Map of the Week: 2009 Toronto grow operations

TARA WALTON/TORONTO STAR

Link to the map

This is our fourth annual map of marijuana grow operations discovered by Toronto police. Maps for 2008, 2007 and 2006 can be found at the links.

Looking at the maps over the years, there are some consistent patterns. First, we see the familiar check-mark shape of low incomes across Toronto. North-central Scarborough and the Black Creek Drive corridor have concentrations of grow operations year over year.

The 2009 map seems to have more grow operations in the central city, depending how you want to use the term, than in previous years, with clusters in East York and the Kensington Market area. East York had a similar pattern in 2006, but not since. In general, though, the map shows that grow operations concentrate where low incomes meet low densities.

The list of addresses was released by Toronto police under access-to-information laws.

Maps elsewhere: The ASBOrometer

Hat tip to Google Maps Mania:

In the UK courts often issue Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) against individuals who have been engaged in anti-social behaviour. The orders are designed to be imposed after minor incidents that would not ordinarily warrant prosecution.

The ASBOrometer uses the data of where ASBO's have been issued to show an assessment of anti-social behaviour at your current location. The app also shows how many parenting orders have been issued and how many crack houses have been closed in any area.

The application uses Google Maps to give you a visual overview of the areas that you might possibly want to avoid.

link

Catching up, and maps elsewhere

First, here's the project I was working on the other week instead of a weekly map: a Google Earth video of the main Olympic venues, narrated by multimedia editor Scott Simmie. Making a Google Earth video of somewhere in British Columbia is about twelve times as much fun as anywhere else, for reasons that will become obvious. Mouseover the image to start:

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A paper forwarded by reporter Vanessa Lu shows maps of concentrations of artists and cultural workers by postal code in Toronto, as well as Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. (Toronto starts on page 42.)

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Former deputy managing editor Catharine Tunnacliffe sent a link to a blog post mapping Facebook relationships in the United States, showing how intensely regional they are. I'd be amazed if a Canadian version didn't look similar.

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Also, I should mention the Star's photo blog, a group effort by our photographers, which for my money is one of the better things we've ever done on line.

Photographer Steve Russell has a recent post on how (and why) male figure skaters' faces can look very, very strange:

Map of the Week

will appear on the week of the 22nd.

Thanks to all those who suggested an intelligent fix to the problems described in the last entry. I ended up with more of a Fred Flintstone approach, which involved a lot of manual addition and data entry.

Map of the Week: Military recruiting, redux

COLIN PERKEL/CANADIAN PRESS

Link to the map

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This week's map looks at regular force military recruiting in Ontario, using data from 2007.

As with several recent maps, this is an exercise in re-presenting data with better tools than were available when the original map was first produced.

The map shows two strong patterns:

Regular force enrollment is very low in the Golden Horseshoe, with very few exceptions. Ontario has 13 postal areas with a population over 20,000 where nobody at all joined the Regular Force in 2007 - 12 are in the GTA and Hamilton.

Pockets of high enrollment can be found in the Ottawa Valley, both above and below Ottawa, and in areas around military bases (look at Meaford, Borden, Trenton, Kingston and Petawawa). I had an idea that these might be reservists working on bases transferring to the regular force, but this isn't consistently the case.

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The FOI request in this case raised an emerging issue with how the federal government handles requests for electronic information. In this case, I filed a request asking for an electronic file showing the first three characters of the postal codes of 2007 recruits, with the reserves and regular force in distinct records.

This took some time to appear, and the reason became clear when DND released a CD-ROM with several .pdf files containing scanned lists containing the postal code information for each individual recruit - 203 pages for the regular force and 153 for the reserves. The tables in these lists, which are images, can't be saved as tables in Windows. The only way of getting a total for any given FSA is to print out the .pdf and count them manually. For Ontario, this meant going through 77 pages of printouts with 37 records per page, counting up totals for 500-odd FSAs. Bear in mind that this started life as an electronic record. I'd produce a military recruiting map for the whole country if I could make time for the manual counting process involved.

I wrote this off as a quirk of military culture until I dealt recently with another federal department which released postal code-based data by mailing a 40-page printout of all 1600-odd FSAs in the country, forcing me to manually enter the values related to them in Excel. (I'm taking a break after reaching the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border.)

The issue here is that data reduced to paper form loses much of its usefulness. The effect is to take power away from the recipient of the data (and by extension in this case from you as a citizen) and conserve it in a government institution as much as possible. Unless the user is bloody-minded enough to re-enter it manually, which of course is only possible at a certain scale.

Halifax-based journalism professor Fred Vallance-Jones blogged about this issue recently:

In late 2007, the Treasury Board Secretariat, which oversees access to information in the federal government, advised departments to "cease responding to ATIP requests in electronic format until they are certain that any potential risks (of inadvertently releasing severed information) have been addressed."

This doesn't have to be a concern. If there is a fear about information being hidden in a file - and there are certainly examples of hidden data being extracted from censored files - then all the agency has to do is save the releasable information as a text file, where there is no place for data to hide.

Ontario ministries, by contrast, will usually release a spreadsheet on CD-ROM - this is an issue with the federal government specifically.

January's real estate map

RICK EGLINTON/TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO

Link to the map

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The latest in our series of real estate maps follows the focus of business reporter Tony Wong's story today, which focused on the dramatic increase in sales since January of last year:

The January real estate market started 2010 at full gallop, with sales up 87 per cent from the year before, according to figures released today.

There were 4,986 existing home sales in January, compared to 2,670 sales the year before when sales hit an all-time low for the month, according to a report by the Toronto Real Estate Board.

The map shows percentage change between January of 2009 and this past January.