Slashdot Mirror
Google Map Hack & Chicago Crime Data
joepez writes "In recent weeks we've seen some great Google Maps hacks (HousingMaps,
Google's own Ride Finder,
etc.), but this weekend Adrian has brought us something truly innovative. He's merged Google map data with Chicago crime data to present a once a day updated crime map of the entire city, including some really nice summarized data. Adrian calls the project Chicagocrime.org. How long till we have real time crime data showing up on Google's map? Pull open HousingMaps next to Chicagocrime.org and figure out if that low rent apartment is truly worth it. Or is this all a clever trick on Google's part to build up more and more third parties dependent upon Google?" There's also a cheap gas hack as well.
Not a single comment, and the site is already crawling. I guess some people actually read the articles!
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
If you select 'prostitution' you can check out the best areas to go to pick up a hooker. Not that this is of any use to me as I'm a) not single and b) not in the US.
Pull open HousingMaps next to Chicagocrime.org and figure out if that low rent apartment is truly worth it. Or is this all a clever trick on Google's part to build up more and more third parties dependent upon Google?
Why can't it be both. And if there is a way to keep it free the better for me.
Evolution or ID?
A better implementation for this would be to link to each individual State's sex offender's registry. This data is readily provided and is in the public domain.
When you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness. So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.
no comments and already slashdotted. i love when that happens. 200 comments where nobody RTFA. not much different than when the site isnt slashdotted i suppose. good day.
Combine housing maps and crime maps to discover exactly where not to live in Chicago!
Not sure if this has been implemented yet. Or even how to do so, but I think a cool Google hack would be a graphical trace route program simillar to NeoTrace.
Not sure how it would make money, but would be cool as hell with those satellite maps.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
The NYPD uses a system very much like this, called COMPSTAT.
More about the history of the program here (clicky)
Here's an excerpt from the NYPD website:
"Among the Command and Control Center's high-tech capabilities is its computerized 'pin mapping' which displays crime, arrest and quality of life data in a host of visual formats including comparative charts, graphs and tables. Through the use of MAPINFO software and other computer technology, for example, the CompStat database can be accessed and a precinct map depicting virtually any combination of crime and/or arrest locations, crime 'hot spots' and other relevant information can be instantly projected on the Center's large video projection screens."
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
Or is this all a clever trick on Google's part to build up more and more third parties dependent upon Google?
I doubt that Google intended on getting third parties dependent on GMaps. If they really wanted that to happen they would have released an open API rather than having to have people poke around in the code to figure out how it all worked.
Yeah, you can do some REALLY neat stuff with GMaps now (and even some of the things I suggested should be available when it first came out) but I just don't think that it was Google's main intention.
If anything, they just want to be a player in the same markets as Yahoo and MSN and not have to link to their competitor's mapping products.
I'm just simply amazed by both of the tools mentioned (the Crime Data and the Housing Maps)... we really live in interesting times. Why do these hacks work so well? Has google built an API to access these maps and to plot points on them, or have the developers of each of these hacks reverse-engineered the Google maps interface and figured out how to place stuff on them?
<obligatory>
It's already been done
</obligatory>
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I was able to tell the moment the Slashdot story went online... the chicagocrime.org site suddenly stopped responding. And it's not like we could have linked to a mirror.
So you'll just have to take my word for it -- it was pretty cool. I found out that there were three reported crimes at Chicago cemeteries, for example -- a theft, a trespassing, and a vandalism. Crimes at airports included a "theft by lessee" -- looks like there's somebody at Midway who you shouldn't get your rental car from.
The gas station link is holding up better, though. Hope it's not hosted at a gas station... kablooie!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Go to http://www.arjis.org./ We've had the same thing in San Diego County for several years now.
The Chicago Police Department already has a web interface, called Citizen ICAM, which displays the same info. I do believe that the new site is compiling its data from ICAM. You can check out ICAM at http://12.17.79.6/
It would be really useful if it could tell where the crime was about to occur .. in advance
And noting that it doesn't appear at all, I can only conclude that there is no crime in Chicago.
It must be a wonderful place to live!
A more appropriate title would be comparitively relative inexpensive gas hack. Gas at $2.00 a gallon is not cheap, and the slow pace the oil companies are using in rolling back prices suggests they are scaling back prices slowly in order to find the highest price consumers are willing to pay.
You still have a lot to learn about women.
