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Open Data Tells NYC Residents Where the Rats Are
itwbennett writes "The New York City Health Department's Rat Information Portal provides raw data on where the rats are, based on inspections done by the health department, as well as by their rat indexing initiative. The portal isn't a new open data initiative, but if you're a NYC resident and not a big fan of rodents, the site is worth a look. 'The most interesting part of the portal is the interactive heat map of rat inspection data,' says ITworld's Phil Johnson. 'Using this interactive map, you can look up the inspection history, going back to 2009, for any address in the five boroughs. It will tell you the dates and results of any inspections, as well of any follow up compliance checks. As for raw data, the site provides city-wide rat reports, aggregated to the zip code level, going back to 2006.'"
And not Washington. Holy crap, the map would just be red, highlighted by ultra red around congress.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
What if they learn to put wet towels around their heads?
NYC has the best pizza in the world, and the really big rats are usually on the subway tracks (and they are smart, never saw one get nailed by the 3rd rail in the 20 years I lived there).
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Now we know what all those cats are doing on all those laptops.
You'd probably need something more subtle... You want a trait that substantially enhances the target's reproductive chances (so that the trait spreads through the population as quickly and thoroughly as possible, per unit expense of introducing new engineered carriers); but somehow either makes them less noxious, or cripples them. If you are too good at engineering an aggressively heritable trait, you'll just strengthen the target population; but if you dial up the lethal/fertility-compromising, your carriers will just die out and be replaced by wild types that don't have the defect.
As an alternative, you could try to implement the defect in a viral vector, and have that spread through the population. They've done some work in Australia trying to get virally-transmitted immunocontraceptives to work on rabbits...
I'd like to see a Google Maps mashup with the data overlayed over it for better panning and zooming.
The NYC GIS map is awkward to use and the rat data doesn't appear to show above a very close in zoom level.
There may be some other link to a city-wide heat map but I didn't find it on the rat portal web site and slashdot's total brain damaged linking to most stories doesn't help.
As an alternative, you could try to implement the defect in a viral vector, and have that spread through the population. They've done some work in Australia trying to get virally-transmitted immunocontraceptives to work on rabbits...
Yeah... what could *possibly* go wrong with that? Why don't you start by cross breeding AIDS with ebola?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Seriously, a health department makes a project with the acronym RIP? I hope they weren't dead serious about it.
Don't you mean "Rodent Americans".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
and public health data, I'm always skeptical about datasets and maps like this. The reason is that what looks like a lot of data usually turns out to be not that much when you spread it out over all the environment you have to deal with. And it usually turns out to have all kinds of selection biases too -- at least the found stuff; data you collect as a side effect of other activities, rather than collected according to some kind of sampling protocol.
To see what I mean, look at the rodent heat map of NYC. You'll see red hot parcels adjacent to ice-cold parcels. Sometimes you'll have an ice-cold parcel with no reports surrounded on three sides by red hot parcels. Does that mean that one side of the boundary is teaming with rats and the other side has none whatsoever? Of course not. It means that somebody has reported a lot of rats on the "hot" parcel. Why is this? Well, maybe there's an observant resident. Maybe there's a place where it's particularly easy to see rats going about their business. Or maybe the residents of an area have banded together to generate a lot of reports so the city will do something. I've certainly seen stuff like that happen.
Imagine you are a rat looking at NYC. What are your top priorities? (1) water; (2) food, (3) shelter (or harborage in the rat watcher's lingo). And you're going to find those things *everywhere* in NYC. In fact the best places for you will be where you can go about your business unnoticed. There are many, many blocks with no rat reports surrounded by very similar blocks with lots of rat reports, and I'm guessing it's not because there are no rats there. And I doubt there's much more than a weak correlation between the rat population in an area and the number of reports.
Don't get me wrong. I think it's terrific NYC is making this data available. But I doubt you can conclude much about the rat population of your block from rat reports; it's safe to assume there are rats everywhere. If you want to know which blocks have the most rats, what you need is a field survey performed by experts.
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