Data Is The New Oil - 04.02.2021 Update
Chinese mobility, Frequent satellite observations, Covid vaccinations and Electric vehicle bubble.
Chinese mobility. Search engine Baidu has created a live webpage tracking the daily movement of Chinese citizens during the new year holiday, using data from their mobile phones. It is similar to the data published by Google since last year, but which does not cover China. The figures suggest the Chinese have complied with government edicts to stay at home to avoid spreading the Covid virus, with movements down from both 2019 and 2020. Unfortunately, the data cannot be easily downloaded and needs to be consulted on the website or scraped directly from it. I have saved it.
More frequent satellite observations. NASA published a new dataset of medium resolution (30 metres) images of the planet. NASA was able to reduce the time between each revisit from 16 days to 2 to 3 days, depending on how close/far a location is to the equator, by merging data from its Landsat 8 programme and the Sentinel 2 satellites operated by the European Space Agency. The dataset is useful for applications in vegetation monitoring and natural catastrophes. Future satellite launches in 2021 and 2023 will feed the dataset and further reduce the time gap between images.
Covid vaccinations. A Spanish data scientist has built a live dataset of daily Covid vaccinations by region, covering 22 countries. This complements the widely used dataset of country-wide vaccinations published by Our World in Data. In addition, France published datasets on available vaccine doses and vaccine deliveries. Finally, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control started publishing data on Covid vaccinations.
An electric vehicle bubble? Journalists working for the Financial Times Alphaville blog have put together a live tracker of stock prices for manufacturers of electric cars, electric batteries and charging infrastructure. Prices are down from their recent highs, but remain up significantly in the last few months, prompting some to warn about a stock bubble.
Other Data Updates
Researchers uploaded a dataset of self-reported bike trips in Germany covering 150,000 users.
A scholar updated a dataset of wind power projects in Vietnam, including their capacity and construction costs.
A paper measures the number and frequency of ash alerts sent to airline operators in relation to volcanic eruptions. Eight volcanoes were responsible for 50% of all alerts between 2009 and 2019.
Researchers created a dataset covering all major lakes in the world and their health over time.
A Reddit user has put together a list of around 20 databases and repositories that can be used to detect plastic trash with machine learning.
Interesting Papers
Plausible energy demand patterns in a growing global economy with climate policy (link)
A machine-learning approach to predicting Africa’s electricity mix based on planned power plants and their chances of success (link)
Machine learning for energy projections (link)
A nowcasting approach to generate timely estimates of Mexican economic activity: An application to the period of COVID-19 (link)
Political Regime and COVID 19 death rate: efficient, biasing or simply different autocracies ? (link)
Artificial intelligence prediction of stock prices using social media (link)
Climate Change Adaptation under Heterogeneous Beliefs (link)
Global maps of twenty-first century forest carbon fluxes (link)
Global and regional drivers of land-use emissions in 1961–2017 (link)
Don't hesitate to contact me (oliv.lejeune@gmail.com) if you have any dataset suggestions or comments about this note. Thanks for reading.