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2016.03.09

Two thousand billionaires.

Researchers have compiled a multi-decade database of the super-rich. Building off the Forbes World’s Billionaires lists from 1996–2014, scholars at Peterson Institute for International Economics have added a couple dozen more variables about each billionaire — including whether they were self-made or inherited their wealth. (Roughly half of European billionaires and one-third of U.S. billionaires got a significant financial boost from family, the authors estimate.)

http://www.iie.com/publications/interstitial.cfm?ResearchID=2917 http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/

International Economic Databases

2016.03.09

Legislative linguistics.

The Sunlight Foundation’s Capitol Words project lets you explore the frequency of words and phrases in the Congressional Record since 1996. For example: "weapons of mass destruction", “war” vs. “peace”, or “Obamacare”. The underlying data is available via an API.

http://capitolwords.org/ http://capitolwords.org/term/weapons_of_mass_destruction/ http://capitolwords.org/?terma=war&termb=peace http://capitolwords.org/term/Obamacare/ http://capitolwords.org/api/1/

Political Data and Analysis

2016.03.09

Historical mortgages.

With the help of volunteers, the New York Public Library is transcribing 6,000+ mortgage and bond ledgers from Emigrant Savings Bank, founded in 1850 and the oldest such bank in the city. You can search the transcribed records, or download the (very) raw data.

http://emigrantcity.nypl.org/#/intro http://emigrantcity.nypl.org/#/data/browse http://emigrantcity.nypl.org/#/data/download

Historical Data Projects

2016.03.09

Overlapping crosswords.

The cruciverb industry is facing its first major plagiarism scandal, unearthed thanks to a newly-published database of crosswords that are at least 25% similar to previous-published puzzles.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-plagiarism-scandal-is-unfolding-in-the-crossword-world/ http://xd.saul.pw/xdiffs/

Historical News Datasets

2016.03.09

Baseball, baseball, baseball.

If you’re looking for historical data on baseball teams, players, salaries, or managers, Sean Lahman’s Baseball Archive likely has it. The archive was updated with data from the 2015 season last week. Related: Retrosheet’s game logs — a record of every major league game since 1871. [h/t Joe Murphy]

http://www.seanlahman.com/baseball-archive/statistics/ http://www.retrosheet.org/gamelogs/index.html

https://twitter.com/joemurph

Sports Data Collections

2016.03.23

Nuclear explosions.

The Oklahoma Geological Survey Observatory’s “Catalog of Nuclear Explosions” contains a “nearly complete” list of such detonations — more than 2,000 of them between 1945 and 2006. The dataset roughly (but not precisely) overlaps with the explosions listed in the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s “Nuclear Explosions, 1945–1998” (PDF) report. Both datasets list the date and location of each explosion, the country responsible, the detonation site, and (where known) its explosive yield, among other variables. And both reports use unconventional formatting, so I’ve extracted a couple of CSVs for you.

http://www.okgeosurvey1.gov/level2/nuke.cat.html http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/31/060/31060372.pdf https://github.com/data-is-plural/nuclear-explosions

Energy Data Resources

2016.03.23

British property sales.

The UK’s Price Paid Data contains virtually all of the country’s residential property sales, with only a few exceptions. (Sales forced under court order are excluded, for example.) Each row includes the sale price, address, property type, and more. The full, multi-gigabyte dataset covers all sales since 1995, but you can also download files for individual years or the most recent month, or just search the dataset online. Related: Where can you afford to buy a house? [h/t Helena Bengtsson]

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/price-paid-data https://www.gov.uk/guidance/about-the-price-paid-data https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/price-paid-data-downloads http://landregistry.data.gov.uk/app/ppd http://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2015/sep/02/unaffordable-country-where-can-you-afford-to-buy-a-house

https://twitter.com/helenabengtsson

Housing Price Data Analysis

2016.03.23

Rising waters.

The U.S. National Water Level Observation Network tracks water levels at hundreds of tide gauges around the country. The data is available via an API. Related: Water’s Edge, a 2014 Reuters investigation based on the gauge data. Also related: The Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service’s flood observations and warnings, as structured data. [h/t Ryan McNeill]

http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/nwlon.html https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/stations.html?type=Water+Levels https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/api/ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/waters-edge-the-crisis-of-rising-sea-levels/ http://water.weather.gov/ahps/ http://water.weather.gov/ahps/download.php

https://twitter.com/mcneill_tweets

Water Resources Data

2016.03.23

What kind of economy does your county have?

The USDA Economic Research Service’s County Typology Codes categorize each U.S. county based on (a) its dependence on certain industries and on (b) various socio-economic factors. For example, the data classifies 219 counties as “mining-dependent.” [h/t Steven Romalewski]

http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/county-typology-codes.aspx

https://twitter.com/SR_spatial

Housing Market Data

2016.03.23

Rodents of New York.

NYC’s 311 dataset contains a special category for rat sightings. This slice of data, which is updated daily and stretches back to 2010, contains more than 73,000 rows. One-third of sightings have occurred in Brooklyn. Related: An academic study of NYC rat sightings. Also related: Reply All #56 — ”Zardulu”.

https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/Rat-Sightings/3q43-55fe http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4157232/ https://gimletmedia.com/episode/zardulu/

Animal Data Collections

2016.03.30

U.S. drone permits.

Want to fly a drone in the United States for non-recreational purposes? You’ll need a “Section 333” exemption from the Federal Aviation Administration, which governs drone activity. The FAA publishes a list of approved exemptions, which Bard College’s Center for the Study of the Drone has converted into a PDF-formatted database. The Verge, in turn, has converted that PDF into an easy-to-use CSV. Related: Last week, the FAA updated its dataset of unmanned aircraft sightings. [h/t Dan Vergano]

https://www.faa.gov/uas/legislative_programs/section_333/333_authorizations/ http://dronecenter.bard.edu/ http://dronecenter.bard.edu/analysis-us-drone-exemptions-14-15-2/ https://github.com/voxmedia/data-projects/tree/master/verge-drones-over-america http://www.faa.gov/uas/law_enforcement/uas_sighting_reports/

https://twitter.com/dvergano

Aviation Safety Data

2016.03.30

Digital black markets.

Researcher Gwern Branwen has assembled an archive of listings posted to “dark net markets". Silk Road is the best-known among the group, but the collection covers scores of other markets, including Amazon Dark and FreeBay. The materials gathered from each site are slightly different; many include product advertisements and seller profiles. Warning: Some of the archives contain pictures, which may include offensive or disturbing imagery. And it’s probably wise to heed Gwern’s caveats: The scrapes “are large, complicated, redundant, and highly error-prone. They cannot be taken at face-value.” [h/t Mike Sconzo]

http://www.gwern.net/Black-market%20archives

http://www.secrepo.com/

Cybersecurity Datasets and Vulnerabilities

2016.03.30

Titanic passengers.

Based in large part on Encyclopedia Titanica, researchers have compiled a structured dataset of 1,309 passengers on the RMS Titanic’s maiden voyage. (To get the data, download titanic3.csv on this page.) The dataset includes passengers’ names, ages, ticket fare, cabin number, and whether they survived.

http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/ http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/pub/Main/DataSets/titanic.html http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/Main/DataSets

Diverse Research Datasets

2016.03.30

Groceries, quantified.

Open Food Facts is a crowdsourced database of food products’ nutrition data and ingredient lists. (E.g., this kilogram jar of Nutella contains 316 grams of fat.) The entire database can be downloaded in several formats.

http://world.openfoodfacts.org http://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/3017620401473/nutella-1kg-ferrero http://world.openfoodfacts.org/data

Geolocation and Dataset Projects

2016.03.30

America, the varyingly beautiful.

