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According to Money Magazine's August issue, the 89th best small town in America is Cave Spring, Va.

Huh? Cave Spring is a small town? It’s a fine place to live, I’m sure, but a small town?

Money does this every year. They compile a list of America’s best places to live, and this year they chose to focus on small towns. They define that as “U.S. towns that have a population of 8,500 to 50,000.”

Cave Spring, according to the U.S. Census, had about 25,000 people in 2007.

But is a town only about a population count? That word, for me, conjures the image of a mini-municipality, with a Main Street and demi-downtown, rows of houses, and probably in rural surroundings. That’s not Cave Spring, but that’s only one subjective definition. Towns also typically have governments and borders. Cave Spring has neither.

In other words, it lacks the kind of independence and apart-from-the-worldness that a phrase like “small town” connotes.

Cave Spring, as defined by the U.S. Census

The Census Bureau has a word for a spot like Cave Spring. They call it a “place.”

All this goes to the meaning of Money’s findings. Per the magazine, they looked at the economy, jobs, crime, affordability of homes, how many things there are to do, schools, health care, diversity, weather and more.

It’s certainly valid to look at something where there’s a definitive answer for Cave Spring alone, like population and diversity. Money discarded towns that were 95 percent white or more. Cave Spring, according to the census, is 92 percent white.

You can certainly determine a crime rate or housing affordability for an area like Cave Spring, too.

But how do you evaluate the economy in a suburb like Cave Spring where few people work where they live? Does it make sense to talk about the economy of Cave Spring alone, when it’s really just part of the larger economy of the Roanoke Valley?

And how do you evaluate the quality of health care in Cave Spring, when really you’re talking about the quality of health care in the whole valley?

Even the schools are part of a larger system that serves both suburbs and rural enclaves.

“Lots to do” there? Well, it’s hard to tell how many people in Cave Spring limit their search for things to do to their neighborhood, but my guess is they get off their own street at least once in a while for shopping, entertainment, the arts, dining.

Oh, and you have to have a major airport within 60 miles. Congratulations, Roanoke Regional Airport. Money thinks you’re major.

Not to take anything away from Cave Spring or the folks who live there. Not at all. If a major magazine says part of the Roanoke Valley is one of the best places to live in the whole country, that’s something to be proud of.

But when you really look at the criteria, part of what makes Cave Spring a great place in Money’s assessment, is the bigger place that Cave Spring is part of.

That's something the whole Roanoke Valley can brag on.

As a journalist and data fiend, I'm embarrassed to admit this, but after the earthquake rattled me out of bed at 4:08 a.m. Saturday, I had no idea where to confirm it, or report it.

But others around here did. Minutes after the 3.0 quake hit, people were online at the United States Geological Survey Earthquake Center Website answering the survey under the heading "Did you feel it?" By 5 a.m., a hundred people had made reports.

By Monday afternoon, the number was over 500.

I got curious about where those reports were coming from, and whether they reflected where the quake's epicenter was. Despite the skews in the data from things like available Internet access to make a report to simply knowing you can make a report, the frequency of reports is in fact highest near the epicenter.

I put it all together on an interactive map you can check out now in the DataSphere, using the data summary for the reports that's available on the USGS site. Lots of good data there, by the way, including the latitude and longitude of the quake's epicenter (which put it in a suburban back yard just off Garst Mill Road in Roanoke County) and the quake's depth beneath the earth's surface (about 8 miles).

I wish I'd had all this about 4:10 a.m. Saturday. Instead, like most of us who felt it, I was left to sit in my bed and wonder what the hell that was that just happened. My wife and I ran through the exact same list of possibilities that many others have recounted -- tree fell on the house, car hit the house, gas leak and explosion. We didn't figure out that it wasn't just our house that shook until my wife overheard someone on the street in front of our house asking the question people would be asking all day: "Did you feel it?"

No one was hurt and no property was damaged, so it all amounted to was a great communal experience predicated on answering that question.

Happily for a data nerd like me, hundreds of you chose to answer that question online, too.

Keep up with new posts and new data in the DataSphere on Twitter.

The Roanoke City Police Department’s latest crime fighting tool is a pdf file.

Starting this week, the department is posting every 24 hours an updated list of people wanted for felonies, misdemeanors, parole violations, and so on. The one online as I write this is 76 pages.

