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He did not float.

Harry succumbed yesterday, but not to that cliche of fish death. Hadley, my 10-year-old, found him lying on his side on the dayglow gravel at the bottom of his little tank when she went to feed him.  One vacant eye was cast upward at the water's surface. We tapped the tank, and only the disturbance in the current moved him.

There were tears. Harper, my 4-year-old, looked into the tank and bawled. Today there will be a small fish funeral.

Harry will be remembered by this data editor as a living example of the outlier -- that freak record in a database that doesn't match with the others.  Your typical betta, or Siamese Fighting Fish, lives two or three years.

Harry was six.

We inherited Harry from Hadley's best friend, Tara, when her family moved from Roanoke to Atlanta not quite a year ago. On the way out of town, they stopped by our house and dropped off Harry, a can of food, a gallon of water already treated for use in his tank, and some instructions.

Even then, Harry was past five and already a marvel for it.  Hadley fed him dutifully. Harper fought to help out and take a turn feeding him. I changed his water and kept his tank clean. The rest of the time, he circled his little world on the buffet in the dining room.

Lately, though, he circled less, his vivid color began to fade, and he seemed more interested in drifting down to the gravel than looking up expectantly for another food pellet. We knew his time was near.

So here's to the fish named for the Boy who Lived. He was fittingly named, it turned out. Like the young wizard, he defied the odds and just kept going and going.

Farewell to the Fish who Lived.

Just because you mess around with spreadsheets and databases all day long doesn’t mean you’re some humorless nerd who can only relate to people through charts and graphs.

You still have a sense of humor. It's just that your limited social skills mean you may only be able to convey it through the aforementioned charts and graphs.

Well, have I got a website for you, my geeky friends. You and anybody else who can spare a few hours to waste company time on something other than facebook.

Check out graphjam.com.

It’s a site loaded with pages and pages of nonsense fever charts, bar graphs and venn diagrams built by graphjam users. You can easily build your own graph and post it.

A few samples:

Since taking this job about a year and a half ago, I’ve discovered that there’s data everywhere, and people everywhere who are fascinated by it, if not obsessed. There are whole online communities out there built around data and sharing it.

See:

www.swivel.com

Many Eyes

FlowingData

Graphjam, to my mind, is just one more sample of how we're using the Web to make sense of the world in different ways, ways that are increasingly visual. And, some would say, increasingly meaningless. Is there meaning in the graphs above? Well, it ain't Shakespeare, but each represents a comment on life that resonates with us because we recognize in it some piece of our own personal truth.

And some are just fantasies:

When it comes to birthing presidents, Virginia is still the queen mother, with eight. Yeah, we’re in a bit of a dry spell – our last was number 28, Woodrow Wilson – but still. Ohio is still one behind at seven.

But we’re spoiled that way. Giving a president to the union is still a rare privilege – so rare that more than half of the states in our union have yet to achieve it.

We added a new one to the list just yesterday, and it was the relatively new kid on the block: Hawaii. Barack Obama might hail from the Land of Lincoln (who, by the way, was born in Kentucky, not Illinois) but he was born in the 50^th state.

I wonder if that gives folks in states who haven’t made the list yet – Wisconsin, Wyoming, Oregon, Mississippi, Louisiana, the Dakotas, Alabama, and 21 more – any feeling of inferiority.

No offense to Hawaii, but it’s the territorial equivalent of an expansion team.

I mean, what if you’re from Rhode Island? You’re one of the thirteen original colonies, right next door to Massachusetts, birthplace of four presidents, and one of the cradles of our great nation, and Hawaii makes the list before you.

It must be a bit like being a Cubs fan and seeing the expansion Florida Marlins collect a World Series title after a couple of years in the league.

But don’t lose heart, Rhode Island, Arizona, New Mexico, Hawaii, Florida, and others.

You get another at bat every four years.