In 1999, the USDA Economic Research Service published a “natural amenities scale,” which rated every county in the contiguous United States based on factors such as landscape variation and January sunniness. Last year, based on the dataset, a Washington Post reporter called Minnesota’s Red Lake County “the absolute worst place to live in America.” Now, he’s moving there. [h/t Jody Avirgan]

http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/natural-amenities-scale.aspx https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/17/every-county-in-america-ranked-by-natural-beauty/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/08/why-im-moving-to-the-place-i-called-americas-worst-place-to-live/

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/he-called-it-americas-worst-place-to-live-now-hes-moving-there/

Housing Market Data

2016.04.06

Global bike-sharing.

The citybik.es API provides access to live data on every bike-sharing station in more than 400 cities around the world. It’s free, and the underlying software is open-source. What data you get per station depends on the city, but typically includes the number of empty slots, number of available bikes, and location information. Looking for bulk data on bike-sharing rides? Many cities — including New York, Chicago, and D.C. — make it available. Related: “A Tale of Twenty-Two Million Citi Bike Rides.” Also related: Three maps illustrating the gender gap in bike-share usage.

http://api.citybik.es/v2/ https://github.com/eskerda/pybikes https://www.citibikenyc.com/system-data https://www.divvybikes.com/data https://www.capitalbikeshare.com/trip-history-data http://toddwschneider.com/posts/a-tale-of-twenty-two-million-citi-bikes-analyzing-the-nyc-bike-share-system/ http://www.buzzfeed.com/jsvine/these-maps-show-a-massive-gender-gap-in-bicycle-riding

Urban Transit Data

2016.04.06

Nine years of homelessness estimates

. Every January, at the behest of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, volunteers across the country attempt to count the homeless in their communities. The result: HUD’s “point in time” estimates, which are currently available for 2007–2015. The most recent estimates found 564,708 homeless people nationwide, with 75,323 of that count (more than 13%) living in New York City. Related: “Why counting America’s homeless is both imperative and imperfect.” Also related: “How Many Street Homeless? NYC’s Tallies Leave the Question Open.” [h/t Tim Henderson + Jonathan Stray]

https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/4832/2015-ahar-part-1-pit-estimates-of-homelessness/ http://fusion.net/story/49980/why-counting-americas-homeless-is-both-imperative-and-imperfect/ http://citylimits.org/2015/10/13/how-many-street-homeless-nycs-tallies-leave-the-question-open/

https://twitter.com/TimHendersonSL https://twitter.com/jonathanstray

New York City Housing Data

2016.04.06

Tech’s water cooler.

Hacker News’ official API provides data describing every submission, comment, and user on the community-driven website. You can also analyze the full dataset via Google’s recently-relaunched BigQuery Public Datasets program. [h/t Michael Gardiner]

https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news

https://twitter.com/MikeARGS

Cybersecurity Datasets and Vulnerabilities

2016.04.06

John Snow’s data.

When physician John Snow constructed his now-famous dot-map of London’s Broad Street cholera outbreak in the 1850s, the leading geospatial technologies were ink and paper. Academic Robin Wilson has adapted the data for the computer age, converting Snow’s map into several modern GIS formats. Related: Infographics in the Time of Cholera.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak#John_Snow_investigation http://blog.rtwilson.com/john-snows-cholera-data-in-more-formats/ https://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/infographics-in-the-time-of-cholera

Geospatial and Environmental Data

2016.04.06

Jon Snow data.

An API Of Ice And Fire lets you fetch data about every book, character, and house in Game of Thrones — including allegiances, family trees, and dates of death. You can also download the data in bulk. Related: Macalester researchers recently published a network analysis (and underlying data) of all characters in A Storm of Swords, the third book in the series. Jon Snow, according to the analysis, was the second-most important character. [h/t Melissa Bierly]

https://anapioficeandfire.com/ https://anapioficeandfire.com/Documentation https://github.com/joakimskoog/AnApiOfIceAndFire/tree/master/AnApiOfIceAndFire.Data.Feeder/Data http://www.macalester.edu/~abeverid/thrones.html

https://blog.modeanalytics.com/analytics-dispatch-017/

Data Collections and Analyses

2016.04.13

Global rainfall.

To create the most detailed measurements of global rainfall ever, researchers at UC Santa Barbara’s Climate Hazards Group harmonize data from satellites and on-the-ground weather stations. The dataset, known as CHIRPS, stretches back more than 30 years and is freely available. Related: Eric Holthaus provides more details and explains why the dataset is so important. [h/t Dave Riordan]

http://chg.geog.ucsb.edu/data/chirps/index.html http://ensia.com/features/this-new-data-set-is-poised-to-revolutionize-climate-adaptation/

https://twitter.com/riordan/status/717800678085758978

Climate and Weather Datasets

2016.04.13

Order in the courts.

CourtListener gathers and publishes bulk data the Supreme Court, all federal appeals courts, and hundreds of other jurisdictions. The files include opinions, audio from oral arguments, dockets, and citations. It also has an API. (If you register, you can also create and explore networks of citation-linked cases.) [h/t Jeff Grove]

https://www.courtlistener.com/api/bulk-info/ https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest-info/ https://www.courtlistener.com/visualizations/scotus-mapper/

http://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/faculty-staff/profile.cfm?Id=14

Legal Data Collections

2016.04.13

Health and wealth.

The Health Inequality Project calculates American life expectancies by income, gender, and geography. You can download the data at the national, state, county, and “commuting zone” levels. Where do poor Americans live the longest? New York City, Santa Barbara, and San Jose. [h/t Margot Sanger-Katz]

https://healthinequality.org/ https://healthinequality.org/data/ https://healthinequality.org/rankings/

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/11/upshot/poor-new-yorkers-tend-to-live-longer-than-other-poor-americans.html

COVID-19 Policy Tracking Datasets

2016.04.13

He said, she said (less).

Over the weekend, Hannah Anderson and Matt Daniels published an interactive analysis of male and female speaking roles in 2,000 movie scripts. Among their findings: 308 scripts gave 90%+ of the film’s dialogue to men, while just 8 scripts did so for women. The duo has also released “as much data as we can share (without getting sued)” on GitHub.

http://polygraph.cool/films/ https://github.com/matthewfdaniels/scripts/

Film Data and Analysis

2016.04.13

Plane papers.

The Federal Aviation Administration maintains a database of all non-military aircraft registrations, which includes extensive details about each plane/helicopter/glider/blimp and their owners. Related: “Spies In The Skies.” [h/t Peter Aldhous]

http://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/aircraft_certification/aircraft_registry/releasable_aircraft_download/ http://www.buzzfeed.com/peteraldhous/spies-in-the-skies

https://twitter.com/paldhous

Aviation Safety Data

2016.04.20

Where computers (maybe) are.

An under-scrutinized quirk in a little-known, widely-used database “turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell.” How? The database contains best-guess geographic coordinates for every IP address on the internet. But for millions of IP addresses, the best guess is just somewhere in the United States. And, until recently, the database translated that vague location into the latitude and longitude of a farm in Potwin, Kansas. (Now it points to a lake.)

http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/ https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/geolite2/ http://fusion.net/story/290772/ip-mapping-maxmind-new-us-default-location/

Agricultural Data and Analysis

2016.04.20

The American consumer.

Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published its midyear update to the Consumer Expenditure Survey. The survey collects data on spending, income, and a handful of characteristics about U.S. consumers. One tidbit: On average, Americans are spending approximately 33% of their income on housing, and a tad less than 1% on alcohol. [h/t Nathan Yau]

http://www.bls.gov/cex/midyear.htm http://www.bls.gov/cex/home.htm

http://flowingdata.com/2015/04/02/how-we-spend-our-money-a-breakdown/

Economic Statistics Reports

2016.04.20

Cricket.

Baseball season is in full-swing, basketball and hockey playoffs have begun, and the NFL draft is nigh. No better time to highlight some cricket data! Cricsheet.org has gathered ball-by-ball data on more than 2,700 matches played since the mid-2000s. Looking for historical data? A new GitHub repository contains stats for more than 40,000 matches going back to 1773 (but mostly since the 1970s), scraped from ESPN Cricinfo. Related: How, statistically, the coin toss affects who’ll win. [h/t Derek Willis]

http://cricsheet.org/ https://github.com/dwillis/toss-up http://www.espncricinfo.com/matches/engine/match/535000.html https://github.com/dwillis/python-espncricinfo http://www.espncricinfo.com/blogs/content/story/997931.html

https://twitter.com/derekwillis/status/720569555119116289

Sports Data Collections

2016.04.20

Where clouds congregate, and when.

Researchers have analyzed 15 years of satellite imagery to create a nearly-global dataset of seasonal cloud coverage. The data — available at a kilometer-square resolution — could help scientists monitor and predict changes in ecosystems. [h/t Grant Smith + Joanna Klein]

http://www.earthenv.org/cloud.html

https://twitter.com/grantmeaccess/status/720992509950865412 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/science/a-cloud-atlas-provides-clues-to-life-on-earth.html

Geospatial Data and Monitoring

2016.04.20

License to distill.

The U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau publishes a few permit datasets, including this table of 1,900+ businesses licensed to produce and/or bottle liquor. [h/t Maggie Lee]

https://www.ttb.gov/foia/frl.shtml https://www.ttb.gov/foia/xls/frl-spirits-producers-and-bottlers.htm

https://twitter.com/maggie_a_lee

Occupational and Workforce Data

2016.04.27

FOIA, four ways.

On Saturday, BuzzFeed hosted a FOIA data hackathon. Participants used datasets — from MuckRock, FOIA Machine, FOIA Mapper, and FOIA.gov — to analyze federal, state, and local responsiveness to public records requests. The first three datasets contain details about individual FOIA requests and responses; FOIA.gov provides aggregate internal data from federal agencies.

https://github.com/FOIA-data-hackathon/Planning/wiki https://github.com/FOIA-data-hackathon/Planning/wiki/Datasets https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/apr/16/join-muckrock-and-buzzfeed-hack-foia-april-23rd/ https://github.com/cirlabs/foiamachine/tree/master/stats https://foiamapper.com/foia-downloads/ http://www.foia.gov/data.html

Data Analysis and Disclosure

2016.04.27

Particle physics.

Last week, the researchers at CERN’s Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment released more than 300 terabytes of data. The datasets include raw particle-detection data from the Large Hadron Collider, as well as pre-processed datasets the researchers say “can be readily analysed by university or high-school students.” [h/t Dad]

http://cms.web.cern.ch/news/cms-releases-new-batch-research-data-lhc http://opendata.cern.ch/about/CMS

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-vine-a480347

Research Data and Datasets

2016.04.27

Flight delays.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics requires the nation’s largest airlines to report scheduled and actual timing data for every domestic flight. The corresponding database includes information about delays, cancellations, and diversions, among other fields — and goes back to 1987. In January 2016, departing flights taxied for an average of 16 minutes, a minimum of 1 minute, and a maximum of 2 hours, 38 minutes. Related: “Which Flight Will Get You There Fastest?” [h/t Tom Augspurger]

http://www.transtats.bts.gov/DatabaseInfo.asp?DB_ID=120&DB_Name=Airline%20On-Time%20Performance%20Data http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/flights/

http://tomaugspurger.github.io/modern-1.html

Aviation Data and Regulations

2016.04.27

Congressional junkets.

The U.S. House of Representatives requires all staff to reveal all “gift travel” — i.e., “free” trips that the government didn’t pay for. The Office of the Clerk compiles those filings into a database containing each trip’s dates and sponsors. (The Consumer Electronics Show paid for 49 staffers and one congressman to visit the Las Vegas convention in January.) The Senate publishes similar data, except it doesn’t include the sponsor name ... which kind of undermines the entire point. [h/t John Stanton]

http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/giftTravel.aspx http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/legislative/g_three_sections_with_teasers/lobbyingdisc.htm#lobbyingdisc=grt

https://twitter.com/dcbigjohn

Government Transparency Datasets

2016.04.27

A long time ago, in an API far, far away.

The Star Wars API provides programmatic access to data about every character, species, spaceship, planet, and film in George Lucas’ cinematic universe. You can also download JSON files containing all the data. [h/t Robin Sloan]

https://swapi.co/ https://github.com/phalt/swapi/tree/master/resources/fixtures

https://twitter.com/robinsloan

Media Franchise APIs

2016.05.04

Scientific paper trails.

Sci-Hub bills itself as “the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers.” Who’s downloading papers from the site? “Everyone,” Science magazine concluded after analyzing data culled from six months of Sci-Hub server logs. For every download, the dataset identifies the paper downloaded, the date and time, an anonymized version of the downloader’s IP address, and a rough location. [h/t Melissa Bierly + Tom Grahame]

http://sci-hub.cc/ http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone http://datadryad.org/resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.q447c

https://twitter.com/melissa_bierly https://twitter.com/tfgrahame

Open Research Datasets

2016.05.04

The Ku Klux Klan, 1915–1940.

Scholars at Virginia Commonwealth University have identified and mapped the locations of 2,000 KKK branches active in the early 20th century. The dataset contains the city, state, earliest-known-date, and sources for each “klavern.” Related: “Active Hate Groups in the United States in 2015,” a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. [h/t K Reed]

http://labs.library.vcu.edu/klan/ http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/hist_data/1/ https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2016/active-hate-groups-united-states-2015

https://twitter.com/ternary_logic/status/726464655632269312

Violence and Crime Databases

2016.05.04

Disciplined doctors.

The National Practitioner Data Bank tracks medical malpractice payments, license suspensions, Medicare expulsions, and other lists of penalized physicians. The public use data file includes dozens of details per entry but excludes the part that is almost certainly most important to patients: the doctors' names. Related: “Doctors perform thousands of unnecessary surgeries,” according to a 2013 USA Today investigation that relied partly on the NPDB.

http://www.npdb.hrsa.gov/ http://www.npdb.hrsa.gov/resources/publicData.jsp http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/18/unnecessary-surgery-usa-today-investigation/2435009/

Healthcare Data and Transparency

2016.05.04

Goooooooooaaaaal.

OpenFootball collects and publishes results and rosters from national and international soccer/football matches, including the Premier League and the World Cup. Related: English soccer/football results, 1871–2014. [h/t Wendy Mak]

http://openfootball.github.io/ https://github.com/jalapic/engsoccerdata

https://twitter.com/wwymak/status/714796436609757184

Sports Data Collections

2016.05.04

Grape timing.

Climate scientists have compiled a dataset of grape-harvest-dates from 380 European vineyards, across 27 regions, and stretching back 650 years. The earliest data-point refers to a Burgundy harvest in 1354. Related: The original academic paper. [h/t Martín González]

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo/f?p=519:1:0::::P1_STUDY_ID:13194 http://www.clim-past.net/8/1403/2012/

https://twitter.com/martgnz

Agricultural Data and Analysis

2016.05.11

Secret offshore companies.

