Data Is Plural

... is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets.

2015.11.18 edition

The international flow of weapons, politicians on Instagram, exonerations in America, insecure health data, and British booze.

Follow the F-17s. The Arms Transfer Database tracks the international flow of major weapons — artillery, missiles, military aircraft, tanks, and the like. Maintained by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the database contains documented sales since 1950 and is updated annually. SIPRI provides a download tool, which outputs rich-text files, but it’s also possible to download the data as CSV. [h/t Martín González]

#campaign. The 2016 presidential hopefuls have been tweeting, ‘gramming, and ‘booking like a pack of millennials. Fusion collected nearly 70,000 images from the candidates’ social media accounts, then pumped the pictures through an automated tagging system. Now you can search for guns, money, beer and more — or download the raw data for your own analysis.

America’s exonerees. The National Registry of Exonerations contains “every known exoneration in the United States since 1989—cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence.” For each of the 1,702 cases, the registry includes details about the exoneree, the crime, and the factors — such as new DNA evidence — that contributed to the exoneration. [h/t agate]

Health data, unprotected. Under the HITECH Act of 2009, companies must notify the government of any data breach involving the HIPAA-protected health data of 500 or more people. Summaries of those reports are available at the Department of Health and Human Services’s Breach Portal, which currently contains more than 1,300 incidents. Related: In April, JAMA published an analysis of the breaches. Also related: Forty years of legislative acronyms. [h/t Virginia Hughes]

Britain’s booze. What contains 34,052 bottles and is worth an estimated £3 million? The United Kingdom’s official wine cellar, which provides libations for the government’s guests and hosts — and a dram of data for the public. Between April 2014 and March 2015, the cellar’s clients consumed more than 5,500 bottles of wine and liquor. Among them: 205 bottles of Champagne, 51-and-a-half bottles of gin, and one bottle Château Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande 1986. [h/t Nadja Popovich]