282 results for search: truth commissions/feed/content/colombia/privacy

Welcoming a New Board Member

As we get ready to begin our fourth year as an independent nonprofit, we are, as always, indebted to our Advisory Board and to our funders for their support and vision. We’re finishing up a busy year that took us to Dakar (for the trial of former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré), Pristina (for the release of the Kosovo Memory Book), Colombia (for work on a book about the Guatemalan Police Archives), and kept us busy here at home working on police violence statistics. But one of our biggest victories has been to score a new, talented, wise Advisory Board member—Michael Bear Kleinman, whom we first met when he was working with Humanity United. ...

HRDAG’s Year in Review: 2023

In 2023, HRDAG continued to learn from our partners about resilience and patience.

Welcoming Our New Statistician

Maria Gargiulo has joined HRDAG as a Statistician.

Gaza death toll 40% higher than official number, Lancet study finds

“Patrick Ball, a statistician at the US-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group not involved in the research, has used capture-recapture methods to estimate death tolls for conflicts in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.

Ball told AFP the well-tested technique had been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached “a good estimate” for Gaza.”

Existe la posibilidad de que no se estén documentando todos los asesinatos contra líderes sociales

En ocasiones, las discusiones sobre ese fenómeno se centran más sobre cuál es la cifra real, mientras que el diagnóstico es el mismo: en las regiones la violencia no cede y no se avizoran políticas efectivas para ponerle fin. En medio de este complejo panorama, el Centro de Estudios de Derecho, Justicia y Sociedad (Dejusticia) y el Human Rights Data Analysis Group, publicaron este miércoles la investigación Asesinatos de líderes sociales en Colombia en 2016–2017: una estimación del universo.

HRDAG and #GivingTuesday 2018

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Stephen Fienberg 1942-2016

We are saddened by the passing of Steve Fienberg yesterday in Pittsburgh, at the age of 74. He is perhaps best known around the world for bringing statistics to science and public policy and was a beloved professor at Carnegie Mellon University. At HRDAG we are in awe of and grateful for the work Steve did formalizing multiple systems estimation. His work on that front blazed a trail and essentially enabled all of our most important analytical work at the intersection of human rights and statistical science. If we are to reduce the amount of human violence in the world, the first task is to determine the scope of the violence, to know how much of ...

Accountability at home and abroad

  Dear friends, Our spirits were really on the ground on Wednesday, but they lifted at the board meeting we had at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group on Thursday. Executive Director Megan Price, Director of Research Patrick Ball, and the Board drafted these thoughts which we'd like to share with you. For more than twenty-five years, we have held heads of state accountable for human rights violations. We support our partners and advocates in the human rights field. They collect data which we analyze using technical and scientific expertise. Those scientific results bring clarity to human rights violence and support the fight for justice. ...

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 -- ...

That Higher Count Of Police Killings May Still Be 25 Percent Too Low.

Carl Bialik of 538 Politics reports on a new HRDAG study authored by Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball regarding the Bureau of Justice Statistics report about the number of annual police killings, which was issued a few weeks ago. As Bialik writes, the HRDAG scientists extrapolated from their work in five other countries (Colombia, Guatemala, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Syria) to estimate that the BJS study missed approximately one quarter of the total number of killings by police.

“El reto de la estadística es encontrar lo escondido”: experto en manejo de datos sobre el conflicto

In this interview with Colombian newspaper El Espectador, Patrick Ball is quoted as saying “la gente que no conoce de álgebra nunca debería hacer estadísticas” (people who don’t know algebra should never do statistics).

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…)

Social Science Scholars Award for HRDAG Book

In March 2013, I entered a contest called the California Series in Public Anthropology International Competition, which solicits book proposals from social science scholars who write about how social scientists create meaningful change. The winners of the Series are awarded a publishing contract with the University of California Press for a book targeted to undergraduates. With the encouragement of my HRDAG colleagues Patrick Ball and Megan Price, I proposed a book about the work of HRDAG researchers entitled, Everybody Counts: How Scientists Document the Unknown Victims of Political Violence. Earlier this month, I was contacted by the Series judges ...

South America

Colombia Perú

Revisiting the analysis of event size bias in the Iraq Body Count

(This post is co-authored by Patrick Ball and Megan Price) In a recent article in the SAIS Review of International Affairs, we wrote about "event size bias," the problem that events of different sizes have different probabilities of being reported. In this case, the size of an event is defined by the number of reported victims. Our concern is that not all violent (in this case homicide) events are recorded, that is, some events will have zero sources. Our theory is that events with fewer victims will receive less coverage than events with more victims, and that a higher proportion of small events will have zero sources relative to large events. The ...

Cuentas y mediciones de la criminalidad y de la violencia

Exploración y análisis de los datas para comprender la realidad. Patrick Ball y Michael Reed Hurtado. 2015. Forensis 16, no. 1 (July): 529-545. © 2015 Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses (República de Colombia).

Las cifras de la CVR en el 2019

Las estimaciones se estratificaron por ubicación y perpetrador.

Using statistics to estimate the true scope of the secret killings at the end of the Sri Lankan civil war

In the last three days of the Sri Lankan civil war, as thousands of people surrendered to government authorities, hundreds of people were put on buses driven by Army officers. Many were never seen again.

In a report released today (see here), the International Truth and Justice Project for Sri Lanka and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group showed that over 500 people were disappeared on only three days — 17, 18, and 19 May.

New report published on 500 Tamils missing while in Army custody

The International Truth and Justice Project and HRDAG have published a report on 500 Tamils who disappeared while in Army custody in Sri Lanka in 2009.

The report is titled “How many people disappeared on 17-19 May 2009 in Sri Lanka?” and Patrick Ball, director of research at HRDAG, is the lead author.

Counting the Dead in Sri Lanka

ITJP and HRDAG are urging groups inside and outside Sri Lanka to share existing casualty lists.

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.

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