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 ...
As the war between the guerrillas, the Army, and paramilitary groups in Colombia winds down, violence against social movement leaders has intensified. Using data from six organizations, this report estimates the total number of social movement leaders killed in 2016 and 2017. The perpetrators of the killings are not reported in the data or in the report.
In the report, we observe that together, the monitoring organizations documented 160 killings in 2016, and we estimate a total population of 166 deaths.[1] In 2017, there were 172 documented killings, and we estimate a total of 185 deaths.[2]
From this, we conclude that the number of killings is ...
Excerpt:
Data scientists are programmers who ignore probability but like pretty graphs, said Patrick Ball, a statistician and human rights advocate who cofounded the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.
“Data is broken,” Ball said. “Anyone who thinks they’re going to use big data to solve a problem is already on the path to fantasy land.”
The Human Rights Data Analysis Group is composed of a diverse group of board members, full-time staff, and consultants. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, we work with experts in the fields of computer science, software development, mathematical and applied statistics, and demography.
Advisory Board
As a nonprofit organization, our Advisory Board serves as our governing body. This board helps us to make decisions, keeps us on track with our mission and goals, and oversees the organization in legal and logistical matters.
David Banks, Professor, Statistical Science, Duke University
Kim Keller, Executive Director, The Keller Foundation
Dinah ...
One of the three main goals of HRDAG is education and outreach, and to that end we use Creative Commons licenses for all of our blogposts and, whenever possible, for our publications. Using a Creative Commons license makes it clear that educators are free to use HRDAG's publications, in their entirety, and with the peace of mind that they are doing so with our blessing.
Also, the use of the Creative Commons license allows us to participate in and encourage the creation of a digital commons, which we feel helps to advance another one of our goals, the creation of knowledge. We feel that it’s important to offer up our publications for use and reuse ...
At some point in the next week, HRDAG's executive director, Patrick Ball, will be providing expert testimony in the trial of General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the de-facto president of Guatemala in 1982-1983. Gen. Ríos is being tried on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. (His military intelligence director, Gen. Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez is also on trial.) Patrick will testify on approximately April 15-18, 2013, and he may begin as early as this Friday, April 12.
The trial opened on March 20, 2013, in the Supreme Court building in Guatemala City. According to an Open Society Justice Initiative blogpost covering the event, the ...
Megan Price, Anita Gohdes and Patrick Ball (2016). Human Rights Data Analysis Group, commissioned by Amnesty International. August 17, 2016. © 2016 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.
Megan Price and Maria Gargiulo (2021). Lies, Damned Lies, and "Official" Statistics. Health and Human Rights Journal. 24 June, 2021. © Health and Human Rights Journal.
Megan Price and Maria Gargiulo (2021). Lies, Damned Lies, and “Official” Statistics. Health and Human Rights Journal. 24 June, 2021. © Health and Human Rights Journal.
Issues surrounding policing in the United States are at the forefront of our national attention. Among these is the use of “predictive policing,” which is the application of statistical or machine learning models to police data, with the goal of predicting where or by whom crime will be committed in the future. Today Significance magazine published an article on this topic that I co-authored with William Isaac. Significance has kindly made this article open access (free!) for all of October. In the article we demonstrate the mechanism by which the use of predictive policing software may amplify the biases that already pervade our criminal ...
In Washington State, some law enforcement officers illegally tip off ICE and CBP for civil immigration arrests. HRDAG helped identify where the problematic practices occurred.
HRDAG's advisory board has added three new members.
Boston Police deployed SWAT teams disproportionately to Black neighborhoods, sometimes raiding homes with young children. HRDAG extracted data revealing just how disproportionate.
In this interview with Colombian newspaper El Espectador, Patrick Ball is quoted as saying “la gente que no conoce de álgebra nunca debería hacer estadísticas” (people who don’t know algebra should never do statistics).
Ten years after the war ended in Sri Lanka, we still don’t know to the nearest ten thousand how many people perished. The estimates for the death toll for the last five months of the war alone vary between 7000 and 147,000. In 2011, the UN said it thought approximately 40,000 civilians had died; then in 2012 an internal UN report estimated it was at least 70,000. Population data from World Bank and UN sources indicated that more than 100,000 Tamils living in the conflict areas in the north have not returned home after the war.
HRDAG has provided technical assistance to a broad range of non-governmental human rights organizations in Sri ...