Sanitation ASP miracle workers

Today is the first day of full restored Alternate Side Parking…and our streets are crying out for your help. Will you move your car? (and thanks @SarahMcLachlan) https://t.co/4iZ4yD234E pic.twitter.com/41kfJLO46y

— NYC Sanitation (@NYCSanitation) July 5, 2022

 

 

Attached is the data that DSNY is using to justify bringing back 4 day a week alternate sides.

How could it be possible that CB5 went from 100% clean streets in January to 30% clean streets in February?

How does CB11 consistently have 100% of its streets clean?

 

 Has anyone in govt ever questioned this data? It seems to be flawed.

 

 

 

What obviously hasn't been questioned by government and the clueless morons mocking citizens with their juked data and asinine tik tok video is the huge role restaurant shanties play in the pollution on the city streets. At least you can move a car.

 

 

Steal your face

 NY Post

This could put a real dent in the fake ID market.

The New York State Senate is moving forward with proposed legislation that would allow bars and restaurants to use facial recognition or fingerprint scanners to verify someone’s age before they buy alcohol, tobacco or electronic cigarettes.

“This is the new frontier of age verification,” said state Sen. James Skoufis, who is sponsoring the biometrics bill. “It does advance the interests of convenience.”

Skoufis envisions that bars and restaurants could scan fingerprints, faces or retinas of customers who want to be spared the trouble of showing an ID when they return to an establishment in the future. The proposed legislation requires all data to be encrypted and prohibits businesses from selling biometric data to third parties.

“No one’s forced into engaging with this technology, but they would have the choice,” Skoufis said. “There’s no big brother involved.”

Skoufis, who chairs the Investigation and Government Operations Committee, said he expects his committee will advance the proposal to the full Senate Monday. There is currently no sponsor in the Assembly though Skoufis said several members have expressed interest.

State lawmakers are scheduled to adjourn for the year on June 2.

Washington state approved a similar proposal in 2018, which allows spectators at professional sporting events to pass security and buy concessions with their fingerprints.

The legislative language states that the State Liquor Authority and the state Department of Health would be responsible for crafting regulations controlling the recording and maintenance of biometric data, which the bill states must be “stored in a centralized, highly secured, encrypted biometric database.”

Expanding the use of biometrics means privacy risks for New Yorkers, according to Albert Fox Cahn, a visiting fellow at Yale Law School and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. And unlike a credit card number or driver’s license, biometrics canno ever be changed, he added.

“This is a horrifying invitation for identity theft,” he said. “If one bar or restaurant gets hacked, our identities are compromised for the rest of our lives … more biometric data, potentially expands the power of government agencies to track us because this data is just going to be one court order away from being turned into a policing tool.”

 

Mario's son's personal privacy = government privacy

 

NY Post

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office won’t reveal what it told the Justice Department about COVID-19 outbreaks in nursing homes, rejecting Freedom of Information requests from The Post and other media outlets — claiming in part that doing so would be an “invasion of personal privacy.”

“Please be advised that portions of the records that respond to your request are exempt
from disclosure pursuant to Public Officers Law § 87(2)(b) because, if disclosed, would
constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,'” Jaclyn Clemmer, the governor’s record access officer, wrote in a denial response to The Post.

The Associated Press received a similar denial letter.

Clemmer didn’t explain whose privacy might be invaded, or how. The Post did not request any personal ID information of nursing home residents. She also said the records sought were exempt from public disclosure because the release would “interfere with law enforcement investigations.”

City claims tech difficulties for delays in covid data as cases rise again.

 

  

Progress New York

 The administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-New York City) has stopped publishing data about Coronavirus test results on the Agency Web site of NYC Health. Some testing data was published was on Monday, when the positivity results for multiple New York City zip codes approached 15 per cent., according to a tweet sent by Councilmember Mark Levine (D-Morningside Heights). Monday was also the first day of return for over 50,000 public high school students for in-person learning. But delays in the full reporting of testing data reportedly began as of Sunday, according to a social media post.

According to social media posts, the Agency Web site has been announcing, since Sunday, a “Data Delay,” explaining that, “Due to delays in receiving and processing data from New York State, some data from the past week will be lower than expected. Data for those days will be updated when we receive it.”

A request made to the City Hall press office was not answered, and a spokesperson for Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-New York) would not address the blame game in the City Agency Web site’s message. In recent weeks, Mayor de Blasio has attacked Gov. Cuomo in the press, calling him to step down due to a sexual harassment scandal, mocking him over the size of his hands, and asking him to slow down the economic reopening due to the uncontrollable pandemic.