On Monday, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released data on 210,000 companies, trusts, and funds named in the massive Panama Papers leak. The database is searchable online and downloadable as several CSV files. The dataset includes companies’ officers, registered addresses, and middlemen. It supplements a pre-existing cache of of 105,000 companies named in ICIJ’s 2013 "Offshore Leaks" investigation.

https://panamapapers.icij.org/blog/20160509-offshore-database-release.html https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/ https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/pages/database https://www.icij.org/offshore

Government Financial Datasets

2016.05.11

Potentially habitable planets.

Since 2009, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has been looking for Earth-like exoplanets — i.e., planets outside our solar system. Through the NASA Exoplanet Archive, you can explore, filter, and download databases of “candidate” and “confirmed” exoplanets, including Kepler’s discoveries. [h/t David Kipping]

http://kepler.nasa.gov/ http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/intro.html http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/TblView/nph-tblView?app=ExoTbls&config=cumulative

https://twitter.com/david_kipping/status/728410422873870336

Space Exploration Datasets

2016.05.11

“Marihuana.”

The Institute for Cannabis (established in 1985 as The Institute for Hemp) has obtained, via FOIA, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s list of organizations licensed to handle marijuana — or, as the license application form calls it, “marihuana.” Many of the nearly 3,000 licensees are law enforcement organizations, but universities, pharmacies, and hospitals also pepper the list. [h/t Michael Ravnitzky]

http://birrenbach.com/INSTITUTE/ http://birrenbach.com/INSTITUTE/foia/dea/ http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/drugreg/reg_apps/225/225_form.pdf

Consumer Safety Reports

2016.05.11

Obesity over time.

An international network of researchers who study noncommunicable diseases estimates the annual prevalence of obesity and diabetes for approximately 200 countries and territories around the world. The data currently covers 1975–2014 and is based, on 2,000+ surveys, according to the group. Related: Bloomberg’s chart and maps of the data.

http://www.ncdrisc.org/ http://www.ncdrisc.org/d-adiposity.html http://www.ncdrisc.org/d-diabetes.html http://www.ncdrisc.org/about-us.html http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-global-obesity/

Public Health Datasets

2016.05.11

Upward mobility.

In response to a freedom-of-information request, the NYC Department of Buildings provided WNYC with a spreadsheet of 76,088 “registered elevator devices” in the city. Elevators and escalators dominate the list, but you’ll also find dumbwaiters, handicap lifts, and a few other vertical transporters. The spreadsheet includes data on location, speed, maximum capacity, floors served, and more. Related: FiveThirtyEight analyzed the data last week. [h/t Michael A. Rice, a teacher at Ingraham High School in Seattle + John Templon]

https://github.com/datanews/elevators http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/new-yorks-elevators-define-the-city/

https://twitter.com/jtemplon/status/727919536561885186

Urban Transit Data

2016.05.18

Drug safety.

To help monitor drug safety, the FDA collects “adverse event” reports submitted by patients, doctors, and manufacturers. You can download the (anonymized) reports from the FDA directly, but that dataset includes duplicate cases, and sometimes calls the same drug by different names. A group of researchers recently announced that they’ve cleaned up the data — removing duplicates and standardizing nomenclature — so that you don’t have to. The resulting dataset covers 4,245 drugs, more than 17,000 types of reactions, and nearly 5 million case reports. Previously: The SIDER database of pharmaceutical side effects, featured Nov. 11, 2015.

http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/Surveillance/AdverseDrugEffects/default.htm http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/Surveillance/AdverseDrugEffects/ucm082193.htm http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201626 http://datadryad.org/resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.8q0s4 http://sideeffects.embl.de/ https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural/letters/data-is-plural-2015-11-11-edition

Healthcare Data and Transparency

2016.05.18

Fossils.

The Paleobiology Database, run by a non-profit group of researchers, has aggregated data on more than a million fossils from all around the world. You can access the dataset — organized by species, era, and location — via an interactive map, download form, or API.

Biodiversity Databases and Datasets

2016.05.18

Immigrants, internationally.

The United Nations publishes estimates of the number of foreign-born residents living in every country. The figures cover 1990 to 2015, at five-year intervals. The Vatican (100% foreign-born) and the United Arab Emirates (88%) had the highest proportion of immigrant residents in 2015; the U.S. (46.6 million) boasted the largest total immigrant population. The dataset also includes estimates by age, sex, and country of origin. Previously: Refugees in America, featured Nov. 25, 2015. [h/t Manu Balachandran]

http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/data/estimates2/estimates15.shtml http://www.wrapsnet.org/Reports/InteractiveReporting/tabid/393/Default.aspx https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural/letters/data-is-plural-2015-11-25-edition

https://www.theatlas.com/charts/4JYKtQedx

Migration and Policy Data

2016.05.18

Tens of millions of parking tickets.

I Quant NY author Ben Wellington recently discovered that New York City had been “ticketing legally parked cars for millions of dollars a year.” To reach that finding, Wellington analyzed three years of parking tickets, amounting to more than 30 million summonses. NYC isn’t alone in providing parking ticket data; Philadelphia, Toronto, Baltimore, Seattle, and others publish similar datasets.

http://iquantny.tumblr.com/ http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/144197004989/the-nypd-was-systematically-ticketing-legally https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/Parking-Violations-Issued-Fiscal-Year-2014-August-/jt7v-77mi https://data.cityofnewyork.us/dataset/Parking-Violations-Issued-Fiscal-Year-2015/c284-tqph https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/Parking-Violations-Issued-Fiscal-Year-2016/kiv2-tbus https://www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/parking-violations http://www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/contentonly?vgnextoid=ca20256c54ea4310VgnVCM1000003dd60f89RCRD https://data.baltimorecity.gov/Transportation/Parking-Citations/n4ma-fj3m https://data.seattle.gov/Public-Safety/Parking-Violations-All/q2m9-8vqf

Urban Transit Data

2016.05.18

Musical metadata.

The MusicBrainz database contains metadata on more than one million artists, 16 million recordings, 900,000 pieces of cover art. You can download the data in bulk or query it via an API. Previously: The smaller-but-more-detailed Million Song Dataset, featured Feb. 10. [h/t Geoff Boeing]

https://musicbrainz.org/ https://musicbrainz.org/statistics https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Database/Download http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Development/XML_Web_Service/Version_2 http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/millionsong/ https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural/letters/data-is-plural-2016-02-10-edition

http://geoffboeing.com/2016/05/analyzing-lastfm-history/

Music and Performance Databases

2016.05.25

Ain’t no mountain high, ain’t no valley low.

Governments around the world have used “LiDAR” — a laser-powered surveying technology — to build impressively precise elevation maps. In many cases, they’ve also released these topographic datasets to the public. The U.S., for instance, publishes gobs of LiDAR data through the Interagency Elevation Inventory. And you can also find LiDAR datasets for the United Kingdom, Spain, Finland, Slovenia, Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and New York City. Related: Using LiDAR data to print a 3D map of London.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar https://coast.noaa.gov/inventory/ https://environmentagency.blog.gov.uk/2015/09/18/laser-surveys-light-up-open-data/ http://pnoa.ign.es/presentacion http://www.maanmittauslaitos.fi/en/professionals/topographic-data/remote-sensing/laser-scanning http://evode.arso.gov.si/indexd022.html?q=node/12 http://rapidlasso.com/2014/05/15/lasmoons-asger-s-petersen/ http://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/internet/swisstopo/en/home/products/height.html http://www.ahn.nl/index.html https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/1-foot-Digital-Elevation-Model-DEM-/dpc8-z3jc http://www.aeracode.org/2016/5/16/hello-london-rising/

Geospatial Datasets and Analysis

2016.05.25

Risky predictions.

