Cody Winchester asks the question: "How many rat hairs in your macaroni before the FDA considers it adulterated?"

The agency's Food Defect Levels Handbook has the answer, in its table listing the “maximum levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods for human use that present no health hazard”: https://www.fda.gov/food/ingredients-additives-gras-packaging-guidance-documents-regulatory-information/food-defect-levels-handbook

Winchester has converted the table to JSON: https://github.com/cjwinchester/fda-food-defect-action-levels

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-14-edition/

The Markup has obtained, analyzed, and published a spreadsheet of 650,000+ ad-targetable “audience segments” and their data suppliers: https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you

The data, which until recently had been linked from an ad platform's website: https://github.com/the-markup/xandr-audience-segments

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-14-edition/

Spotlight PA and the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism have shared data on 697 criminal cases that involved competency hearings, based on state court records: https://github.com/spotlightpa/competency-data-2023/

The newsrooms used the data for an investigation into Pennsylvania's competency system earlier this year: https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2023/03/pa-mental-illness-jail-incompetent-treatment/

The data and story are featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-14-edition/

Reuters and Big Local News teamed up to extract data on 43,000+ climate finance contributions from wealthy to developing countries. Some funding went to "questionable" projects “including a coal plant, a hotel and chocolate shops," according their investigation: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/climate-change-finance/

How to get and use their data: https://biglocalnews.org/content/news/2023/06/01/climate-finance-story-recipe.html

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-14-edition/

The Canadian Wildland Fire Information System monitors provides maps and datasets of fires and fire weather in the country: https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/home

Read more in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-14-edition/

“Ransomware negotiations are usually not shared widely, limiting the understanding of the process,” writes Valéry Marchive, whose new repository of chat transcripts — https://github.com/Casualtek/Ransomchats — “aims at changing that, in a respectful manner for the victims of cyberattacks: chats are anonymized as long as the victim hasn’t been publicly disclosed, either by the attackers or in the media.”

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-07-edition/ via @duncangeere

Harvard University's library system provides several ways to access detailed metadata about its holdings: https://library.harvard.edu/services-tools/harvard-library-apis-datasets

... including its LibraryCloud API: https://wiki.harvard.edu/confluence/display/LibraryStaffDoc/LibraryCloud

... and bulk downloads: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/I8L0ZZ

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-07-edition/

Recent work by Megan Kang and Elizabeth Rasich “extends an existing proxy for household gun ownership rates — the rate of firearm suicide divided by suicide (FSS) — from 1949 to 2020, including new coverage for the 1949 to 1972 period”: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4453698

Dataset: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/QVYDUD

Featured in today's edition of Data Is Plural: https://www.data-is-plural.com/archive/2023-06-07-edition/