Here's the tally:

Virginia	8
Ohio	7
Massachusetts	4
New York	4
North Carolina	2
New Jersey	2
Texas	2
Vermont	2
Arkansas	1
California	1
Connecticut	1
Georgia	1
Illinois	1
Iowa	1
Kentucky	1
Missouri	1
Nebraska	1
New Hampshire	1
Pennsylvania	1
South Carolina	1
Hawaii	1

You only have to poke around the DataSphere for a little while to figure out I love Google maps, and partly because I'm so dependent on them to give you, gentle reader, a geographic look at data sometimes.

Google just seems to jam out great new stuff all the time -- Google Earth, Google Chat, and now the Google video chat.

The latest Google thing we in the Roanoke area ought to be checking out is it's "Street View" images of Roanoke. Just go to maps.google.com, search on an address, and if there's a street view there, you'll see a link to it in the info bubble that pops up. Click that, and you'll be transported to that spot photographically. From there you can pivot in any direction, 360 degrees. You can look straight up, or straight down. Notice the arrows on the roadway. Click one to move forward.

I played with this a while yesterday. Naturally, I plugged in my home address to see if my house was there. It was, in an image shot, apparently, on a spring day, while we were all gone. Neither of our cars was in the driveway. Well, that's cool, right?

I mean, this is not only a visual document of pretty much every square inch of roadway around here, but it's also a snapshot of the second in time when a particular image was taken. You can see cars on the road, pedestrians on the sidewalk, notice the weather.

On the other hand, it was kind of creepy. It made me feel vulnerable somehow, made my private life feel a little more out there than I really wanted it to be.

Now, as a journalist, I defend the right of any documentarian to take photos in a public place like a city street. This newspaper depends on that.

On the other hand, this feels invasive somehow. I'm all about more information, but do we really need this much information?  Granted, there's not a minute level of visual information in these photographs. You can see people in some places, and you can zoom in, but not to a great extent before the image begins to deteriorate. I've been trying, and I've yet to be able to really see a face or make out a license plate. But is there still potential for abuse here? Could people use this to gather information about you for nefarious purposes?

No doubt, the technology is amazing, but this puts me in mind of something I ask myself about putting data on the web. I'm all about data, and the more the better, but all journalists, including data editors, ought to be frequently asking themselves,  "Just because I can, does that mean I should?"

What do you all think? Go play with this new toy, and if you think about it, report back here.

When you think of corrupt spots on the U.S. map, you might naturally think of Illinois. And certainly moreso with the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich on federal corruption charges this week. Or maybe you think of Florida. Plenty of shenanigans down Miami way over the years, right?

But where would you put Virginia? I've lived here my whole life, and while journalists love a good corrupt official to chew on, I don't think of my homestate as a place with a steady diet of crooked officials.

But one study by a publication called the Corporate Crime Reporter ranked Virginia 12th, at least among the 35 most populous states in the union. Louisiana was first, followed by Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, Ohio and finally, at #6, Illinois. Florida was 8th.

CCR took a report from the U.S. Justice Department on prosecutions on federal corruption charges and calculated a rate of the number of charges in a state from 1997 to 2006 per 100,000 residents.

Here's a look at the number of convictions in Virginia's two federal judicial districts by year from the DOJ report:

U.S. Attorney's Office	1997	1998	1999	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	Totals
Virginia, Eastern	9	32	17	22	22	17	8	21	23	38	209
Virginia, Western	2	2	8	7	3	13	3	16	2	13	69

That's a total of 278 convictions over 10 years, which is way more than I would have imagined. The vast majority, though, are in the Eastern District. (This comes from a set of tables at the end of the DOJ report, by the way.)

By comparison, Illinois had 524, Louisiana had 329, and Florida had 809. Florida's Southern District had the most of any judicial district with 574.  Washington D.C. had 390, but the city's too small to make the top 35 considered, plus it's the nation's capital and is rather more overrun with public officials to begin with.

We should bear in mind that the numbers reflect not only the level of corruption, but also the interest of particular U.S. Attorneys in these kinds of cases, those same prosecutors' ability to get convictions, and other factors.

