As always, let us know if you notice anything interesting. Just drop me a note at matt.chittum@roanoke.com or post a comment here.

Search through Tech's record under Coach Frank Beamer (The Datasphere's Beamer File), and you find the loss is exceptional in a number of ways.

-- Tech has played seven games in the month of August under Beamer, and lost only one, in 2004, to USC -- ironically the same team that bludgeoned UVa in its opener Saturday. (The 2000 season opener against Georgia Tech was cancelled mid-game due to lightning.)

-- Tech is 15-5 in season openers under Beamer. It's last loss was that same USC game in 2004. For the next opening game loss, you have to go all the way back to 1995.

-- Tech is 9-4 against ECU. For the last loss to ECU, go all the way back to a game in 1992.

UVa's 52-7 shellacking Saturday was less surprising, and not only because they were taking on a visiting USC team that came with a #3 ranking. Here's what The Groh Profile shows:

-- UVa is 1-4 in August since 2001, when Al Groh took over the head coaching job.

-- The Cavs are just 3-5 in season openers under Groh.

-- It was the Cavaliers first game against USC or any PAC 10 opponent, but their third game against a top 5 opponent during Groh's tenure. The were 1-1 before Saturday, including a 2005 upset of #4 Florida State.

Now, Frank has company from his cross-state rival.

We now have Al Groh's entire record as head football coach at the University of Virginia as a searchable online database.

And just like in Beamer's, you can be your own analyst and see how the Cavaliers have performed under Groh in a given season, against a certain opponent, a certain conference, against ranked teams. Even see how the do on a certain day of the week, or in a certain month. Or, for home games, even see how weather affects UVa.

That's about an additional two weeks worth of fresh sales data, or about 29 transfers.

The most expensive was a home in Raleigh Court for $410,000.

In all, a half-dozen properties sold in the over $300,000 range, while a total of 15 sold in the $100,000-plus range, a number of them commercial properties sold by Virginia Scrap Iron to the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority.

So go nose around, and don't forget, your results are mapped.

Check out the Beamer File, a searchable database of every game the Hokies have played under Coach Frank Beamer since his arrival in 1987. Search by season, opponent, opponent's conference, opponent's rank, even the TV station that televised the games. Get the weather almanac data for home games, too.

Did you know, for example, that while the Hokies are 8-4 under Beamer against their first opponent, East Carolina, they've won the last 6 match-ups?

The Hokies are also undefeated under Beamer in games played in August -- with one game against Georgia Tech unfinished due to lightning.

Also, Sports Writer Doug Doughty continues to keep us up to date with all the latest commitments to both the Tech and UVa programs, and you can search all those commitments from 2008 to the present now in the DataSphere.

This year's biggest boy? How about 6'7", 265-pound Brent Urban out of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, a defensive end headed to UVa next fall? Yikes.

Well more than half of the cases involve selling alcohol to under age buyers – those under 21. Get the details on every case in a database now available in the DataSphere. The data comes from the Virginia ABC Board.

If you’re like me, you’ll go straight for the biggest and baddest.

Biggest fine? That’s $26,500, a penalty earned by O’Meara’s Restaurant and Pub in Manassas, Va., which “URGED OR ENTICED PATRONS TO PURCHASE AB, MADE GIFTS OF AB 8 TIMES, ADVERTISED HAPPY HOUR 7 TIMES, SERVED INTOXICATED PATRONS 2 TIMES, ALLOWED INTOXICATED PATRONS TO LOITER 2 TIMES, ALLOWED CONSUMPTION BY INTOXICATED PATRONS 6 TIMES.”

The number two, offender, notably, is in Roanoke. Montano’s International restaurant on Franklin Road was fined $12,500 and had it’s license suspended for 8 days. It was a repeat offense.

In all, 37 stores, bars and restaurants in Roanoke and Roanoke county were cited, along with 15 in Blacksburg and 8 in Christiansburg. Note that not all charges lead to “convictions,” as it were. In 36 cases charges were dismissed.

This may be a new low in my descent into geekdom.

I gave my wife a database as an early birthday present.

Worse, I regifted it to her. Still worse, I didn't just give it to her. Anybody can use it.