I haven't been able to connect to the site yet, but I'm wondering how closely it resembles the crime map view in SimCity. :)
Ah, what a great game...
http://nerdfortress.com/
A true public service for undercover-cop fetishists!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It's amazing how fast a company can go from being Slashdot's little darling to suddenly being suspected at every turn of being the new EvilEmpire(tm).
Guys, these people are making wonderful tools and making them available for free, and letting people mess with them. They're probably reading comments like that slack-jawed, thinking "man, you just can't win with that crowd!" Give em a break! :)
-M
Or is this all a clever trick on Google's part to build up more and more third parties dependent upon Google?
I think it's just a case of people using tools in ways their creators didn't envision. As Perl's Larry Wall says, that's the mark of a good tool.
Another way to look at it is that if you serve people, they become dependent on you. Google is trying to build its business by offering services and getting people hooked.
I, for one, welcome our new information infrastructure servant overlords.
sigs, as if you care.
Crime is always a hot topic.
"Hmm, My moms basement is a nice refuge from the world, but what about all the deadliness I'm missing out on in the real world...."
-20 Un patriotic
It let me see that one prospective condo was right in a corner of fairly low crime, bordered by much higher crime. I could have guessed that visiting the neighborhood, but it was nice to see somewhat empirically.
Most exciting phrase in science: not "Eureka!" but "Hmm... That's funny..." -Asimov (abridged for \. limits)
Lots of cities have online crime maps. If your doesn't, ask your city council. They almost certainly have the technology for internal use within their police department; and it's in the interest of the community to share the info.
a howto which describes, how to combine Criagslist with Google Maps similar to the site mentioned inn the summary (http://www.paulrademacher.com/housing/)
Soon someone will come out with a site that displays your location (taken from your cell phone) in real time. Then they can pull this up with real time crime and solve crimes in real time without invetigating.
As it turned out, the area was "bad." I wonder if she just didn't want to tell me, or is there really such a restriction?
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
How hard is it for the editor who posts these stories to the front page of Slashdot to replace them with Coral Cache links?
Seriously, just make it an automated process or something. ALWAYS make it a Coral link.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
This is actually a great project. It would be great if there was some way to adopt this on a much larger scale, covering as many large cities as possible, thus making it incredibly useful to tourists who are visiting cities. It shouldn't be limited to just American cities either. Obviously this may not be reasonable, considering the amount of work it would entail, and also I am not aware of how difficult it would be to get crime data for cities in other countries, but it certainly would be something worth looking into I think.
A geographical map of sites unreachable due to the Slashdot Effect.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The trick is to come up with a visual representation so that if some crook is hitting South Side liquor stores about once a week, somebody sees it. In classical policing, that's not likely to be noticed unless the crook commits all their crimes in the same precinct on the same shift.
I guess some people actually read the articles!
No they don't RTFA, it's just lunch time so your companies network is being maxed out.
Evolution or ID?
...but I thought it was just the war or something...I didn't think cheap gas was actually forbidden now. Must be the damn treehuggers.
Apparently my neighbors in the next block have a pretty serious TRO violation problem. =S But, I'm happy to see that there hasn't been any crime on my block of Chicago. Even though I've seen this site before, it's still cool, especially with satellite options.
Or is this all a clever trick on Google's part to build up more and more third parties dependent upon Google?
Probably, yes but WTF? Google is offering a service, you can choose to use it, or not. Go build your own if you don't like the fact that a Company is doing it (GL HF). Not every product or service offered by a company is some sort of hidden conspiracy to steal our lives and take our money. I also fail to see how "novelty" products such as these constitute a "dependency" on the google map service.
Try this link:
http://www.chicagocrime.org.nyud.net:8090/
Real-time crime maps have already been done by the guys at rancidbacon.com. So you can see a near real-time Seattle crime map. Well, the crime reporting, not the crime as it's taking place
http://www.geovista.psu.edu/grants/nci-esda/public ations.html
i zation/index.html
m
"The project will leverage GeoVISTA Studio as an environment for building and testing software applications focusing on exploratory spatial data analysis applied to cancer and related risk factor data."
http://www.geovista.psu.edu/research/healthvisual
" Dynamic geovisualization methods extend traditional cartographic approaches for representing georeferenced health statistics and related information in at least two ways: by emphasizing the use of maps and other representation forms to construct knowledge (not just to present it) and by dynamically linking the visual map display with both the underlying geographic data structures and the system users (resulting in maps that change in response to changes in data and/or to actions on the part of users)."
