2019.05.22 edition
Internet speeds. The Measurement Lab describes itself as “the largest open source Internet measurement effort in the world.” Volunteers run the lab’s tests on their own devices, measuring their internet connection’s speed, latency, and other characteristics. The lab then publishes the data it collects, both as raw output and as BigQuery tables. It also offers a tool for charting internet speeds by location and ISP, based on 240+ million tests generated from 87,000+ cities; you can access the data underlying any chart, and also download the same aggregations directly. [h/t Georgia Bullen]
City finances. The Fiscally Standardized Cities database “makes it possible to compare local government finances for 150 of the largest U.S. cities across more than 120 categories of revenues, expenditures, debt, and assets.” The database, developed by Adam Langley at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, covers the years 1977 to 2016 and takes into account the ways in which finances and responsibilities overlap between cities, counties, school districts, and other local governments. [h/t Cezary Podkul]
The Supreme Court of Canada’s interveners. At Canada’s highest court, “interveners” are the rough equivalent of amicus brief filers in U.S. Supreme Court cases. Sancho McCann, a student at the University of British Columbia’s law school, has created a dataset of the past ten years of interveners and has analyzed it. For each of the 665 cases from 2009 to 2018, the dataset includes the case name, the previous court, a couple of case classifications, and the names of the interveners (if any).
Primates. A team of researchers at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México have aggregated the observations of 1,216 studies into a database describing 504 primate species. The traits in the database include body mass, habitat, type of diet, conservation status, and more.
From Abdul-Aziz to Young-Malcolm. The Pudding’s Jan Diehm has identified and analyzed decades of hyphenated last names in seven North American sports leagues: the MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, MLS, WNBA, and NWSL. The code and data are available to download. Now you know: Two ambi-hyphenates — Pierre-Luc Letourneau-Leblond and Jean-Luc Grand-Pierre — have played in the NHL (and none in any of other leagues).