This new report by the United Nations Office of High Commissioner of Human Rights builds on three prior analyses and new statistical analysis by HRDAG on killings in Syria.
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Procès Hissène Habré : Le statisticien fait état d’un taux de mortalité de 2,37% par jour
Les auditions d’experts se poursuivent au palais de justice de Dakar sur le procès de l’ex-président tchadien Hissène Habré. Hier, c’était au tour de Patrick Ball, seul inscrit au rôle, commis par la chambre d’accusation de N’Djamena pour dresser les statistiques sur le taux de mortalité dans les centres de détention.
Sous la dictature d’Hissène Habré, le ridicule tuait
Patrick Ball, un expert en statistiques engagé par les Chambres africaines extraordinaires, a conclu que la « mortalité dans les prisons de la DDS fut substantiellement plus élevée que celles des pires contextes du XXe siècle de prisonniers de guerre ».
Download: Megan Price
Executive director Megan Price is interviewed in The New York Times’ Sunday Review, as part of a series known as “Download,” which features a biosketch of “Influencers and their interests.”
Syria’s status, the migrant crisis and talking to ISIS
In this week’s “Top Picks,” IRIN interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball about giant data sets and whether we can trust them. “No matter how big it is, data on violence is always partial,” he says.
Are journalists lowballing the number of Iraqi war dead?
The Columbia Journalism Review investigates the casualty count in Iraq, more than a decade after the U.S. invasion. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball is quoted. “IBC is very good at covering the bombs that go off in markets,” said Patrick Ball, an analyst at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group who says his whole career is to study “people being killed.” But quiet assassinations and military skirmishes away from the capital often receive little or no media attention.
Kriege und Social Media: Die Daten sind nicht perfekt
Suddeutsche Zeitung writer Mirjam Hauck interviewed HRDAG affiliate Anita Gohdes about the pitfalls of relying on social media data when interpreting violence in the context of war. This article, “Kriege und Social Media: Die Daten sind nicht perfekt,” is in German.
Experts Greet Kosovo Memory Book
On Wednesday, February 4, in Pristina, international experts praised the Humanitarian Law Centre’s database on victims of the Kosovo conflict, the Kosovo Memory Book. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball is quoted in the article that appeared in Balkan Transitional Justice.
Data and Social Good: Using Data Science to Improve Lives, Fight Injustice, and Support Democracy
In this free, downloadable report, Mike Barlow of O’Reilly Media cites several examples of how data and the work of data scientists have made a measurable impact on organizations such as DataKind, a group that connects socially minded data scientists with organizations working to address critical humanitarian issues. HRDAG—and executive director Megan Price—is one of the first organizations whose work is mentioned.
Palantir Has Secretly Been Using New Orleans to Test Its Predictive Policing Technology
One of the researchers, a Michigan State PhD candidate named William Isaac, had not previously heard of New Orleans’ partnership with Palantir, but he recognized the data-mapping model at the heart of the program. “I think the data they’re using, there are serious questions about its predictive power. We’ve seen very little about its ability to forecast violent crime,” Isaac said.
Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools
Sarah L. Desmarais and Evan M. Lowder (2019). Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools: A Primer for Judges, Prosecutors, and Defense Attorneys. Safety and Justice Challenge, February 2019. © 2019 Safety and Justice Challenge. <<HRDAG's Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah served as Project Members and made contributions to the primer.>>
Sarah L. Desmarais and Evan M. Lowder (2019). Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools: A Primer for Judges, Prosecutors, and Defense Attorneys. Safety and Justice Challenge, February 2019. © 2019 Safety and Justice Challenge. <<HRDAG’s Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah served as Project Members and made significant contributions to the primer.>>
What HBR Gets Wrong About Algorithms and Bias
“Kristian Lum… organized a workshop together with Elizabeth Bender, a staff attorney for the NY Legal Aid Society and former public defender, and Terrence Wilkerson, an innocent man who had been arrested and could not afford bail. Together, they shared first hand experience about the obstacles and inefficiencies that occur in the legal system, providing valuable context to the debate around COMPAS.”
Quantifying Injustice
“In 2016, two researchers, the statistician Kristian Lum and the political scientist William Isaac, set out to measure the bias in predictive policing algorithms. They chose as their example a program called PredPol. … Lum and Isaac faced a conundrum: if official data on crimes is biased, how can you test a crime prediction model? To solve this technique, they turned to a technique used in statistics and machine learning called the synthetic population.”
New UN report counts 191,369 Syrian-war deaths — but the truth is probably much, much worse
Amanda Taub of Vox has interviewed HRDAG executive director about the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Right’s release of HRDAG’s third report on reported killings in the Syrian conflict.
From the article:
Patrick Ball, Executive Director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and one of the report’s authors, explained to me that this new report is not a statistical estimate of the number of people killed in the conflict so far. Rather, it’s an actual list of specific victims who have been identified by name, date, and location of death. (The report only tracked violent killings, not “excess mortality” deaths from from disease or hunger that the conflict is causing indirectly.)
Unveiling Statistical Invisibility: The Structural Racism of the War on Drugs, its Impact on Social Inequalities, and the Need for Citizen Data Empowerment in Latin America
Cecilia Olliveira, Patrick Ball, Dayana Blanco, Eduardo Ribeiro, Juliana Borges, Maria Isabel Couto, Nathália Oliveira (2024)."Unveiling Statistical Invisibility: The Structural Racism of the War on Drugs, its Impact on Social Inequalities, and the Need for Citizen Data Empowerment in Latin America." T20 Brasil. September 2024.
Cecilia Olliveira, Patrick Ball, Dayana Blanco, Eduardo Ribeiro, Juliana Borges, Maria Isabel Couto, Nathália Oliveira (2024).”Unveiling Statistical Invisibility: The Structural Racism of the War on Drugs, its Impact on Social Inequalities, and the Need for Citizen Data Empowerment in Latin America.” T20 Brasil. September 2024.
Even if there’s a ceasefire, thousands of deaths projected in Gaza over next 6 months
In this NPR story, HRDAG’s Patrick Ball comments on first-of-its-kind projections.
War and Illness Could Kill 85,000 Gazans in 6 Months
HRDAG director of research Patrick Ball is quoted in this New York Times article about a paper that models death tolls in Gaza.
A look at the top contenders for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize
The Washington Post’s Paul Schemm recognized HRDAG’s work in Syria, in the category of research and activism. “HRDAG gained renown at the start of the war, when it was one of the few organizations that tried to put a number on the war’s enormous toll in Syrian lives.”
PRIO Director Henrik Urdal’s 2022 Nobel Peace Prize Shortlist
Henrik Urdal has released his final Nobel Shortlist for 2022, and HRDAG is included on it, alongside Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Alexei Navalny, and others. The list highlights pro-democracy efforts, multilateral cooperation, combating religious extremism and intolerance, and the value that research and knowledge can have for promoting peace.