“There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks,” a ProPublica analysis has found. The investigation focused on risk assessments and recidivism in Broward County, Florida, and found that black defendants were more likely than white defendants to be mislabeled as “high risk.” The reporters have published their methodology, code, and the underlying data — including two years of Broward County risk assessments — on GitHub.

https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing https://github.com/propublica/compas-analysis

Incarceration Data and Research

2016.05.25

Historical San Francisco rents.

To help understand San Francisco’s soaring real estate prices, Eric Fischer transcribed decades of apartment and house listings in the San Francisco Chronicle. For each year from 1948 through 1979, Fischer jotted down every monthly rent advertised in the paper on the first Sunday in April. (Similar data for 1979 through 2001 is available from San Francisco’s Housing Study DataBook.) The transcriptions are available on GitHub. [h/t Kendall Taggart + Michael Andersen]

https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html http://sfrb.org/san-francisco-housing-study-databook https://github.com/ericfischer/housing-inventory/

https://twitter.com/KendallTTaggart/status/732737115205701633 https://medium.com/@andersem/a-guy-just-transcribed-30-years-of-for-rent-ads-heres-what-it-taught-us-about-sf-housing-prices-bd61fd0e4ef9#.spmzmbb6r

Housing Market Data

2016.05.25

American soccer salaries.

The Major League Soccer Players Union publishes salary data going back to 2007, and released 2016’s figures last week. (At $7.17 million in total compensation, Orlando City’s Kaká ranks as the league’s highest-paid player.) The MLSPU publishes the data as PDFs; I’ve converted those PDFs into CSVs for you. [h/t Rose Eveleth + John Templon]

https://www.mlsplayers.org/salary_info.html https://github.com/data-is-plural/mls-salaries

https://twitter.com/roseveleth/status/733311382679130112 https://twitter.com/jtemplon

Sports Data Collections

2016.05.25

Photography biography.

The Photographers’ Identities Catalog aggregates data on more than 110,000 photographers and photo studios throughout history. The information “has been culled from trusted biographical dictionaries, catalogs and databases, and from extensive original research” by the New York Public Library’s photography experts. The catalog — which includes data on gender, geography, range of years active, and more — is available as raw CSVs on GitHub.

http://pic.nypl.org/ https://github.com/NYPL/pic-data

Open Data Art Projects

2016.06.01

Veterans in America.

In 2014, approximately 22 million U.S. military veterans were still alive, including 1 million who served in World War II, 7.2 million who served during the Vietnam War era, and 3.9 million who have served in post-9/11 wars. Those numbers come from the VA’s National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics, which publishes estimates and future-projections of the country’s veteran population. You can explore the data by age, race, ethnicity, gender, military branch, state, county, era of service, and more. (To see the files, click on the “Population Tables” header.) [h/t Charles Worthington]

http://www.va.gov/vetdata/Veteran_Population.asp

http://opendata.stackexchange.com/a/1253

Migration and Policy Data

2016.06.01

Farmers in Africa.

Between 2002 and 2004, researchers surveyed more than 9,500 farming households in 11 African countries to better understand how climate change might affect agricultural practices. Last month, they published the detailed results and documentation in Scientific Data. The dataset includes responses to questions about plantings, harvests, yields, water sources, animal purchases, taxes paid, and much more.

http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201620?WT.ec_id=SDATA-201605

Agricultural Data and Analysis

2016.06.01

Income inequality, country-by-country.

The United Nations University’s World Income Inequality Database contains historical Gini coefficients for more than 170 countries — in some instances stretching back to the 1930s or ‘40s. The latest version of the database was released in October 2015 and includes key details about each estimate, such as the name of the primary source and the quality of data collection.

https://www.wider.unu.edu/project/wiid-%E2%80%93-world-income-inequality-database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient https://www.wider.unu.edu/download/WIID3.3

International Economic Databases

2016.06.01

Speling chellange.

The Scripps National Spelling Bee publishes the competition’s results online, but not in any analysis-friendly format. Thankfully, statistician Christopher Long has scraped and spreadsheet-ified the Scripps results going back to 1996 – including last week’s finals. Related: FiveThirtyEight uses the data to ask, “Where Do Spelling Bee Words Come From?”

http://spellingbee.com/public/results/2016/round_results http://angrystatistician.blogspot.com/ https://github.com/octonion/spelling http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-do-spelling-bee-words-come-from/

Data-Driven Puzzles Analysis

2016.06.01

The LEGO-verse.

BrickLink is a website for buying and selling LEGOs. It also happens to publish a (nearly?) complete inventory of every LEGO set and piece produced since 1949. Related: LEGO sets have become increasingly violent, according to a recent study. [h/t Lindsey Cook]

http://tinyletter.com/UpDownAllAround/letters/so-random

Historical Data Datasets

2016.06.08

Nuclear accidents.

Researchers in Europe have published a database of 216 nuclear energy accidents — a compendium they say is “twice the size of the previous best data set.” For each accident, the database contains the date, location, description, and four measurements of severity: its ratings on the International Nuclear Event Scale and on the Nuclear Accident Magnitude Scale, the number of fatalities, and total monetary cost. (The three most expensive: Chernobyl, Fukushima, and a 1995 accident at Japan’s Monju Nuclear Power Plant, estimated to have caused $15.5 billion in damages.) [h/t Dad]

https://innovwiki.ethz.ch/index.php/Nuclear_events_database http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/risa.12587/full http://www-ns.iaea.org/tech-areas/emergency/ines.asp http://www.davidsmythe.org/nuclear/accidents.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-vine-a480347

Water Resources Data

2016.06.08

Government court payouts.

The U.S. government maintains a “judgment fund,” which it uses to pay plaintiffs when federal agencies lose in court (or settle “actual or imminent lawsuits”). The Department of the Treasury, which administers the fund, publishes data on these payouts for each fiscal year going back to FY2006. [h/t CJ Ciaramella]

https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/fsservices/gov/pmt/jdgFund/judgementFund_home.htm https://jfund.fms.treas.gov/jfradSearchWeb/JFPymtSearchAction.do

http://tinyletter.com/cjciaramella/letters/foia-rundown-elephants

Legal Data Collections

2016.06.08

Local justice data.

The Sunlight Foundation’s Hall of Justice brings together “nearly 10,000” criminal justice datasets and research documents from across the United States. You can search for topics and filter by geography, publisher, and accessibility (open, open-but-not-machine-readable, restricted access, et cetera.). Related: Sunlight’s “lessons learned from a year of opening police data.” [h/t Susie Cambria + Noah Veltman]

http://hallofjustice.sunlightfoundation.com/ http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2016/05/04/lessons-learned-from-a-year-of-opening-police-data/

https://twitter.com/susiecambria https://twitter.com/veltman

Violence and Crime Databases

2016.06.08

The Netflix Prize, archived.

In 2006, Netflix launched a $1 million challenge to beat the company’s movie-recommendation algorithm. In 2009, Netflix awarded the prize to a group of AT&T scientists (though ultimately didn’t use the winning algorithm). The challenge, which was open to the public, was based on a dataset of 100 million ratings from 480,000 (anonymized) users, corresponding to more than 17,000 movies between Oct. 1998 and Dec. 2005. The dataset, once hosted at UC Irvine, is currently available through the Internet Archive. Previously: MovieLens, featured Jan. 27. [h/t Brandon Loudermilk]

http://www.netflixprize.com/ https://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20120409/03412518422/why-netflix-never-implemented-algorithm-that-won-netflix-1-million-challenge.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20090925184737/http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Netflix+Prize https://archive.org/details/nf_prize_dataset.tar http://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/ https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural/letters/data-is-plural-2016-01-27-edition

http://opendata.stackexchange.com/a/7884

Film Data and Analysis

2016.06.08

Billboard hits and lyrics.