 Mayor de Blasio’s withholding of COVID-19 testing data, and the lack of any explanation from Gov. Cuomo’s office for how the City Agency Web site blamed the State Government for the delays, comes at a time when the Federal Government is reportedly investigating the Cuomo administration for undercounting COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes. Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo have been under pressure to reopen the economy in order to encourage economic activity for their big business donors and to fund Government operations. To some extent, the Government executives have also used reopening announcements to quell criticism from the public and the press. Whereas, in other pandemic hotspots, like France, the Government there has opted for another confinement order to deal with evolving variants of the virus, the lack of vaccines, and the shortcomings of the vaccines, Democrats in the United States have faced pressure to open schools and travel, two sectors that provide day care for working parents and tourism for the service industry-focused economy, respectively.

Today's COVID indicators show that de Blasio is juking the stats of the recovery for all of us.

 

No, you are wrong Cuomo

 

Gothamist

In New York and beyond, the coronavirus pandemic has ushered in an unusual new conversance with public health metrics, with government officials now using testing and hospitalization data as a gauge for the severity of the virus and important policy decisions.

No metric has drawn more attention—or controversy—than the positivity rate. The number, which measures the percent of tests that turn up positive and serves as a proxy for infection rate, has been used to justify economic reopenings as well as business and school shutdowns.

For example, Governor Andrew Cuomo has said that he would order schools to close should local positivity rate rises above 9 percent, an increasingly likely possibility given the surge of infections.

In spite of the high stakes, New York state officials have been calculating positivity on a flawed basis, according to several experts. The criticism stems from the state's decision to fold in a type of rapid test known as antigen tests, which are less sensitive than polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.

"That's not what the professional guidance is," said Dr. Jay Varma, Mayor Bill de Blasio's top health adviser. "It's not what the WHO does or the CDC or the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists does."

The Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, which advises the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies, has said that a positive antigen test should be considered a probable case of COVID-19, not a confirmed case. In turn, the CDC has defined its positivity rate as based on PCR tests only.

Despite the limitation of antigen tests, their benefits are clear: the tests can provide results within 15 minutes and can cost as little as $5, whereas PCR tests cost around $100 at national labs. Antigen testing has proliferated across the country in nontraditional testing centers, like schools and nursing homes, especially as the demand for testing increases.

In New York City, the tests are now available at pharmacies, CityMDs and doctor's offices. Drawn by their quick turnaround time, many people are unaware of the caveats.

During a recent seven-day period, there were nearly 88,000 antigen tests performed in one week, although city health officials cautioned that not all antigen test results are being reported to the city.

According to Cuomo, the state performs “hundreds of thousands" of antigen tests per week.

Dr. Ian Lipkin, a renowned epidemiologist at Columbia University and testing expert, agreed with Varma that antigen tests should be separated from PCR tests. The latter are currently considered the gold standard in terms of accuracy.

"You need to distinguish those clearly," he said. "It's reasonable to say these are PCR, these are antigen, but I don't think you should mix the two."

City finally releases coronavirus map data by zip code

NYC Health

 THE CITY

  Asked about the data on NY1 late Monday, de Blasio called the disparities “horrible.” 

“What we’re talking about here is the really painful, really unfair history of race and class in this city and in this country,” he said. 

 The mayor cited the city’s work to secure insurance or medical care for all its residents to address the preconditions associated with poor COVID outcomes — which include diabetes, hypertension and compromised immune systems. 

“These are things that obviously get back again not just to racial disparity but to economic disparity — to folks who never got the health care they deserved because they didn’t have the money they deserved,” de Blasio said.

 Elected officials have argued that access to testing has not been equitable across neighborhoods, and a number of them said they’d been pushing City Hall to release more specific data on deaths sooner. 

Councilmember Inez Barron (D-Brooklyn), who represents Starrett City, said her district was left to suffer for weeks as she pleaded with the mayor’s office to release more details about neighborhood impacts of the virus. 

“Why aren’t residents — which is the hotbed for this disease — why aren’t these people being tested? It’s illogical to me,” she said. “They know that senior concentrations, and black and brown communities and other areas are hotbeds, but yet you don’t make provisions in the very areas where we see the numbers soaring.”

NYCHAleaks

Progress New York


Progress New York has obtained data, which reportedly reveals which public housing developments owned by the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA, will be put into the hands of private landlords. In the interest of the public’s right to know, Progress New York has released this information.

