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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.

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.

Just a heads up that the data for the Roanoke Valley crime map just got it's weekly update. It now has offenses through April 20. Same goes for the separate database and map of Salem felonies.

To refresh your memory, the valley-wide data includes only serious violent and property crimes. The Salem-only data includes all felonies.

A repeated thanks to the Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem police departments for providing this data consistently and reliably each week so we can offer it to you on roanoke.com.

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

He is nameless, faceless, thoroughly anonymous. Just a simple bar on a graph in a government report.

Yet he seems lonely even in that representation. On a bar chart of child suicides in Virginia in 2007, his bar stands off to the left, alone, above the number 10, denoting his age.

A statistical outlier.

Scan to the right, and you pass a series of zeroes over ages 11, 12, 13. Then a clump of teen suicides – all of them tragic, yet not so much as that solitary bar off to the left.

Was he an outlier in life, too, as alone with whatever sadness or circumstance lead him to this as his remote spot on the chart suggests?

I had pulled up annual report of Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia looking for data on alcohol related deaths. I paged through dozens of charts, graphs, maps before coming to “Suicide Deaths of Children” on page 84.

And there he was.

The questions rushed up to me: Who was he? Whose child was he? What could make a 10-year-old so unhappy as to think, at that tender age, that there was no need to go on? What about the poor parents, or whoever cared for him? Somewhere, there’s a mother, a father, a grandparent, a brother, a sister, a teacher, a neighbor, a friend, wondering what they missed. Could they have done more?

There’s only my wondering, and not much else to know in the report. He was one of 19 child suicides that year. I could guess at how he died. Most likely it was by gunshot or hanging. Those methods account for all but three of the child suicides that year. One inhaled a toxic agent, one jumped from a high place, one drowned.

I have a 10-year-old. My wife teaches 10-year-olds. Ten-year-olds don’t do these things.

Well, they do. Remember Aquan Lewis? A little more than a month ago, he was found hanging by his shirt collar on a hook in a bathroom at Oakton Elementary School in Evanston, Ill. Investigators found his footprint on a toilet. A coroner ruled the death a suicide.

He was in the fifth grade.

I have a fifth grader.

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:

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.

The Roanoke Valley crime and Salem felony crime maps and databases are up to date again, and we crossed the 3,000 threshold in total number of offenses in the Roanoke Valley data. That's total serious violent and property crimes in Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem for 2008. The database of all felonies in Salem now exceeds 500 items.

And, incidentially, the Salem data, which formerly went back only to Jan. 26, 2008, now goes back to Jan. 1, 2008. That's thanks to Lt. Mike Green at the Salem P.D., the guy who so kindly generates weekly crime and arrest reports for the local press and sends them out by email. Mike, without being asked, realized our data didn't go back to the first of the year and offered up the offenses for that period. Thanks for that, Mike.

And finally, if you just can't get enough crime data from these databases, don't forget we have similar searches for Radford and Montgomery County, which are maintained by my colleague Jim Ellison.

Happy searching.

Oh, yeah, crime has marched on the last few weeks. And that's not a joke about the last two weeks on the campaign trail.

The Roanoke Valley has been racking up it's share of crime during that time, though you couldn't tell it from our Roanoke Vallley and Salem crime maps. I haven't been able to update them thanks mainly to being swallowed up by election coverage here lately.

But I put in an update today, so the data now runs through last Monday, Nov. 3.

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."

Just made the weekly update to our Roanoke Valley crime data, and the Salem felony data.

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.