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You only have to drive through the Gainsboro and Lincoln Terrace neighborhoods of Northwest Roanoke, or through Southeast along the Jamison Avenue corridor, to know they are places devoid of supermarkets.

A couple of months ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released data that confirmed what residents of those neighborhoods have long known. They live in what researchers have come to call “food deserts” – areas with concentrations of low income families, in many cases with no personal transportation, and no nearby supermarket. Food deserts aren’t exclusively urban, but frequently are.

And those who live in them, researchers confirm, suffer from high rates of diet-related disease – obesity and type 2 diabetes, for example — because of the ways they must shop.

The USDA identified nearly 200 census tracts in Virginia as food deserts. Just 29 of those are found to have 100 percent of residents with low access to a supermarket. And four of those 29 are in Roanoke, including the Gainsboro/Lincoln Terrace and Southeast.

Moreover, according to a Roanoke Times analysis of the data, the city of Roanoke is second only to Petersburg among Virginia’s urban areas

According to it’s documentation, the USDA first identified census tracts that it labeled low-income. Then, researchers determined what portion of the total population of each of those tracts lived more than a mile from a full-service supermarket in urban areas, and more than 10 miles in rural areas.

Some have questioned the USDA’s methodology, including Mari Gallagher, a Chicago-based researcher who first popularized the term “food desert” in 2006. In our story in The Roanoke Times, Gallagher points out that there is no perfect distance to a grocery store. You could live a quarter mile from a store, but if you have to cross a freeway on foot to get there, for many it may as well be 10 miles away.

Her sense is that the USDA data may underestimate the problem.

At a minimum, it does seem to confirm what is plain to the eye.  Grocery chains long ago began pulling out of the urban core in favor of places that accommodate their new model: megastores surrounded by seas of asphalt along main arterial roads with easy access.

What’s left behind is a hodge-podge of neighborhood food sources that charge higher prices, from fast food to old-fashioned corner groceries to convenience stores to chain pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens.

That sets up a dynamic for those who live in food deserts, which I described in an interview on pubic radio WVTF/RadioIQ: If you have to pay extra for bus fare and cab fare to grocery shop, your incentive is to shop less frequently, maybe even once a month.  If you shop once a month, your incentive is to by stuff that is filling and will keep, often high-preservative stuff in cans or dehydrated noodles. You have little incentive to buy stuff like fresh produce and dairy products that won’t last in a month’s quantity. The result is a diet which, paradoxically, produces obesity in people who have less to eat.

That’s the same stuff that’s hard to find in those neighborhood stores.

So, what’s the solution? Getting mad at chain grocery stores? Asking them to open stores in places that don’t make sense for them business-wise, when they already operate on thin profit margins?

Some cities are trying to convince those neighborhood stores to sell healthier choices, like fresh produce. What about community gardens and community farmers’ markets?

Are there transportation solutions? In Roanoke, there is bus service to supermarkets from its most challenged neighborhoods. But you can’t bring two weeks worth of groceries on a bus. Is there another option?

There are independent grocers who open stores in food deserts, and chains like Save-a-lot that specialize in smaller stores in impoverished areas. Some say they are proving that small stores on and old-fashioned scale can still be profitable in the inner city.

Does government have a role? What is it? Incentives and zoning to promote development of stores in needy areas? What else?

What do you think the solution is?

The New York Times does a lot of things well, and they really excel at creative and thorough interactive graphics for the Web. And scale is no issue for them. That’s why they can do things like produce an interactive map of the entire United States showing demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

On this map, you can zoom out to see almost the entire nation at once, or zoom in to see just a handful of census tracts at a time. Scroll over and see pop-ups with data for each individual tract. It’s an impressive piece of work.

There’s a significant caveat with it, though. The data displayed is from the American Community Survey, not the actual decennial census. So, the data are estimates, not actual counts. That means there’s a margin of error, which gets greater and greater as the slice of geography you’re looking at becomes smaller and smaller. So, for a locality the size of Roanoke or Montgomery County, the numbers are probably pretty solid. But by the time you drill down to an individual census tract, the numbers amount to an educated guess.

The survey data has since been superseded by data from the 2010 Census.

Just something to bear in mind as you play with this otherwise really cool tool.

