2025.01.08 edition
Overdose demographics. Since mid-2024, reporters at the Baltimore Banner have been publishing a series examining the city’s overdose crisis — reporting supported by The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship and Stanford’s Big Local News. Last month the team partnered with The Upshot and a range of local news organizations to examine a stark phenomenon: In dozens of US counties, “Black men born between 1951 and 1970 have died of overdose at exceptionally high rates for decades.” They’ve published the supporting data, which list overdose death counts and rates by year, county, race/ethnicity, sex, and age group. The data, based on restricted-use records from the CDC, cover the years 1989 to 2022 for “the 408 U.S. counties that had 200 or more overdose deaths between 2018 and 2022”. [h/t Cheryl Phillips + Kimi Yoshino]
Opioid settlement spending. KFF Health News, working with researchers at Johns Hopkins and Shatterproof, has published “a first-of-its kind database” tracking how states and local governments are using the billions of dollars received via opioid settlements in recent years. The database, drawing from “dozens of interviews, thousands of pages of documents, an array of public records requests, and outreach to all 50 states,” represents “the most comprehensive resource to date tracking some of the largest public health settlements in American history.” For each state, it indicates the total funds received in 2022-23, amount committed or spent in various categories (e.g., prevention, treatment, recovery), amount set aside, and amount “untrackable via public reports.” It also catalogs 7,000+ specific spending decisions: funder, destination, purpose, and amount. Previously: Opioid settlement payouts (DIP 2024.04.10). [h/t Aneri Pattani]
AI governance documents. The Emerging Technology Observatory’s AGORA “is a living collection of AI-relevant laws, regulations, standards, and other governance documents from the United States and around the world.” The dataset, available to download and explore online, provides the full text, metadata (e.g., jurisdiction, title, relevant dates), summaries, and thematic tags for 600+ documents. The project currently “skews toward U.S. law and policy” but is aiming “to broaden coverage of U.S. state documents […] and to broaden coverage of Chinese central government documents and major corporate commitments.”
NEA writing fellowships. A team led by English professor Alexander Manshel has compiled a dataset of every recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts’ fellowship for creative writing, “from the organization’s founding in 1965 to 2024, including information about those writers’ demographics, education, and geography.” The dataset, which lists 3,700+ recipients, is based on the NEA’s own directory and a 2006 report, as well as “author biographies and websites, institutional websites, interviews, encyclopedias, literary criticism, and literary journalism.” [h/t Melanie Walsh + Derek Willis]
ISS telemetry. The International Space Station beams home a wide range of measurements: cabin temperature, solar array angles, spacesuit power supply, wastewater tank capacity, oxygen production rate, and much more. NASA, in collaboration with Lightstreamer, provides a feed of these measurements. A team developing a live 3D model of the station has also published a couple of dashboards of the realtime data, historical data going back to 2018, and a data dictionary. [h/t ajdud + AIorNot]