The Data Is Plural newsletter provides a mass of free and fascinating data

I recently chanced upon "Data Is Plural" - an email newsletter, currently on issue 370. Each week it provides a list and some commentary on "useful/curious datasets". There's a ton of links in each issue for anyone who wants data to play or work with to get stuck into. To give a taster of what … Continue reading The Data Is Plural newsletter provides a mass of free and fascinating data →

The Great Resignation of British Ministers

Last week was a pretty dramatic week for UK politics. On Tuesday, Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid, the UK's chancellor and health secretary respectively, resigned from their cabinet posts within minutes of each other, citing the incompetency and impossibility of working with Prime Minister Boris Johnson as their motivation. Over the next couple of days, … Continue reading The Great Resignation of British Ministers →

Official UK Covid-19 vaccination progress data

Now that the Covid-19 vaccination program is under way, data fans might be interested in obtaining the stats of how the UK is doing in terms of vaccinations administered so far. The NHS is publishing a variety of these reports and, even better, the underlying data here. The most comprehensive data there is likely the … Continue reading Official UK Covid-19 vaccination progress data →

Average age at menarche by country

A question came up recently about variations in the age at menarche - the first occurrence of menstruation for a female human - with regards to the environment. A comparison by country seemed like a reasonable first step in noting whether there were in fact any significant, potentially environmental, differences in this age. A quick … Continue reading Average age at menarche by country →

data.world: the place to go for your open data needs?

Somewhere in my outrageously long list of data-related links to check out I found "data.world". Not only is that a nice URL, it also contains a worthy service that I can imagine being genuinely useful in future, if it takes off like it should. At first glance, it's a platform for hosting data - seemingly biased towards the … Continue reading data.world: the place to go for your open data needs? →

Free up-to-date UK postcode latitude longitude data

Unless your data comes pre geo-encoded, if you're trying to do some UK-based geospatial analysis you'll probably need some easy way of translating addresses into latitude/longitude pairs or some similar co-ordinate system. Whilst full-address geocoders are available, if you don't actually need that level of precision then looking up a full postcode is often good enough and … Continue reading Free up-to-date UK postcode latitude longitude data →

Free interactive data and analysis tools from Public Health England

Public Health England is an agency sponsored by the UK Department of Health whose aim is to "protect and improve the nation's health and wellbeing, and reduce health inequalities". They use, generate or distribute a bunch of interesting health-related data. They've a collection of many, many "data and analysis tools", linked to from this page. There's something for everyone … Continue reading Free interactive data and analysis tools from Public Health England →

New website launch from the Office of National Statistics

Yesterday, the UK Office of National Statistics, the institution that is "responsible for collecting and publishing statistics related to the economy, population and society", launched its new website. As well as a new look, they've concentrated on improving the search experience and making it accessible to mobile device users. The front page is a nice at-a-glance … Continue reading New website launch from the Office of National Statistics →

Kaggle now offers free public dataset and script combos

Kaggle, a company most famous for facilitating competitions that allow organisations to solicit the help of teams of data scientists to solve their problems in return for a nice big prize, recently introduced a new section useful even for the less competitive types: "Kaggle Datasets". Here they host "high quality public datasets" you can access for free. … Continue reading Kaggle now offers free public dataset and script combos →

Microsoft Academic Graph: paper, journals, authors and more

The Microsoft Academic Graph is a heterogeneous graph containing scientific publication records, citation relationships between those publications, as well as authors, institutions, journals and conference "venues" and fields of study. Microsoft have been good enough to structure and release a bunch of web-crawled data around scientific papers, journals, authors, URLs, keywords, references between and so on for … Continue reading Microsoft Academic Graph: paper, journals, authors and more →