There
is an urgency to humanitarian response that Tina Rosenberg ("The Body Counter,"
March/April 2012) and her subject, Patrick Ball, do not seem to appreciate.
Representative numbers are important in the human rights field, but only to the
extent that they actually improve people's lives. The U.S. Marine Corps used
the SMS data mapped on the
Ushahidi-Haiti platform to save hundreds of lives after the 2010 earthquake.
Something is wrong when self-styled human rights defenders attack lifesaving
volunteer work.
Ball does not typically work with representative samples. He simply applies methods that assume he has nicely behaved random samples. Validation studies are needed to demonstrate that a technique can perform well despite substantial real-world violations of its assumptions. Validation works by applying the technique to a case with an already known answer to test whether one gets the right answer. There are, unfortunately, few validation studies in Ball's area of work. Many of his studies therefore ride entirely on assumptions.
In the case of Haiti, we actually have a strong validation study. This research was produced independently by the European Commission's Joint Research Center and survived a peer-review process, which is how scientific work is validated. The Ushahidi data provided a truer guide to the damage in Haiti than Ball's alternative -- a map of buildings -- would have. (Note that no such map existed at the time anyway.)
Ball and Rosenberg also appear to be confused about the Ushahidi platform, which is simply an information collection and visualization tool that is equally usable for either representative or nonrepresentative data. Columbia University researchers Macartan Humphreys and Peter van der Windt, for example, used Ushahidi to collect and visualize representative cell-phone data in their Voix des Kivus project in eastern Congo.
Finally, Rosenberg states that I "ultimately retreated to a narrower set of claims" after defending the European Commission's analysis. Absolutely not. I fully stand by my original arguments.
Read more: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/23/trust_but_verify
Ball does not typically work with representative samples. He simply applies methods that assume he has nicely behaved random samples. Validation studies are needed to demonstrate that a technique can perform well despite substantial real-world violations of its assumptions. Validation works by applying the technique to a case with an already known answer to test whether one gets the right answer. There are, unfortunately, few validation studies in Ball's area of work. Many of his studies therefore ride entirely on assumptions.
In the case of Haiti, we actually have a strong validation study. This research was produced independently by the European Commission's Joint Research Center and survived a peer-review process, which is how scientific work is validated. The Ushahidi data provided a truer guide to the damage in Haiti than Ball's alternative -- a map of buildings -- would have. (Note that no such map existed at the time anyway.)
Ball and Rosenberg also appear to be confused about the Ushahidi platform, which is simply an information collection and visualization tool that is equally usable for either representative or nonrepresentative data. Columbia University researchers Macartan Humphreys and Peter van der Windt, for example, used Ushahidi to collect and visualize representative cell-phone data in their Voix des Kivus project in eastern Congo.
Finally, Rosenberg states that I "ultimately retreated to a narrower set of claims" after defending the European Commission's analysis. Absolutely not. I fully stand by my original arguments.
Read more: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/23/trust_but_verify
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