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Scatter and keep working
Structural Zero Issue 02
July 17, 2025
Part Two of Our Three Part “Gathering the Data” Series. Read part one.
As a statistician, I spend most of my days working at a computer.
Because I work with data about human rights violations, I go to places where I can document evidence of crimes—like disappearances, killings, and torture. So while I may just be working at a computer, those computers can be in places where there is still the potential for violence to emerge.
Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about how to work in countries emerging from conflict. Those lessons seem especially applicable today, ...
Making Missing Data Visible in Colombia
Valentina Rozo Ángel has worked with HRDAG and the Colombian Truth Commission to acknowledge victims of the 50-year conflict who are not visible or easily counted.
Sri Lanka
Ten years after the war ended in Sri Lanka, we still don’t know to the nearest ten thousand how many people perished. The estimates for the death toll for the last five months of the war alone vary between 7000 and 147,000. In 2011, the UN said it thought approximately 40,000 civilians had died; then in 2012 an internal UN report estimated it was at least 70,000. Population data from World Bank and UN sources indicated that more than 100,000 Tamils living in the conflict areas in the north have not returned home after the war.
HRDAG has provided technical assistance to a broad range of non-governmental human rights organizations in Sri ...
Casanare, Colombia
Estimates of Killings and Disappearances in Casanare
Casanare is a large, rural department or state in Colombia that includes 19 municipalities and a population of almost 300,000 inhabitants. Located in the foothills of the Andes and on the eastern plains, Casanare has a history of violence. Multiple armed groups have operated in Casanare including paramilitaries, guerillas and the Colombian military. Many Casanare citizens have suffered violent deaths and disappearances.
But how many people have been killed or disappeared? For reasons of policy, accountability and historical clarification, this question deserves a valid answer. In February ...
Sous la dictature d’Hissène Habré, le ridicule tuait
Patrick Ball, un expert en statistiques engagé par les Chambres africaines extraordinaires, a conclu que la « mortalité dans les prisons de la DDS fut substantiellement plus élevée que celles des pires contextes du XXe siècle de prisonniers de guerre ».
Applications of Multiple Systems Estimation in Human Rights Research
Lum, Kristian, Megan Emily Price, and David Banks. 2013. The American Statistician 67, no. 4: 191-200. doi: 10.1080/00031305.2013.821093. © 2013 The American Statistician. All rights reserved. [free eprint may be available].
HRDAG Retreat 2016
What do you get when you bring seven statisticians, one quantitative political scientist, a writer, a computer scientist, and an administrator together for four days in a vacation rental on California’s Russian River? A lot of code, a technical paper and book chapter revised, another paper started, a great hike in the Redwoods, descriptions of food poisoning and crash landings in war zones, and a lot of talk about feelings.
Did I mention feelings? On the first evening of the annual retreat of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, executive director Megan Price asked us to go around the room and share how we were feeling on arrival. The request ...
HRDAG and #GivingTuesday 2017
Help us hold human rights violators accountable!
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 justif...
Reflections on Data Science for Real-World Problems
Trina Reynolds-Tyler's internship at HRDAG helped her use data science to find patterns in state-sanctioned violence.
Patrick Ball Honored as New ASA Fellow
We’re very happy to announce that our executive director, Patrick Ball, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), as announced by ASA President Nathaniel Schenker. Patrick is one of 63 new ASA Fellows to be honored this year in a ceremony at the Joint Statistical Meetings, which will take place this August 5 in Boston, Massachusetts. (more…)
Disrupt San Francisco TechCrunch 2018
On September 7, 2018, Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball participated in a panel at Disrupt San Francisco by TechCrunch. The talk was titled "Dismantling Algorithmic Bias." Brian Brackeen of Kairos was part of the panel as well, and the talk was moderated by TechCrunch reporter Megan Rose Dickey.
From the TechCrunch website, "Disrupt is a 3-day conference focused on breaking technology news and developments with big-name thought leaders who are making waves in the industry."
Video of the talk is available here, and Megan Rose Dickey's coverage is here.
Trips to and from Guatemala
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: Collection, Cleaning and Canonicalization of Data
<< Previous post: MSE: The Basics
Q3. What are the steps in an MSE analysis?
Q4. What does data collection look like in the human rights context? What kind of data do you collect?
Q5. [In depth] Do you include unnamed or anonymous victims in the matching process?
Q6. What do you mean by "cleaning" and "canonicalization?"
Q7. [In depth] What are some of the challenges of canonicalization? (more…)
The Art and Science of Coding AHPN Documents
The coding, from my perspective, is the heart of the project. I say this, because the coding team has the responsibility of selecting documents according to the random sample, recording the documents’ contents, and applying the criteria to convert that content into an entry in a quantitative database. Not to mention the fact that this team has the privilege of being in direct contact with the documents.
At present, because of advanced organizational processes, not everyone has a chance to hold an original document in their hands. The quantitative study had many advantages in this regard; since we started work in parallel with the archival ...
Timor-Leste Op-Ed
Defending Human Rights Data And The Possibility of Justice In East Timor
By Patrick Ball and Romesh Silva
On June 5th, armed gangs broke into the offices of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) in Dili, East Timor and stole their motorbikes.
Many human rights workers wondered whether the mobs would soon return to loot the irreplaceable paper records used by the CAVR to compile a definitive report on human rights abuses during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975-1999.
The release of this report was preempted by the recent violence in Dili. But in the midst of the chaos, Australian military forces stepped in to ...
New results for the identification of municipalities with clandestine graves in Mexico
The goal of this project is identify Mexican municipalities with a high probability of having clandestine graves. Knowing where to search will help to create better public programs regarding missing persons in Mexico.
How Machine Learning Protects Whistle-Blowers in Staten Island
People filed complaints against NYPD officers, and HRDAG went above and beyond to protect the privacy of the people who reported the offenses.
Big Data Predictive Analytics Comes to Academic and Nonprofit Institutions to Fuel Innovation
"Revolution Analytics will allow HRDAG to handle bigger data sets and leverage the power of R to accomplish this goal and uncover the truth." Director of Research Megan Price is quoted.
REVOLUTION ANALYTICS
Press release
February 4, 2014
Link to press release
Back to Press Room
FAQs on Predictive Policing and Bias
Last month Significance magazine published an article on the topic of predictive policing and police bias, which I co-authored with William Isaac. Since then, we've published a blogpost about it and fielded a few recurring questions. Here they are, along with our responses.
Do your findings still apply given that PredPol uses crime reports rather than arrests as training data?
Because this article was meant for an audience that is not necessarily well-versed in criminal justice data and we were under a strict word limit, we simplified language in describing the data. The data we used is a version of the Oakland Police Department’s crime report...