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MEDIA MISREPRESENTATIONS OF THE CAVR REPORT

Press release from the Technical Secretariat of the Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation (CAVR) MEDIA MISREPRESENTATIONS OF THE CAVR REPORT Although not yet officially released, the 2500 page CAVR Report 'Chega!' has been the subject of several prominent reports in the media based on leaked versions of the Executive Summary and particularly its section on Recommendations. Stories on the Report have been carried by AFP, AP, the Japan Times, the Singapore Straits Times, Sydney Morning Herald, Lusa,Timor-Leste press and Bali Times - to name some. Regrettably some of these stories contained serious misrepresentations of the Report which ...

Building Capacity in Colombia: Truth and Reconciliation

The datasets contributed by 30+ organizations do a wonderful job of tallying the violence that was observed—but they don’t account for the violence that nobody witnessed or documented.

Full Updated Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic

Price, Megan, Jeff Klingner, Anas Qtiesh, and Patrick Ball. 2013. Commissioned by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Human Rights Data Analysis Group (June 13). © 2013 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. [pdf via UN]


In Colombia: HRDAG and Dejusticia on the Importance of Missing Data

It’s inevitable that databases will have information gaps, and special care must be taken to account for these gaps.

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 ...

Estimated Gaza Toll May Have Missed 25,000 Deaths, Study Says

Patrick Ball, director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, and a statistician who has conducted similar estimates of violent deaths in conflicts in other regions, said the study was strong and well reasoned. But he cautioned that the authors may have underestimated the amount of uncertainty caused by the ongoing conflict.

The authors used different variations of mathematical models in their calculations, but Dr. Ball said that rather than presenting a single figure — 64,260 deaths — as the estimate, it may have been more appropriate to present the number of deaths as a range from 47,457 to 88,332 deaths, a span that encompasses all of the estimates produced by modeling the overlap among the three lists.

“It’s really hard to do this kind of thing in the middle of a conflict,” Dr. Ball said. “It takes time, and it takes access. I think you could say the range is larger, and that would be plausible.”


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.


HRDAG and the Digital Commons

One of the three main goals of HRDAG is education and outreach, and to that end we use Creative Commons licenses for all of our blogposts and, whenever possible, for our publications. Using a Creative Commons license makes it clear that educators are free to use HRDAG's publications, in their entirety, and with the peace of mind that they are doing so with our blessing. Also, the use of the Creative Commons license allows us to participate in and encourage the creation of a digital commons, which we feel helps to advance another one of our goals, the creation of knowledge. We feel that it’s important to offer up our publications for use and reuse ...

Kosovo

During the conflict between NATO and Yugoslavia in early 1999, hundreds of thousands of people fled Kosovo, and thousands more were killed. Who were the perpetrators? Statistical analysis helped answer this question. While at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), members of the HRDAG team wrote several reports on the conflict. With partners at ABA CEELI (American Bar Association/Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative), HRDAG submitted an expert report that was used in the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević at the  ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) in The  Hague, ...

RustConf 2019, and systems programming as a data scientist

It could make sense to use Rust as a data journalist for in-browser computations, and other thoughts from RustConf.

Data Archaeology for Human Rights in Central America: HRDAG Collaborates with UWCHR

Patrick Ball is kicking himself for a decision he made almost 25 years ago. “I was clever, but I wasn’t smart,” he says ruefully, as he considers the labyrinth of tables and ASCII-encoded keystrings he used to design a database of human rights violations for the pioneering Salvadoran non-governmental Human Rights Commission (CDHES). Now I’m sitting in his office in San Francisco’s Mission District watching over his shoulder, and trying to keep up, as he bangs out code to decipher the priceless data contained in these old files. Created in 1991 and 1992, during the last days of El Salvador’s internal armed conflict, the files detail ...

.Rproj Considered Harmful

We aim to produce code that is clear, replicatable across machines and operating systems, and that leaves an easy-to-follow audit trail.

HRDAG Retreat 2022

A week in the California redwoods amongst a hodgepodge of people united by their passion for using quantitative analysis to combat injustice.

Updated Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic

Megan Price, Anita Gohdes, and Patrick Ball (2014). Human Rights Data Analysis Group, commissioned by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). August 22, 2014. © 2014 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


Predictive Policing Reinforces Police Bias

Issues surrounding policing in the United States are at the forefront of our national attention. Among these is the use of “predictive policing,” which is the application of statistical or machine learning models to police data, with the goal of predicting where or by whom crime will be committed in the future. Today Significance magazine published an article on this topic that I co-authored with William Isaac. Significance has kindly made this article open access (free!) for all of October. In the article we demonstrate the mechanism by which the use of predictive policing software may amplify the biases that already pervade our criminal ...

12 Questions about Using Data Analysis to Bring Guatemalan War Criminals to Justice

When people talk about war criminals in Guatemala, which war are they talking about? They’re talking about the Guatemalan civil war, which began in 1960 and ended in 1996. That’s thirty-six years of civil war. Even though it ended almost two decades ago, Guatemala is still recovering from it. At its simplest, this civil war story was right-wing government forces fighting leftist rebels. But it went deeper than that, of course. The majority of the rebel forces was composed of indigenous peoples, primarily the Maya, (more…)

Our Story

Dec 10, 1991 HRDAG is born when Patrick Ball begins database design at the Human Rights Office of the Salvadoran Lutheran Church. The work soon moves to the non-governmental Human Rights Commission (CDHES). The database analysis identified the 100 worst officers in the Salvadoran military — who were forced to resign as part of the peace process. 1994 Patrick publishes A Definit...

How Predictive Policing Reinforces Bias

Algorithmic tools like PredPol were supposed to reduce bias. But HRDAG has found that racial bias is baked into the data used to train the tools.

Guatemala’s Bol de la Cruz Found Guilty

Today Guatemala’s former national police chief Colonel Héctor Rafael Bol de la Cruz was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in the 1984 kidnapping and disappearance of 27-year-old student union leader Fernando Garcia, who was last seen when officers detained him outside his home. Along with Bol de la Cruz, former senior police officer Jorge Gomez was also tried; he received a sentence of 40 years in prison. That verdict comes in part because of testimony this month by HRDAG’s Patrick Ball, who served as an expert witness and presented data analysis done with colleague Daniel Guzmán to assess the flow of thousands of ...

Analyzing patterns of violence in Colombia using more than 100 databases

The institution’s objectives were to learn the truth about what happened during the armed conflict.

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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