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.
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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...
Unveiling Statistical Invisibility: The Structural Racism of the War on Drugs, its Impact on Social Inequalities, and the Need for Citizen Data Empowerment in Latin America
Cecilia Olliveira, Patrick Ball, Dayana Blanco, Eduardo Ribeiro, Juliana Borges, Maria Isabel Couto, Nathália Oliveira (2024)."Unveiling Statistical Invisibility: The Structural Racism of the War on Drugs, its Impact on Social Inequalities, and the Need for Citizen Data Empowerment in Latin America." T20 Brasil. September 2024.
Cecilia Olliveira, Patrick Ball, Dayana Blanco, Eduardo Ribeiro, Juliana Borges, Maria Isabel Couto, Nathália Oliveira (2024).”Unveiling Statistical Invisibility: The Structural Racism of the War on Drugs, its Impact on Social Inequalities, and the Need for Citizen Data Empowerment in Latin America.” T20 Brasil. September 2024.
HRDAG Retreat 2018
What follows is an elaborate criss-crossing of collaborations—retreat is a time to embrace the productivity that comes with being in the same room.
HRDAG Retreat 2015
I look at the beach and then at the table surrounded by nerds, deep in thought and conversation about Dirichlet priors, matching algorithms, and armed conflicts. This peculiar (in the best way) environment catalyzes a moment of reflection: how did I get here?
Four years ago, as a second-year statistics PhD student, I watched "Guatemala: The Secret Files" on PBS Frontline World. I listened to stories of family members who disappeared without answers or justice. Then the story shifted to the work being done by archivists and data experts at Guatemala's Historic Archive of the National Police. The scientists' pursuit of the truth energized me. I ...
Families flock to Syria’s prisons looking for released inmates
According to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, at least 17,723 people were killed in government custody from the start of the uprising in March 2011 to December 2015 – an average of 300 deaths each month. There are no figures for subsequent years but there is no reason to believe the killings stopped.
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.”
Unbiased algorithms can still be problematic
“Usually, the thing you’re trying to predict in a lot of these cases is something like rearrest,” Lum said. “So even if we are perfectly able to predict that, we’re still left with the problem that the human or systemic or institutional biases are generating biased arrests. And so, you still have to contextualize even your 100 percent accuracy with is the data really measuring what you think it’s measuring? Is the data itself generated by a fair process?”
HRDAG Director of Research Patrick Ball, in agreement with Lum, argued that it’s perhaps more practical to move it away from bias at the individual level and instead call it bias at the institutional or structural level. If a police department, for example, is convinced it needs to police one neighborhood more than another, it’s not as relevant if that officer is a racist individual, he said.
Nonprofits Are Taking a Wide-Eyed Look at What Data Could Do
In this story about how data are transforming the nonprofit world, Patrick Ball is quoted. Here’s an excerpt: “Data can have a profound impact on certain problems, but nonprofits are kidding themselves if they think the data techniques used by corporations can be applied wholesale to social problems,” says Patrick Ball, head of the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group.
Companies, he says, maintain complete data sets. A business knows every product it made last year, when it sold, and to whom. Charities, he says, are a different story.
“If you’re looking at poverty or trafficking or homicide, we don’t have all the data, and we’re not going to,” he says. “That’s why these amazing techniques that the industry people have are great in industry, but they don’t actually generalize to our space very well.”
Why It Took So Long To Update the U.N.-Sponsored Syria Death Count
In this story, Carl Bialik of FiveThirtyEight interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball about the process of de-duplication, integration of databases, and machine-learning in the recent enumeration of reported casualties in Syria.
New reports of old deaths come in all the time, Ball said, making it tough to maintain a database. The duplicate-removal process means “it’s a lot like redoing the whole project each time,” he said.
Amnesty International Reports Organized Murder Of Detainees In Syrian Prison
Reports of torture and disappearances in Syria are not new. But the Amnesty International report says the magnitude and severity of abuse has “increased drastically” since 2011. Citing the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, the report says “at least 17,723 people were killed in government custody between March 2011 and December 2015, an average of 300 deaths each month.”
“Surmortalité carcérale” sous Habré
Le statisticien américain Patrick Ball, expert au procès de Hissène Habré, a déclaré vendredi que le taux de mortalité d’opposants tchadiens présumés dans les prisons du régime Habré était encore pire que celui des prisonniers de guerre américains dans les camps japonais.
A Definition of Database Design Standards for Human Rights Agencies.
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Patrick Ball. “A Definition of Database Design Standards for Human Rights Agencies.” © 1994 American Association for the Advancement of Science. [pdf]
Syrian civil war death toll exceeds 190,000, U.N. reports
Ayan Sheikh of PBS News Hour reports on 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:
The latest death toll figure covers the period from March 2011 to April of this year, came from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and is the third study of its kind on Syria. The analysis group identified 191,269 deaths. Data was collected from five different sources to exclude inaccuracies and repetitions.