RECENT DATASET CHANGES - PLEASE READ (2007-12-01)

Dear CIRI User,

Along with our 2005/2006 update of the dataset, we have made some significant improvements to our dataset and website of which you should be aware:

1. Political Participation (POLPAR) has been renamed to Electoral Self-Determination (ELECSD) to better-reflect the substance of that variable.
2. Government Censorship (GOVCEN) has been renamed to Freedom of Speech (SPEECH) to better reflect the substance of that variable.
3. We have created and added to the dataset a new CIRI numeric country identifier variable (CIRI). This is now the variable we use to serve the online datasets. We formerly keyed off the POLITY project's numeric country identifier.
4. We have updated and corrected the proper names of countries to make them as up-to-date as possible.
5. We have updated and corrected the beginning/ending years and existence status of states associated with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.
6. We have updated our "Variable Short Descriptions" documentation to include score ranges for each variable in the dataset, calculation particulars for aggregate indices, and any additions/changes to variables in the dataset.
7. We have updated our Country List information to include the years for which data are available for each country, reflect corrected country names, and to include the new CIRI country code.
8. We have revised and expanded our coding guide.
9. We have assigned a -77 (no central authority) code to Somalia, effective for all variables back to 1991.
10. We have added an RSS feed to the CIRI site, via which CIRI users can receive information about dataset updates and improvements without having their e-mail box affected. You can subscribe to the RSS pointing your RSS reader to http://www.humanrightsdata.org/content/ciri_news_rss.xml.