Midwest River Killer

This story has been repeated many times in the past few years. A college-age male, whom after a night of heavy drinking is missing. After several days or months, the body is found is the Mississippi. The toxicology shows the person died with a high blood-alcohol content. The cause of death is ruled as accidental. Basically, the official story goes, the persons was drunk, stumbled and fell into the river and drowned. This was ruled the case most recently with Lucus Homan.

Many people believe the deaths are no accident. They think a serial killer is pushing/dumping drunk college-age men into the river.

Milwaukee Channel 12 WISN did a segment (10/12/06) on a Minnesota professor who claims he has found a spatial pattern to intoxicated males who drowned after a night of drinking. The pattern roughly follows along I-94 in several Midwest states. Several "pattern" maps where shown on TV along with an interview. (I barely caught glimpse of the report) I currently don't see a reference on WISN to their news story, but it may appear later. Nor did I catch the name of the professor.

I curious to know more about the spatial analysis involved. If a link appears, or if the professor has information available online, please post a comment indicating the link. I think we all would like to know a little bit more about this.

T-Shirt Update

Just got back the proof from the T-Shirt people. Here's the next hottest thing in GIS wear.

The Cost of Data

This popped up on my Google News alert and then on several blogs. Santa Clara County California is being taken to court over their high fees for the purchase of GIS data. Here's what their data costs according to their Basemap Request Form:

(One-time purchase, entire county)

• Parcels: $126,000
• Streets: $4,312
• Address: $140,000 (assuming these are address points)
• ROW: $32,200
• APN: $126,000 (assuming this is Assessor Parcel Number, but don't know if these are separate points, or just added as an attribute to the parcels).

Total: $428,512 +$250 processing fee

To bring everything in perspective, the population of Santa Clara County is 1,699,052. So they are asking about $0.252 per person for all of their GIS data. Using this metric, here's what the top four Wisconsin Counties would be charging for their GIS data based on population:

• Milwaukee: $236,921
• Dane: $107,485
• Waukesha: $90,913
• Brown: $57,118

Going a big step further, with the US population fast approaching 300 Million, the total value of the US parcel dataset is worth about $75.7 Billion.

BTW - I tried finding the actual case documents, but the website kept timing out. Hopefully someone will post a link to the soon. The devil is always in the details.