This new report by the United Nations Office of High Commissioner of Human Rights builds on three prior analyses and new statistical analysis by HRDAG on killings in Syria.
677 results for search: %E3%80%8E%EB%8F%84%EB%B4%89%EA%B5%AC%EC%83%81%ED%99%A9%EA%B7%B9%E3%80%8F%20O6O%E3%85%A15O1%E3%85%A19997%20%EC%82%AC%EC%8B%AD%EB%8C%80%EB%8C%80%ED%99%94%EC%96%B4%ED%94%8C%20%EC%BB%A4%ED%94%8C%EC%BB%A4%EB%AE%A4%EB%8B%88%ED%8B%B0%E2%86%95%EB%AF%B8%EC%8A%A4%EB%85%80%EB%8D%B0%EC%9D%B4%ED%8C%85%E2%92%AE%EB%B0%A9%EC%95%84%EC%83%81%ED%99%A9%EA%B7%B9%20%E3%83%8D%E5%AF%9D%20bifoliate/feed/content/colombia/Co-union-violence-paper-response.pdf
How Structuring Data Unburies Critical Louisiana Police Misconduct Data
In Louisiana, appeals for police disciplinary action are often buried in meeting minutes. HRDAG uses machine learning to extract, structure data and make it searchable..
The Great Lessons in Research at the Archive
Doing an investigation on the contents of the Archive brought with it three major lessons. The first big lesson was the constant movement (nothing was static), The second great lesson was that everything evolved (the changes were a constant). The third major lesson was to discover how two institutions can work together while geographically far apart.
The constant movement
As there were other processes being carried out at the Archive, everything was in constant movement. In other words, one day the documents were in X location and tomorrow they may be in location Y or dispersed in multiple locations. This made it impossible to know with certai...
Download: Megan Price
Executive director Megan Price is interviewed in The New York Times’ Sunday Review, as part of a series known as “Download,” which features a biosketch of “Influencers and their interests.”
Truth and Myth in Sierra Leone: An Empirical Analysis of the Conflict, 1991–2000
Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, Romesh Silva, Kristen Cibelli, Jana Asher, Scott Weikart, Patrick Ball, and Wendy Grossman. “Truth and Myth in Sierra Leone: An Empirical Analysis of the Conflict, 1991–2000″ (pdf). A report by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the American Bar Association. March 28, 2006.
Using MSE to Estimate Unobserved Events
At HRDAG, we worry about what we don't know. Specifically, we worry about how we can use statistical techniques to estimate homicides that are not observed by human rights groups. Based on what we've seen studying many conflicts over the last 25 years, what we don't know is often quite different from what we do know.
The technique we use most often to estimate what we don't know is called "multiple systems estimation." In this medium-technical post, I explain how to organize data and use three R packages to estimate unobserved events.
Click here for Computing Multiple Systems Estimation in R.
Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools
Sarah L. Desmarais and Evan M. Lowder (2019). Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools: A Primer for Judges, Prosecutors, and Defense Attorneys. Safety and Justice Challenge, February 2019. © 2019 Safety and Justice Challenge. <<HRDAG's Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah served as Project Members and made contributions to the primer.>>
Sarah L. Desmarais and Evan M. Lowder (2019). Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools: A Primer for Judges, Prosecutors, and Defense Attorneys. Safety and Justice Challenge, February 2019. © 2019 Safety and Justice Challenge. <<HRDAG’s Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah served as Project Members and made significant contributions to the primer.>>
Welcoming a New Board Member
As we get ready to begin our fourth year as an independent nonprofit, we are, as always, indebted to our Advisory Board and to our funders for their support and vision. We’re finishing up a busy year that took us to Dakar (for the trial of former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré), Pristina (for the release of the Kosovo Memory Book), Colombia (for work on a book about the Guatemalan Police Archives), and kept us busy here at home working on police violence statistics. But one of our biggest victories has been to score a new, talented, wise Advisory Board member—Michael Bear Kleinman, whom we first met when he was working with Humanity United.
...
