2024.03.27 edition
Institutional investments. If you’re an institutional investor with US operations and managing at least $100 million in publicly traded securities, the Securities and Exchange Commission requires you to file Form 13F each quarter. (The biggest filers — such as Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street — have trillions of dollars invested.) These filings, available to download going back to mid-2013, detail each investor’s long positions for each security: their number of shares, market value, security type, issuer name, CUSIP code, and more. As seen in: Michigan teenager Anonyo Noor’s wallstreetlocal.com, which aggregates the data, matches it to additional information, and provides a search interface.
Human development, indexed. Perhaps the best-known metric of its kind, the United Nations’ Human Development Index combines statistics on life expectancy, income per capita, and years of schooling into a single number for each country-year. The UN provides downloads and an API for all annual HDI ratings and sub-components for 1990 to 2022. Those resources also feature data from related indices, such as the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, Gender Development Index, and Gender Inequality Index. [h/t Michael A. Rice]
Extrajudicial killings in Bangladesh. Between 2009 and 2022, “Bangladesh’s security forces killed at least 2,597 people in apparent extrajudicial executions, custodial torture, and by firing bullets at protesters,” according to Nazmul Ahasan’s analysis for Netra News, building on data “compiled by Bangladeshi human rights defenders and collated by the Australia-based Capital Punishment Justice Project.” Ahasan and colleagues “independently verified more than 98% of the cases in the dataset using press reports and subsequently updated any incomplete data.” The records are available as a table in the article and as a JSON file. Each entry includes the victim’s name (if known), incident date, description, location, agencies involved, purported justification, and news source. As seen in: The 2024 Sigma Awards.
Agri-environmental policies. David Wuepper et al. have constructed a dataset of 6,000+ policies between 1960 and 2022 “at the intersection of agriculture and the environment, implemented not only by national entities but also by subnational and supranational entities, covering different instruments (for example, regulations, frameworks, payment programmes) and topics,” such as the US Safe Drinking Water Act, the Bavarian Forestry Law, and Tanzania’s 2009 Wildlife Conservation Act. Each entry lists the policy’s country, title, type, keywords, year implemented, description, and other details.
Rolling Stone’s album rankings. A new visual essay from The Pudding compares Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” lists from 2003, 2012, and 2020. A methodology note says the project began with a spreadsheet by Chris Eckert and eventually led the authors to develop a dataset of their own. Theirs lists every album in the rankings — its name, genre, release year, 2003/2012/2020 rank, the artist’s name, birth year, gender, and more — plus each year’s voters. [h/t Jason Kottke]