http://www.geocomputation.org/2000/GC018/Gc018.ht
"One barrier to the uptake of Geocomputation is that, unlike GIS, it has no system or toolbox that provides easy access to useful functionality. This paper describes an experimental environment, GeoVISTA Studio, that attempts to address this shortcoming. Studio is a Java-based, visual programming environment that allows for the rapid, programming free development of complex data exploration and knowledge construction applications to support geographic analysis. It achieves this by leveraging advances in geocomputation, software engineering, visualisation and machine learning."
I'll tell you what the real crime is... not submitting any mirrors! We're going to get arrested for arson on this guy's server.
Mirrordot came up empty but there does seem to be a Coral Cache available.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
FORBIDDEN:
Site Owner, Please contact your support center for assistance.
thanks.
What I want is someone to hack google maps to display full screen (1024 X 768) or nearly on 90% of the screen. The challenge is that even if you set the browser to full screen, the map height X width is fixed.
It should be a very simple hack. Let us know if someone has already done it.
"Server found alive after being mercilessly buried by slasdotters."
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
I live in a resort community in the Colorado rocky mountains. Every fall we have a few weeks
of elk (wapiti) mating season where tourist type folks drive around looking for the herds of elk.
I think it would be really cool to have a google maps app on a website where people could click on a map to show where they saw elk.
How would I go about doing that?
Is this even legal? Obviously, these are "good" causes, but what if someone was to create a commercial product based on a google maps hack? Would that even be legal?
The data source (city of chicago ICAM) already runs a searchable, mappable, filterable crime map:
...and it's not slashdotted.
http://12.17.79.6/ctznicam/ctznicam.asp
It seems the cheap gas hack was being hosted at CWI hosting. I had such a terrible experience with it. One day they decided that we are using too much resources and we should upgrade to stand alone server. They would not define what is 'too much'. The worse part was that they didnt even let us point the DNS to some other hosting provider, they simply froze our account. We had to do DNS transfer before the website got operational again. HORRIBLE work ethics!!
I wish someone would show the sales rates of birth control superimposed over a map so I can find easy women. Actually that would probably backfire. Women smart enough to take charge of their bodies probably have higher self esteem then I could crack. What did Jay and Silent Bob say about abortion clinics?
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Fun to watch, but nothing of actual worth being produced.
AC
I'd like to see GoogleMaps(TM) combined with a Job Board. Then you could see were all the jobs are in relation to you, and even better if they're colored according to type.
I whipped up a google maps hack of geolocation of Illinois registered sex offenders: http://demon.dopeman.org/sexOffenders/ It was amazingly easy.
I used all of the tutorials and shit that the rancidbacon peeps created. made it rather simple. actually delightful.
now if i was only mapping locations of something cool.. rather than depressing things.
stupid maps.
Producing satire is kind of hopeless because of the literacy rate of the American public. - Frank Zappa
Why are there all these Sarb-ox postings mixed in as replies to the Google crime hack? Even browsing at -1 I don't see the trail.
You laugh, but SimCity would make a nice interface for GeoSpatial data.
Both links are down so I whent to http://mirrordot.org/ and look at this Presently sustaining 0 parallel Slashdottings. Far out! . Any other mirrors any one knows about?
Taco?
"Guys, these people are making wonderful tools and making them available for free, and letting people mess with them. They're probably reading comments like that slack-jawed, thinking "man, you just can't win with that crowd!" Give em a break! :)"
The root to all this is simple. We don't trust others. Do you all trust the geek next door? How about the one in the next city? How about the one that goes on to create a company, that provides a free service, and constant improvements?
JGAA's anarchist political agenda is the central point of his WAR FTP Daemon software license. I wasn't aware there was a problem with his license. Can you elaborate?
GNU's license can also be interpreted as political support for communal ownership. Even the word "copyleft" has a connotation of political progressiveness. I'm sure others can give similar examples.
RFM
RFM
We already have PortlandMaps. You can see crime maps, tax maps, appraised value, bus routes, upcoming road improvments, much better satallite imagery... Google Maps has nothing on these guys. Every city should have something like this.
Just you wait until it's $6.50/gallon.
