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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Lancet Study Estimates Gaza Death Toll 40% Higher Than Recorded
“Patrick Ball, a statistician at the US-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group not involved in the research, has used capture-recapture methods to estimate death tolls for conflicts in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.
Ball told AFP the well-tested technique has been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached “a good estimate” for Gaza.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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…)
Happy Hacking
From my first introduction to the HRDAG community at the annual retreat it was clear to me that mentorship is an organizational priority and that the contributions of interns are valued. Much of my first couple weeks as a summer intern at HRDAG were spent familiarizing myself with Patrick’s paradigm for principled data processing. At the same time, I was learning the skills and tricks (bash, make, vim, git) that promote an effortless programming workflow, a pursuit that Patrick calls “sharpening the saw” (just like in programming, you can cut down a tree with a dull blade, but your life will be much easier if you take the time to sharpen ...
There may have been 14 undocumented Korean “comfort women” in Palembang, Indonesia
Patrick Ball, Ethan Hee-Seok Shin and Hyerin Yang (2018). There may have been 14 undocumented Korean “comfort women” in Palembang, Indonesia. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 26 December 2018.© 2018 HRDAG. Creative Commons.
Patrick Ball, Ethan Hee-Seok Shin and Hyerin Yang (2018). There may have been 14 undocumented Korean “comfort women” in Palembang, Indonesia. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 26 December 2018.© 2018 HRDAG. Creative Commons.
How many people disappeared on 17–19 May 2009 in Sri Lanka?
Patrick Ball and Frances Harrison (2018). How many people disappeared on 17–19 May 2009 in Sri Lanka? Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 12 December 2018.© 2018 HRDAG. Creative Commons.
Patrick Ball and Frances Harrison (2018). How many people disappeared on 17–19 May 2009 in Sri Lanka? Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 12 December 2018.© 2018 HRDAG. Creative Commons.
Measures of Fairness for New York City’s Supervised Release Risk Assessment Tool
Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah (2019). Measures of Fairness for New York City's Supervised Release Risk Assessment Tool. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 1 October 2019. © HRDAG 2019.
Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah (2019). Measures of Fairness for New York City’s Supervised Release Risk Assessment Tool. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 1 October 2019. © HRDAG 2019.
Drug-Related Killings in the Philippines
Patrick Ball, Sheila Coronel, Mariel Padilla and David Mora (2019). Drug-related killings in the Philippines. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 26 July 2019. © HRDAG 2019.
Patrick Ball, Sheila Coronel, Mariel Padilla and David Mora (2019). Drug-related killings in the Philippines. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 26 July 2019. © HRDAG 2019.