Data Is Plural

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

2019.10.16 edition

Presidential popularity, California power outages, mobile broadband prices, the ways couples meet, and palm trees.

Presidential popularity. The Executive Approval Project uses international polling data measure public support for presidents, prime ministers, and other political executives in 50 countries. For most of the countries, the database goes back to the 1990s; for some, it goes even further. Access requires providing a name, affiliation, and email address — plus agreeing to receive updates. [h/t Erik Gahner Larsen]

California power outages. Last week, Pacific Gas and Electric began cutting power to hundreds of thousands of Californians — a precaution to keep the company’s aging infrastructure from sparking wildfires. Simon Willison has been scraping PG&E’s outage website every 10 minutes, and pushing the results into a database you can query and download. [h/t Lam Thuy Vo]

Mobile broadband prices. Since 2017, the Alliance for Affordable Internet has been collecting country-level prices for mobile data. The most recent data covers 99 low- and middle-income countries for the second quarter of 2019. The rates are based on “the cheapest plan(s) providing at least 1GB of broadband data over a 30-day period from the largest mobile network operator in each country.” [h/t Teddy Woodhouse]

Dating. Stanford’s How Couples Meet and Stay Together study, which receives funding from both the university and the National Science Foundation, has been asking American adults about dating since 2009. A new-and-updated version of the survey includes questions related to dating apps. [h/t u/morningshower]

🌴🌴🌴🌴🌴. A team of researchers has “derived measurements of essential functional traits” for more than 2,500 species of palm plants — including but not limited to palm trees. Their PalmTraits database, based on published studies and preserved specimens, includes variables such as maximum height, fruit shape, and whether the fruit color is “conspicuous.”