And, what the numbers don't reflect is similar kinds of cases that go through state courts. Think of Roanoke City Councilman Alfred Dowe, who double-dipped on his expense reimbursements, and whose case is before state courts. And then there's former Henry County Administrator Sid Clower, who took taxpayers for over $800,000, and was prosecuted in state court, but also picked up some charges at the federal level.

On the upside, those kinds of cases are fairly rare around here. And if you're still looking for comfort, at least our governor's name is not on the lips of every blogger and late-night comedian in the country. And if that's still not enough, be glad our governor doesn't have that peculiar hairstyle. I can stomach Gov. Tim Kaine's energetic eyebrow as long he's not selling off senate seats.

You all are still chewing on those Barack Obama attendance estimates from the Democratic presidential candidate's visit to Roanoke last week. And some of you are chewing on each other, too.

So, here's a similar round-up of attendance estimates for Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's stop in Salem Monday.

I'm not surprised to find more wide-ranging numbers here. Outdoor events, with thousands of people standing on a ball field, are notoriously hard to estimate. It's not like you can't count the number of chairs in a row and multiply by the number of rows. Of all the numbers and news sources, only one estimate is attributed to a specific source in the publication.

So, here's what I found out there on Google News and on local news sites:

The Roanoke Times reported an "estimated crowd of 16,000." Mason Adams told me this morning the source was Carey Harveycutter, director of Salem's civic facilities.

The Associated Press reports a "crowd of 12,000," a number repeated in a different version of the AP story in USA Today.

WSET television out of Lynchburg gave a count of 16,000, but attributed it to "Republican officials."

Roanoke's WSLS NewsChannel 10 said Palin spoke to "a roaring crowd of more than 14,000."

WDBJ7 reported two numbers, at one point saying "about 12,000," and at another time saying "some put the estimates at 16,000."

And the highest estimate came from a Roanoke Valley community news site, called ourvalley.org, which put the number at "more than 20,000."

Salem stadium has been only rarely used for events like the Palin rally in the past, I suspect because until last year it had a natural grass field which wouldn't hold up well under all that foot traffic.

Salem officials sent out a list of the biggest crowds in the venue. Three were football games, with the biggest crowd reaching 10,000-pus in 1989. But the biggest event by far was the Franklin Graham Festival, an evangelistic gathering over several days.

Salem officials said 53,000 attended over three days, with more than 15,000 on one day. But The Roanoke Times put the number on day much higher than that: "an estimated 21,000."
The audience "filled the bleachers and field seats, overflowing onto the grassy berm at one end of the football field," Cody Lowe wrote. "Still, it was Saturday's attendance - estimated at more than 15,000 despite driving rain and thunder - that continued to impress the folks who staged the event."

Part of a comment by Roanoke R n R on this morning’s post about why Obama came to the Roanoke Civic Center intrigued me:

“What I do find really interesting is that if the numbers are correct...only 6,500 people showed up at a venue that can hold over 3,000 more, was free, and people didn't even need to get a ticket to attend.”

That got me wondering about the number myself. I decided to poke around Google news to see what numbers people were reporting. I’m the first to admit we reporters can get wild of reality in these estimates sometimes (Roanoke R n R is right to be skeptical), but not so much this time.

The Washington Independent, Reuters, and CBS News all put the attendance at 8,000.

WSET in Lynchburg reported mid-rally that “the Coliseum holds about 10,000 people and it is filled to capacity right now.” (The Roanoke Civic Center website reports the capacity this way: "10,600 In The Round (general admission); 10,500 Proscenium Stage; 8,672 Hockey; 5,626 Basketball.")

A news source called AFP put it at 8,250.

Naturally, I wanted to know what number we’d be reporting, too. So, when my colleague Mason Adams, who has the unfortunate fate of seeing me five feet from him everytime he looks up from his computer, came in from covering the rally, I asked him the number.

