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Roanoke's population, like that every other urban center in Virginia, has been in decline for a couple of decades now. But, as reported by Jay Conley in today's paper, estimates from the respected Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service indicate that for the last two years, the city's population has actually increased by a total of 833 people.

The bleeding appears to have been stemmed, but what remains unclear (and forgive me for belaboring the metaphor) is what or who is supplying the clot.

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Nearly 3.5 million federal student loans came due for repayment in 2005. By the end of the year, nearly five percent were in default for non-payment. That's bad enough, but it's actually a gargantuan improvement over 15 years earlier, when nearly one in four of the same loans were in default. Check out the default figures for over 5,000 U.S. colleges for 2003 through 2005 now in the DataSphere. The data comes from the U.S. Department of Education.

You can make a number of assumptions from those figures. Some people had legitimate hardships and couldn't pay (although deferments are an option in some circumstances), while others no doubt just shirked their responsibility.

But, as the U.S. Department of education sees it, those numbers reflect not only on the borrowers, but on the colleges who awarded the loans in the first place.

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I guess it's all I talk about anymore, crime, but it is kind of the hot new item in the DataSphere.

Anyway, I updated both the Roanoke and the Roanoke County crime maps today.

The city one now runs through January 26, while the county is up to date through January 19.

That's the headline from my latest DataSphere column in Sunday's paper.

Just thought I'd put up a link here for you folks who don't get the print edition. This month's column is basically the exposition of some thoughts you may have already read in this forum, plus some interesting back story on the city quadrants issue.

And keep your eyes open for some new additions to the DataSphere, hopefully this week. We've got city parking ticket data still in the works, and I also picked up data on student loan default rates for over 5,000 colleges, plus some foreign universities.

The Roanoke City crime map has its first update, with data through January 19. At the same time, to keep the map from getting too cluttered, I removed the oldest offenses. So, there's now exactly a month's worth of reports mapped.

Also, if you want to know what each offense type listed means, you can check out the definitions from the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

I wish I had a convenient way to archive these maps, but I don't -- not yet. But we're still plugging towards building a crime mapping site that has a searchable archive. One day, hopefully soon, you'll be able to sort the map by offense, limit it by a date range, or by offenses within a certain distance of an address you enter.

For now, we're still on the low-tech end of this high-tech kind of undertaking.

You can read more of my thoughts on crime maps in Sunday's paper, by the way. Look for my next DataSphere column in the Virginia section.

The briefing of Roanoke City Council on crime statistics proved to be a summary report on crime trends in the city, which showed a substantial decrease in Part I offenses -- basically major crimes against people and property, and the same crimes listed on our crime maps.

Here is one of the charts council was shown:

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Roanoke City Council will get a scheduled five-minute briefing on "2007 Crime Statistics Police Initiatives" during its 2 p.m. meeting today, according to the agenda posted online. I have no idea what this means, but any talk of crime stats stirs interest on this blog and in the DataSphere, so I thought I'd pass it on.

If you lack the time or interest to actually go to the council meeting (and, really, I or anyone would forgive you for either of those excuses), you can check out a live video feed of the meeting, or view it later by going here.

You can also watch this space for a run-down of what was discussed later today.

Our Roanoke City crime map now has company from Roanoke County.

Just this week, the Roanoke County police department began posting weekly crime reports that are basically uniform to those posed by the Roanoke City Police Department that are the basis for the city crime map. So, having figured out the city map, it was easy to duplicate the process for the county data.

The county has long published a monthly report of all kinds of offenses on its website, but it wasn't always posted in a timely fashion. The change this week not only offered the possibility of a map, but the chance to be fair to Roanoke. Now you can see the same offenses mapped for both localities and make fair comparisons.

Currently, the county map looks somewhat bare compared to the city one, but that's in large part because the county map has only two weeks worth of offenses, compared to five weeks of city data.

Valerie, in a comment today, asked how we got this rolling finally. The first part was, the crime data became available on a regular basis in a form we could use. The second part was me finding ways to maximize my minimal know-how for the technical part of this job. In short, I learned how to use a free web-based mapping utility, called mapbuilder.net, to plot large numbers of addresses simultaneously. That allowed for a level of efficiency in building these maps that made doing them make sense.

Really, it's not that hard. If a thick-headed, retro-fitted newspaper man like me can figure out, it must be easy.

It took a while, and what we've got is still a pretty simple product, but we're at last mapping crime data in the DataSphere.

Yesterday I put up a map of Part I offenses reported to Roanoke police from December 1 to January 12. I'll update the map every week or two, so that the most current four or five weeks' of offenses are there. I'll also be adding a map for Roanoke County Part I offenses soon, perhaps this week.

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Lee Suggs, if you don't know, was a top flight running back at William Fleming High School in Roanoke, then at Virginia Tech, and finally in the NFL, albeit briefly. He's also one of the last football players of note to come out of the Roanoke Valley.

Check out the map of The Roanoke Times' sports staff's picks for the top 50 high school football prospects in the state, class of 2008. Naturally, there are more good players out of the heavily populated eastern half of the state. But it's hard to overlook the glaringly vacant space in and around Roanoke.

From where I sit, there nearest prospects are a good drive away, in Richlands, Bristol and Lynchburg. Meanwhile, it seems you can't swing a dead cat in Tidewater without hitting a player bound for a top college program.