Data

Introduction An RSS reader is very good at collecting material and almost useless at telling me what deserves the next ten minutes of my day. On a busy morning, a hundred stories can arrive, four may alter a customer conversation or an account plan, and the rest bury them under wire copy, recycled commentary, and headlines whose relationship to the underlying event is thin. Keyword alerts do not repair that problem. They report a word’s presence, then happily ring for a passing reference, a syndicated rewrite, an executive departure, a funding round, and a lawsuit with no discernment among them. The human cost is familiar. An alert stream that repeats itself becomes background noise, and the article that did matter gets read after the meeting for which it would have been useful. ...

Introduction Members of the United States Congress must disclose many securities transactions, and the resulting records are public. As a dataset, however, they are close to unusable: the House publishes a ZIP archive whose underlying filings are frequently scanned images; the Senate uses a separate system with its own irregularities; tickers are inconsistent or absent; and neither chamber provides an interface resembling a durable public API. Several commercial services solve this and sell the result. I wanted to see how much of it I could do myself, in-cluster, from the primary sources. ...