Statistics grad student Kaylin Walker scraped 50 years of Billboard’s “Year-End Hot 100” rankings and those songs’ lyrics. Related: Walker’s analysis and methodology. [h/t Melissa Bierly]

https://github.com/walkerkq/musiclyrics http://kaylinwalker.com/50-years-of-pop-music/

https://blog.modeanalytics.com/analytics-dispatch-026/

Data Collections and Analyses

2016.06.15

(Almost) every politician.

On everypolitician.org, you can search and download data on 70,000+ legislators (past and present) from 233 countries. (Among those missing: Cuba, Ethiopia, and Qatar.) The dataset includes each lawmaker’s party affiliation, years served, gender, social media profiles, and more. Related: Every member of the United States Congress since 1789.

http://everypolitician.org/ http://docs.everypolitician.org/repo_structure.html http://everypolitician.org/countries.html https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators

Political Data Datasets

2016.06.15

Title IX investigations.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has been tracking federal investigations into sexual assault on college campuses. Recently, The Chronicle added an API, so that developers and data analysts can access the data more easily. Currently, the dataset includes 292 investigations conducted since April 2011 — 49 of which have been resolved. [h/t Jon Davenport]

http://projects.chronicle.com/titleix/ http://projects.chronicle.com/titleix/api/v1/docs/

https://twitter.com/JonDavenport1/status/741372292710707200

Data Analysis and Disclosure

2016.06.15

Air quality.

Last month, the World Health Organization released its latest update to the Global Urban Ambient Air Pollution Database, which now covers nearly 3,000 cities in 103 countries. For each city, the dataset includes annual average density of two key categories of particulates (PM2.5 and PM10), as well as details regarding the data collection. According to the organization’s own analysis, “98% of cities in low and middle income countries with more than 100,000 inhabitants do not meet WHO air quality guidelines.” Related: ”A New Air Pollution Database Is Good, but Imperfect.”

http://www.who.int/phe/health_topics/outdoorair/databases/cities/en/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/a-new-air-pollution-database-is-good-but-imperfect/

Climate Data and Emissions

2016.06.15

Gone phishing.

PhishTank is a clearinghouse that tracks thieves’ attempts to steal personal information and online credentials. The website also publishes bulk data on all verified phishing attempts — 44,000 and counting. With more than 1,000 phishing attempts recorded against it, PayPal is the single most-targeted website in the database. [h/t Herman Slatman]

https://www.phishtank.com/index.php https://www.phishtank.com/developer_info.php

https://github.com/hslatman/awesome-threat-intelligence

Cybersecurity Datasets and Vulnerabilities

2016.06.15

Gone fishing.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Statistics Division provides data on seafood caught by U.S. commercial fisheries, sliceable by month, species, and fishing gear. You can learn, for example, that these fisheries caught 88,893,305 pounds of Dungeness crab in 2006 — the highest recorded total since at least 1950. [h/t Gwynn Guilford]

https://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/commercial-fisheries/commercial-landings/

https://www.theatlas.com/charts/4yVqvlTR

Fish and Wildlife Data

2016.06.22

Nonprofit IRS filings — at long last.

Last week, the Internal Revenue Service released a huge dataset of nonprofits’ annual Form 990 filings, which provide details on program expenses, salaries, and more. More than 60% of Form 990s are filed digitally, according to the IRS. Previously, those forms were only available as images; now the IRS is publishing them as analysis-friendly XML files. (You can also download the data in bulk from the Internet Archive, thanks to Carl Malamud, the public domain advocate who led the fight for 990s-as-XML.) One early observer noted that the some of the data was misformatted, and has provided instructions for fixing it. [h/t Andrew Sullivan + Kendall Taggart]

https://www.irs.gov/uac/newsroom/irs-makes-electronically-filed-form-990-data-available-in-new-format https://aws.amazon.com/public-data-sets/irs-990/ https://archive.org/details/IRS990-efile https://twitter.com/licyeus/status/743308612672466944 https://gist.github.com/licyeus/95b99d6feb423ebea604b5f3e2cdf590

https://twitter.com/licyeus/status/743308612672466944 https://twitter.com/kendallttaggart

Government Financial Data

2016.06.22

6,000 years of urbanization.

Earlier this month, researchers published “the first spatially explicit dataset of urban settlements from 3700 BC to AD 2000,” along with a detailed methodology. The dataset digitizes and geocodes population numbers originally tabulated by historian Tertius Chandler (Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth) and political scientist George Modelski (World Cities: -3,000 to 2,000). Though “far from comprehensive,” the authors say that the dataset a “first step towards understanding the geographic distribution of urban populations throughout history.” Related: “Watch 6,000 years of urbanization taking over the world.”

http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201634 http://urban.yale.edu/data http://www.worldcat.org/title/four-thousand-years-of-urban-growth/oclc/59678315 http://www.worldcat.org/title/world-cities-3000-to-2000/oclc/57695214 http://qz.com/706051/706051/

Geospatial Datasets and Analysis

2016.06.22

Bull vs. man.

Next month, thousands of adrenaline junkies will gather in Pamplona for the city’s annual Running of the Bulls. The San Fermin festival, which organizes the spectacle, publishes injury data on its website. (Here’s a shortcut to display every year of data, instead of one year at a time.) Last year, the bulls gored 10 runners and injured another 27. Related: “Your Chances Of Being Gored By A Bull In Pamplona Are Getting Higher.”

http://www.sanfermin.com/index.php/en/encierro/como-correr/cuanta-gente-corre-en-el-encierro-de-sanfermin http://www.sanfermin.com/index.php/en/encierro/que-es http://www.sanfermin.com/index.php/en/encierro/buscador/buscador-encierros http://www.sanfermin.com/old/encierrometro/buscador_encierros.php?lang=eng&buscar=1 http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/your-chances-of-being-gored-by-a-bull-in-pamplona-are-getting-higher/

Animal Data Collections

2016.06.22

2BR with vinyl siding, sweet 2BR with vinyl siding.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s Annual Characteristics of New Housing culls data on features such as square footage, wall material, number of bedrooms, and number of fireplaces. (Air conditioning was present in 93% of new single-family homes built in 2015, up from 49% in 1973.) Related: “Houses Keep Getting Bigger, Even as Families Get Smaller.” [h/t Lindsey Cook]

http://www.census.gov/construction/chars/ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/upshot/houses-keep-getting-bigger-even-as-families-get-smaller.html

http://tinyletter.com/UpDownAllAround/letters/orlando

Housing Market Data

2016.06.22

The Hum.

“Most people find this website because they are searching for the source of an unusual low frequency sound.” The World Hum Database currently includes more than 10,000 reader-submitted reports, including a recent submissions that describe the noise as sounding “like a fridge,” “like a train in the distance,” and “like a cicada that never shuts up.” [h/t Susie Cambria]

http://www.thehum.info/ https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1EyjVZqUPpoXGQDa_cry9DqFaBVMOgEyq-3qo85bx#rows:id=1

https://twitter.com/susiecambria

Biological Databases and Analysis

2016.07.06

Public Policy.

