218 results for search: sijihomi.blogspot.com/feed/rss2/privacy
Reality and Risk in Our Mortality Study of the Peruvian TRC
HRDAG researchers and analysts at Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) estimated conflict mortality due to violence using Capture-Recapture methods.
Reflections: Minding the Gap
How might we learn what we don’t know? HRDAG associate Christine Grillo hits the wayback machine and recalls her first exposure to People Against Bad Things, ideas about bias and correlation versus causation, and truth.
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?
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...
Syria: No word on four abducted activists
Razan Zatouneh is an esteemed colleague of ours, and we are one of 57 organizations demanding immediate release for her and the three other human rights defenders still missing.
A year on, no information on Douma Four
The prominent Syrian human rights defenders Razan Zaitouneh, Samira Khalil, Wa’el Hamada and Nazem Hamadi – the Douma Four—remain missing a year after their abduction, 57 organizations said today. The four were abducted in Duma, a city near Damascus under the control of armed opposition groups. They should be released immediately, the groups said.
On 9 December 2013, at about 10:40 pm, a group of armed men stormed into the ...
HRDAG Names New Board Member Margot Gerritsen
Margot is a professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University, interested in computer simulation and mathematical analysis of engineering processes.
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.
Casanare, Colombia
Text in English
[popup citation="Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, Megan Price, Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball. (2010). Benetech/Human Rights Data Analysis Group database of lethal violence in Casanare."]
Estimaciones de Homicidios y Desapariciones en Casanare
Casanare es un departamento extenso y rural de Colombia con 19 municipios y una población de casi 300.000 habitantes. Ubicado entre las faldas de los Andes y las planicies orientales, Casanare tiene una larga historia de violencia. Diversos grupos armados han hecho presencia en Casanare, entre ellos paramilitares, guerrillas y el ejército colombiano. Muchos habitantes del Casanare han sido vícti...
Quantifying Police Misconduct in Louisiana
HRDAG contributes to the project by helping to classify, filter, extract, and standardize the records so that they can be useful in the database.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Sierra Leone TRC Data and Statistical Appendix
HRDAG assisted the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission in building a systematic data coding system, electronic database, and secure data analysis process to manage the thousands of statements given to them in the course of their work. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball and HRDAG field consultant Richard Conibere worked at the TRC full-time for approximately eighteen months starting in March 2003.
HRDAG worked with TRC researchers to help them incorporate quantitative findings to support the qualitative findings in their writing for the other chapters of the TRC report. In addition, HRDAG produced a Statistical Appendix to present ...
Human Rights and the Decentralized Web
Our partners were eager to learn and talk about emerging decentralized technology.
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. ...
Counting the Dead in Sri Lanka
ITJP and HRDAG are urging groups inside and outside Sri Lanka to share existing casualty lists.