I’m currently in the throes of assembling data to use in forecasts on various forms of political change in countries worldwide for 2014. This labor-intensive process is the not-so-sexy side of “data science” that practitioners like to bang on about if you ask us, but I’m not going to do that here. Instead, I’m going to talk about how hard it is to find data sets that applied forecasters of rare events in international politics can even use in the first place...