2018.05.09 edition
Clinical trials. OpenTrials, a collaboration between Open Knowledge International and Oxford University’s Ben Goldacre, “aims to locate, match, and share all publicly accessible data and documents, on all trials conducted, on all medicines and other treatments, globally.” The project’s “public beta” brings together data from several of the world’s largest clinical trial registries — including the United States’ ClinicalTrials.gov, the European Union Clinical Trials Register, and the WHO’s International Clinical Trials Registry Platform — and other related sources. You can explore the data through an online search tool, monthly bulk exports, and an API.
Medical examiner reports. Cook County, Illinois, publishes data on all deaths reported to its medical examiner — 20,000+ deaths since August 2014, and updated daily. (FYI: “Not all deaths that occur in Cook County are reported to the Medical Examiner or fall under the jurisdiction of the Medical Examiner.”) Connecticut’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has published data on all accidental drug deaths reported between 2012 and 2017. The Dallas Morning News’ Dana Amihere obtained autopsy data from the Dallas County medical examiner’s office, and NJ Advance Media’s Stephen Stirling obtained data on “all cases referred to the NJ Medical Examiner system from 1996 to 2016.”
Himalayan expeditions. The Himalayan Database tracks “all expeditions that have climbed in the Nepalese Himalaya.” The hyper-detailed database “is based on the expedition archives of Elizabeth Hawley, a longtime journalist based in Kathmandu, and it is supplemented by information gathered from books, alpine journals and correspondence with Himalayan climbers.” The database — long accessible only on CD, for a fee — is now available to download for free. (The main download is provided as a Microsoft Visual FoxPro database, but the .DBF files within it can be opened using other software, including LibreOffice.) Related: Yuichiro Miura, the oldest person to reach the summit of Mount Everest. [h/t Jacob Bradburn]
1.7 billion Milky Way stars. The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft “has produced the richest star catalogue to date, including high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars and revealing previously unseen details of our home Galaxy.” Those measurements, released last month, are available to download. They’ve also been used to create a high-resolution image of all observed stars and to expand the ESA’s interactive space map. Related: This Vox article provides some more context. [h/t u/Kopachris]
Sidewalk grates. You know those metallic grates embedded into city sidewalks? D.C.’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer has identified 10,000+ of them in the District. Also: 89,727 curb segments. [h/t Sunlight Open Cities]
Updates and corrections:
- Correction, 2018.05.09: The emailed edition misspelled Stephen Stirling’s name.