This is a periodic newsletter of the interesting things we’ve seen and what we are thinking about in open source policy analysis.

PCI Outbreak* releases working paper. Authors of the Policy Change Index (PCI) Outbreak have released a new working paper outlining the project’s natural language processing algorithm and its results for data from February to October 2020. Link

“Demo Days” series at the Policy Simulation Library* (PSL) features Tax-Brain*. In the latest PSL Demo Day, Anderson Frailey demonstrates Tax-Brain using a simulation on Compute Studio. Link

Tweeting with Tax-Calculator*. In a recent tweet, Ernie Tedeschi validates the impact of a $2,000 coronavirus relief check for households on government expenditures. Link

An open-source data compression module for the HDF5 format. An international group of researchers has open sourced Hickle, an implementation of Python’s popular “pickle” data compression and serialization module for the HDF5 data format. NumPy arrays, Pandas dataframes, and standard Python objects such as lists and dictionaries can be saved to and loaded from HDF5 files extremely quickly, and HDF5’s hierarchical structure allows multiple datasets and objects to be stored in groups and subgroups in one HDF5 file. Link

Into city simulation? German Aerospace Center (GAC) open sources urban mobility simulation software. The Institute of Transportation Systems at the GAC has open-sourced SUMO, a software package for simulating intermodal traffic and public transport systems that interact with pedestrians. Link

* These projects are attendees or graduates of OSPC’s incubator program.

Edited by Matt Jensen and Jacob Chuslo