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Greenhouse Gases, Infectious Diseases, and Tinned Fish
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Nov. 16, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Big emitters. Climate TRACE, a nonprofit coalition launched in 2020, uses satellite imagery, sector-specific datasets, and other sources to estimate greenhouse gas emissions in detail. Its most recent inventory, released last week, highlights more than 70,000 individual sites that “represent the top known sources of emissions in the power sector, oil and gas production and refining, shipping, aviation, mining, waste, agriculture, road transportation, and the production of steel, cement, and aluminum.” You can download the data, explore sector- and country-level estimates, and browse a map of the sites. Read more: Coverage in the New York Times. [h/t Ian Johnson]
Incomes, Mines, and William Still’s Freedom-Seekers
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Nov. 9, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Income patterns. The Global Repository of Income Dynamics is a new “open-access international database that provides a wealth of micro statistics on income inequality and income dynamics.” It was constructed by an international team of economists using longitudinal administrative data and “designed from ground up with a focus on comparability across countries.” The project’s data access tool provides stats ranging from the widely understood (e.g., share of income going to the top one percent) to the more specialized (e.g., kurtosis coefficients of various income-change distributions). It currently covers 13 countries (although access to the U.K.’s data is listed as “coming soon”), with time spans that typically stretch from the 1980s or 1990s to the mid- to late-2010s.
Nuclear Stockpiles, River Widths, and the Weight of the Web
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Nov. 2, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Nuclear stockpiles. As of early 2022, a total of nine countries possessed approximately 12,700 nuclear warheads, according to estimates from the Federation of American Scientists. Although “the exact number of nuclear weapons in each country’s possession is a closely held national secret,” the researchers say that “publicly available information, careful analysis of historical records, and occasional leaks” make the estimates possible, albeit “with significant uncertainty.” The report includes each country’s current warhead count and subtotals by status, as well as annual totals for each country since 1945. As seen in: Our World in Data. Previously: Nuclear capabilities (DIP 2016.02.24) and explosions (DIP 2016.03.23). [h/t u/jcceagle]
Twitter is Still Throttling Competitors’ Links—Check for Yourself
Twitter continues to slow traffic to competing sites nearly a month after it partially pulled back from such throttling, a Markup analysis has found. Users of the social platform, now officially known as X, are made to wait on average about two and a half seconds after clicking on links to Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Substack, the analysis found. That’s more than 60 times longer than the average wait for links to other sites.
Introducing Smol Links: Shorten URLs Without Tracking
About the LevelUp series: At The Markup, we’re committed to doing everything we can to protect our readers from digital harm. We’re constantly working on improving digital security, respecting reader privacy, creating ethical and responsible user experiences, and making sure our site and tools are accessible. We’re also committed to writing about our process and sharing our work.
From Strategic Petroleum to Gargantuan Gourds
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Oct. 26, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Strategic petroleum. The U.S. Energy Information Administration maintains a dataset tracking the monthly volume of the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, measured in the thousands of barrels. The figures go back to 1977, the year the first crude oil was delivered to the reserve, but lag by a couple of months; the end-of-August volume is scheduled for publication on Oct. 31. Read more: The Department of Energy’s history of reserve releases. Previously: Petroleum Supply Monthly reports (DIP 2017.08.16) and weekly gas prices (DIP 2021.06.09), both also published by the EIA. [h/t u/CountBayesie]
The Markup Receives Honors from Adweek and the National Edward R. Murrow Awards
The Markup has been named the Hottest in Tech on Adweek’s 2022 Hot List and in August won two national Edward R. Murrow Awards—one for investigative reporting for Prediction: Bias, in partnership with Gizmodo, and one for excellence in innovation for our Citizen Browser project. Each year Adweek...
Senator Questions Zuckerberg About Facebook’s Collection of “Sensitive Health Information”
On Thursday—days after millions of patients across the country learned that their hospital may have leaked their medical information to Meta—Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) requested that the tech giant answer questions about its pixel tracking tool and the sensitive personal data it collects. “I am troubled by the...
Carbon Pricing, UNICEF, Community-Moderated Tweets, U.K. Museums, and Cattle Brands
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Oct. 19, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Carbon pricing. In a paper published last month, Geoffroy Dolphin and Qinrui Xiahou describe their World Carbon Pricing Database. For each country (as well as each U.S. state and certain other subnational jurisdictions), the database indicates the price per metric ton of CO2 equivalent associated with any carbon taxes and cap-and-trade mechanisms in place for each year going back to 1990. It lists these prices for each combination of type of fuel and sectoral classification. Previously: The Voluntary Registry Offsets Database and the World Bank’s database of carbon pricing initiatives (DIP 2021.11.17).
How We Uncovered Disparities in Internet Deals
As became painfully obvious when pandemic lockdowns began, fast, reliable internet service is a necessity today. A Pew survey released last year found that 90 percent of Americans said the internet has been essential or important to their lives over the course of the pandemic. Yet the high-speed internet options...