The Correlates of State Policy Project aims to become a “one-stop shop” for data related to public policy in America’s 50 states. So far, the project is tracking 700+ aspects of each state’s laws, budgets, demographics, and more. Among the policy variables: Can pharmacies dispense emergency contraception without a prescription? Does the state ban corporal punishment in schools? and Does the state have an endangered species act? Don’t miss the codebook, which describes the data and sources in greater detail. Related: State and Local Public Policies in the United States, a similar project, for which an update to include 2014 data is “underway.” [h/t Rob Gillezeau]

http://ippsr.msu.edu/public-policy/correlates-state-policy http://www.matthewg.org/correlatesofstatepolicyprojectv1Codebook.pdf http://www.statepolicyindex.com/about/

https://twitter.com/robgillezeau/status/746080180280537088

Migration and Policy Data

2016.07.06

Nursing homes.

Last month, German investigative nonprofit Correctiv published a searchable database of 13,000 nursing homes in the country. The data are based on government inspections, and the reporters have published the raw and processed data on GitHub. Related: ProPublica’s searchable database of nursing homes in the United States and the Medicare’s nursing home data. [h/t Sandhya Kambhampati]

https://correctiv.org/en/investigations/nursing-homes/guide/ https://correctiv.org/en/investigations/nursing-homes/articles/2016/06/09/nursing-homes-what-we-know-what-we-do-not-know/ https://github.com/correctiv/pflege-notebook http://projects.propublica.org/nursing-homes/ https://data.medicare.gov/data/nursing-home-compare

https://twitter.com/sandhya__k

Healthcare Data and Transparency

2016.07.06

Russian election results.

In a recently-updated paper, three academics say they’ve found “convincing evidence of election fraud” in federal Russian elections since 2004. To support their analyses, the researchers have published the underlying data, which includes polling station data from seven Russian elections (as well as one Polish and one Spanish election, which showed no such signs of fraud). Related: WSJ analysis of Russian parliamentary election “points to widespread fraud” (2012). [h/t Arthur Bashlykov]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.6059 https://figshare.com/articles/kobakEtAl_AOAS2016_suppData_zip/3126883 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203391104577124540544822220

https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-bashlykov-8a3b2b102

Political Data Datasets

2016.07.06

NYC property taxes and exemptions.

Property tax data in New York City is technically available to the public, but the city makes it difficult to access. So a pair of civic hackers liberated the data. Now you can download 1.1 million rows of bulk data, which details each property’s type, assessed value, taxes due, owner’s name, and more. You can also download 750,000 rows of tax exemptions and abatements. Related: “A Look at NYC’s $650 Million Property Tax Breaks Related to Religion”

http://chriswhong.com/open-data/liberating-data-from-nyc-property-tax-bills/ http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/146688053904/payer-or-prayer-a-look-at-nycs-650-million

New York City Housing Data

2016.07.06

You shouldn’t point lasers at airplanes.

And yet, people do... by the thousands. In 2005, the Federal Aviation Administration created a system for pilots to report “laser events,” which it says can temporarily blind crewmembers. The administration has published five years of data from the reporting system. In 2014, the most recent year available, pilots reported 3,894 laser beamings. The vast majority involved a green beam, and none were reported to have caused an injury.

http://www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/news_story.cfm?newsId=12765 http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/lasers/laws/

Aviation Safety Data

2016.07.13

Every United Nations vote, 1946–2014.

This repository contains voting data from each of the UN General Assembly’s the first 69 sessions. One spreadsheet summarizes the topic and results of each voted-upon resolution. (The dataset also indicates whether the U.S. State Department identified the vote as “important” — such those condemning human rights violations in Syria and North Korea — in its annual Voting Practices in the United Nations report.) Another file contains each country’s individual voting decisions. [h/t David Robinson]

https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:1902.1/12379 http://www.state.gov/p/io/rls/rpt/index.htm

https://twitter.com/drob/status/751398401867182080

Political Data Datasets

2016.07.13

The money bone.

Late last month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services added data from 2015 to its Open Payments database, which tracks medical companies’ payments to doctors and teaching hospitals. The payments — which include consulting fees, gifts, honoraria, meals, drinks, grants, and more — totaled more than $7.5 billion last year. Related: ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs project, which began tracking medical industry payments in 2010, long before CMS released the OpenPayments database. [h/t Cat Ferguson + Chris Hamby]

https://www.cms.gov/Newsroom/MediaReleaseDatabase/Press-releases/2016-Press-releases-items/2016-06-30.html https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/ https://www.cms.gov/OpenPayments/About/Natures-of-Payment.html https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/

https://twitter.com/biocuriosity https://twitter.com/ChrisDHamby

Healthcare Data and Transparency

2016.07.13

Hundreds of millions of street addresses.

OpenAddresses.io is an effort to collect the official geocoordinates of the all the world’s physical addresses. (These data come from “authoritative” sources, such as city governments. When Google Maps tells you the location of an address, it’s often just a very-educated guess, extrapolated from coarser data.) As of Monday evening, the project had processed 265,078,567 addresses, mostly in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Related: “Open-source geo is really something right now.”

https://openaddresses.io/ https://results.openaddresses.io/ https://trackchanges.postlight.com/open-source-geo-is-really-something-right-now-f8e310c5f57a#.t2f638jnj

Geospatial Datasets and Analysis

2016.07.13

Workplace safety.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) conducted 86,000 workplace inspections last year. The agency makes its inspection results — including investigations of fatal accidents and severe injuries — available in bulk and via an API.

http://ogesdw.dol.gov/views/data_summary.php http://developer.dol.gov/health-and-safety/dol-osha-enforcement

Consumer Safety Reports

2016.07.13

Catch ‘em all.

Pokéapi is an API “detailing everything about the Pokémon main game series,” including every character, evolution, battle skill, and more. The data is also available as a series of CSVs. Currently, however, the dataset doesn’t include details from the so-hot-right-now Pokémon Go game.

https://pokeapi.co/ https://github.com/phalt/pokeapi/tree/master/data/v2/csv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Go

Media Franchise APIs

2016.07.20

Coups d'état.

Two political science professors at the University of Kentucky are compiling a dataset of coup attempts. So far, the dataset covers both successful and unsuccessful attempts from 1950 to late 2015. During those 65+ years, coup plotters have been foiled about half the time, with 236 victories and 238 failures. According to the dataset, Bolivia’s top leaders have faced 23 coup attempts, including 11 successful overthrows — more than any other country by either metric. [h/t Arthur Charpentier]

http://www.jonathanmpowell.com/coup-detat-dataset.html

https://twitter.com/freakonometrics

Political Dataset Collections

2016.07.20

Tech support.

StackOverflow is a Q&A site for programmers, and part of the larger StackExchange network of Q&A communities. StackExchange publishes periodic data dumps of the networks’ users, questions, answers, votes, and comments. On Monday, the company released “StackLite,” a smaller, easier-to-use slice of the data. (Even so, it contains metadata on more than 15 million questions.) If you don’t want to download anything, you can also explore and analyze the data online. [h/t David Robinson]

http://stackoverflow.com/ http://stackexchange.com/ https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://github.com/dgrtwo/StackLite https://data.stackexchange.com/

http://varianceexplained.org/r/stack-lite/

Open Research Datasets

2016.07.20

🔥 🔥 🔥 .

