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From Congressional Votes to Coconut Thumps
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated March 1, 2023, has been republished with permission of the author. Congressional votes and ideology. The Voteview project “allows users to view every congressional roll call vote in American history” and places those votes in the context of ideology estimates along a liberal-to-conservative spectrum. The core estimates come from DW-NOMINATE, a method developed by the project’s directors emeritus, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal. Voteview’s bulk data includes ideology estimates for every member of the House and Senate since 1789, every vote taken in either chamber, and every member’s position on those votes. [h/t Philip Bump]
How We Investigated L.A.’s Homelessness Scoring System
More than 65,000 “people experience homelessness on any given night in LA County,” according to Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) estimates published last year. Although the rise in homelessness in the region has slowed during the pandemic, LAHSA recently said that it needed a 250 percent increase in available permanent housing in order to quickly and efficiently move people off the streets and out of shelters.
Journalists: Investigate Homeless Vulnerability Scoring in Your City
Today, The Markup published an investigation into Los Angeles’s use of a scoring system to guide who receives priority for housing assistance. Under this system, people in need of housing take a survey designed to measure their vulnerability, with those deemed more vulnerable receiving higher priority. The story was based on an analysis of data from more than 130,000 surveys that we obtained by filing a public records request with the agency responsible for coordinating homeless services in Los Angeles. (You can read in detail about our analysis of the survey data here.)
L.A.’s Scoring System for Subsidized Housing Gives Black and Latino People Experiencing Homelessness Lower Priority Scores
For most of the past four years, Chantel Jones lived in a homeless shelter on Los Angeles’s skid row, hating the danger, noise, and confinement: “You feel like you’re in jail, but you’re not in jail,” she recalled. Like tens of thousands of other people...
Lam Thuy Vo Joins The Markup
We’re excited to announce that Lam Thuy Vo, a seasoned journalist who marries data analysis with on-the-ground reporting to examine how systems and policies affect individuals, will be joining The Markup as a reporter. This fall, Lam will also be starting a new job as an associate professor of data journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, where she is currently a data journalist in residence.
From Hazardous Chemicals Facilities to Unclaimed Estates
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Feb. 22, 2023, has been republished with permission of the author. Facilities handling hazardous chemicals. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Management Program rule requires facilities that handle “extremely hazardous substances” to tell the government, at least every five years, about those substances, their safety plans, their recent accident history, and more. Through a FOIA request to the EPA, the Data Liberation Project (full disclosure: I run this project) obtained a copy of the agency’s database of these filings (minus some parts the government deems nondisclosable), containing submissions by 21,000-plus facilities from early 1999 to February 2022. You can now access that data, in various formats, along with documentation guiding you through it.
The Markup Honored by AHCJ Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism
An investigation by The Markup into online tracking by hospitals was recognized by the Association for Health Care Journalists, winning third place in the large investigative category of AHCJ’s Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. AHCJ awards the best health reporting in print, broadcast, and online media and...
Your Tax Data Shouldn’t Be Up for Grabs
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Editor’s note: Colin Lecher, whose latest investigation has the attention of Congress, is the first in a line...
Fair Market Rents, Diplomatic Visits, Bog Bodies, and Open Data Day Events
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Feb. 15, 2023, has been republished with permission of the author. Fair market rents. Every year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development recalculates what it calls “fair market rents” for every county in the U.S. and for individual ZIP codes in metropolitan counties. The results, which factor into various housing subsidy programs, represent the 40th percentile cost of monthly rent and (basic) utilities for “recent movers” in “standard quality” units, adjusted for the number of bedrooms. HUD’s annual spreadsheets go back to the early 2000s; you can also browse the estimates online and query them via an API. As seen in: “Where are rents rising post COVID-19?” (USAFacts).
“Check Your Pixels”
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Hi, everyone,. Sisi Wei here (👋🏼). I joined The Markup in late August as editor-in-chief, and this week...