A lot of numbers are tossed out here on the Datasphere blog, especially around census reporting time.

Sometimes it helps to see what those numbers look like, laid out  in front of you. To that end, we’ve created an interactive map, outlining population totals for the state of Virginia from the past two census counts.

Dig on in to the map, where you can find population figures for each county and city in Virginia — including numbers on racial makeup for each locality.

At roanoke.com/census, you’ll find our census hub, with ongoing census data and coverage.

I’ve been slacking. Unfortunately, crime in the area hasn’t been. So crime data has been piling up, waiting for me to update our online crime databases. Finally, I’ve gotten things squared away.

So, you can now find updated crime data for the Roanoke Valley, as well as in our separate Salem felonies crime database. And our running tally of Roanoke Valley homicides is now current through the tragic death of toddler Aveion Lewis. That’s 56 murders altogether since 2006.

And don’t forget our Radford crime database, which is also updated weekly.

This is for you, holiday lights nuts.

You know who you are: the guy who can reel off exactly how many tens of thousands of twinkling bulbs there are engulfing his house; the couple with the electric meter about to vibrate off the wall every December, the fanatic with his own FM transmitter that broadcasts music perfectly synched to his 11 blinking Santas.

Once again, The Roanoke Times and roanoke.com are offering our readers a searchable map and database of holiday lights displays in the Roanoke and New River Valleys — and beyond. And we need you folks with the lighting displays to populate it for us.

You can submit information about your display online using a convenient Web form. We’re looking for your address, so people can find your lights, the times you have the lights on, and a description of what visitors will see.

You can even upload a photo of your display if you have one, though that’s not a requirement. And if you want to shoot a photo, we have some tips on how to do it from one of our own staff photographers, Eric Brady.

Only a display’s owner can submit info, but if it’s your neighbor instead of you with all the lights, by all means, encourage them to submit their information.

Once you click submit, your information is instantly available to our visitors at roanoke.com in a searchable database.

So put down that extension cord and get clickin’.

Virginia has 332 state-run liquor stores flung into all corners of the state. Some do big business. Others, not so much. The busiest ones, you’d guess — mostly correctly — are in the most populated places: Virginia Beach, Richmond, Fairfax County.

But, at No. 7 on the list, the store on South Main Street, Blacksburg, Va, less than a mile from the Virginia Tech campus. The two other liquor stores in Montgomery County combined didn’t do the volume of that store. That’s just one example of the noteworthy juxtaposition of a number of those top-selling stores (as measured by gallons sold) with college campuses.

We put the top 50 stores on a map to see how many lined up near Virginia’s 42 four-year residential colleges.

Check out the University of Virginia. Just down Emmett Street are two of the top 50 stores.

And it’s not just the big universities. Longwood University, in Farmville, has about 4,000 students — and one of the top 50 stores just a little ways down Main Street.

Along with the top liquor stores, we also mapped licensed alcohol sellers busted for selling to under-age buyers. State ABC agents routinely conduct under-cover inspections of places licensed to sell beer and wine by sending in operatives who are actually 17-19 years old to buy alcohol. The inspections are essentially random, but where they’re conducted can be influenced by the availability of under-age operatives and they can also be prompted by citizen complaints.

Between July 2008 and June 2009, licensees failed inspections 483 times. In the same period, nearly 4,200 inspections produced no violations, so the mass of sellers are following the law.

With nearly 500 of those violations on our map, naturally they’re all over the state, but you can see on the map that quite a few of the red Xs marking them are, again, near college campuses.

Since 1968, more than 2.5 percent of all the land area in Virginia has been put off limits from development using conservation easements.

That’s 687,117 acres under easement out of 27.3 million acres in the state, according to data from the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation. (And it doesn’t include other kinds of protected lands, like national parks, national forests, state parks, wildlife refuges and so on.)

I learned all this doing data work for a story by Rex Bowman about Gov. Tim Kaine nearing his goal of preserving 400,000 acres during his term, which began in January 2006 and ends in January 2010.

The tally toward Kaine’s goal was about 352,000 acres as of September. Only thing is, as Rex and I discovered in analyzing the data on over 4,000 easements on record with the DCR, Kaine is including almost 50,000 acres put under easements during the last six months of 2005 — when Mark Warner was governor.

