Cody Winchester asks the question: "How many rat hairs in your macaroni before the FDA considers it adulterated?"

The agency's Food Defect Levels Handbook has the answer, in its table listing the “maximum levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods for human use that present no health hazard”: https://www.fda.gov/food/ingredients-additives-gras-packaging-guidance-documents-regulatory-information/food-defect-levels-handbook

Winchester has converted the table to JSON: https://github.com/cjwinchester/fda-food-defect-action-levels

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-14-edition/

The Markup has obtained, analyzed, and published a spreadsheet of 650,000+ ad-targetable “audience segments” and their data suppliers: https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you

The data, which until recently had been linked from an ad platform's website: https://github.com/the-markup/xandr-audience-segments

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-14-edition/

Spotlight PA and the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism have shared data on 697 criminal cases that involved competency hearings, based on state court records: https://github.com/spotlightpa/competency-data-2023/

The newsrooms used the data for an investigation into Pennsylvania's competency system earlier this year: https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2023/03/pa-mental-illness-jail-incompetent-treatment/

The data and story are featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-14-edition/

Reuters and Big Local News teamed up to extract data on 43,000+ climate finance contributions from wealthy to developing countries. Some funding went to "questionable" projects “including a coal plant, a hotel and chocolate shops," according their investigation: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/climate-change-finance/

How to get and use their data: https://biglocalnews.org/content/news/2023/06/01/climate-finance-story-recipe.html

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-14-edition/

Internationally, there's also the Global Wildfire Information System: https://gwis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/

(Previously featured in DIP 2022.07.27: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2022-07-27-edition/.)

Another government organization, the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (https://www.ciffc.ca/), maintains a dashboard of active fires: https://ciffc.net/

The Canadian Wildland Fire Information System monitors provides maps and datasets of fires and fire weather in the country: https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/home

Read more in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-14-edition/

“Ransomware negotiations are usually not shared widely, limiting the understanding of the process,” writes Valéry Marchive, whose new repository of chat transcripts — https://github.com/Casualtek/Ransomchats — “aims at changing that, in a respectful manner for the victims of cyberattacks: chats are anonymized as long as the victim hasn’t been publicly disclosed, either by the attackers or in the media.”

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-07-edition/ via @duncangeere

Harvard University's library system provides several ways to access detailed metadata about its holdings: https://library.harvard.edu/services-tools/harvard-library-apis-datasets

... including its LibraryCloud API: https://wiki.harvard.edu/confluence/display/LibraryStaffDoc/LibraryCloud

... and bulk downloads: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/I8L0ZZ

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-07-edition/

Recent work by Megan Kang and Elizabeth Rasich “extends an existing proxy for household gun ownership rates — the rate of firearm suicide divided by suicide (FSS) — from 1949 to 2020, including new coverage for the 1949 to 1972 period”: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4453698

Dataset: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/QVYDUD

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-07-edition/

The FAA, which regulates the US commercial space transportation industry, publishes HTML tables of licensed launches (552 of them since 1989), permits for experimental operations, and more: https://www.faa.gov/data_research/commercial_space_data/

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-07-edition/

A recent article in Science, by Virginia Gewin, describes the pushback against USGS’s decision “to reduce the number of chemicals it tracks and to release updates less frequently”: https://www.science.org/content/article/move-change-how-u-s-tracks-pesticide-use-sparks-protests

As part of its National Water-Quality Assessment Project, the US Geological Survey publishes maps and datasets that estimate local pesticide usage: https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/pnsp/usage/maps/about.php

More details in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-07-edition/

NYC’s Department of Buildings publishes a map and dataset of active permits for “sidewalk sheds,” the ubiquitous, temporary structures (often colloquially called scaffolding) meant to shield pedestrians from falling debris: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/sidewalk-shed-map.html

More details and visualizations, by @zhik@urbanists.social: https://observablehq.com/@betanyc/what-are-sidewalk-sheds

Both featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-05-31-edition/

In a recent paper, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s GeoMAP team describes building the “first detailed geological map dataset covering all of Antarctica,” assembled and refined from 589 sources: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-023-02152-9

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-05-31-edition/

Claudio Feliciani et al. have compiled a dataset of 281 crowd accidents from 1900 to 2019: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925753523001169

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-05-31-edition/

The Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns datasets indicate the number establishments and (noise-infused) employee counts and payroll figures, disaggregated by industry code: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html

And they're not just for counties, but for a range of other geographic units, including states, congressional districts, metro areas, and ZIP codes.

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-05-31-edition/

The Prison Policy Initiative has cross-referenced data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and several other sources to count/estimate the number of people under eight forms of “correctional control” in each state and DC: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/correctionalcontrol2023_data_appendix.html

- federal prisons
- state prisons
- local jails
- Indian Country jails
- youth confinement
- involuntary commitment
- parole
- probation

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-05-31-edition/

Gero Laurenz Höhn et al. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00343404.2023.2187365) have collected the prices of protected-origin and non-protected European ham from dozens of supermarket websites: https://dataverse.nl/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.34894/RX0QIN

Featured in this week's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-05-24-edition/

The Parking Reform Network, a US-based nonprofit that aims “to discourage the building of too much parking supply,” has compiled a map and dataset of ~1,400 relevant local mandates: https://parkingreform.org/resources/mandates-map/

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-05-24-edition/