The National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) is “the world’s largest, national, annual database of fire incident information,” containing about 1 million fires per year, including wildfires, structure fires, vehicle fires, and more. NFIRS data from 2013 (and prior years) are available online from FEMA. Looking for 2014’s data? The government asks you to request it via postal mail; or you could trust the copy a public safety analyst uploaded in March. (See the links at the bottom of that page.) The U.S. Fire Administration, which maintains NFIRS, publishes additional datasets, including a spreadsheet of 27,000+ fire departments and a database of on-duty firefighter fatalities. Also, the U.S. Geological Survey publishes data on current and historical wildfire perimeters. [h/t Nick Penzenstadler + Nadja Popovich]

https://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/nfirs/ https://www.fema.gov/media-library/assets/documents/112009 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nfirs-2014-available-dov-chelst https://github.com/dnchelst/NFIRS https://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/statistics/order_download_data.html https://apps.usfa.fema.gov/census-download/main/download https://apps.usfa.fema.gov/firefighter-fatalities/ http://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/outgoing/GeoMAC/

https://twitter.com/npenzenstadler/status/754010911292190720 https://twitter.com/popovichn

Wildfire Data and Monitoring

2016.07.20

World heritage sites.

Today, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee will wrap up its 40th session, during which it has “inscribed” more than 20 new awe-inspiring places around the world. Online, the organization publishes spreadsheets and map files of 1,031 heritage sites it has previously inducted. For each site, the spreadsheet tracks its location, size, date inducted, category (“cultural,” “natural,” or “mixed”), and which selection criteria it met, and more. Through 2015, the countries with the largest number of heritage sites were Italy (51), China (48), and Spain (44).

http://whc.unesco.org/en/sessions/40COM/ http://whc.unesco.org/en/newproperties/ http://whc.unesco.org/en/syndication http://whc.unesco.org/en/criteria/

Diverse Research Databases

2016.07.20

Paperwork, work, work, work, work, work.

Thanks to the Paperwork Reduction Act, federal agencies must get approval from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for any “information collection” (e.g., a form) that seeks 10 or more responses. You can search all information collections — under review, approved, or rejected — online, or download an XML file of all active collections.

http://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRASearch http://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAXML

Legislative Data and Transparency

2016.07.27

How we die.

The Global Burden of Disease dataset represents “the largest and most comprehensive effort to date to measure epidemiological levels and trends worldwide,” according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which runs the project. For each disease and each country, the dataset contains estimates of the total deaths, years of life lost, and years lived with disability. The estimates are currently available for 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2013. Related: “Where We Live and How We Die: What a year of death looks like around the world.” [h/t Mimi Onuoha + Data & Society]

http://www.healthdata.org/gbd/data http://www.healthdata.org/gbd https://howwegettonext.com/where-we-live-and-how-we-die-36eeb4c256ab#.6g464ysu0

https://twitter.com/thistimeitsmimi http://us7.campaign-archive1.com/?u=00b33d1beca407762446037f0&id=5cf8e71652&e=3bafe38e66

Mortality Data and Analysis

2016.07.27

Public transit.

Transitland and TransitFeeds both aggregate data on routes, stops, and timetables from hundreds of public transit systems — from the Bay Area’s BART, to New York’s MTA, to Milan’s ATM, to Budapest’s BKK.

https://transit.land/ https://transitfeeds.com/

Urban Transit Data

2016.07.27

Public libraries.

The U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services annually collects responses from 9,000 public library systems. The results, currently available through 2013, include information about the libraries’ collection size, physical footprint, population served, hours, and more. Previously: Every known museum in the United States, featured Nov. 11, 2015.

https://www.imls.gov/research-evaluation/data-collection/public-libraries-united-states-survey/public-libraries-united https://www.imls.gov/research-evaluation/data-collection/museum-universe-data-file https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural/letters/data-is-plural-2015-11-04-edition

Open Data Art Projects

2016.07.27

Walrus hangouts.

The Pacific walrus (Odobenus rosmarus divergens) accounts for the vast majority of walruses on the planet. When they’re not swimming, Pacific walruses like to rest at places called “haulouts.” A new dataset and study include details on 150 current and historic haulouts, the largest of which has been reported to attract more than 100,000 walruses. Miscellany: Three of the study’s authors work for the U.S. Department of the Interior; the fourth works for Russia’s Institute of Biological Problems of the North. [h/t Keith Collins]

http://alaska.usgs.gov/products/data.php?dataid=74 http://www.ibpn.ru/en/

https://twitter.com/collinskeith

Biodiversity Databases and Datasets

2016.07.27

Bigfoot sightings.

The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization dubs itself “the only scientific research organization exploring the bigfoot/sasquatch mystery.” The BFRO collects and vets sighting reports, and publishes them online. (Direct link to KMZ file.) Related: “'Squatch Watch: 92 Years of Bigfoot Sightings in the US and Canada.” [h/t Joshua Stevens + Lynn Cherny]

http://www.bfro.net/ http://www.bfro.net/news/google_earth.asp http://www.bfro.net/app/AllReportsKMZ.aspx http://www.joshuastevens.net/visualization/squatch-watch-92-years-of-bigfoot-sightings-in-us-and-canada/

https://twitter.com/jscarto/status/743861481998016512 https://twitter.com/arnicas/status/743859743945555968

Fish and Wildlife Data

2016.08.03

Vaccination nations.

The World Health Organization publishes a slew of datasets on national vaccination rates and policies. Some facts gleaned from the data: Asked whether they provided routine vaccinations to children at school, just 55% of 191 countries that responded said they did. And: In 2015, Equatorial Guinea reported that only 26% of infants had received a first dose of measles vaccine, a lower rate than any other country’s. [h/t Philip Shemella]

http://www.who.int/immunization/monitoring_surveillance/data/en/

http://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/7220/vaccination-policies/9345#9345

Public Health Datasets

2016.08.03

Deaths in police custody.

At least 6,913 people died while in the custody of Texas police, jails, and prisons between 2005 and 2015, according to the newly-launched Texas Justice Initiative. The data, gathered through freedom-of-information requests, contains the age, sex, and race/ethnicity of each person who died, as well as the general cause of death and a more detailed summary. Read more at: The Atlantic. Related: California’s Department of Justice publishes similar statistics and raw data. [h/t Melissa Segura + Reade Levinson]

http://texasjusticeinitiative.org/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/7000-deaths-in-custody-texas/493325/ https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/death-in-custody/overview https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data

https://twitter.com/MelissaDSegura https://twitter.com/readelev

Incarceration Data and Research

2016.08.03

Electricity prices.

In May 2016, U.S. residential consumers paid an average of roughly 12.8 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity. The price was lowest in Louisiana (9.28 cents) and Washington state (9.54 cents), and highest in Hawaii (26.87 cents) and Connecticut (21.63 cents). These data-points, and more, are available through the Energy Information Administration’s electric power reports, which are updated monthly. [h/t Jordan Wirfs-Brock]

http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_06_a http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/

https://github.com/InsideEnergy/24-energy-stories-CAR16

Energy Data Resources

2016.08.03

Measuring up.

A group of public health researchers have estimated the average height of adults in 200 countries over the course of a century. Their calculations are based on a re-analysis of 1,472 previous studies, which collectively measured nearly 19 million participants. The resulting dataset contains annual height estimates for both men and women born each year between 1896 and 1996. During that time, South Korean women’s average height increased by approximately 8 inches, the largest gain of any group. These days, the Netherlands boasts the tallest men, and Latvia the tallest women.

https://elifesciences.org/content/5/e13410 http://www.ncdrisc.org/d-height.html

International Economic Databases

2016.08.03

Email like it’s 1993.

The 20 Newsgroups dataset contains 20,000 messages (including some duplicates) sent to 20 Usenet bulletin boards in 1993. Among the groups: alt.atheism, misc.forsale, sci.electronics, talk.politics.guns, and talk.politics.mideast.

http://qwone.com/~jason/20Newsgroups/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup

Political Data and Analysis