The information was received from an anonymous source, who was motivated to share the information, in order for the public to know details about the privatisations being planned by the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-New York City).

According to the information, the de Blasio administration plans to transfer 59,216 public housing apartments to private landlords. The information refers to the programme under which this transfer of public housing assets would take place as PACT, an Orwellian acronym for Permanent 

Affordability Commitment Together. PACT was an Agency code name used to replace Rental Assistance Demonstration, or RAD, the official programme of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has steadily gained a negative connotation due to negative reports of rent increases, civil rights violations, and evictions.

Another Orwellian term used by the Agency, Build to Preserve, is a code name that replaces infill development, which has also gained a negative connotation, particularly during the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R-New York City), who had proposed the real estate development of children’s playgrounds, parking lots, and lawns and gardens. Under Build to Preserve, 3,694 apartments were slated to be constructed as infill development. According to the information obtained by Progress New York, the Build to Preserve plans were accurate as of May 2019.
 
According to a review of the information, the information was last updated in mid-2019, and it identifies which, of the 324 NYCHA public housing developments, are slated for some form of privatisation. The information indicates that 127 NYCHA public housing developments face transfer to private landlords under PACT/RAD.

Mayor de Blasio administration obfuscating race and income data of affordable housing applicants

 

THE CITY

The de Blasio administration is fighting to keep under wraps studies of its own data used to analyze whether the city’s affordable housing lottery system reinforces segregation.

The latest result: a 31-page report filed in Manhattan Federal Court on Tuesday that contains the word “Redacted” 131 times over the spots where the findings would be — including eight times with the R-word screaming out in huge type.

The fight for secrecy stems from a suit filed by a civil rights group arguing that the city’s policy of giving so-called “community preference” for affordable housing to residents already living in a neighborhood keeps intact the racial and income status quo.

The Anti-Discrimination Center’s latest analysis of the issue isn’t public, thanks to objections by the city.

“

It’s extraordinary that information that can’t be personally identified is treated as a state secret,” said Craig Gurian, an attorney representing the Anti-Discrimination Center. “This is information the public could not be more interested in. It’s not personal information. It’s how the housing lottery process — which can have tens of thousands of New Yorkers apply for a few apartments — whether people get a level playing field or not, based on race.”

Gurian first asked a federal magistrate judge to put this data into the court record in June 2017 after a statistics expert hired by the Anti-Discrimination Center completed his first report.

At the time, however, Judge Katharine Parker blocked the release of the study’s results, agreeing with the de Blasio administration’s request to keep it private while city lawyers prepared their response.

Flushing plagued by excessive aircraft noise

From AM-NY:

Noise levels in the Flushing, Queens, neighborhood near LaGuardia Airport exceeded federal levels on one of every three days earlier this year, elected officials and community activists said Monday.

The maximum permissible Day/Night Noise Level — or DNL — of 65 decibels was exceeded on 32 out of the 92 days from March through May on a monitor on Franklin Avenue, state Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky (D-Flushing) said at a news conference.

The Federal Aviation Administration measures on a scale that averages all community noise during a 24-hour period, with a tenfold penalty for noise occurring at night and early morning.

“With this data, we now see what we’ve always known: parts of Queens are subjected to higher levels of sound than others,” Stavisky said.

She said the current DNL standards date to the 1970s and are obsolete. She and others at the news conference said the FAA should reduce the maximum allowable DNL to 55, the standard at most airports overseas.

AirBnB now wants to cooperate

From the Daily News:

The apartment-sharing website — which includes many listings that are illegal under state housing laws — agreed to sit down with officials to discuss sharing its data following a contentious City Council hearing Friday.

Christopher Lehane, head of public policy for Airbnb, told City Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal that the company would meet with her before Thanksgiving to discuss what data they could share to crack down on illegal operators.

AirBnB to hand user data over to AG

From the Huffington Post:

Airbnb has announced it will turn over user data -- anonymized, for now -- to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

But if Schneiderman suspects an Airbnb host of illegal activity, the company will turn over detailed user information from name to social media accounts to Tax ID number and more, Gawker reports.

The decision comes as part of a joint agreement reached Wednesday between Airbnb and the state, which have engaged in a highly publicized battle over the legality of the popular home rental company. Schneiderman says Airbnb users routinely violate laws prohibiting residents from renting out their apartments for less than 30 days, leaving New York out of millions of dollars in hotel taxes.

Schneiderman's office issued a subpoena for the records back in October, but Airbnb officials had fought to keep them private. As part of the agreement, user data will initially be substituted with individual codes.