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You Are Not So Smart: How we miss what is missing and what to do about it
On the San Francisco program, You Are Not So Smart, HRDAG director of research Megan Price talked with host David McRaney about Syria, human rights violations, and statistical analysis. The topic was survivorship bias. Megan's part in the podcast begins around Minute 27. From the YANSS blog: "Unfortunately, survivorship bias stands between you and the epiphanies you seek."
You Are Not So Smart
March 11, 2014 (podcast April 24, 2014)
San Francisco, California
Link to YANSS podcast
@notsmartblog
@davidmcraney
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Record Linkage and Other Statistical Models for Quantifying Conflict Casualties in Syria
How do we know how many people have been killed in Syria? The hard answer is we don't. In this talk, presented at Strata, Megan Price addresses how HRDAG uses random forests, multiple systems estimation, and various Python and R packages to estimate conflict casualties.
STRATA
February 13, 2014
Santa Clara, California
Link to 10-minute talk on youtube
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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 ...
History
HRDAG has been fortunate to have a long and exciting history that has taken us around the world to analyze data related to human rights violations. Along the way, we have met wonderful people, worked with amazing organizations and been a part of an amazing advancement of science through data analysis.
This page highlights key moments in our history.
Liberia 2009 – Coding Testimony to Determine Accountability for War Crimes
In July 2009, HRDAG concluded a three-year project with the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to help clarify Liberia’s violent history and hold perpetrators accountable. A military coup in 1979 sparked 24 years of civil war in Liberia where warring factions subjected civilians to severe human rights abuses. The TRC sought to determine whether these violations represented a systematic pattern or policy. This chapter describes how HRDAG developed a statistical analysis of the more than 17,000 victim and witness statements collected by the TRC and applied Ball’s “Who Did What To Whom?” methodology. HRDAG scientist Kristen ...
Accountability at home and abroad
Dear friends,
Our spirits were really on the ground on Wednesday, but they lifted at the board meeting we had at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group on Thursday. Executive Director Megan Price, Director of Research Patrick Ball, and the Board drafted these thoughts which we'd like to share with you.
For more than twenty-five years, we have held heads of state accountable for human rights violations. We support our partners and advocates in the human rights field. They collect data which we analyze using technical and scientific expertise. Those scientific results bring clarity to human rights violence and support the fight for justice.
...
Tech Corner
The HRDAG Tech Corner is where we collect the deeper and geekier content that we create for the website. You can browse by Category or scroll to view find all articles listed.
Our People
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 ...
Partners
How we work with partners is how we relate to the whole human rights community. We work with human rights advocates and defenders to support their goals by complementing their substantive expertise with our technical expertise. To date, partners have included truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, United Nations missions, and non-governmental human rights organizations on five continents.
Here are a few stories that illustrate how we work with our partners:
HRDAG partner stories:
Quantifying Police Misconduct in Louisiana (2023)
Scraping for Pattern: Protecting Immigrant Rights in Washington State (2022)
Police Violence ...
Publications
From time to time, we issue our own scientific reports that focus on the statistical aspects of the data analysis we have done in support of our partners. These reports are non-partisan, and they leave the work of advocacy to our partners.
You can search our publications by keyword or by year.
Testimonials
HRDAG is honored to work with a diverse set of partners. These organizations and the individuals that operate them are critical to our success, and our goal is to be critical to theirs. Here are a few quotes from our colleagues.
"Over the last two years, Dr Patrick Ball has spoken several times to relevant AI staff on the use (and mis-use) of quantitative data in human rights work. Each time, people rave about it afterwards commenting on Patrick's inimical skills to convey the complexity of statistical science in an accessible, relevant and fun way. This year, we also organised small meetings with individual teams who have to crunch 'big data' ...
Use this form to donate to HRDAG
Your tax deductible gift helps us seek justice for victims of human rights violations, hold perpetrators accountable, and strengthen the overall human rights advocacy community.
HRDAG is a project of Community Partners, providing us with administrative infrastructure — so we can focus on our mission and work. We are grateful for your (and their) support.
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 ...
Welcoming Our New Admistrative Coordinator
After a long search, we're pleased to welcome Suzanne Nathans as our new administrative "hub" at HRDAG. It was no easy feat to find someone whose skills and experience promise to be such a good fit with our team. Suzanne comes to HRDAG with a great deal of experience in nonprofit administration, success stories in operations, communications, and organization, and warmth and compassion. (more…)
Improving the estimate of U.S. police killings
Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing writes about HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball and his contribution to Carl Bialik's article about the recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics report on the number of annual police killings, both reported and unreported, in 538 Politics. Doctorow writes:
Patrick Ball and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group applied the same statistical rigor that he uses in estimating the scale of atrocities and genocides for Truth and Reconciliation panels in countries like Syria and Guatemala to the problem of estimating killing by US cops, and came up with horrific conclusions.
Ball was responding to a set of new estima...
Evaluation of the Kosovo Memory Book at Pristina
On February 4, 2015, at the National Archive in Pristina, Kosovo, HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball gave a presentation on research (done with colleague Jule Krüger) about the database of the Kosovo Memory Book (KMB). The KMB is part of the Humanitarian Law Centre in Belgrade and Pristina). In this photo, Patrick is speaking, and HLC-Belgrade executive director emeritus Natasa Kandic and Professor Michael Spagat are at the table with him. At the laptop between Spagat and Patrick is Laza Lazarevic of HLC; he is part of the KMB team.
About 130 people attended—a terrific response.
Presentation on the research behind the Evaluation of the ...
Civil War in Syria: The Internet as a Weapon of War
Suddeutsche Zeitung writer Hakan Tanriverdi interviews HRDAG affiliate Anita Gohdes and writes about her work on the Syrian casualty enumeration project for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. This article, "Bürgerkrieg in Syrien: Das Internet als Kriegswaffe," is in German.
Suddeutsche Zeitung
Hakan Tanriverdi
January 4, 2015
Link to story on SZ
Related blogpost (Updated Casualty Count for Syria)
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