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Clarifying the Pastand Commemorating Sri Lanka’s Disappeared: a Descriptive Analysis of Enforced Disappearances Documented by Families of the Disappeared.
Romesh Silva, Britto Fernando, and Vasuki Nesiah (2007). “Clarifying the Pastand Commemorating Sri Lanka’s Disappeared: a Descriptive Analysis of Enforced Disappearances Documented by Families of the Disappeared.” Benetech & Families of the Disappeared.
Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
As an organization that uses science to advocate for human rights, the goals and issues represented by Ada Lovelace Day are very near and dear to our hearts. Additionally, we are lucky to work with and be advised by some pretty kick-ass ladies in STEM (see our People page to learn more about these amazing women (and men)).
I brainstormed a list of women I could write about, as Finding Ada suggests we celebrate today by blogging about a STEM heroine. I considered Anita Borg (she has her own institute!), who advocated tirelessly for women in computer science. I thought about Sally Wyatt, keynote speaker and organizer of the fascinating workshop...
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Perú, Final Report – General Conclusions.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Perú, Final Report – General Conclusions. Comisión de la verdad y reconciliación, 2003.
Mortality in the DDS Prisons in Chad, 1985–1988
Patrick Ball (2014). Human Rights Data Analysis Group. August 22, 2014. © 2014 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.
Timor-Leste Op-Ed
Defending Human Rights Data And The Possibility of Justice In East Timor
By Patrick Ball and Romesh Silva
On June 5th, armed gangs broke into the offices of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) in Dili, East Timor and stole their motorbikes.
Many human rights workers wondered whether the mobs would soon return to loot the irreplaceable paper records used by the CAVR to compile a definitive report on human rights abuses during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975-1999.
The release of this report was preempted by the recent violence in Dili. But in the midst of the chaos, Australian military forces stepped in to ...
How many police homicides in the US? A reconsideration
(This post is co-authored by Patrick Ball and Kristian Lum.)
In early March, the Bureau of Justice Statistics published a report that estimated that in the period 2003-2009 and 2011, there were approximately 7427 homicides committed by police in the US. We responded that the method the analysts used, capture-recapture with two databases, is vulnerable to underestimation if the databases exhibit positive dependence. We conduct a thorough sensitivity analysis on the original independence model as applied to the police homicides databases. We used information from several other countries where our partners created multiple databases of homicides. We ...
HRDAG is hiring – technical lead
If this could be you, let us know. Also, please feel free to pass on this link to great people.
Job Title. Technical lead with a hacker's heart
Location. A cool office in SOMA, San Francisco. You need to be on-site with us.
What we do. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) develops statistical techniques to measure human rights atrocities. Our work helps bring dictators to justice through data analysis of human rights atrocities around the world. Over more than 20 years, our small team has developed technology and statistical techniques to take disjoint, incomplete, and inaccurate information from conflict zones and process it to identify ...
El Salvador
Some of the earliest large-scale human rights information projects happened in El Salvador. One was developed by Patrick Ball at the Salvadoran non-governmental Human Rights Commission, also known as Comision de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador (CDHES-ng). Between 1977 and 1990, more than 9,000 testimonies were taken in an effort to document the nature and scope of the bloody conflict between the army and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Starting in 1991, Patrick worked with CDHES staff to organize the information in an early computer database. They linked reported human rights violations with the career structures of individual ...
The case of Ana Lucrecia Orellana Stormont
When working with documents in an archive, every document offers the opportunity for statistical study and quantitative research. But a document can also offer the discovery of a story. That is the case with the disappearance of Ana Lucrecia Orellana Stormont, who was reported missing on June 6, 1983, at the age of 35.
Ana Lucrecia, a professor of psychology at the University of San Carlos, was scheduled to attend a meeting with Edgar Raúl Rivas Rodríguez at the Plaza Hotel in Guatemala’s capital city. Edgar, who also went missing, was a teacher at the School of Political Science at the University. (Ana Lucrecia’s case is explained more fully ...
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 ...
BJS Report on Arrest-Related Deaths: True Number Likely Much Greater
(This post is co-authored by Patrick Ball and Kristian Lum.)
Today the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released a report on their effort to document “all deaths that occur during the process of arrest in the United States.” The analysis estimates that the Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) program covers only 34-49% of these deaths. A parallel program by the FBI (the Supplementary Homicide Reports, SHR) is estimated to cover approximately the same proportion of deaths. Even taking into consideration both programs, 28% of all police homicides remain unreported.
In order to estimate the total number of homicides that appear on neither the ARD or ...
Herb Spirer, 1925 – 2018
Herb led and mentored a generation of statisticians working in human rights.
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 ...
Big Data Predictive Analytics Comes to Academic and Nonprofit Institutions to Fuel Innovation
"Revolution Analytics will allow HRDAG to handle bigger data sets and leverage the power of R to accomplish this goal and uncover the truth." Director of Research Megan Price is quoted.
REVOLUTION ANALYTICS
Press release
February 4, 2014
Link to press release
Back to Press Room
Get Involved/Donate
Donating to HRDAG
Thank you for your interest in making a donation to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group to help us use science to support our partners in the human rights world.
You can make a donation by credit card on the Community Partners® Network for Good page. HRDAG is a "project of Community Partners," and right below the section on payment information, you'll be able to select "Human Rights Data Analysis Group" from a drop-down menu. (On most browsers, if you use this link, HRDAG will be pre-selected on the drop-down menu.)
This transaction will appear on your credit card statement as "Network for Good."
If you donate by check, ...
Yezidi Activists Teach HRDAG about Human Rights – updated
UPDATE (21 Dec 2014): Juan Cole is reporting that the Kurdish militia (the peshmerga) have retaken Shingal (also known as Sinjar) mountain where many Yezidi people have been trapped since 3 August 2014. They are now moving to liberate other Yezidi towns south of the mountain. The Yezidi people trapped on the mountain are now free. There is no word yet on the thousands of Yezidi people enslaved by ISIS.
ORIGINAL (19 Nov 2014): Farhad (not his real name) got the call from ISIS on his personal cell phone just after lunch: we have your sister, and we will give her back if you pay us $6000, plus $1500 for the driver.
Carrying little more than his ...