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The Alarming Rise of Dangerous Speech
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,. This week, new details emerged about how social media platforms allowed...
Unreturned Remains, Brazilian Biodiversity, and Food Coloring Additives
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Jan.18, 2023, has been republished with permission of the author. Unreturned remains. “The remains of more than 110,000 Native American, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Natives’ ancestors are still held by museums, universities and federal agencies,” according to The Repatriation Project, a ProPublica investigative series launched last week. The project’s interactive database provides more detailed figures—such as counts by institution, tribe, and geography. It builds upon National Park Service databases that track institutional compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, including each institution’s self-reported counts of human remains and funerary objects not yet made available for return and compliance updates published in the Federal Register. Event: ProPublica is hosting a webinar at 4 p.m. U.S. Eastern today.
Five Ways Toward a Fairer, More Transparent Hiring Process
As I enter my first major round of hiring at The Markup (the jobs are here!) and my first major round of hiring as editor-in-chief, once again I’m thinking about how our industry approaches this process—what I like, and what I’d like to change. Many people have...
Automobile Recalls, Variable Stars, and NYC Pizza
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Jan.11, 2023, has been republished with permission of the author. Automobile recalls. In the U.S., the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration oversees all recalls of vehicles, tires, child safety seats, and other auto equipment. Through the agency’s recall portal, you can search by vehicle identification number, make, model, and year; for other types of recalls, you can search by brand and model. The agency also provides a dataset of all 26,000-plus recalls since 1966. It lists the recall type, manufacturer’s name, component, number of units potentially affected, and date the manufacturer notified NHTSA, plus descriptions of the problem, recall action, and remedy. [h/t Chartr]
Just a Sample of What We Accomplished in 2022
This year, The Markup investigated the firehose of data people’s cars are sending to companies, how internet service providers offered the worst internet deals to lower-income and least-White neighborhoods, how the Meta Pixel is sending sensitive information from multiple industries to Facebook, and more. Here’s just a smidgen of our work and impact in 2022.
Back into the Trenches of the Crypto Wars
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,. Happy New Year. In the final days of 2022, the everlasting...
How We Verified Ourselves on Mastodon — and How You Can Too
About the LevelUp series: At The Markup, we’re committed to doing everything we can to protect our readers from digital harm, write about the processes we develop, and share our work. 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.
Prison and Jail Call Costs, Drones, Folklore, and Ski Trails
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Dec. 21, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Prison and jail* call costs. In its latest “State of Phone Justice” report, the Prison Policy Initiative has compiled data on the price of phone calls for incarcerated people and their families “for almost every jail and prison in the country.” One table lists each jail’s name, state, type, average daily population, telecom company, and the per-minute cost of in-state and out-of-state calls in 2021. As the report’s methodology explains, those figures are based on forms that telecom providers must submit to the Federal Communications Commission, with “additional corrections and updates based on our research.” Additional tables examine phone rates in state prisons over time (supplemented by previous collection efforts), state averages for local jails, and more. [h/t Mike Wessler]
Flu, Jewish Texts, Women’s College Basketball, and Mastodon Membership
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Dec. 14, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Flu trends. The CDC’s Influenza Division collaborates with state and local health departments, hospitals, laboratories, and other partners to keep tabs on flu trends. Its Weekly U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report tracks case counts, positivity rates, strain distribution, and other metrics that you can explore and download through an interactive dashboard. The records go back to the 1997–98 flu season and are available at a national, regional, and state level. Read more: “The US has never recorded this many positive flu tests in one week” (Vox). [h/t Jay Arthur]
Sen. Elizabeth Warren Questions Tax Filing Companies, Meta, and Google About Sharing of Financial Data
Following a recent investigation by The Markup, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and colleagues are questioning tax filing companies, Meta, and Google about how users’ sensitive financial information was shared with the tech companies. Last month, The Markup, in partnership with The Verge, revealed how major tax filing companies such as...
When Drivers Are Attacked, Uber Leaves Police Waiting for Help
An investigation by The Markup found that Uber is slow to respond to law enforcement requests, leaving drivers vulnerable to repeated attacks By Dara Kerr. In St. Louis, a narrow and quiet street, shadowed with trees, has haunted Brian Blagoue since the spring of 2021. It’s where two passengers carjacked him at gunpoint while he was working as a full-time Uber driver. Three weeks later, police found a Lyft driver shot dead in the driver’s seat of his car in the exact same location.
Work Stoppages, Avian Flu, Literature Prizewinners, and Video Games
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Dec. 7, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Work stoppages. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Work Stoppages program collects and publishes data on “major work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers lasting one full shift or longer.” The program’s main dataset lists each major strike or lockout since 1993, the organizations involved, employer industry and ownership type, start and end dates, number of workers participating, and total worker-days idle. Its annual dataset counts the number of major stoppages, workers involved, and worker-days idle for each year since 1947. Related: The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service used to publish data on all stoppages that its mediators entered into its case system (regardless of number of workers involved) but stopped doing so in late 2020. Forest Gregg has rescued and standardized the archived records. [h/t Chartr]
Meta Sued for Collecting Financial Information Through Tax Filing Websites
A proposed class-action lawsuit filed this week alleges that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, violated users’ trust and expectations of privacy by collecting sensitive financial information from online tax-filing services. The lawsuit, filed on Dec. 1 in federal court, accuses Meta of breaking contractual promises to users and, in...
How The Markup Tracks Impact—and How Your Newsroom Can Too
About the LevelUp series: At The Markup, we’re committed to doing everything we can to protect our readers from digital harm, write about the processes we develop, and share our work. 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.
Pills, School Spending, and Indonesian Earthquakes
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Nov. 30, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Pills. From its launch in 2009 until its retirement last year, the National Library of Medicine’s Pillbox project collected and created 8,600-plus photographs of medical pills. The images, which are still available to download, are accompanied by a dataset that provides information on 83,000-plus pills’ shape, size, color, markings, dosage, and other characteristics derived from drug labels. Related: The library’s DailyMed service provides frequently updated images and data from 140,000-plus labels submitted to the FDA for drugs and other regulated products. As seen in: Jon Keegan’s Pillbox overview in Beautiful Public Data. [h/t Giuseppe Sollazzo]
Presidential Pardons, Radioactive Waste, Songs, and “Star Trek”
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Nov. 23, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author. Presidential pardons. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney reviews all federal clemency requests and advises the president on such matters. The office provides a search tool and spreadsheet with the names, case statuses, and decision dates for all 76,000-plus pardon and commutation requests since 1989. It also publishes a series of tables, with varying structure, listing the people who received clemency from each president since Richard Nixon. Those tables additionally include recipients who did not submit formal requests and, for more recent presidents, details about the recipients’ offenses and sentences. Another page contains clemency statistics for each year and president since William McKinley.
Tax Filing Websites Have Been Sending Users’ Financial Information to Facebook
Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online, The Markup has learned. The data, sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses...
We Joined Mastodon. Here’s What We Learned About Privacy and Security
Many of us at The Markup are active Twitter users who are witnessing a platform that has been such an important part of journalism descend into what Elon Musk might call a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”. The chaos of late sparked a migration of sorts, as some Twitter users have...
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