Letter from the Executive Director
Dear Friends,
This has been quite a year, and I don’t just mean the recent political events in the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
Thanks to your ongoing support, HRDAG has a number of accomplishments to be proud of this year:
Patrick’s testimony in the trial of Hissene Habré for crimes against humanity was cited by the judges three times in their determination of guilt.
We launched a book describing ten years of collaborative work with the Historic Archive of the National Police in Guatemala.
We contributed quantitative analyses to Amnesty International’s report on deaths in Syrian custody, and published an ...
Epidemiology has theories. We should study them.
With so many dashboards and shiny visualizations, how can an interested non-technical reader find good science among the noise?
Capture-Recapture for Casualty Estimation and Beyond: Recent Advances and Research Directions
Daniel Manrique-Vallier, Patrick Ball, Mauricio Sadinle. (2022). Capture-Recapture for Casualty Estimation and Beyond: Recent Advances and Research Directions. In: Carriquiry, A.L., Tanur, J.M., Eddy, W.F. (eds) Statistics in the Public Interest. Springer Series in the Data Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75460-0_2
Manrique-Vallier, D., Ball, P., Sadinle, M. (2022). Capture-Recapture for Casualty Estimation and Beyond: Recent Advances and Research Directions. In: Carriquiry, A.L., Tanur, J.M., Eddy, W.F. (eds) Statistics in the Public Interest. Springer Series in the Data Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75460-0_2
UN Raises Estimate of Dead in Syrian Conflict to 191,000
Nick Cumming-Bruce of the New York Times writes about the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Right’s release of HRDAG’s third report on reported killings in the Syrian conflict.
From the article:
In its third report on Syria commissioned by the United Nations, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group identified 191,369 deaths from the start of the conflict in March 2011 to April 2014, more than double the 92,901 deaths cited in their last report, which covered the first two years of the conflict.
“Tragically, it is probably an underestimate of the real total number of people killed during the first three years of this murderous conflict,” Ms. Pillay said in a statement that accompanied the report, which observed that many killings in Syria were undocumented.
Megan Price Elected Board Member of Tor Project
Today The Tor Project announced that it has elected a new Board of Directors, and among them is HRDAG executive director Megan Price. The Tor Project is a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes online privacy and provides software that helps users opt out of online tracking.
Megan and Patrick have long maintained that encryption and privacy are essential for enabling human rights work. Patrick's ideas are described in Monday's FedScoop story about encryption, human rights, and the U.S. State Department.
“Human rights groups depend on strong cryptography in order to hold governments accountable," says Patrick. "HRDAG depends on local human ...
New report published on 500 Tamils missing while in Army custody
The International Truth and Justice Project and HRDAG have published a report on 500 Tamils who disappeared while in Army custody in Sri Lanka in 2009.
The report is titled “How many people disappeared on 17-19 May 2009 in Sri Lanka?” and Patrick Ball, director of research at HRDAG, is the lead author.
What we’ll need to find the true COVID-19 death toll
From the article: “Intentionally inconsistent tracking can also influence the final tally, notes Megan Price, a statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. During the Iraq War, for example, officials worked to conceal mortality or to cherry pick existing data to steer the political narrative. While wars are handled differently from pandemics, Price thinks the COVID-19 data could still be at risk of this kind of manipulation.”
A look at the top contenders for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize
The Washington Post’s Paul Schemm recognized HRDAG’s work in Syria, in the category of research and activism. “HRDAG gained renown at the start of the war, when it was one of the few organizations that tried to put a number on the war’s enormous toll in Syrian lives.”
Speaking Stats to Justice: Expert Testimony in a Guatemalan Human Rights Trial Based on Statistical Sampling
Daniel Guzmán (2011) Speaking Stats to Justice: Expert Testimony in a Guatemalan Human Rights Trial Based on Statistical Sampling, CHANCE, American Statistical Association, 24, (3), Alexandria, VA. © 2011 CHANCE. All rights reserved.
Always Learning
The data science field is always changing, which means that I'll always be learning.