Deleted
Why can't I shake the mental image of Homer Simpson drooling "Tempting targets...mmmmmm"?
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
> Right. Foreign, married men _never_ use prostitutes.
;-)
And I thought maps.google.com is only available for the US (and UK)! But your answer implies that you found that secret back door
Please tell us! Everywhere on the world men want to find hot chicks via a mouse click on googles maps...
Couldn't Microsoft Canada sell to Cuba?
In any effect, computers aren't very popular in Cuba. A business partner and I looked into creating an island wide public access wireless network and found there was no interest, not even the gov't was interested in getting online.
Most people in cuba are pretty down to earth and very hospitable, provided you're a Canadian. However, MOST of them don't really care about computers. Some do.
Hell, you probably had children with the express intentent of gaining improper access to children.
did you reply to the wrong thing?
So in Chicago, there is crime on nearly every other street at any time a day ?
Holy god is that really true? Can't believe that.
I live in a small independent country in the mid Europe and there was no crime around that I can remember, and I am living in a 100k+ city. I can't even remember that police hotline number well, never used it and probably never will. I can walk our dog with my girlfriend to any place here, no problem, never face any kind of crime anywhere.
So I must conclude that if u speak lang. that nobody in the world can speak and live where winters are too cold for hispanian or negro's ass to withstand then our society is pretty well protected from foreign crime makers. Hell, if I can be incorporated in here, even daytrade on Wallstreet from here, register TM/patent on USPTO from here, watch that HDTV FOX network TV over "torrent" feeds here then Do I really need to live in that "oh" so amazing and flashing U.S. ?
since, judging by my abilities to connect to the server, some criminals seem to have made off with the server
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How long until some autocratic judge declares that you have to keep all voice mails and record all phone conversations in some ruling?
Why is it judges can make "laws" with no checks or balances?
> How long till we have real time crime data showing up on Google's map?
and then the next logical step...
Dear Google Inc.:
I was pleased to hear that Google's map data had finally been merged with real-time crime data. To celebrate, I knocked over two liquor stores on the 800 block of Harrison, then mugged a guy over on Grant and committed some minor vandalism around Eastwood. Then I headed on back to my apartment to see my efforts rewarded on your site.
Imagine my surprise when I got back to my browser and discovered... NOTHING! I kept reloading the damn window every 15 minutes, but not a blip showed up. I cannot express my disgust.
It used to be the Google name meant something, but ever since your stock price hit $240 you've just been slacking. It's like nobody cares any more. It's enough to make a petty criminal like me lose his faith in humanity.
Signed,
-Disgusted in Chicago
I'm sure Maxis will patent this from their use of the tech from SimCity!
Anyone into creating a connect the dots puzzle?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Might make convoy rides a bit smoother.
Dissent is highly patriotic. Go read some history. Hell, I didn't even *go* to school, and I know some of these things!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
How long till we have real time crime data showing up on Google's map?
How long before real estate interests make him pull the site down or make the agencies providing the crime data stop providing it - or stop providing it in a computer-useful form?
Not a purely academic question. My wife noticed that crimes we's heard about from other sources was not being reported in some areas of Silicon Valley and asked the San Jose paper in question about it. The person she reached said that they didn't want to depress real estate values. B-(
Then they wonder why we don't subscribe these days, and prefer to get our news from the web.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Because sex offenses of a particular kind are actually related to sexual addiction, and there is an extremely high recidivism rate due to the fact that prisons don't treat addiction very effectively, and treating addiction at all is difficult in the first place, and these are people that are extremely deep into their addictions to have committed their crimes.
Having said that:
* Why don't we fix the prison system so it does treat addictive behaviors related to sex?
* Why don't we distinguish between sex crimes that are connected to an addition and those that are not, and not track sexual offenders who are unlikely to commit a new crime?
* Why are there so many people on the list who don't deserve to be there? (Misguided applications of the statutory-rape laws come to mind, as others have pointed out.)
Without fixing these problems I am opposed to the sex offender registry, but I do understand why it exists.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Danish Police - though usually in the stoneage technologically speaking are providing a crime mapping service to the public and have done so for a while.
It's a dynamic site. You can't exactly cache a dynamic site.
too many idiots that don't understand how the net works... and yet they still insist one whining that they can't get what they want RIGHT NOW...
I'll bet you're one of those people that has an MBA and just likes throwing out keywords and catchphrases to make it sound like you know what you're talking about.
