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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?
Learning to Learn: Reflections on My Time at HRDAG
So much of what I learned at HRDAG was intangible, and I'm grateful to have been able to go deep.
Multiple Systems Estimation: Stratification and Estimation
<< Previous post, MSE: The Matching Process
Q10. What is stratification?
Q11. [In depth] How do HRDAG analysts approach stratification, and why is it important?
Q12. How does MSE find the total number of violations?
Q13. [In depth] What are the assumptions of two-system MSE (capture-recapture)? Why are they not necessary with three or more systems?
Q14. What statistical model(s) does HRDAG typically use to calculate MSE estimates? (more…)
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, ...
Uncovering Police Violence in Chicago: A collaboration between HRDAG and Invisible Institute
In 2014 and again in 2020, the Invisible Institute, a Chicago grassroots organization, won lawsuits that granted them access to decades of complaints of misconduct by Chicago police officers. The collection contains hundreds of thousands of pages of allegation forms, memos, various police administrative forms, interviews and testimonies, pictures, and even embedded audio files. The Institute published scanned images on the Citizens Police Data Project, and is using them for a project with HRDAG known as Beneath the Surface, which is a detailed investigation into gender-based violence by Chicago Police.
Image: David Peters
Often, gender-b...
How Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools Perpetuate Unfairness
Tools like Compas allegedly help judges predict future criminal activities and eliminate bias. HRDAG and partners showed how the tools recycle bias.
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.
Bangladesh
In December 2006, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a report documenting torture and unlawful killings committed by Bangladesh's Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite anti-crime and anti-terrorism force. According to HRW, many of the deaths for which RAB is responsible resulted from summary executions or extreme physical abuse. The statistical analysis presented in the report, "Judge, Jury, and Death: Torture and Executions by Bangladesh's Elite Security Force," was conducted by Romesh Silva, a statistician who worked within the Benetech Human Rights Program at the time, and who now works with HRDAG.
While researching these incidents, HRW compiled ...
Reflections: Some Stories Shape You
The first time I met anyone at HRDAG, I was a journalist. It was 2006. I was working on a story about a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon who’d collaborated with the organization on a survey in Sierra Leone, and I contacted Patrick Ball to discuss the work. At the time, I found him challenging.
But I thought his work—trying to estimate how many people were killed, or, in that study, otherwise injured, during wars—was fascinating. Over the next few years, I got to know other researchers working on similar questions. In 2008, as the war in Iraq ramped up, I spoke with epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University, the World Health Organiz...
Perú
In 2001, President Alejandro Toledo, called for the establishment of the Comision de la Verdad y Reconciliacion (CVR) (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) to investigate human rights abuses in Perú between 1980 and 2000. Dr. Patrick Ball was invited to work with the Commission to evaluate the CVR technical work and make recommendations on the information management process and analytic strategies. HRDAG consultant Jana Asher worked with Dr. Ball and CVR staff members David Sulmont (Director Informations Systems) and Daniel Manrique (Database Expert) to present evidence of the violations in a report to the CVR.
The work included new estimates of ...
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Over the course of a year, we mail quarterly letters and fundraising letters, as well as one or two updates as events demand. If, during the course of a fundraising campaign, you make a donation, we will do our best to remove you from the remainder of fundraising mailings that year. We may use your contact information to invite you to ...
Sri Lanka
Ten years after the war ended in Sri Lanka, we still don’t know to the nearest ten thousand how many people perished. The estimates for the death toll for the last five months of the war alone vary between 7000 and 147,000. In 2011, the UN said it thought approximately 40,000 civilians had died; then in 2012 an internal UN report estimated it was at least 70,000. Population data from World Bank and UN sources indicated that more than 100,000 Tamils living in the conflict areas in the north have not returned home after the war.
HRDAG has provided technical assistance to a broad range of non-governmental human rights organizations in Sri ...
Data on Kosovo Migration
[popup citation="For migrations: Ball, Patrick. (2000). AAAS/ Human Rights Data Analysis Group database of migrations in Albania and Kosovo. For killings: Patrick Ball, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jana Dudukovich, and Jana Asher. (2002). AAAS/ABA-CEELI/Human Rights Data Analysis Group database of killings in Kosovo. For other data: Human Rights Data Analysis Group. (2002). Database of NATO airstrikes, geographic coding, and KLA activity in Kosovo."]
The data on migration from Kosovo are in seven files. All of the files are comma-delimited ASCII. The fields in each file are described below. For more information, see Policy or Panic, section A1, pp. ...
Release of Yellow Book Calls on Salvadoran Military to Open Archives
With the release today of a civil war-era catalog of “enemies,” Salvadorans are calling for a new look at the 12-year civil war during which hundreds of citizens were victims of human rights violations such as torture, forced disappearance, and illegal imprisonment.
The recently leaked document, known as The Yellow Book, is a list created and (more…)
In Pursuit of Excellent Data Processing
With help from HRDAG, Roman Rivera built the data backbone for the Invisible Institute's Citizens Police Data Project.
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…)
Multiple Systems Estimation: The Basics
Multiple systems estimation, or MSE, is a family of techniques for statistical inference. MSE uses the overlaps between several incomplete lists of human rights violations to determine the total number of violations. In this blogpost, and four more to follow, I’ll answer both conceptual and practical questions about this important method. (In posts to follow, questions that refer to specific statistical procedures or debates will be marked, "In depth.") (more…)
Seeking the Truth with Documentation
The need to establish the truth around events is central to goals of transitional justice, particularly securing accountability, establishing legitimate and effective justice mechanisms, and laying the foundations for a peaceful society.
Documentation to provide verifiable and widely accepted accounts of such events is a critical component of establishing this truth, or the multiple truths that may exist for a population. It is difficult to overstate the important role of documentation in transitional justice efforts. If some of what follows sounds familiar, echoing points of previous posts, it is no coincidence. Documentation, in a word, is the ...