Kaine’s people say they include that period because it’s the first half of the fiscal year, which runs from July 2005 through June 2006. But by that reasoning, they should have stopped counting toward Kaine’s goal on June 30, 2009, and they haven’t. So, really, Kaine is giving himself a 4-and-a-half year window, when his term as governor is only four years.

Still, it’s a major achievement, and one of the most significant of Kaine’s tenure. The number of acres protected by easements has nearly doubled during Kaine’s time in the mansion. Easements added during Kaine’s term add up to something nearly twice the size of Roanoke County.

Even Kaine’s nemesis, House of Delegates Majority Leader Morgan Griffith (R-Salem) called that a good thing – through while knocking Kaine for mathematical chicanery.

Where are all these easements? How convenient you should ask. In the process of working on Rex’s story, I developed a couple of maps that didn’t make it into the paper. I thought I’d share them here.

Here’s a density map colored by how many acres are under easement in each city and county. The numbers in the legend are numbers of acres. Note that the lightest color is for localities that have no easements.

Less useful, but just so you can see it, is this map, showing where the easements are. There are more than 4,000 easements, and zoomed out this far, they all run together, but you can still get an idea of where they are just by the density of them. That clump up there in Northern Virginia is on the border of Fauquier and Loudon counties.

Come Dec. 1, Virginia will join a growing number of states banning smoking in restaurants (except for private clubs, outdoor seating, and designated smoking areas in a separate room from the main dining area, in Virginia’s case).

My colleague, Jenny Kincaid Boone, has a story on what the change means in the Sunday, Sept. 27, Roanoke Times.

As part of that, we decided to look at which places had the farthest to go to become smoke-free. I obtained from the Virginia Department of Health, the agency that inspects restaurants, data including the smoking status of more than 16,000 full-service and fast-service restaurants in Virginia.

And it turns out that statewide, some 70 percent of those restaurants are already non-smoking. And the Roanoke and New River Valleys are just about there, too, with about 68 percent of restaurants smoke-free.

(One caveat about the data: the smoking status is based on what was recorded during a health department inspection, and some of the dates on these status are months old, and might have changed.)

We took the data and stuck it on a map to see just where the stragglers are. Now, 16,000 restaurants is a lot of points to map, so we rolled the data up into percentages for each city and county, and that’s what you’ll find on the map. It’s a cool interactive, and you can make all sorts of changes to it, including changing which data is shown on the map. There are instructions at the bottom of the page.

It struck me that, really, there aren’t any dramatic and obvious patterns to where non-smoking restaurants are. I thought maybe rural areas would have fewer non-smoking places. But look at Craig County. It has five restaurants, and all are smoke-free. Look at the Shenendoah Valley. The whole spine of it has a high percentage of non-smoking restaurants. My best guess on that is that it’s influenced by Interstate 81, and the number of fast-food restaurants near interchanges. Fast food restaurants are routinely smoke-free these days.

Switch the map over to the percentage of restaurants which allow smoking in all areas. No great pattern there, either. I thought that the high percentages might correspond with heavy tobacco producing communities, but except for Pittsylvania County, that theory isn’t really born out.

But maybe you’ll see things that we missed. As always, let us know.

Just over a year after the Amethyst Inititive to re-examine the legal drinking age was launched, 135 college and university presidents have signed on, and just 27 of them are from public colleges.

That same ratio seems to be playing out in Virginia.

Of the seven Virginia college and university presidents who either signed on to the initiative or said they support it in a survey by The Roanoke Times, six lead private schools, and just one is at a public university: Charles Steger of Virginia Tech.

“Unfortunately, as a large university, Virginia Tech experiences the problems associated with college-age drinking all too often,” Steger said in a statement submitted as part of the survey. “The ‘binge drinking’ rate at Virginia Tech is 58.4 percent, far above the national average of 42 percent.

“The Amethyst Initiative, fundamentally, seeks to open a nationwide dialogue on misuse of alcohol. I signed the initiative to help facilitate this discussion. I applaud and support that effort.”

In all, 18 of Virginia’s 44 four-year, residential colleges and universities in Virginia completed all or part of the survey, and two more who did not complete the survey have declared their support for the initiative on the Amethyst Initiative Web site.

