2017.12.13 edition
Government-sponsored cyberattacks. Last month, the Council on Foreign Relations launched the Cyber Operations Tracker, a database of “publicly known state-sponsored cyber incidents that have occurred since 2005.” The 191 attacks in the database so far have been sponsored by 16 different countries, with China, Russia, and Iran being the most cited. For each incident, the dataset also includes the type of attack (e.g. espionage, data destruction), its name (e.g., “Stuxnet”), a description, the date it occurred, its victims, and the type of response, if any.
Fatal and nonfatal officer-involved shootings. For an investigation published Monday, Vice News spent “nine months collecting data on both fatal and nonfatal police shootings from the 50 largest local police departments in the United States.” They’ve published raw and standardized data on every shooting, plus the code they used to analyze it. [h/t Allison McCann]
Sports team ratings. For several years now, the folks at FiveThirtyEight have been quantifying professional sports teams’ current and historical strength, mostly using Elo rating systems. Their global club soccer ratings go back to 2016, their basketball ratings go back to 1946, their American football ratings go back to 1920, and their baseball ratings go back to 1871. For each of those, the entire histories of match-by-match ratings are available as CSV files. [h/t Jay Boice]
State lawmakers’ financial disclosures. For a recent investigation into state legislators’ financial interests, the Center for Public Integrity “analyzed disclosure reports from 6,933 lawmakers holding office in 2015 from the 47 states that required them.” You can search through the disclosures and download the data. For each of the 11,000+ disclosed interests, the dataset includes the lawmaker’s state, legislative body, and district; the name and industry of the financial interest; and a link to the lawmaker’s personal disclosure form. [h/t The Nerds at INN Labs]
Secure seeds. In far northern Norway, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault safekeeps hundreds of millions of seeds, helping to back up the world’s biodiversity. Data on the vault’s deposits, which often contain hundreds of seeds apiece, are available to search and to download. [h/t Enigma Public]