

HRDAG is joining Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society (PAI).

In Pursuit of Excellent Data Processing

With help from HRDAG, Roman Rivera built the data backbone for the Invisible Institute's Citizens Police Data Project.

Happy Hacking

From my first introduction to the HRDAG community at the annual retreat it was clear to me that mentorship is an organizational priority and that the contributions of interns are valued. Much of my first couple weeks as a summer intern at HRDAG were spent familiarizing myself with Patrick’s paradigm for principled data processing. At the same time, I was learning the skills and tricks (bash, make, vim, git) that promote an effortless programming workflow, a pursuit that Patrick calls “sharpening the saw” (just like in programming, you can cut down a tree with a dull blade, but your life will be much easier if you take the time to sharpen ...

How Machine Learning Makes Visible Gender-Based Violence by Police

Sexual misconduct by police sometimes gets buried through official coding procedures. In Chicago, HRDAG processed police misconduct documents to give visibility to allegations that would otherwise be lost.

Why raw data doesn't support analysis of violence

This morning I got a query from a journalist asking for our data from the report we published yesterday. The journalist was hoping to create an interactive infographic to track the number of deaths in the Syrian conflict over time. Our data would not support an analysis like the one proposed, so I wrote this reply. We can't send you these data because they would be misleading—seriously misleading—for the purpose you describe. Here's why: What we have is a list of documented deaths, in essence, a highly non-random sample, though a very big one. We like bigger samples because we think that they must be closer to true. The mathematical justificat...

Letter from the Executive Director

Dear Friends, This has been quite a year, and I don’t just mean the recent political events in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. Thanks to your ongoing support, HRDAG has a number of accomplishments to be proud of this year: Patrick’s testimony in the trial of Hissene Habré for crimes against humanity was cited by the judges three times in their determination of guilt. We launched a book describing ten years of collaborative work with the Historic Archive of the National Police in Guatemala. We contributed quantitative analyses to Amnesty International’s report on deaths in Syrian custody, and published an ...

Guatemala 1993-1999 – Using MSE to Estimate the Number of Deaths

Propelled by the impact of data analysis in El Salvador, Patrick Ball applied his WDWTW model to human rights information in other countries. Throughout the 1990’s, Ball worked at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) analyzing large-scale human rights violations in Ethiopia, South Africa, Haiti and Guatemala. Together with senior scientific colleagues, including statistician Dr. Herb Spirer, Ball developed new methods for analyzing state-sanctioned violence. This chapter documents how the research expanded when a group of nongovernmental organizations in Guatemala asked the scientific community to gather and analyze ...

Reflections: HRDAG Was Born in Washington

I began working with HRDAG in the summer of 2001 before it was ever even called HRDAG. In fact, not intended as a boast, I think I’m responsible for coming up with the name. After contracting with Dr. Patrick Ball for a time writing the Analyzer data management platform, I left New York City and joined him in Washington, DC, at AAAS in 2002. Soon after starting, Patrick decided to establish an identity for this new team, consisting mainly of myself, Miguel Cruz and a handful of field relationships. We discussed what to name it briefly in the AAAS Science & Policy break room, which at the time, being in the mind of unclever descriptive naming ...

Matching the Libro Amarillo to Historical Human Rights Datasets in El Salvador

Patrick Ball (2014). A memo accompanying the release of The Yellow Book. August 20, 2014. © 2014 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.[pdf español]


Predictive policing violates more than it protects

William Isaac and Kristian Lum. Predictive policing violates more than it protects. USA Today. December 2, 2016. © USA Today.

William Isaac and Kristian Lum. Predictive policing violates more than it protects. USA Today. December 2, 2016. © USA Today.


Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to Recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict

ed. by Taylor B. Seybolt, Jay D. Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff. Oxford University Press. © 2013 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

The following four chapters are included:

— Todd Landman and Anita Gohdes (2013). “A Matter of Convenience: Challenges of Non-Random Data in Analyzing Human Rights Violations in Peru and Sierra Leone.”

— Jeff Klingner and Romesh Silva (2013). “Combining Found Data and Surveys to Measure Conflict Mortality.”

— Daniel Manrique-Vallier, Megan E. Price, and Anita Gohdes (2013). “Multiple-Systems Estimation Techniques for Estimating Casualties in Armed Conflict.”

— Jule Krüger, Patrick Ball, Megan Price, and Amelia Hoover Green (2013). “It Doesn’t Add Up: Methodological and Policy Implications of Conflicting Casualty Data.”


Lies, Damned Lies and Official Statistics

This essay in the Health and Human Rights Journal addresses attempts to undermine Covid-19 data collection.

Our work has been used by truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, and non-governmental human rights organizations. We have worked with partners on projects on five continents.

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