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
Category: Free data
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
Free dataset: all Reddit comments available for download
As terrifying a thought as it might be, Jason from Pushshift.io has extracted pretty much every Reddit comment from 2007 through to May 2015 that isn't protected, and made it available for download and analysis. This is about 1.65 million comments, in JSON format. It's pretty big, so you can download it via a torrent, as per the … Continue reading Free dataset: all Reddit comments available for download
Dabbling with Data 