Kevin Uhrmacher of the Washington Post prepared a graph that illustrates reported deaths over time, by number of organizations reporting the deaths.
Washington Post
Kevin Uhrmacher
August 22, 2014
Link to story on Washington Post
Related blogpost (Updated Casualty Count for Syria)
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We live in very challenging times. The pervasiveness of bias in AI algorithms and autonomous “killer” robots looming on the horizon, all necessitate an open discussion and immediate action to address the perils of unchecked AI. The decisions we make today will determine the fate of future generations. Please follow these amazing women and support their work so we can make faster meaningful progress towards a world with safe, beneficial AI that will help and not hurt the future of humanity.
53. Kristian Lum @kldivergence
Megan Price and Patrick Ball. 2015. Canadian Journal of Law and Society / Revue Canadienne Droit et Société volume 30 issue 2 (June): 1-21. doi:10.1017/cls.2015.24. © Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. Restricted access.
Welcome to the web data resource for the International Center for Human Rights Research (Centro Internacional para Investigaciones en Derechos Humanos, or CIIDH). Here you will find raw data on human rights violations in Guatemala during the period 1960-1996. You're welcome to use it for your own statistical analyses.
ASCII delimited (csv)
Resource Information
Data Dictionary
Value Labels
File Structure (Variables)
These files are between 300-700 kilobytes. The data are stored in a zipped compression format.
For an explanation of how the data are structured and what the variables represent, see the data dictionary.
If you use ...
In 1995, the Haitian National Commission for Truth and Justice (CNVJ) requested the advice of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Dr. Patrick Ball on how to develop a large-scale project to take the testimonies of several thousand witnesses of human rights abuses in Haiti.
The team conducted work incorporating over 5,000 interviews covering over 8,500 victims to produce detailed regional analyses, using quantitative material from the interviews, historical, economic and demographic analysis.
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 Columbia Journalism Review investigates the casualty count in Iraq, more than a decade after the U.S. invasion. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball is quoted. “IBC is very good at covering the bombs that go off in markets,” said Patrick Ball, an analyst at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group who says his whole career is to study “people being killed.” But quiet assassinations and military skirmishes away from the capital often receive little or no media attention.
After almost two months of searching for the perfect fit, we’re very pleased to announce that Josh Shadlen has joined HRDAG as our new technical lead. Finding Josh was no easy feat. We were looking for what many people would call a “data scientist,” that is, someone with expertise in both computer science and statistics. These days, “data science” is one of the hottest fields out there.
Bringing the perfect mix of academic depth and thoughtful reflection, Josh stood out for us. With prior jobs including gigs at Silicon Valley startups and Twitter, he’s got high-level (more…)
From the Guatemalan military to the South African apartheid police, code cruncher Patrick Ball singles out the perpetrators of political violence.
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).
In this week’s “Top Picks,” IRIN interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball about giant data sets and whether we can trust them. “No matter how big it is, data on violence is always partial,” he says.
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' ...
We welcome the verdict of a week ago by Judges Barrios, Bustamante, and Xitumul in the conviction of General Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity. Their 718-page written opinion contains many compelling arguments, findings, and conclusions. But the section we at HRDAG are most interested in is the one on page 245 (see original, below), where Patrick's testimony is referred to. (more…)
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. ...
As of today, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) is an independent* non-profit! It's been a long time coming, and we're delighted to have gotten to this point. HRDAG is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that applies rigorous science to the analysis of human rights violations around the world; for more information, see our About Us page.
Benetech has spun out the scientific and statistical part of the Human Rights Program to HRDAG. The spinout includes (as staff) me -- Patrick Ball -- and Dr Megan Price, as well as our many part-time scientific and field consultants (a list is here). The software and technology component of our work -- ...
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 ...
HRDAG contributed to work by the ACLU showing that a predictive tool used to guide responses to alleged child neglect may forever flag parents with disabilities. “These predictors have the effect of casting permanent suspicion and offer no means of recourse for families marked by these indicators,” according to the analysis from researchers at the ACLU and the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group. “They are forever seen as riskier to their children.”
