One of the challenges in creating realistic problems for my students is finding good/interesting sources of data.  I will list here some useful site for finding data along with a brief description of the sorts of data one can find there.  I have to confess that this post is largely self-serving, providing me with a record of data sources I have heard of or used before.

Data.gov is “the home of the US Government’s open data.”  There are over 300,000 data sets, for example Chicago crimes from 2001 to the present and national hourly precipitation data. 

Data.detroitmi.gov is a data base of information on the city of Detroit.  Information includes government data, public health data, and education data.

data.nasa.gov is NASA’s data base which includes climate change data.

http://mlb.mlb.com/stats/sortable.jsp has the statistics of every major league  baseball player which can be sorted and filtered by things like team and position.

http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/data-sharing is a source of data about NCAA teams/players.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/ is the CIA’s “World Fact book” containg a wide variety of information on all the world’s countries from land area to GDP to major exports.

https://www.bls.gov/data/ the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

https://pollingreport.com/ has results of American Opinion Polls.

World Values Survey https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp .

https://www.datafiles.samhsa.gov/data-sources (The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive).

https://data.cdc.gov/ Center for Disease Control.