(normally i don't do this, but i'm only posting anon just in case you're MY current project manager.)
Maybe when our cars take part in IP packet switching we will be able to keep real time tabs on crimes which we happen to see take place. Then the other cars in the city on the network can home in on [RECENTLY STOLEN CAR]. All the geeks can chase down the criminals before the cops get there and we can blast the criminals with our home made stun guns. Better yet we can have an online ui for which the highest bidder gets to trigger the stun gun via one click of a mouse button. ...kind of like a live unreal tournament.
The Chicago Police have something called ICAM which maps all of the crimes and the general type but not specifics http://12.17.79.6/ctznicam/ctznicam.asp Also, the site link provided for this guy's site wouldn't work for me. Anybody else having problems with it?
A high concentration of low education + single parent households == very high crime rate.
This holds across all demographic groups.
now if only someone could do this to place the subway stops on the map.
where is the info on the API?
The St. Louis PD already has something like this, albeit on a proprietary system.
People have obviously done their homework already to hack this thing... where is the community documentation? I want to support GPS's with this, like GPS Drive - that's a sweet app but with google driving direction downloads and maps it'd be truely amazing.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
There is a newly released interface to the mapserver application called Ka-Map that adopts a tiled map approach, similar to Google Maps. Pretty speedy considering maptools.org doesn't have anything close to Googles resources.
Compare the Illinois category to somewhere like New York over at Google Sightseeing and you'll see why they need to Google map the crimes in Chicago - there's bugger all else going on!
And I have a hard time understanding society's interest in hounding that kid for the rest of his days, especially if no kids even saw the ASCII goatse man.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You can see it here:
http://www.dashpc.com/map/
It's probably not the wisest thing to do - but it's a proof of concept.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Sorry, slashdot users aren't allowed. You've been too naughty.
I have?
Sorry, slashdot users aren't allowed. You've been too naughty.
This isn't innovative, Sim City had it in 1990.
You mean this ol' thing?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
IDtenT...spent more time trying to deny us than it takes to just go around. Hmmm.. Cut (Control C) ....1 second
Alt Tab...2 seconds (too many things open)
Paste (Control V) ....1 second
Looking like an idiot in front of 10,000+ viewers for no reason than to look like an idiot... timeless
-1 for misuse of .htaccess
Can someone please explain to me or point me in the right direction on how integrating various data with Google maps works? thanks.
You know what realtime crime mapping will lead to???
The dawn of SUPER HEROES
This makes we glad to live in a small midwest City (120K). We had one murder last year.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
when will we be able to type in someone's name and see where they are in real time?
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
Not related to the topic, but needed if you want to get to the site.
The admin has blocked people coming from slashdot. If you want to get there, you must reload the page or type it into the browser's address field.
Again, the link is not broken, the admin just doesn't like people sucking up his bandwidth.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
something that is "innovative" is never described that way by anyone involved, to them it was just work.
these maps are cool, but not innovative, innovative would be if google was able to predict the weather month by month on a farily high resolution (current weather systems do predictions for 200 km square blocks.
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
Already has this built into their website, except that it's updates as the call comes in. Even for things as small as animals in the road. Not to detract from the mans work, but it's not unique to the Chicago area, or an entirely new idea.
http://cad.chp.ca.gov/
built in. By CHP I mean California Highway Patrol. On their incident information page, updated every minute, a map link is preasent for each call shown. Even for trivial things.
http://cad.chp.ca.gov/
Sorry, slashdot users aren't allowed. You've been too naughty.
(Current Website from the link)
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.
walking will keep you healthy, but running can save your life!
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ovc/publications/infores/ statutoryrape/handbook/issu.html
Exclusions for rape:
Under current laws, depending upon the State, the age differential may be set at from 2 to 6 years older than the minor. Most often, however, it is set at 3 or 4 years. In the survey, the age differentials reflected these variations.
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
http://www.chicagocrime.org/types/narcotics/172/
...and get it done to you for free (if you're not picky).
Is prostitution illegal in the US?
If so, which part of it? Being a prostitute, offering one's sexual services for money, or obtaining and paying for such services?
Here is my little attempt at informing Florida's residences about local sexual predators..
Right. Foreign, married men _never_ use prostitutes.
...
In Soviet Russia the prostitute uses you.
hmm now that don't seem too bad
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.