His immediate response: 8,250.

His source: The Roanoke City Fire Marshall, based apparently on counts from clickers at the doors.

And, just for the sake of trivia -- and what is any of this but trivia? -- if this were a ticketed event, it would rank among last year's best-selling Roanoke Civic Center events at No. 4, behind the Winter Jam contemporary Christian music show, and just a head of Disney's High School Musical on Ice.

I'm not kidding.

Ok, don't pretend you weren't wondering. Just how many times did John McCain and Barack Obama mention Joe the plumber during the final presidential debate Wednesday night? That would be references to an Ohio plumber who appeared on camera with Obama recently asking questions about what Obama's tax plan would mean for him and plans to buy the plumbing business he works for.

After Sarah Palin's invocation of the mythical work-a-day everyman "Joe Sixpack" during the vice-presidential debate, it's a rather hilarious coincidence that an actual work-a-day everyman who became part of the debate really is named Joe.

But back to the question. How many times was Joe invoked?

Well, you can figure it out with our latest presidential debate word clouds, a fun visual analysis of the 14,000 words the candidates uttered -- or hurled-- during the debate.

Tell you what, I'll give you the answer to that one. When they mentioned Joe the plumber, they didn't always say "plumber." McCain mentioned "Joe" 23 times, and Obama nine times. But a total of five of those mentions were about Obama's running mate, Joe Biden. So that leaves 28 mentions of the other Joe.

The word "plumber" came out 11 times by the way -- probably the most times plumbers were the subject of so much political discourse since the Nixon administration, and the revelation of Nixon's crew of Watergate operatives and burglars, known around the Oval Office back then as "the plumbers."

Enjoy the word clouds.

When you deal with data all day long, you start to look for it everywhere - and find it.

So, Tuesday I'm at the Kirk Family YMCA in downtown Roanoke for my lunch-time workout, and during a break, I scan the bulletin board. There are lists there, lists with names and numbers. Ah. Data.

It's there that I spot it, on the list of the top females for September in terms of weight lifted as tracked by the Y's FitLinxx system.

No. 2 on the list: Darlene Burcham.

Yup, the 63-year-old Roanoke City Manager pushed, pulled, hoisted and hauled a total of 535,445 pounds during September.

Now, Burcham has been accused of throwing her weight around as city manager before, but a half million pounds?

I called her. She was gracious, but not thrilled by more attention from the press, even for something like her athletic prowess. But she indulged me.

"I was startled to see that myself," she  said. And she was skeptical. "I don't believe it. I think it's fake," she said of the number. The FitLinxx system must add wrong. FitLinxx users create an account they log into before a workout, and it tracks your workouts on the assorted fitness machines at the Y.

Burcham said she started working out at the Y back in June, mainly walking around the track at the inhuman hour of 5 a.m. She's had two different foot surgeries in recent years, is overly careful when traversing stairs now, and realized because of fear of injury, she just wasn't getting as much exercise as she used to. Her daughter Ann Kreft, a Roanoke City Schools principal, joins her often. (She's No. 14 on the list, by the way.)

After a couple of months of walking, Burcham started working out on 10 different fitness machines, too.

"I do not have any kinship with those machines," she said. "I think this is something you do because it's good for you."

And when she thinks about it, and how the weight can add up during a workout, she thinks maybe that number could be right after all.

But she found the number meaningless as a motivator. Nor did she take any satisfaction from the fact that anyone had noticed.

"The last thing I need," she said, "is more publicity."

The candidates are hammering at each other, talking over each other, each tossing out talking points like crumbs to the pigeons. You come away from a presidential debate with some vague notion of who prevailed, but what actually got said? It flies by so fast, it's hard to recall.

So, to sort out Friday's debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, I took the text of the debate as transcribed by Congressional Quarterly and reported by the New York Times and converted each candidates remarks into two different quick read visualizations. One is a tag cloud, and the other is something called a "word tree." Read more »