On Wednesday, April 9, the file hosting service Dropbox announced the addition of Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, to their Board of Directors, citing the need for “a leader who could help us expand our global footprint.”
In response to this announcement, HRDAG requested (and rapidly received) a refund for our recent purchase of Dropbox for Business, and will drop the use of their service entirely.
Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s Executive Director stated: “As a human rights organization, we find Condoleezza Rice's complicity in the serious human rights abuses of the Bush administration very worrying. ...
People filed complaints against NYPD officers, and HRDAG went above and beyond to protect the privacy of the people who reported the offenses.
The Rafto Foundation, an international human rights organization, has bestowed the 2021 Rafto Prize to HRDAG for its distinguished work defending human rights and democracy.
Christian Davenport and Patrick Ball. “Views to a Kill: Exploring the Implications of Source Selection in the Case of Guatemalan State Terror, 1977-1996.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 46(3): 427-450. 2002.
Much of the debate about the March–June 1999 war between NATO and Yugoslavia turned on how many people left their homes in particular places and at certain times. Solid information about the flow of refugees out of Kosovo has helped investigators to link patterns in the flow to patterns of NATO bombing, Yugoslav strategic plans for "cleansing" Kosovo, and Yugoslav and irregular troop deployments. At its heart, the debate was about whether refugees left their homes fleeing NATO attacks and fighting between the KLA and Yugoslav forces, or whether they left their homes after being threatened, assaulted, and robbed by Yugoslav police, army, and irregu...
The modular nature of the workflow and use of Git allowed us to work on different parts of the project from across the country.
Dr. Patrick Ball recently visited the Plutopia News Network podcast for a wide-ranging, inspiring conversation about his work for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.
Patrick spoke about how he first discovered human rights work during his time in El Salvador with the Peace Brigades International. That led to his ongoing work as a statistician and computer programmer working to assess and analyze human rights violations. He also unpacked some common statistical techniques used by researchers at Human Rights Data Analysis Group, such as multiple systems estimation, which uses multiple different datasets to gain insights into the data we don't ...
This past year at HRDAG has been about continuing efforts to uncover the truth.
Earlier this month, HRDAG and the Historic Archive of the National Police (AHPN) of Guatemala launched a book that represents a long-time collaboration between the two organizations. The book, “Una mirada al AHPN a partir de un studio de cuantitativo,” is, as the title states, a look at the Archive’s datasets via a quantitative study. Book authors are HRDAG executive director Megan Price and AHPN colleague Carolina López, with translations by Beatriz Vejarano. The book is available in Spanish and forthcoming in English.
The book explains how HRDAG and the Archive worked together over a decade to gain insight into the police activities that ...
Some police officers avoid accountability by “wandering” to another agency. HRDAG and partners created a data tool that tracks officers’ employment history.
This post introduces the methodology of the Innocence Discovery Lab, a collaboration between IPNO and HRDAG.
Megan Price, Anita Gohdes, Jay D. Aronson, and Christopher McNaboe. 2015. BMJ (29 September): 351. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h4736. © The BMJ Publishing Group Ltd. All rights reserved. Open access.
We stand with our partners and every organizer fighting for justice.
In our work, we merge many databases to figure out how many people have been killed in violent conflict. Merging is a lot harder than you might think.
Many of the database records refer to the same people--the records are duplicated. We want to identify and link all the records that refer to the same victims so that each victim is counted only once, and so that we can use the structure of overlapping records to do multiple systems estimation.
Merging records that refer to the same person is called entity resolution, database deduplication, or record linkage. For definitive overviews of the field, see Scheuren, Herzog, and Winkler, Data Quality ...