Map of the Week: C.difficile revisited

In today’s paper, reporter Megan Ogilvie wrote about falling rates of C.difficile, a potentially deadly form of infectious diarrhea, in Ontario hospitals.

In November, there were 295 cases, a rate of 0.35 per 1,000 patient days, as contrasted with 319 cases, or 0.39 per 1,000 patient days, in August.

We mapped how the GTA’s hospitals fared with the August data. Here is a similar map for November.

The GTA hospitals with the worst rates per 1,000 patient days in August have all succeeded in severely cutting infections:

1) Scarborough General Hospital
August: 2.01 | November: 0.64

2) Lakeridge Health- Whitby Site
August: 1.7 | November: 0

3) Lakeridge Health - Port Perry Site
August: 1.64 | November: 0

4) St Joseph's Health Centre - Toronto
August: 1.21 | November: 0.51

5) Credit Valley Hospital
August: 1.16 | November: 0.37

Maps elsewhere

A couple of days ago, this blog had its 200,000th hit.

I’m glad it’s attracted so many readers. Back in June, I wasn’t sure how many people would be interested in an interactive map blog. The answer is: about a thousand a day, more or less. Original maps will resume in January. 

If you are looking for the eviction maps, they're linked from the post below this one.

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From Google’s LatLong blog:

A map of U.S. oil imports since 1973, using a more sophisticated use of polylines than I’m used to seeing. An animation shows change in source and volume over time. I’d be curious to know how the animation was done – I think it’s a series of screenshots.

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From Google Maps Mania (which recently had nice things to say about this blog):

A solar roof calculator tool driven by Google Maps. Find your house in the satellite view, draw the area that could be covered by solar panels, and get some information about the possible power generation potential. I’d like it better if it allowed for the differences in sunlight between regions, but still much better than nothing.

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From the Map Room:

… For all the attention garnered by catastrophic hurricanes such as Katrina and Andrew, simple heatwaves kill far more people than all natural disasters combined, according to a newly published county-by-county map of natural hazard deaths.

Other extreme summer hazards, such as floods, and cold winter weather also outranked hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires, according to geographers Kevin Borden and Susan Cutter, of the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

More here.

We should be doing much more with mapping mortality in general. As well as this U.S. data, there have been some outstanding British mortality maps.

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Also from the Map Room: a Flash-based animated map of sources of immigration to the U.S. since 1870.

Map of the Week: Eviction

This week's map package looks at eviction applications in the Toronto area:

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Map 1: Applications to evict, Toronto

In Toronto itself, eviction application rates are highest in South Riverdale/Leslieville, followed by the east downtown and Parkdale. Rates are also high in eastern Leslieville, Thorncliffe Park, the Annex and lakeshore Etobicoke.

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Map 2: Applications to evict, GTA

The Cooksville and Port Credit areas have high eviction rates by 905 standards, followed by the south end of Oshawa.

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Map 3: Top addresses for eviction applications

This map looks at the top individual addresses for eviction applications in Toronto.

The pattern of dots tends to follow the rough check-mark shape that we saw in the low-income households map back in October. There are strong clusters centred around Jarvis and Shuter, in Parkdale and Thorncliffe Park.

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Nerd box: This project started with an access-to-information request to the Landlord and Tenant Board, in which I asked for a spreadsheet of landlord- and tenant-side applications for the year to date. The board said it would only release the records if I signed a confidentiality agreement (which of course removes its usefulness), so I appealed to the province's information and privacy office, which persuaded the board to release the records. It's fair to say that this is information that the Landlord and Tenant Board didn't want you to see, though it's not all that clear to me why.

I have two other cases under appeal in the IPC's office, both of which will hopefully become maps here in due course.

Maps elsewhere: First we take New Wild Boar Village, then we take Swampton

H/t to the Map Room blog for this one:

The Atlas of True Names “reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today’s maps of the World and Europe. Place names are replaced with their literal meanings. It's fascinating - and some of the names are quite surprising.

Some screen shots are at left.

Map of the Week: Driver testing

COLIN MCCONNELL/TORONTO STAR

A story by reporter Daniel Dale in Sunday's paper looked at the wildly varying failure rates at driver test centres:

Ontario drivers who take their road tests in Brampton fail at nearly five times the rate of drivers in Sault Ste. Marie.

Drivers who test in Oakville fail at twice the rate of drivers in Kingston. Drivers who test in north Toronto fail at twice the rate of drivers in Sarnia. Even within the GTA, drivers who test at some locations fail significantly more often than drivers at others.

The rumours that have circulated for years among the province's driver's ed students are correct: there is indeed such a thing as a relatively easy or relatively difficult place to take a road test, government figures obtained via a freedom of information request confirm.

Dale's data (link (.pdf)) lends itself well to online mapping. Here is a map of Ontario's 55 driver testing centres, ranked in order by failure rate.

Map of the Week: Impaired driving in the GTA

TORONTO POLICE HANDOUT

In this week’s first map, we look at impaired driving in the whole GTA, including some rural areas we haven't included before. (Last week's map, which looked at impaired driving across Ontario, is here.)

The region's highest rates of impaired driving are in rural areas of Halton, York and Durham, beginning with Scugog Township, rural Milton, Georgina and Uxbridge. The only exception to the pattern is downtown Oshawa, in the #2 spot. After that, we have Bowmanville and south Pickering, followed by King, an area of Brampton along the 401, and western Oshawa.

In Toronto itself (separate map), impaired driving is concentrated in northern Etobicoke and eastern Scarborough. The highest incidence is in Downsview.

The most obvious relationship here is with car dependency, with the highest impaired driving rates being in the areas with least access to high-quality public transit.

Only one of Toronto's 68 subway stations is in an FSA which had over 1.0 suspensions per thousand, and that one (Kipling) is on the extreme southeast corner of M9B. In fairness, we could also include M8Y, which is across the street from Old Mill and Royal York stations, but that ends the exceptions.

Toronto's impaired driving rates are low by regional standards (and even lower by provincial standards).

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Note: We've been steadily expanding the postal areas depicted on our maps - there are now nearly 200. If the maps take a long time to load, you may find they display better in Firefox.