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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Improving the estimate of U.S. police killings
Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing writes about HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball and his contribution to Carl Bialik's article about the recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics report on the number of annual police killings, both reported and unreported, in 538 Politics. Doctorow writes:
Patrick Ball and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group applied the same statistical rigor that he uses in estimating the scale of atrocities and genocides for Truth and Reconciliation panels in countries like Syria and Guatemala to the problem of estimating killing by US cops, and came up with horrific conclusions.
Ball was responding to a set of new estima...
Epidemiology has theories. We should study them.
With so many dashboards and shiny visualizations, how can an interested non-technical reader find good science among the noise?
Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to Recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict
ed. by Taylor B. Seybolt, Jay D. Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff. Oxford University Press. © 2013 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
The following four chapters are included:
— Todd Landman and Anita Gohdes (2013). âA Matter of Convenience: Challenges of Non-Random Data in Analyzing Human Rights Violations in Peru and Sierra Leone.â
— Jeff Klingner and Romesh Silva (2013). âCombining Found Data and Surveys to Measure Conflict Mortality.â
— Daniel Manrique-Vallier, Megan E. Price, and Anita Gohdes (2013). âMultiple-Systems Estimation Techniques for Estimating Casualties in Armed Conflict.â
— Jule KrĂŒger, Patrick Ball, Megan Price, and Amelia Hoover Green (2013). âIt Doesnât Add Up: Methodological and Policy Implications of Conflicting Casualty Data.â
Reflections: Challenging Tasks and Meticulous Defenders
I have made it my personal objective to amplify HRDAG's message of being extra careful and scientifically rigorous with human rights data.
Reflections: A Simple Plan
I got an email from my superheroic PhD adviser in June 2006: Would I be interested in relocating to Palo Alto for six months in order to work with Patrick Ball at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group? (She'd gotten a grant and would cover my stipend.) Since I'd spent the last several months in New Haven wrestling ineffectually with giant, brain-melting methodological problems, I said yes immediately.
The plan with my adviser was simple: I'd digitize the ancient, multiply-photocopied pages of data from the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador, combine them with two other datasets, match across all the records, and produce reliable ...
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. âI was clever, but I wasnât smart,â 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 Iâm sitting in his office in San Franciscoâs 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 Salvadorâs internal armed conflict, the files detail ...
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 ...
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 Departmentâs crime report...
Beka Steorts Named MIT Under-35 Innovator
Weâve known for years that Beka Steorts is on the cutting-edge of statistical science, and now The MIT Technology Review has realized the same. Last week she was named one of 35 Innovators Under 35, in the category of humanitarian.
We first became familiar with Beka's work in 2013Â when she was a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon and was introduced to us by Prof. Steve Fienberg. Since then, weâve felt very fortunate to collaborate with her on projects such as the UN enumeration of casualties in the Syrian conflict, and we look forward to many more years of work with her. She is one of several young stars we include in our superheroine hall ...
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 Californiaâs 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 ...
Transitional Justice in Syria: Accountability and Reconciliation Conference
I spent last weekend in Istanbul at an excellent conference organized by the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies (SCPSS). The conference included numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Syria as well as international human rights researchers and advocates. Families of victims told their stories, data collection groups discussed the challenges, and need, to document violations, transitional justice experts worried about infrastructure such as the police force and judicial system, and local leaders pledged to work together for peace.
I was invited to speak about HRDAG's recent report examining killings in Syria documented by ...
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 documentsâ 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 ...
Rise of the racist robots â how AI is learning all our worst impulses
âIf youâre not careful, you risk automating the exact same biases these programs are supposed to eliminate,â says Kristian Lum, the lead statistician at the San Francisco-based, non-profit Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). Last year, Lum and a co-author showed that PredPol, a program for police departments that predicts hotspots where future crime might occur, could potentially get stuck in a feedback loop of over-policing majority black and brown neighbourhoods. The program was âlearningâ from previous crime reports. For Samuel Sinyangwe, a justice activist and policy researcher, this kind of approach is âespecially nefariousâ because police can say: âWeâre not being biased, weâre just doing what the math tells us.â And the public perception might be that the algorithms are impartial.
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.
Momentous Verdict against HissÚne Habré
Today weâre very pleased to hear of the verdict finding HissĂšne HabrĂ© guilty of crimes against humanity. HabrĂ©, president of Chad from 1982 to 1990, has been sentenced to life in prison in Dakar, Senegal, where he was tried. He is the first former head of state to be tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity in one country (Chad) by the courts of another country (Senegal).  Hereâs more on the verdict from The Guardian.
The verdict resonates especially with HRDAG because of our role in the trial. In September 2015, director of research Patrick Ball testified as an expert witness about the very high rates of prison mortality in ...
HRDAG and #GivingTuesday 2018
Will you help HRDAG advance human rights?
Accountability at home and abroad
Dear friends,
Our spirits were really on the ground on Wednesday, but they lifted at the board meeting we had at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group on Thursday. Executive Director Megan Price, Director of Research Patrick Ball, and the Board drafted these thoughts which we'd like to share with you.
For more than twenty-five years, we have held heads of state accountable for human rights violations. We support our partners and advocates in the human rights field. They collect data which we analyze using technical and scientific expertise. Those scientific results bring clarity to human rights violence and support the fight for justice.
...