218 results for search: sijihomi.blogspot.com/feed/rss2/privacy


Coders Bare Invasion Death Count


5 Humanitarian FOSS Projects to Watch

Dave Neary described “5 Humanitarian FOSS Projects to Watch,” listing HRDAG’s work on police homicides in the U.S. and other human rights abuses in other countries.


Reflections: Richard Savage’s Vision Fulfilled

In 1984, as a fresh PhD, I heard Richard Savage give his presidential address at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Philadelphia. He called it "Hard/Soft Problems" and made a big pitch for statisticians to get involved in human rights data analysis. It was inspirational, and I was immediately sold. I started working with the American Statistical Association's Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights (now chaired by HRDAG's own Megan Price). Over time, a growing set of statisticians became involved, initially in letter-writing campaigns to help dissident statisticians (and other quantitative academics—economists seemed to have a particular ...

Reflections: A Meaningful Partnership between HRDAG and Benetech

I joined the Benetech Human Rights Program at essentially the same time that HRDAG did, coming to Benetech from years of analyzing data for large companies in the transportation, hospitality and retail industries. But the data that HRDAG dealt with was not like the data I was familiar with, and I was fascinated to learn about how they used the data to determine "who did what to whom." Although some of the methodologies were similar to what I had experience with in the for-profit sector, the goals and beneficiaries of the analyses were very different. At Benetech, I was initially predominantly focused on product management for Martus, a free ...

Use this form to donate to HRDAG

Your tax deductible gift helps us seek justice for victims of human rights violations, hold perpetrators accountable, and strengthen the overall human rights advocacy community. HRDAG is a project of Community Partners, providing us with administrative infrastructure — so we can focus on our mission and work. We are grateful for your (and their) support.

New results for the identification of municipalities with clandestine graves in Mexico

The goal of this project is identify Mexican municipalities with a high probability of having clandestine graves. Knowing where to search will help to create better public programs regarding missing persons in Mexico.

Welcome!

As of today, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) is an independent* non-profit! It's been a long time coming, and we're delighted to have gotten to this point. HRDAG is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that applies rigorous science to the analysis of human rights violations around the world; for more information, see our About Us page. Benetech has spun out the scientific and statistical part of the Human Rights Program to HRDAG. The spinout includes (as staff) me -- Patrick Ball -- and Dr Megan Price, as well as our many part-time scientific and field consultants (a list is here). The software and technology component of our work -- ...

Talks

Upcoming Talks TBA Past Talks 2015 Presentation on the research behind the Evaluation of the Kosovo Memory Book Database. National Archive, Pristina, Kosovo. Patrick Ball. February 4, 2015. How do we know what we know? Patrick Ball. Arizona State University. January, 2015. AAAS Science & Human Rights Coalition Meeting: Big Data & Human Rights. Megan Price, panelist. Washington, D.C. January 15-16, 2015. Examining the Crisis in Syria: Conference Hosted by New America and Arizona State University’s Center on the Future of War and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Megan Price, panelist. Washingt...

Data on Kosovo Killings

The data on killings in Kosovo are in four files. All of the files are comma-delimited ASCII. The fields in each file are described below. If you use these data on Kosovo killings, please cite them with the following citation, as well as this note: “These are convenience sample data, and as such they are not a statistically representative sample of events in this conflict.  These data do not support conclusions about patterns, trends, or other substantive comparisons (such as over time, space, ethnicity, age, etc.).” Patrick Ball, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jana Dudukovich, and Jana Asher. (2002). AAAS/ABA-CEELI/Human Rights Data ...

How Data Analysis Confirmed the Bias in a Family Screening Tool

In Pittsburgh …

Connect with HRDAG

If you’d like to stay informed about HRDAG events, blogposts, and news, connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or through our RSS feed. We also have a LinkedIn page. You may contact us directly via email at info @ hrdag.org. A note for persons in search of assistance with specific human rights cases: We are very sorry for your troubles and your suffering; however, HRDAG does not take on casework. If you need help with a human rights case, you might consider requesting it from the International Committee of the Red Cross (www.icrc.org). Photo: U.S. National Archives

Identifiers of Detained Children Have Implications for Data Security and Estimation

Identifiers being sequential could make possible estimations of the population of detained children.

.Rproj Considered Harmful

We aim to produce code that is clear, replicatable across machines and operating systems, and that leaves an easy-to-follow audit trail.

Primer to Inform Discussions about Bail Reform

The primer addresses what pretrial risk assessment is and what the research supports.

Rise of the racist robots – how AI is learning all our worst impulses

“If you’re not careful, you risk automating the exact same biases these programs are supposed to eliminate,” 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 “learning” from previous crime reports. For Samuel Sinyangwe, a justice activist and policy researcher, this kind of approach is “especially nefarious” because police can say: “We’re not being biased, we’re just doing what the math tells us.” And the public perception might be that the algorithms are impartial.


How we go about estimating casualties in Syria—Part 1

I spent the two weeks over Easter working with Patrick and Megan in San Francisco, trying to figure out a strategy of how best to estimate the number of casualties the Syrian civil war has claimed in the past two years. In January, HRDAG published a report on the number of fully identified casualties reported in the Syrian Arab Republic between March 2011 and November 2012. The number of de-duplicated records of killings for this period was 59,648, a number that is likely to be an undercount since we know that many incidences of lethal violence in conflict go unreported, and that the unreported cases are not missing at random. (more…)

Contact Us

You may contact us via info @ hrdag.org or use this form. Would you like to receive our newsletter? Great! Please sign up here. Find us on Mastodon Follow HRDAG on Mastodon. Employment with HRDAG Please keep in touch by signing up for our newsletters and following us on Twitter @hrdag or Mastodon. If you do not see a job listed here, please do not send your CV or résumé, as we do not file or save them, and we will only have to send you a sad “no thank you” letter. Volunteering with HRDAG Are you interested in volunteering your time to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group? We’re very flattered—but at this time we’re ...

Haiti

In 1995, the Haitian National Commission for Truth and Justice (CNVJ) requested the advice of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Dr. Patrick Ball on how to develop a large-scale project to take the testimonies of several thousand witnesses of human rights abuses in Haiti. The team conducted work incorporating over 5,000 interviews covering over 8,500 victims to produce detailed regional analyses, using quantitative material from the interviews, historical, economic and demographic analysis.

Our work has been used by truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, and non-governmental human rights organizations. We have worked with partners on projects on five continents.

Donate