This week we begin with an article on the Police Data Accessibility Project, a data mining movement on Reddit, for making police data open source. The next story is on the increasing reliance of investors on alternative data related to the pandemic for making investment decisions. The following story talks about a Public Emotions Framework developed by an audience intelligence company to track public sentiment in the UK and US. Next, we cover the disorganization and panic reflected by researches on Covid-19 drugs, resulting in wastage of efforts and resources. Then we have a story that estimates how much asset managers are paying for alternative data sets that are used to guide investment decisions. To end, we have an article about the global lack of access to data about air quality, resulting in inaction to tackle this environmental and health threat.
A Plan to Make Police Data Open Source Started on Reddit
ON MAY 18, Kristin Tynski dropped a link into the Reddit community r/privacy: “I scraped court records to find dirty cops.” Tynski, who owns a marketing firm, had collected the public police records in Palm Beach County, where she lives, and wrote up her findings on data like traffic citations and race. She wondered if other Redditors might want to do the same in their counties. “If cops can watch us, we should watch them,” she wrote.
Wall Street Forges a New Deal With Data in Coronavirus Age
Alternative data has been a buzzword on Wall Street for years. Never has demand been greater than during the coronavirus era. For many professionals, fundamental and technical stock analysis now takes a back seat to epidemiological charts and real-time economic signals. Macroeconomists and money managers spend days tracking everything from Covid-19 reproduction rates to the number of restaurant reservations on OpenTable.
How the world is feeling right now, according to data
The last few months have been a rollercoaster of emotions for everyone from fear, loneliness, and boredom under confinement to positivity and concern over the easing of lockdown measures and back up again with feelings of anger and frustration over the death of George Floyd and too many others.
Data show panic and disorganization dominate the study of Covid-19 drugs
In a gigantic feat of scientific ambition, researchers have designed a staggering 1,200 clinical trials aimed at testing treatment and prevention strategies against Covid-19 since the start of January. But a new STAT analysis shows the effort has been marked by disorder and disorganization, with huge financial resources wasted.
How Much Are Managers Paying for Data?
Asset managers are increasingly using non-traditional data to make investment decisions — but it doesn’t always come cheap. According to consulting firm Neudata, which helps investors evaluate data providers, yearly subscriptions for alternative data sets can range from less than $25,000 to $500,000 or more. The most expensive include transactional data like credit card spending, as well as location and web- and app-tracking data. About 30 percent of transactional data subscriptions, for example, cost more than $150,000 a year, Neudata said.
Unequal access to air quality information
There is a huge global inequality in access to information about air quality, a new report released today by OpenAQ, an international NGO based in Washington DC, reveals. Over half of the world’s population has no access to official government data on air quality, despite the fact that nine out of 10 people breathe air containing high levels of pollutants, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Source: https://mailchi.mp/zigram/data-asset-weekly-dispatch_13_july
