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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

This part was disappointing: "Top 10 Dog Bite States" because it is probably driven by population and does not provide unique insight. It would be awesome to, minimally, scale this by state population -- or ideally, scale this table by unique mailing delivery addresses.

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But the fact that Houston is on top with nearly 20% more bites than LA yet LA having a much larger population leans toward it not being directly population related.

You need to normalize to the dog population at least - rather than the human population.

Probably need to normalize both to dog population and people population (perhaps normalize to dogs per capita?)

If I were a postal employee, I'd want it normalized to bites per hour worked

Rockford IL is punching way above its league!

*biting above its league.

I'll see myself out

Houston has less than half the population density as LA. Bigger properties / houses / yards almost certainly means more dogs per capita in Houston than LA.

Yeah, my thoughts exactly. Also, some states (e.g. NY) may have a higher percentage of mail delivered to "mail hives" than other states (e.g. Ohio). I would think that delivering to a mailbox on the house-owner's property is a lot higher risk for dogbite than delivering to an apartment-renter's mail slot. Does that account for why Ohio is as high as NY? Maybe, but it's hard to say from this data.

I'll bet central mailrooms are a big driver for safety. In my NYC building, for example, the mailman does not even see any of the public space -- they enter the delivery room through the mailboxes' rear side and deliver en masse to all 110+ units' mailboxes. I imagine the higher the highrise the more efficient the delivery and the safer the delivery.

Now contrast that to crossing lawns individually house by house...

Scaled by population, at least for CA/TX:

39.51M / 782 = 72139

29M / 402 = 50524

Surprisingly higher rate, especially considering I'd -guess- more dogs in CA are kept indoors, although obviously the dog-ownership-rate is another important adjustment. This is all fairly meaningless data without loads more controls.

Erm aren't these numbers people per dog attack? So the higher number means fewer per capita attacks? Seems like a weird way to calculate a rate. Regardless, label your units people!

Isn't Texas often hot enough that it would be unfriendly to leave dog outside?

You swapped the results, and should be computing the reciprocal anyway.

782 bites / 39.51 M people = 19.8 bites per million people per year (CA)

402 bites / 29 M people = 13.9 bites per million people per year (TX)

Why would you guess more dogs are kept indoors in California? Much of Texas gets too hot for dogs to live outdoors during the summer.

I was thinking the same thing. It should be something like dog bites per 1,000,000 residents or something like that. Then, the rankings would probably change.

Per resident or per number of dogs? City populations are going to have fewer dogs and the dogs in cities are going to be leashed or in doors and less likely to bite.

This doesn't really matter from the point view of the victims of the bite. It should be normalised by number of man-hours worked.

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