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' ...
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On Wednesday, February 4, in Pristina, international experts praised the Humanitarian Law Centre's database on victims of the Kosovo conflict, the Kosovo Memory Book. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball is quoted in the article that appeared in Balkan Transitional Justice.
HLC’s work won praise from Patrick Ball, from Human Rights Data Analysis Group and from Michael Spagat, professor of economics at Royal Holloway, University of London, who have examined and analysed the database.
Ball, with 24 years of experience in databases and statistics of human rights, said that the HLC’s database had enormous quality and marked it out as among the ...
HRDAG has been working with the Historic Archive of the National Police in Guatemala (hereafter, the Archive) for the past seven years. The Archive contains a treasure trove of data recorded and kept by the Guatemalan National Police over the past century. When the Archive was first discovered in 2005, researchers there immediately recognized both the value and fragility of the tens of millions of documents. As a result, they reached out to HRDAG, and we reached out to volunteers at Westat to devise a plan to estimate the contents of the entire Archive as quickly as possible in case the documents were destroyed or access to them was limited. ...
Multiple systems estimation, or MSE, is a family of techniques for statistical inference. MSE uses the overlaps between several incomplete lists of human rights violations to determine the total number of violations. In this blogpost, and four more to follow, I’ll answer both conceptual and practical questions about this important method. (In posts to follow, questions that refer to specific statistical procedures or debates will be marked, "In depth.") (more…)
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.
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.
...
In March 2013, I entered a contest called the California Series in Public Anthropology International Competition, which solicits book proposals from social science scholars who write about how social scientists create meaningful change. The winners of the Series are awarded a publishing contract with the University of California Press for a book targeted to undergraduates. With the encouragement of my HRDAG colleagues Patrick Ball and Megan Price, I proposed a book about the work of HRDAG researchers entitled, Everybody Counts: How Scientists Document the Unknown Victims of Political Violence. Earlier this month, I was contacted by the Series judges ...
From the Guatemalan military to the South African apartheid police, code cruncher Patrick Ball singles out the perpetrators of political violence.
Kristian Lum’s work on the HRDAG Policing Project is referred to here: “In fact, Lum argues, it’s not clear how well this model worked at depicting the situation in Oakland. Those data on drug crimes were biased, she now reports. The problem was not deliberate, she says. Rather, data collectors just missed some criminals and crime sites. So data on them never made it into her model.”
Patrick Ball es un sabueso de la verdad. Ese deseo de descubrir lo que otros quieren ocultar lo ha llevado a desarrollar fórmulas matemáticas para detectar desaparecidos.
Su trabajo consiste en aplicar métodos de medición científica para comprobar violaciones masivas de derechos humanos.
Contrario a lo que se puede pensar, los datos oficiales sobre líderes sociales asesinados no necesariamente corresponden a la realidad y podría haber mucha mayor victimización en las regiones golpeadas por este flagelo, según el más reciente informe del Centro de Estudios de Justicia, Derecho y Sociedad (Dejusticia) en colaboración con el Human Rights Data Analysis Group.
Video available. La organización Dejusticia, en alianza con una institución estadounidense, asegura que los crímenes van en aumento y existe un subregistro. “Aumentó la violencia letal contra líderes sociales en 2016 y 2017 en al menos 10%”, asegura Valentina Rozo, investigadora de Dejusticia.