Word: rodents
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Michael Mills, a veteran health inspector in New York City, helps create a map of the city you won't find in any guidebook: a rat map. That's right, a map of the New York neighborhoods that rodent populations call home...
...with an intensive pilot program in the Bronx. Mills and other inspectors scoured the streets, building by building, cataloging rat hot spots - places that show so-called active rat signs, such as lived-in burrows, fresh droppings, telltale gnaw marks on plastic garbage bags - in an effort to target rodent-control measures more effectively. That geocoding information was entered into each inspector's handheld indexing computer and aggregated with similar data from all across the borough. (See the top 10 animal stories...
...Today, rodent complaints by residents from all over New York are electronically pinpointed on the city's computerized rat map, which allows inspectors to track complaints and hot spots over time and determine how well rat-control efforts are working. The results, after just one year, should be music to the ears of most New Yorkers: when the pilot study began in the Bronx, inspectors found active rat signs on 3,100 of the borough's 39,000 properties. Preliminary results now show that 1,250 of those properties are rat-free. That's a 40% drop-off in infestations...
...synchronized music and sound effects, hit the screen. The film premiered in New York on Nov. 18, 1928 and was an instant hit. A series of Mickey Mouse shorts appeared within a matter of months - including Plane Crazy, a short that predated Steamboat Willie in which Mickey plays a rodent Charles Lindbergh. The mouse was a national fad by the end of the year, and it wasn't long before the real genius of Walt Disney kicked in: marketing. Walt quickly started up a line of Mickey merchandise, and within two years the Mickey Mouse Club, a fan club...
...According to the hosting site, ustream.tv - which also features a "hamster live" webcam for the more rodent-inclined - the Shiba Inu Puppycam is the most-viewed show currently available. The American Kennel Club says Shiba Inus have "an independent nature and can be reserved toward strangers." Good thing they don't know they've been watched by strangers for more than 66,000 combined viewing hours...