Five of the schools that responded to the survey said they oppose the initiative, three of them public schools.

Another eight schools said they were undecided in the survey, six of them public.

You can see the first wave of survey responses here. You’ll find an interactive map of all the schools we surveyed and the schools’ unabridged answers to the parts of the survey related to our coverage so far in our Under 21 series. The series looks at the Amethyst Initiative and college drinking in general.

The survey responses suggest relatively weak opposition to the initiative, and a lot of indecision about it.

That’s especially true among the state’s taxpayer-supported public colleges, for whom the notion that the 21-year drinking age has led to more clandestine and heavier drinking and ought to be re-considered seems to be a touchy one.

As Longwood University in Farmville pointed out in its survey response, supporting a re-consideration of the legal drinking age can be more complicated for a school that depends on taxpayers.

“We answer to a higher authority and our number one priority has always been, and continues to be, the safety and security of our students,” the school said. “It’s a matter of trust between our students, their parents and us.”

The University of Virginia’s John Casteen, who also said he’s undecided, acknowledged in an address to parents in August 2008 that changing the drinking age to 18 would make life simpler for college administrators, who would then have student bodies almost uniformly of legal drinking age. But he isn’t convinced it would be a good idea on the whole.

“I’ve encouraged the people involved in this Amethyst Initiative … to lay out their evidence to show how they can assert that there is no appreciable difference between behavior at age 18 and behavior at age 21,” he said. “I fear sometimes that part of the motive here is to make the lives of college deans and dorm head residents, and so on, easier. I don’t think that’s the point. But I’m also perfectly willing to be persuaded by good evidence.”

Radford University’s Penelope Kyle found the same lack of compelling evidence reason enough to oppose the initiative.

“There is still no compelling evidence that clearly demonstrates that lowering the drinking age to 18 would, in fact, ameliorate problematic drinking behaviors of college students,” the university said in accounting for Kyle’s position.

While public colleges seem reluctant to sign on, three schools with religious affiliations who responded to the survey support the initiative.

Billy Greer, president of the United Methodist Church-affiliated Virginia Wesleyan, “believes that the proposed 18-year-old requirement for drinking alcoholic beverages is more in line with both the reality of what already occurs and the appropriate rights for that age individual,” the college said in its statement.

A number of religious schools that didn’t complete the survey, such as Regent University and Patrick Henry College, oppose drinking in general, regardless of age.

Generally, the data you find in the DataSphere is found data. It’s tables and spreadsheets and databases we’ve found on government Websites, or obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

But this summer, a database we wanted didn’t exist, so we set out to build it ourselves. As part of our ongoing series on the Amethyst Initiative to re-examine the legal drinking age and college drinking in general, we sent a survey to 44 Virginia colleges to gather data on their alcohol policies, enforcement of them, the number of alcohol related disciplinary actions on campus, and each college president’s position on the Amethyst Initiative.

The results are in, and you can see the first wave of data from the survey now. It’s an interactive map with markers for each of the colleges we surveyed, a digest of part of their responses, and a link to their unabridged answers to some of the questions.

The map and data, along with all of our coverage in the series are collected on a site devoted to our series.

We sent the survey only to four-year colleges with on campus housing, whether public or private. In other words, schools offering some version of traditional campus life. Fewer than half the colleges completed the survey, while several more declined to complete for various reasons, but in most cases because of concerns about how the questions were phrased or that their responses would be handled fairly in being compared to other schools. The remainder simply didn’t respond at all.

Still, there’s plenty to be learned from the responses we did get. To begin with, we’re looking at which school presidents support the Amethyst Initiative, and which don’t. As you’ll read in my analysis, the idea of re-considering the legal drinking age and possibly lowering it appears to be generating only weak opposition in Virginia. The largest block of those presidents whose positions we documented are undecided.

We’re not done with the data, and the most interesting stuff may be yet to come.  With the next installment in the series, we’ll be rolling out more of the schools’ responses, and layering other data onto the map, such as where the highest volume liquor stores are located in relation to college campuses, where other alcohol sellers are located, and which of them have been caught selling to underage buyers.

In the meantime, post your questions and comments here. I’ll be glad to get them.