Dollars to Megabits, You May Be Paying 400 Times As Much As Your Neighbor for Internet Service
A couple of years into the pandemic, Shirley Neville had finally had enough of her crappy internet service. “It was just a headache,” said Neville, who lives in a middle-class neighborhood in New Orleans whose residents are almost all Black or Latino. “When I was getting ready to use my tablet for a meeting, it was cutting off and not coming on.”
Journalists: Investigate Which Neighborhoods in Your City Are Offered the Worst Internet Deals
We found that AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered the worst internet deals to neighborhoods that were formerly redlined, whose residents are lower income and have a higher concentration of people of color than other parts of the city. We examined actual internet offers to more than 800,000 addresses in 38 cities across the country.
The Markup Hires Ko Bragg and Ryan Tate as Editors
The Markup has hired editors Ko Bragg and Ryan Tate to expand the newsroom’s focus on human-first, impact-driven reporting. I’m excited to work alongside both editors over the next six months as we continue to report on how people and communities are being harmed by technology—intentionally or unintentionally—and equip people with the tools, knowledge, and agency to drive change.
Work-Related Injuries, Rebel Leaders, and Wine Economics
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Oct. 12, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Work-related injury counts. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires many (but not all) businesses to track employees’ work-related injuries and illnesses. Larger companies and those in high-risk industries must electronically submit annual counts to the agency. Thanks to freedom-of-information lawsuits by Reveal and Public Citizen, OSHA began to publish business-level data from those electronic submissions in 2020. The records, which go back to 2016, include each business’s name, location, industry, employee count, and employee hours worked, plus their reported number of deaths, injuries, skin disorders, respiratory conditions, poisonings, hearing loss, and other illnesses.
The Markup Wins Loeb Award for Amazon’s Advantage
The Markup has won the Gerald Loeb Award in the Personal Finance and Consumer Reporting category for our investigative series “Amazon’s Advantage,” which found that Amazon gives itself a leg up against competitors when deciding what order to place products in its search results and selecting the default seller for individual items.
Grid Emissions, Restaurants, Wildfire Smoke, and a Decade of Tasks
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Oct. 5, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Grid emissions. Ember, an “energy think tank that uses data-driven insights to shift the world from coal to clean electricity,” has begun compiling annual and monthly statistics on electricity demand, generation, and estimated greenhouse gas emissions by country, standardized from national and international sources. The annual estimates span two decades and 200-plus countries and territories; the monthly dataset provides somewhat less coverage. Both can also be explored online. Related: Singularity’s Open Grid Emissions initiative estimates the hourly grid emissions of balancing authorities and power plants in the U.S., currently for 2019 and 2020. Previously: Other energy-related datasets. [h/t Philippe Quirion]
FDA Inspections, Academic Citations, University Endowments, and Tech Products
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Sept. 28, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. FDA inspections. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s inspections dashboard lists 264,000-plus assessments of facilities (primarily those manufacturing food, drugs, and other FDA-regulated products) and 227,000-plus problems the inspectors found. The fields include the facility owner, location, product type, inspection completion date, and outcomes. The records, which go back to fiscal year 2009, can be bulk-downloaded from the dashboard and queried via an API. They come with certain caveats; they exclude, for instance, “inspections waiting for a final enforcement action” and those conducted by state (rather than federal) inspectors. Related: More compliance-related data dashboards from the FDA.
Labor Turnover, Biodiversity Trends, Working Artists, and Atari Emails
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Sept. 21, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Labor turnover. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey estimates the number of jobs that people quit, how many people were fired or laid off, the number of new hires, and the current number of open positions. Those estimates, based on data gathered from a sample of businesses across the country, are available to download and query by state, industry, and business size. They include most types of workers, regardless of whether they’re full time or part time, permanent or seasonal, salaried or hourly.
Meta Faces Mounting Questions from Congress on Health Data Privacy As Hospitals Remove Facebook Tracker
Meta is facing mounting questions about its access to sensitive medical data following a Markup investigation that found the company’s pixel tracking tool collecting details about patients’ doctor’s appointments, prescriptions, and health conditions on hospital websites. During a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on...
Congress’s API, Voter ID Laws, Art Sales, and Space Weather
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Sept. 14, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Congress gets an official API. The United States’ legislative branch now has an official API, the Library of Congress announced last week. It provides structured data on legislators, bills, bill summaries, amendments, committee reports, appointee nominations, international treaties, and more. To use the service, you’ll need to sign up for a free API key. Read more: Some context from the Congressional Data Coalition. Related: The Government Publishing Office’s bulk data on bills and bill summaries (DIP 2020.08.26) and ProPublica’s Congress API. [h/t Jackie Kazil]
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