237 results for search: %EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD %EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD %EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD %EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD %EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD bit.ly%2Fpsy3000/feed/rss2/privacy
How much faith can we place in coronavirus antibody tests?
Given a positive test result, what is the probability that an individual has antibodies? This HRDAG-authored Granta article explains the science.
The task is a quantum of workflow
This post describes how we organize our work over ten years, twenty analysts, dozens of countries, and hundreds of projects: we start with a task. A task is a single chunk of work, a quantum of workflow. Each task is self-contained and self-documenting; I'll talk about these ideas at length below. We try to keep each task as small as possible, which makes it easy to understand what the task is doing, and how to test whether the results are correct.
In the example I'll describe here, I'm going to describe work from our Syria database matching project, which includes about 100 tasks. I'll start with the first thing we do with files we receive ...
HRDAG Drops Dropbox
On Wednesday, April 9, the file hosting service Dropbox announced the addition of Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, to their Board of Directors, citing the need for “a leader who could help us expand our global footprint.”
In response to this announcement, HRDAG requested (and rapidly received) a refund for our recent purchase of Dropbox for Business, and will drop the use of their service entirely.
Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s Executive Director stated: “As a human rights organization, we find Condoleezza Rice's complicity in the serious human rights abuses of the Bush administration very worrying. ...
Can the Armed Conflict Become Part of Colombia’s History?
Paula Amado and María Juliana Durán Fedullo reflect on how the Truth Commission may change Colombia’s history, finally officially acknowledging the 50-year conflict and its casualties, and reckoning with who did what to whom.
Where Stats and Rights Thrive Together
Everyone I had the pleasure of interacting with enriched my summer in some way.
Historic verdict in Guatemala—Gen.Efraín Ríos Montt found guilty
I've been working with various projects in Guatemala to document mass violence since 1993, so in 2011, when Claudia Paz y Paz asked me to revisit the analysis I did for the Commission for Historical Clarification examining the differential mortality rates due to homicide for indigenous and non-indigenous people in the Ixil region, I was delighted. We have far better data processing and statistical methods than we had in 1998, plus much more data. I think the resulting analysis is a conservative lower bound on total homicides of indigenous people. (more…)
Guatemala
Collecting and Protecting Human Rights Data in Guatemala (1991-2013)
In 1996, a peace accord brokered by the United Nations ended 36 years of internal armed conflict in Guatemala. During the hostilities, non-governmental organizations asked for technical support from the scientific community in the project to gather the experiences of witnesses and victims in databases.
From 1993 to 1999 Dr. Patrick Ball, then at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), worked with the International Center for Human Rights Research in Guatemala (CIIDH) to collect and organize evidence of more than 43,000 human rights violations. The ...
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 ...
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 ...
The UDHR Turns 70
We're thinking about how rigorous analysis can fortify debates about components of our criminal justice system such as cash bail, pretrial risk assessment and fairness in general.
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...
Rionegro
Texto en Español
Using Cemetery Information to Search for the Disappeared Lessons from a Pilot Study in Rionegro, Antioquia, Colombia
Between May and July 2009, researchers from the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) conducted a pilot study to examine patterns of information about unidentified bodies at a cemetery in Rionegro, a town located Antioquia, Colombia. The study was carried out to support ongoing efforts by HRDAG's partner organization EQUITAS (Colombian Interdisciplinary Team for Forensic Work and Psychosocial Assistance) to identify bodies of unknown persons in the Rionegro cemetery. EQUITAS has found that cemeteries in ...
How Data Processing Uncovers Misconduct in Use of Force in Puerto Rico
In Puerto Rico, some people are more likely to be victims of police violence than others. HRDAG processed a flood of data to illuminate the racial bias.
New UN report counts 191,369 Syrian-war deaths — but the truth is probably much, much worse
Amanda Taub of Vox has interviewed HRDAG executive director 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:
Patrick Ball, Executive Director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and one of the report's authors, explained to me that this new report is not a statistical estimate of the number of people killed in the conflict so far. Rather, it's an actual list of specific victims who have been identified by name, date, and location of death. (The report only tracked violent killings, not "excess mortality" deaths from from disease or ...
CIIDH Data – Dictionary
Version date: 2000.01.29
Current version: ATV20.1
Patrick Ball & Herbert F. Spirer
The unit of analysis for each record in this structure is VIOLATION.
Each violation was of a particular type, happened at a particular time and place, and was committed by zero, one, or several organizational perpetrators. The violation was committed against zero or one named (individually identified) victim, and zero or more anonymous (unidentified) additional victims. The violation was reported one or more times in one, two, or three source types.
Note that to count the number of times individuals suffered particular violations, users should sum either the ...
Donate with Cryptocurrency
Help HRDAG use data science to work for justice, accountability, and human rights. We are nonpartisan and nonprofit, but we are not neutral; we are always on the side of human rights.
Cryptocurrency donations to 501(c)3 charities receive the same tax treatment as stocks. Your donation is a non-taxable event, meaning you do not owe capital gains tax on the appreciated amount and can deduct it on your taxes. This makes Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency donations one of the most tax efficient ways to support us.
We are a team of experts in machine learning, applied and mathematical statistics, computer science, demography, and social science, and ...
Learning a Modular, Auditable and Reproducible Workflow
The modular nature of the workflow and use of Git allowed us to work on different parts of the project from across the country.
Primer to Inform Discussions about Bail Reform
The primer addresses what pretrial risk assessment is and what the research supports.
Partners
How we work with partners is how we relate to the whole human rights community. We work with human rights advocates and defenders to support their goals by complementing their substantive expertise with our technical expertise. To date, partners have included truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, United Nations missions, and non-governmental human rights organizations on five continents.
Here are a few stories that illustrate how we work with our partners:
HRDAG partner stories:
Quantifying Police Misconduct in Louisiana (2023)
Scraping for Pattern: Protecting Immigrant Rights in Washington State (2022)
Police Violence ...