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Here's a chance to contribute to crucial research into a deeply important issue of American life.

In connection with Roanoke Times food writer Lindsey Nair's column today on sweetened iced tea, we're conducting a poll to help us determine where the oft-debated "sweet tea" line is. That is, where's the latitude north of which folks generally don't sugar their tea, and south of which, they like it tooth-rotting sweet?

It's a six question poll that'll take just a few seconds to fill out. No, it ain't what you'd call scientific research, but it does get at the geography of sweet tea, and because we also ask your age and where the tea maker in your family was from, it might also give us a glimpse into generational differences.

And those differences are bound to be there. It's hard to imagine the mass marketing of tea hasn't blurred the sweet tea line. In my house in Roanoke growing up, it was sweet stuff or not at all. Mom made it a couple of gallons at a time in the summer. Other than at the K&W cafeteria, home was the only place I got sweet tea.

Then comes fast food restaurants, the "Nestea plunge" (remember those commercials for instant tea?), and Snapple. Followed by Arizona and a bunch of other tea makers, and lately, sweet tea flavored vodka.

What has all that done to American tea drinking habits? Well, that's where you come in.

Check out the poll, add your spoonful of experience to the batch, and sweeten up this data.

After a couple of weeks, we'll produce maps or charts or graphics to show off the results.

Earlier this week, I wrote a story for the paper which I also posted here about people becoming concerned about address listers from the U.S. Census Bureau coming onto their property. The story was sparked by a news release from the Census Bureau intending to explain what the workers are doing and how to identify them.

It turns out this isn’t just a matter of people being a little freaked out. Some people are really freaked out.

The day the story published, I got an email from someone named Donna.

“Matt, I don't know about you but I am starting to get a little nervous with all this Big Brother activity. You know what they do in Irag [sic] with GPS coordinates, don't you?”

She referred me to a few links and a YouTube video. I also did my own Google search. I found long, long threads on assorted blogs about this. Donna is not alone in her worry and accusations.

Some of the concern – and concern is an understatement in some cases – is born of confusion about why Census workers are in the field in 2009 when the census isn’t until 2010. (The answer is these people are not Census takers. These workers are checking and confirming the addressed to which the actual Census forms will be mailed in 2010.)

Some seem creeped out by a stranger coming into their yard, collecting information into a computer, and leaving without saying a word. It’s as though they’d feel better if the worker had knocked on the door and said what they were doing. It seems secretive, and therefore suspicious.

But most of the angst centers on that hand-held computer they carry – a Global Positioning System (or GPS) unit which they use to mark the coordinates of dwellings and their address as they go along.

Bloggers and commenters out there suggest this is everything from just one more obnoxious invasion of privacy by the Federal government to a plot by the shadowy New World Order.

Others commenters have responded that the GPS mapping is just a more accurate means of documenting the address list to which the census forms will be mailed, and knowing precisely where they are. Location matters, because the census isn’t just about counting people, but counting where they are. The numbers of people and their locations are used to drive federal decisions from how much federal money flows into an area to where the lines for congressional districts are drawn.

The Census Bureau itself rarely opens its mouth on any subject without mentioning its promise of security and confidentiality of the data, and that it’s required by law.

But where do you stand on this? Do you trust that the process is as benign and secure as promised? Do you think the intentions are benign, but worry about how that information could be used by others whose intentions aren’t so benign? Or do you think it really is part of an ongoing effort by the federal government to know way to much about you?

Finally, have you had an encounter of any kind with a census address lister in your neighborhood or at your home? What happened? Did you trust them? Ignore them? Worry? Run them off your property? Call the police, or the U.S. Census Bureau?

I’d like to hear. Drop me a comment here. This is a national conversation, but I want to see what the same conversation sounds like in the community where I live.

The decennial U.S. Census is a 2010 thing, but all the groundwork to make the Big Count happen is already underway. Workers are in the field, and their presence has apparently prompted some concerned calls from residents not sure about them, which further prompted a re-assuring news release from the U.S. Census Bureau, which in turn prompted me to write something for Tuesday's paper:

That weirdo staring at your house and holding something that looks like a camera might not be a weirdo after all.

It could be a representative of the U.S. Census. Not everyone can tell the difference, apparently, and people have been calling census offices to make sure.

The bureau put out a news release Monday to help the public recognize its address listers.

Some 3,000 census workers are in the field in Virginia right now building the address lists that will be the mailing list for the 2010 Census forms. That work will continue through midsummer.

They wear official identification badges and carry handheld computers that they use for data entry. They also might be carrying workbags with "U.S. Census Bureau" on them.

"Anyone who is worried by someone gazing at his house or knocking at her door should ask for identification," said William Hatcher, regional director in the Charlotte Regional Census Center, the hub for census operations in Virginia and four other states.

Feel free to ask for the census worker's name and the phone number of the local census office to call for verification, Hatcher said. "We want residents to feel safe so that census workers can safely do their jobs."

Katie Blixt Cody, spokeswoman for the Census Bureau, said that she wasn't aware of any specific incidents or confusion in Roanoke. "One thing that we have heard is that the handheld computers can look like cameras, because the lister has to hold it up to get the GPS map spot," she said.

"We really just want to alleviate concerns and let people know we are out there."

Follow the latest developments in the DataSphere on Twitter.

Every Wednesday, on page A2, The Roanoke Times publishes a list of the most visited DataSphere items from the previous week, be they databases, maps, graphics, or whatever.

I'm not above shameless self-promotion, so I figured I'd start posting the same top 5 list here in the blog. Just one more way of letting you know what's knew or updated or just buzz-heavy in a particular week.

So, here's this weeks list:

1 - Roanoke Valley homicides, 2006-2009
2 - Map: Layoffs in Southwest Virginia
3 - Roanoke Valley crime map and data search
4 - New Roanoke elementary school attendance zones map
5 - Map: Scrap tire piles in the Roanoke region

And don't forget you can now follow the latest additions and updates to the DataSphere and the DataBlog on Twitter.

Thanks for tuning in,

m

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

The Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control Board's annual report came out recently, and the latest data on the top selling liquors was featured in The Roanoke Times today in a story by your favorite data delivery editor.

And, like last year, I've offered the data as interactive graphics in the DataSphere.

Here's the top of the story:

Thirsty, Virginia?

Apparently so. Virginia ABC stores sold about 9.2 million gallons of liquor in fiscal year 2008.

That's more than a gallon and a half for every person of legal drinking age in the state. That's 795,412,236 shots. That's enough to fill 14 Olympic-size swimming pools and still have enough left over to keep a football team schnockered for a good chunk of the off-season.

Statewide, vodka is the big seller, with 28 percent of all liquor sales by volume. But around the southwestern part of the state, it's dark spirits, not clear ones, that rule.

"You're going to skew a lot more brown goods than in an urban area," said John Knutson, director of marketing for Jim Beam bourbon maker Beam Global Spirits & Wine.

Liquor sales representative Michelle Brooks sells Jack Daniel's whiskey products to every one of 130 clients she has in the Roanoke region. Her colleagues elsewhere in the state say "it's like water in these parts. Everybody's got it." (more)

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.

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."