On the plus side, she loved it.

It's data on all 45,000 real estate parcels in the city of Roanoke, searchable in all kinds of ways. Plus, your results are mapped. Find it right now in the DataSphere.

See, Ellen, she's real estate obsessed. Watches HGTV all the time, talks about "staging" our house for sale, disappears for hours studying home sale listings on the Web. She sneaks off to open houses on Sundays. Real estate agents tell her she knows the market better than they do.

I pegged her for just the kind of "user" -- sorry, honey -- who would love this kind of data, even if it's regifted.

And now, thanks to Roanoke Times Food Writer Lindsey Nair and your friends in the DataSphere, it's now a lot easier to scratch those international cullinary itches.

Lindsey's been writing a series of Front Burner columns on the area's ethnic markets the last few weeks, and compiling a list of them, their addresses, phone numbers and what they offer.

She passed her list onto me, and it's now available as a table and map that hopefully not only tells you what's out there, but where to find it.

It's a small but diverse offering of 14 markets with Asian, Mediterranean, Hispanic and other foods. Lindsey's columns offer shopping tips, so give those a read.

And if you know of a market that's not on the list, let me or Lindsey know.

Happy noshing.

So, what a perfect union, then, for me to appear on WVTF's Evening Edition with Fred Echols (whom my daughter, Hadley, amusingly calls "Frechols" -- sorry, Fred) to talk about the DataSphere.

Fred was kind enough to take an interest in the site and my curiously-titled job -- data delivery editor. He interviewed me for about 20 minutes and either found it worthwhile enough -- or at least handy when he was desperate to fill a time slot -- to air pretty much the entire interview on evening last week. A few cuts from the interview also ran as a short story the next day on Morning Edition.

So, if you're curious about how this whole DataSphere thing works, check out the interview, and learn a little bit about the man behind the curtain.

(Oh, and for the sake of full-disclosure, WVTF General Manager Glenn Gleixner is my brother-in-law, though that had no bearing on this interview that I'm aware of. Fred had no idea when he called, though he did express his sympathy.)

So, you can guess what I did when Roanoke Times Metro Editor Brian Kelley told me about a the database at the Virginia Big Trees Program. I looked up Roanoke to find the biggest sucker in there.

The program, as the website itself puts it, "relies on volunteers to search for, nominate, and verify the measurements of big trees in Virginia. When a big tree is reported to the program, it is put into the Virginia Big Tree Database maintained jointly by the Virginia Forestry Association, the Virginia Department of Forestry, and the Virginia Tech College of Natural Resources."

The big winner turned out to be a 90-foot crack willow (Salix fragilis, for you Latin lovers out there) at 6311 Blacksburg Rd, "on right side of house in a field. Visible from road." That's in the picture.

You can search by locality, by the common or Latin name of a species, or other ways in the advanced search option.

This is terrific data partly because it's fascinating for what it documents, and partly for the way it documents it: by hand, by people out in the field with tape measures and cameras and pencils and paper. Many entries include hand-drawn maps to the locations.

In some ways, this is like the DataSphere's own black bear sightings map. It invites you to add to the database yourself by reporting what you've seen.

That's one of the best ways the Web works these days: the best content is created by the users themselves. Think YouTube for the most obvious example. YouTube for trees? For bears?

This is data doing what it can do best: becoming a conversation.

Ok, that's nerdy, but then this all started with my own glee over a database of big trees. I'm more of a data dork every day.

Lucky I'm married, because at this rate, I'd never get to kiss a girl again.

You can imagine the fair keeps the police busy.

Take a bunch of people eager for fun, put ‘em in a confined space in the heat of summer, throw in long lines for the Typhoon and the Cliffhanger, and some people are bound to, well, get out of line.

In all, this year, the Salem Police report they arrested 28 people on a total of 38 charges.

“The small number of those charged compared to the huge numbers of people who come through the Fair over 11 days … is great as far as we’re concerned,” said Lt. Mike Green. “I’ve worked all 21 of the Fairs and the last couple of years’ have been mostly ‘non-eventful’ from a police perspective.”

