Eric Sears, a director at the MacArthur Foundation who leads the grantmaker’s Technology in the Public Interest program, worked at Human Rights First and Amnesty International before joining MacArthur, and has been following HRDAG’s work for years. … One of HRDAG’s strengths is the long relationships it maintains with partners around the globe. “HRDAG is notable in that it really develops deep relationships and partnerships and trust with organizations and actors in different parts of the world,” Sears said. “I think they’re unique in the sense that they don’t parachute into a situation and do a project and leave. They tend to stick with organizations and with issues over the long term, and continually help build cases around evidence and documentation to ensure that when the day comes, when accountability is possible, the facts and the evidence are there.”
SILICON VALLEY GROUP USES TECHNOLOGY TO HELP THE TRUTH COMMISSION ANSWER DISPUTED QUESTIONS ABOUT MASSIVE POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN TIMOR-LESTE
Palo Alto, CA, February 9, 2006 – The Benetech® Initiative today released a statistical report detailing widespread and systematic violations in Timor-Leste during the period 1974-1999. Benetech's statistical analysis establishes that at least 102,800 (+/- 11,000) Timorese died as a result of the conflict. Approximately 18,600 (+/- 1000) Timorese were killed or disappeared, while the remainder died due to hunger and illness in excess of what would be expected due to peacetime mortality.
The magnitude of deaths ...
Our partners were eager to learn and talk about emerging decentralized technology.
El objetivo de esta institución temporal es conocer la verdad de lo ocurrido en el marco del conflicto armado.
Lum, Kristian, Megan Emily Price, and David Banks. 2013. The American Statistician 67, no. 4: 191-200. doi: 10.1080/00031305.2013.821093. © 2013 The American Statistician. All rights reserved. [free eprint may be available].
When Patrick Ball was introduced to Ibero’s database, the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group in San Francisco, California, saw an opportunity to turn the data into a predictive model. Ball, who has used similar models to document human rights violations from Syria to Guatemala, soon invited Data Cívica, a Mexico City–based nonprofit that creates tools for analyzing data, to join the project.
“Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s Director of Research and the statistician behind the code, explained that the Random Forest classifier was able to predict with 100% accuracy which counties that would go on to have mass graves found in them in 2014 by using the model against data from 2013. The model also predicted the counties that did not have mass hidden graves found in them, but that show a high likelihood of the possibility. This prediction aspect of the model is the part that holds the most potential for future research.”
Megan Price, Morgan Agnew, and David Peters (2020). How much faith can we place in coronavirus antibody tests? Granta. 28 April 2020. © Granta Publications 2020.
Megan Price, Morgan Agnew, and David Peters (2020). How much faith can we place in coronavirus antibody tests? Granta. 28 April 2020. © Granta Publications 2020.
Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives. Excerpt:
As Patrick once explained to me, you can train an algorithm to predict someone’s height from their weight, but if your whole training set comes from a grade three class, and anyone who’s self-conscious about their weight is allowed to skip the exercise, your model will predict that most people are about four feet tall. The problem isn’t the algorithm, it’s the training data and the lack of correction when the model produces erroneous conclusions.
Patrick Ball, Kristian Lum, Tarak Shah and Megan Price (2020). How many people are going to die from COVID-19? Granta. 14 March 2020. © Granta Publications 2020.
Patrick Ball, Kristian Lum, Tarak Shah and Megan Price (2020). How many people are going to die from COVID-19? Granta. 14 March 2020. © Granta Publications 2020.
Una investigación de Dejusticia y Human Rights Data Analysis Group concluyó que hay un subconteo en los asesinatos de líderes sociales en Colombia. Es decir, que el aumento de estos crímenes en 2016 y 2017 podría ser incluso mayor al reportado por las organizaciones y por las cifras oficiales.
Under apartheid, South Africans from all sides suffered violence and human rights abuses. One of the mandates of the the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was to report truth by reporting on violations and victims.
Dr. Patrick Ball, as Deputy Director of the Science and Human Rights Program (SHRP) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), used the who-did-what-to-whom data model to provide statistical analysis of the violations reported to the Commission, for use in the final report of the TRC.
Links:
http://shr.aaas.org/southafrica/trcsa/
http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/index....
Michelle spent a weekend in Toronto, Canada, reaching out to the community at TamilFest, where she and a colleague invited people to sit down and talk.
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 ...
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 ...
On the San Francisco program, You Are Not So Smart, HRDAG director of research Megan Price talked with host David McRaney about Syria, human rights violations, and statistical analysis. The topic was survivorship bias. Megan's part in the podcast begins around Minute 27. From the YANSS blog: "Unfortunately, survivorship bias stands between you and the epiphanies you seek."
You Are Not So Smart
March 11, 2014 (podcast April 24, 2014)
San Francisco, California
Link to YANSS podcast
@notsmartblog
@davidmcraney
Back to Talks
We’re very happy to announce that our executive director, Patrick Ball, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), as announced by ASA President Nathaniel Schenker. Patrick is one of 63 new ASA Fellows to be honored this year in a ceremony at the Joint Statistical Meetings, which will take place this August 5 in Boston, Massachusetts. (more…)
What follows is an elaborate criss-crossing of collaborations—retreat is a time to embrace the productivity that comes with being in the same room.