If you've ever lived in a major city, you've probably seen at least a rat or two scurrying down the street at night or searching for food on the metro tracks. We don't like it, but they're our neighbors, and it's just something that comes with city living.
However, if you want to avoid — or embrace, if that's your thing — these furry friends, you're in luck. A team of researchers at MIT have created a project where they track the locations of rats over time in major cities across the United States.
The project, called "You Are Here," uses data from reports of rat sightings in each city to pinpoint where they were located usually during a period of about three years. The reports typically cover complaints of "sightings of rodents, evidence of rodents, and unsanitary rodent conditions," according to the "You Are Here"'s project website. The locations of the incidents are placed on a map of the city and animated to show how they change day-by-day. It's actually so cool and pretty that you even forget you're looking at where rats are.
The team in charge of the project, the Social Computing Group at MIT Media Lab, collected data on rat complaints in New York, Boston, Washington, D.C. and Chicago. So which city has the most rats? The rankings go as follows: Chicago (an average of 95 complaints per day), New York (an average of 28 complaints per day), Washington, D.C. (an average of seven complaints per day) and Boston (an average of five complaints per day). However, differences in population, geography and the length of the time period of the data set need to be taken into account, so proceed with caution when looking at these results. Still, you're allowed to feel some hometown pride (or disgrace) right about now.
Another interesting finding is that the frequency of reports of rat sightings is definitely seasonal. In the warmer months, there is a dramatic increase in reports and goes down in the Fall and Winter, which isn't completely surprising. It makes sense that more rats would be out in the open where people can see them and report their presence when it's warm outside, versus in the colder months, when they probably seek shelter and hide to stay warm.
With the "You Are Here" project, the Social Computing Group, which includes computer scientists, mathematicians, artists, designers and educators, aims to upload a new map of a different city where members of the team have lived every day for the next year. The group has also mapped coffee shops in Seattle, street greenery in Atlanta and graffiti in Brooklyn.
"We hope that by showing these stories, we empower people to make their city — and therefore the world — a more beautiful place," the group wrote on the project's website.
Ah, changing the world one rat map at a time.
