2024.08.07 edition
State/local government employment. Every year, the Census Bureau sends its Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll to all 50 state governments and 90,000+ local governments, requesting employee counts and payroll totals. The survey’s public datasets provide those figures for each government unit, broken down by several dozen “functional categories” (such as “Highways”, “Financial Administration”, and “Hospitals”). As seen in: The Marshall Project’s guide to using the data to examine declines in prison staffing, part of the organization’s new Investigate This! initiative; they’ve also aggregated the raw records into a spreadsheet of annual state totals. [h/t David Eads]
Railroad incidents. Since last August, the Federal Railroad Administration has been rolling out a new portal for its safety data. Through it, you can find datasets on incidents and accidents involving railroad equipment, incidents at grade crossings, and reported injuries and illnesses, as well as dashboards and reports on related topics. The grade crossing dataset, for instance, lists 246,000+ incidents since 1975; it indicates each incident’s date, railroad, crossing identifier, nearest station, number of injuries, vehicle and train speeds, and much more. Previously: Blocked rail crossings (DIP 2023.05.10).
Ireland’s gender pay gaps. Ireland’s Gender Pay Gap Information Act requires certain-sized companies to report their differences pay for men versus women. “While plans are in place to create a central portal (similar to that in the UK) to collate this information, such a database does not exist yet,” writes Jennifer Keane, who has built PayGap.ie to fill the void. For each company and year, the project’s database lists the metrics the Act requires — mean and median hourly pay gaps, percentages of men and women paid bonuses, proportion of employees in each pay quartile for each gender, among others — plus a link to the company’s public report.
Weather balloons. When a weather balloon rises into the atmosphere, it carries a radiosonde to record the temperature, pressure, wind speed, humidity, and other measurements. NOAA’s Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive “consists of radiosonde and pilot balloon observations from more than 2,800 globally distributed stations,” some dating back to the early 1900s. SondeHub, meanwhile, tracks hundreds of weather balloons a day in real-time, thanks to a community-run network of 1,400+ receiver stations. You can browse the flight paths and detailed measurements online, and access the data via download and API. [h/t Michael Allen]
Art auction sales. Kangsan Lee et al. have compiled a dataset of “34,200 auction sales records, including images, artists’ attributes, and market information, encompassing 590 living contemporary artists spanning 17 years (1996 to 2012) across 23 countries.” It includes the artist’s name, nationality, and birth year; the artwork’s name, year, medium, and dimensions; the auction date, house, initial estimates, and final sale price; and more. The sales information comes from Blouin, which the researchers “cross-check[ed] with publicly available auction house data at the time, such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s.”