“Maybe,” answered a pair of presenters at the 10–12:00 Sunday (12/6) poster session. Samuel Berger and Lisset Duran of John Jay College of Criminal Justice looked through logs of 311 complaints about the city’s water quality. (The database saved complaint locations as coordinates [rather than as addresses or names of buildings], and going through the data proved tedious as each point had to be then put on a map.) Most of the complaints were regarding the smell of the water, which the group then further broke down by type of odor described. They also looked at the number of callers by borough, though noted that Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens likely had the most callers because of their greater populations. The graphs were laid out well and were clear in showing the main points of the poster.

One of the medium-level¹ 311 complaints, however, was of worms in people’s water. And when the group tried calling 311 to ask about said worms, the response was along the lines of “oh, that happens sometimes,” and to not worry about it. That reveal was somehow both surprising and expected, and the duo’s delivery made it even better. A key reason I enjoyed this poster so much was that the presentation was simultaneously informative and entertaining; I’d never considered the thought of worms in my water — much less encountered any — and the group did an excellent job of balancing potential squeamishness with a sense of levity. Their pitch made me laugh at times (which I appreciated), provided an insight into how the city 311 complaint system works, and overall was just really fun.

Another poster whose title caught my eye was “Greenery vs. Immorality in Manhattan” by Ansh Jain, Nazir Jalili, Dennis Mejia, Gustavo Ramirez, & Ben Stannis of Hunter College. The pitch was engaging; they’d found that despite hypothesizing that there’d be more crime in areas with fewer trees (more “urbanized” areas), there was a slight positive correlation, albeit statistically insignificant, between the number of trees and crime rate. When I first saw the title I hadn’t realized the poster was about crime rates, and had almost expected them to be trying to connect amounts of greenery with people’s morals.