Data Is Plural

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

2022.04.06 edition

COVID-19 therapeutics, the 1950 Census, electric vehicle registrations, military alliances, and white sharks.

COVID-19 therapeutics. The US Department of Health & Human Services’ COVID-19 Therapeutics Locator tracks which pharmacies, hospitals, and other facilities have received government-procured COVID-19 drugs, and how much they have left. The therapeutics include one preventative antibody combination (Evusheld) and several treatments (bebtelovimab, molnupiravir, Paxlovid, and, until its distribution was recently paused, sotrovimab). The underlying dataset contains 39,000+ entries, one for each facility-therapeutic combination; they list the facility’s name and location, the drug, the number of courses available, and the time of the last update. As seen in: Rob Relyea’s locators with current and historical data. [h/t Betsy Ladyzhets]

The 1950 Census. After 72 years of mandated confidentiality, the US government on Friday released “over 165 terabytes” of microfilm digitized from the 1950 decennial Census. You can search the scans, which include millions of population schedules (the sheets that contain the details recorded about each household and resident), plus maps and descriptions of the survey’s enumeration districts. You can also download the raw images and metadata files. [h/t Eric Gardner + Michael E. Ruane]

Electric vehicle registrations. The US Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center hosts dozens of vehicle-related datasets, including the number of electric vehicle registrations in each state in 2020, hybrid sales by model from 1999 to 2019, and a database of manufacturers’ offerings. As seen in: “U.S. Has a Blueprint to Electrify Its Country Roads” (Bloomberg Opinion). Previously: Alt-fuel stations (DIP 2021.09.08). [h/t Rose Mintzer-Sweeney]

Military alliances. The Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions project, based at Rice University, examines “the content of military alliance agreements signed by all countries of the world between 1815 and 2018.” Its dataset covers 760+ alliances, their various phases, and membership, with variables speaking to the formation, duration, obligations, and other aspects of the arrangements. [h/t Ashley Leeds]

White sharks. A collaboration led by the Monterey Bay Aquarium has published a dataset of location, pressure, light, and temperature measurements gathered from trackers attached to dozens of juvenile white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) that researchers tagged off the coast of Southern California. The project ran from 2001 to 2020, when its “present and future status was adversely affected” by pandemic-related budget cuts. [h/t Sharon Machlis]