2018.08.01 edition
The death penalty. Law professor Brandon L. Garrett has led an effort to compile data on every death sentence in the U.S. since the early 1990s. Garrett’s “End of its Rope” database currently includes more than 4,900 sentencings, and specifies each defendant’s name, race, and gender; the state, county, and year of the sentence; whether it was a resentencing; and whether the defendant has been executed. You can download the data, browse it online, and explore it via an interactive map.
Global tax revenues. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has launched a database “providing detailed and comparable tax revenue information for 80 countries around the world.” The Global Revenue Statistics Database, “which will expand to cover more than 90 countries by the end of 2018,” breaks tax revenues into dozens of categories and subcategories — such as sales taxes, taxes on capital gains, and taxes on exports. Related: The OECD’s interactive charts of the data.
Consumer-product chemicals. Researchers at the Environmental Protection Agency have created a new dataset of “reported and predicted information on more than 75,000 chemicals and more than 15,000 consumer products.” The Chemicals and Products Database, as they’ve named it, is an “aggregation of publicly available data on chemical-use categorization, consumer product composition […], and functional use of chemicals”, and uses “a consistent scheme for categorizing products and chemicals.” You can download the data via the EPA’s Chemistry Dashboard.
Development projects and outcomes. Earlier this year, Johns Hopkins professor Dan Honig released the Project Performance Database, which tracks the outcome ratings of international development projects (typically conducted by auditors on a four- or six-point scale). “The PPD is, at present, the world’s largest” such database and “contains over 14,000 unique projects from eight agencies,” including the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and others. [h/t Paddy Carter]
Public restrooms. There are many official datasets of public toilets, including those in New York City parks, Vancouver, Seattle parks, many UK cities, Australia, and New Zealand. [h/t Jens von Bergmann]