African American Biographies, India’s High Court Judges, Aquifers, and Prognosticating Groundhogs
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Feb. 8, 2023, has been republished with permission of the author. African American biographies, 1508–1865. The African American National Biography, first printed in 2008 and expanded to a 12-volume second edition in 2013, is “the most extensive African American biographical encyclopedia ever compiled, including the widest range of historically significant black individuals possible.” Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, the print volumes feature nearly 5,000 entries, with additional biographies published in an online collection (subscription required). Executive editor Steven J. Niven has created a dataset describing the 1,300-plus people in the encyclopedia born before the U.S. abolition of slavery. It includes their names, dates and places of birth, occupations, whether they were ever enslaved and/or freed before abolition, how they obtained freedom, and much more.
How Big Tech Rewrote the Nation’s First Cellphone Repair Law
This story was published in partnership with Grist, a nonprofit media organization covering climate, justice, and solutions. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here. New York State took a historic step toward curbing the power of Big Tech when lawmakers passed the Digital Fair Repair Act, giving citizens the right to fix their phones, tablets, and computers. For years, advocates for the “right to repair” have pushed for such legislation in statehouses nationwide. They argue that making it easier to repair gadgets not only saves consumers money but also reduces the environmental impact of manufacturing and electronic waste. Most of those bills have failed amid intense opposition from tech companies that want to dictate how and where their products are serviced.
Senators Launch Inquiry into Telehealth Companies for Tracking and Monetizing Personal Data
This article was co-published with STAT, a national publication that delivers trusted and authoritative journalism about health, medicine, and the life sciences. Sign up for its health tech newsletter here. A bipartisan group of senators fiercely criticized several prominent telehealth startups for failing to protect their patients’ sensitive health information,...
Journalistic Lessons for the Algorithmic Age
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Hello, friends,. I’m sad to inform you that this is my last missive to you. After founding The...
Members of Congress Call for IRS to Investigate Tax Companies Sharing Data with Facebook
Three congressional Democrats are demanding that the Internal Revenue Service investigate tax preparation companies for sharing sensitive taxpayer data with Facebook after The Markup revealed the practice in an investigation last year. Tax Filing Websites Have Been Sending Users’ Financial Information to Facebook. In that investigation, The Markup found...
The FTC Is Taking on Telehealth’s Data Sharing Problem—Starting with GoodRx
In a “first-of-its-kind” action with broad implications for the telehealth industry, the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday sought a court order to prevent GoodRx, a popular website that provides discounts on prescription drugs, from sharing users’ sensitive health data for advertising purposes. The FTC alleges that GoodRx,...
From Women’s Well-Being to Radiation-Contaminated Waste to English Football
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Feb. 1, 2023, has been republished with permission of the author. In last week’s newsletter, I noted that the Coast Guard’s list of boat recalls “seems possible to scrape.” Reader Michael Nolan took up the challenge; here’s the dataset he extracted. Thanks, Michael!
In 2023, Resolve to Fix Your Organization’s Meta Pixel Problem
We all use the internet to complete increasingly sensitive tasks: book doctor’s appointments, file taxes, apply for financial aid. When we do, our data can be tracked from the moment we open our browsers to when we click “book” or “submit.”. This type of data tracking...
Decoding the Hype About AI
Dispatches from founder Julia Angwin. Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Hello, friends,. If you have been reading all the hype about the latest...
From Jazz Solos to Cats on the Move
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Jan. 25, 2023, has been republished with permission of the author. DIP 2023.01.11 featured vehicle recall data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Other U.S. federal agencies publishing recall data include the Food and Drug Administration, whose dataset contains 81,000-plus entries related to food, drugs, medical devices, and related products going back to 2012; the Consumer Product Safety Commission, whose database includes 8,500-plus recalls since 1973; and the Coast Guard, whose listing of 1,600-plus boat recalls is not downloadable but seems possible to scrape. Also: Vehicle recall data from Canadian and U.K. regulators. Previously: International medical device recalls from ICIJ’s Implant Files (DIP 2019.04.17).
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