Still, there are lessons to be learned by the less than law-abiding folks among us, and here are a few:

Which reminds me of a question which I reckon only you, gentle reader, can answer. When I first started posting crime data on maps earlier this year, we all marveled at how popular the Salem map was. At the time, each locality's data was on a different map.

Then, thanks to some great cooperation from the area police departments, I was able to merge the data onto a single map of serious violent and property crime. I considered this an improvement -- and I still do -- because it allowed readers who lived near the city limits find crime nearby even if it was in the next jurisdiction. Criminals, after all, don't particularly care if they're in Salem or Roanoke. So far as I know, anyway, I'm not a criminal and I'm unaware if I consort with criminals.

At the same time, I decided to continue with a separate Salem map and search because the Salem data I get includes all felonies reported to the police there -- including drug crime, bad checks, embezzlement, shoplifting, parole violations, and all kinds of other interesting stuff. I had the data, why not use it?

The thing is, traffic on that Salem map has steadily declined ever since. So, my question is, if you're a user of these maps, why did you begin to pay less attention to the Salem data, even though it's richer and more comprehensive?

I'll continue to do both maps regardless, but, still, I'd like to know, so, do tell.

I'm back, but, alas, when you're the only guy who does your job, things tend to pile up while you're gone, and all you get on your return is the chance to do all your regular work, plus what you would have been doing the week before.

But I'm caught up, and ready to blast some new data at you. Fresh in the DataSphere, please find a database of economic development data for all of Virginia's 134 localities for 2001 through 2007.

This is a list of announced jobs and investment tabulated by the Virginia Economic Development Partnership. I say announced because, while companies often open and factories or expand them with promises of a certain number of jobs and spending, they don't always fully come through. Even when those promises are tied to hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funded incentives to do business in a certain place.

That said, the data is still a measure of who is keeping their local economy vibrant growing, and who isn't doing so well. There's only so much new and expanding business to go around, so things can be competitive. Some localities just aren't players in the economic development game. Look at the data and you'll see that most years roughly half of Virginia's cities and counties have no new jobs or investment. Meanwhile, some just grow and grow -- think Fairfax, for example.

Roanoke, my hometown, has had some success, but not enormous success. In that period, the city had 36 announcements for a total of 2,238 jobs and $182 million in investment. Calculated per capita for comparison to other localities, Roanoke averaged a rank of 45 in jobs for every 1,000 residents over the period, and 36th in investment per 1,000 people.

Could be better, but could be a whole mess of worse.

How did your locality do?

Working with the Roanoke County Police, we discovered that the crime data in our database did not include about 200 offenses reported between December 30, 2007 and June 7, 2008.

My source for the county's crime data is a weekly report of serious violent and property crime the department publishes on the web. Since the police began posting it weekly at the beginning of the year, it went up on Tuesday afternoon and covered offenses from the previous week.

What was invisible in the report is that some offenses that happen in that week aren't included because, for a variety of reasons, the reports aren't always filed in the same week. Sometimes, for example, a supervisor might kick a report back to an officer for revisions, causing a delay in the report's completion.

We compared the offenses in my database with those the department could find in its, and found I was lacking something like 40 percent of them. The department graciously agreed to provide me with a complete listing so I could complete our database, which I did this morning. That brings the total number of offenses in the database for Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem to over 1,300.

Going forward, the police will now post their report on Thursday instead of Tuesday to allow time for more delayed reports to get into the system and be included. In addition, I will periodically ask them the run a query to catch offenses that slipped through the regular reports.

So, whatever gets missed will be caught eventually. It's not a perfect system, but it's the best we can manage right now within the realities of what it takes for the police to produce these records. And to their great credit, the department and Lt. Chuck Mason have shown great concern for presenting a complete and accurate record in these reports.

The long and short of it is, now you know what you've been missing.

It includes a special prosecutor and allegations of candidates and an unregistered political action committee running afoul of state election laws.

It also includes what is now an incomplete record of the financing of this election, despite laws that demand a complete, accurate and transparent record.

As a data-geek, a journalist who believes fervently that open government is good for everybody, and the purveyor of a database of city council campaign contributions , that troubles me.

The record of this election apparently has a signifiant hole in it. How big a hole?