A few years ago, I wrote about Patrick Ball for the Christian Science Monitor. It’s one of my favorite stories, in part because he’s such a compelling talker, in part because this data stuff is so critical. Get thee to New York!
Crunching Numbers for Human Rights: the Promise and Perils of Data and Statistics
A Conversation with Patrick Ball
Location: OSI-New York
Event Date: February 9, 2011
Event Time: 12:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Human rights monitoring consists primarily of receiving information from witnesses and conducting investigations. The resulting information is often stored in databases. However, the statistics generated from databases collected in this way may tell us more about the functioning of the organization doing the monitoring than about the violence being monitored.
Using examples from Guatemala, El Salvador, Kosovo, Colombia, Timor-Leste, and Sierra Leone, Patrick Ball, vice president of the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group, will explain how statistics derived from data collected by direct observation can be inconsistent or misleading representations of true patterns of violence. He will conclude with two examples showing how reliable statistics can be produced using multiple independent databases (and a lot of math) or using a random sample of respondents.
Open Society Foundations president Aryeh Neier will participate as a respondent to this talk.
Lunch will be provided.
RSVP here.
