683 results for search: %E3%80%8C%EC%97%94%EC%A1%B0%EC%9D%B4%ED%8F%B0%ED%8C%85%E3%80%8D%20WWW_BEX_PW%20%20%EC%82%BC%EC%84%B1%EC%A4%91%EC%95%99%EC%97%AD%EB%9E%9C%EC%B1%97%20%EC%82%BC%EC%84%B1%EC%A4%91%EC%95%99%EC%97%AD%EB%A6%AC%EC%96%BC%ED%8F%B0%ED%8C%85%E2%86%92%EC%82%BC%EC%84%B1%EC%A4%91%EC%95%99%EC%97%AD%EB%A7%8C%EB%82%A8%E2%9C%81%EC%82%BC%EC%84%B1%EC%A4%91%EC%95%99%EC%97%AD%EB%A7%8C%EB%82%A8%EA%B5%AC%ED%95%A8%E3%8A%8C%E3%81%86%E8%B9%9Eimparkation/feed/content/colombia/Co-union-violence-paper-response.pdf


Guatemala 1993-1999 – Using MSE to Estimate the Number of Deaths

Propelled by the impact of data analysis in El Salvador, Patrick Ball applied his WDWTW model to human rights information in other countries. Throughout the 1990’s, Ball worked at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) analyzing large-scale human rights violations in Ethiopia, South Africa, Haiti and Guatemala. Together with senior scientific colleagues, including statistician Dr. Herb Spirer, Ball developed new methods for analyzing state-sanctioned violence. This chapter documents how the research expanded when a group of nongovernmental organizations in Guatemala asked the scientific community to gather and analyze ...

Reflections: Richard Savage’s Vision Fulfilled

In 1984, as a fresh PhD, I heard Richard Savage give his presidential address at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Philadelphia. He called it "Hard/Soft Problems" and made a big pitch for statisticians to get involved in human rights data analysis. It was inspirational, and I was immediately sold. I started working with the American Statistical Association's Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights (now chaired by HRDAG's own Megan Price). Over time, a growing set of statisticians became involved, initially in letter-writing campaigns to help dissident statisticians (and other quantitative academics—economists seemed to have a particular ...

HRDAG at FAT* 2020: Pre-Trial Risk Assessment Tools

How do police officer booking decisions affect pre-trial risk assessment tools relied upon by judges?

The Day We Fight Back

Today, February 11, is the day of national protests against the National Security Administration. The critical threat is mass surveillance. In the words of The Day We Fight Back, “Together we will push back against powers that seek to observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action. Together, we will make it clear that such behavior is not compatible with democratic governance. Together, if we persist, we will win this fight.” (more…)

Identifiers of Detained Children Have Implications for Data Security and Estimation

Identifiers being sequential could make possible estimations of the population of detained children.

Frequently Asked Questions

Multiple Systems Estimation What is MSE?  What do you mean by statistical inference?  What is an overlap, and how do we know when lists overlap?   How does MSE find the total number of violations?  How was MSE originally developed?  How does the Benetech Human Rights Program use MSE?    1. What is MSE? A: 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. Return to Top 2. What do you mean by statistical inference? A: ...

Reflections: Challenging Tasks and Meticulous Defenders

I have made it my personal objective to amplify HRDAG's message of being extra careful and scientifically rigorous with human rights data.

Why raw data doesn't support analysis of violence

This morning I got a query from a journalist asking for our data from the report we published yesterday. The journalist was hoping to create an interactive infographic to track the number of deaths in the Syrian conflict over time. Our data would not support an analysis like the one proposed, so I wrote this reply. We can't send you these data because they would be misleading—seriously misleading—for the purpose you describe. Here's why: What we have is a list of documented deaths, in essence, a highly non-random sample, though a very big one. We like bigger samples because we think that they must be closer to true. The mathematical justificat...

Learning to Learn: Reflections on My Time at HRDAG

So much of what I learned at HRDAG was intangible, and I'm grateful to have been able to go deep.

Training with HRDAG: Rules for Organizing Data and More

I had the pleasure of working with Patrick Ball at the HRDAG office in San Francisco for a week during summer 2016. I knew Patrick from two workshops he previously hosted at the University of Washington’s Centre for Human Rights (UWCHR). The workshops were indispensable to us at UWCHR as we worked to publish a number of datasets on human rights violations during the El Salvador Civil War.  The training was all the more helpful because the HRDAG team was so familiar with the data. As part of an impressive career which took him from Ethiopia and Kosovo to Haiti and El Salvador among others, Patrick himself had worked on gathering and analysing ...

Outreach at Toronto TamilFest for Counting the Dead

Michelle spent a weekend in Toronto, Canada, reaching out to the community at TamilFest, where she and a colleague invited people to sit down and talk.

Reflections: Minding the Gap

How might we learn what we don’t know? HRDAG associate Christine Grillo hits the wayback machine and recalls her first exposure to People Against Bad Things, ideas about bias and correlation versus causation, and truth.

Verdad al acecho (The Truth Is Stalking)


Drug-Related Killings in the Philippines

HRDAG analysis shows that the government figures are a gross underestimation of the drug-related killings in the Philippines.

Why Just Counting the Dead in Syria Won’t Bring Them Justice

Patrick Ball (2016). Why Just Counting the Dead in Syria Won’t Bring Them Justice. Foreign Policy. October 19, 2016. © 2016 Foreign Policy. 

Patrick Ball (2016). Why Just Counting the Dead in Syria Won’t Bring Them Justice. Foreign Policy. October 19, 2016. © 2016 Foreign Policy


UN says nearly 93,000 confirmed killed in Syrian conflict


Counting the Dead in Sri Lanka

ITJP and HRDAG are urging groups inside and outside Sri Lanka to share existing casualty lists.

Lies, Damned Lies, and “Official” Statistics

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.


SermonNew death toll estimated in Syrian civil war

Kevin Uhrmacher of the Washington Post prepared a graph that illustrates reported deaths over time, by number of organizations reporting the deaths.


Cuentas y mediciones de la criminalidad y de la violencia

Exploración y análisis de los datas para comprender la realidad. Patrick Ball y Michael Reed Hurtado. 2015. Forensis 16, no. 1 (July): 529-545. © 2015 Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses (República de Colombia).


Our work has been used by truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, and non-governmental human rights organizations. We have worked with partners on projects on five continents.

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