It’s not the most detailed document, just a list of names with a gender and age by them. There’s no indication of the charges against anyone on the list. (There is a separate "Most Wanted" page that includes photos and charges.)

The pdf isn’t the friendliest format, either. How many people will scroll through a document that long? But it’s a logical move by the police department to get these names out there. In a story on the new practice in today’s paper by Amanda Codispoti, the police say getting these names before the public has led to people on the list being turned in, and even turning themselves in. A partial list used to be published in the now defunct Crime Tracker published by WSLS (Channel 10).

The Roanoke police and the The Roanoke Times don’t always agree on what the public ought to know about crime in the city. As newspaper people, we naturally want to know everything we can know, while the police tend to see more value in withholding certain information.

But year or so, the department has come around to sharing this kind of data on a regular if limited basis – they’re one source of the data in our crime database -- and that’s to be applauded.

I first looked at the wanted list with an eye for finding a way to co-opt it and turn it into a database to post in the DataSphere.

I’ve learned in my year and a half in this job that you all really like any data with names in it. And why not? We’re all curious about people in our community, and some are just plain nosey.

In this case, though, I decided it against it. Managing daily updates from data converted from a pdf is more than I have time to do, for one thing.

Plus, the information available is just incomplete enough to make a newspaper like mine uneasy. For me to post a list of names that simply says these people are wanted by police, without saying what for, and without enough information to distinguish the Jim Johnson or Sally Williams on the list from the one you know, that just seems fraught with potential for giving readers wrong or inflated ideas about real people.

As a data editor, I tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to stuff like this.

Not everyone does.

In journalism circles, there was a big dustup recently over a website developed by the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times called mugshots.tampabay.com, which aggregates jailhouse mug shots from three different police departments. It’s updated frequently, it’s searchable, and, in a voyeuristic kind of way, fascinating.

You start looking at these people, what they’re charged with, sort them by age, gender, even height and weight, and it’s like me eating a bag of chips. Suddenly I’m at the bottom and I’ve wasted 20 minutes and put on another half a pound.

But is it journalism? some journos asked. Is this what newspapers ought to be doing? Isn’t it just generating Web traffic by sharing the faces of people who committed crimes that would never rise to the level of being covered by the paper?

In sum, is the St. Pete Times doing this just because it can?

And yet, no one seems to be asking those questions about the police departments themselves doing the exact same thing. Mug shots are different than names, of course. You can be interested in a picture of a person you know nothing else about. You don’t need to recognize the face, like you would need to recognize a name, to find the information useful or interesting.

The names and mug shots are also different in another key respect. The wanted list is intended to bring wanted people to justice. The people in the mug shots are already charged and in custody, which raises the question of why the police themselves post them.  Maybe shaming the criminals is part of it. Police in other parts of the country have, in that interest, released names of drunk drivers or men patronizing prostitutes. And the Roanoke police post photos of people caught shoplifting.

But what do you think?

Am I too conservative about this stuff? Is there an argument for the police to be as careful as I’m being? Should they, for example, give more identifying information, like race, or height and weight, or a last known address? Or at least give the charges so you have a more precise idea of what to think of your friend or neighbor whose name is on the list?

You tell me.

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.

Here's the list of the five most popular DataSphere items for the week ending Monday, April 27:

1. Virginia freshwater trophy fish database

2. Map: Layoffs in Southwest Virginia

3. Roanoke Valley crime map and data search

4. Map: Scrap tire piles in the Roanoke region

5. Radford crime map and data search

Follow the latest in The DataSphere on Twitter.

Ok, I've caved. I've been a facebook user for a while in my personal life, but never got into Twitter -- until now. And it's strictly for professional reasons. It's just one more way to get the word out to the data hungry in the world about what's new in the DataSphere.

So do me -- and yourself -- a favor and sign up to follow the DataSphere's latest at http://www.twitter.com/The_DataSphere.

I'll do my best to be regular with updates on my latest blog posts, data updates and new additions to the site.

April 15 came and went yesterday. You might have been thinking taxes. But Virginia's political candidates had a different deadlline in mind: the deadline for first quarter fundraising reports.

That includes three Democrats and a Republican seeking the governor’s mansion at the top, and closer to home in Roanoke, a small herd of Republicans and a single Democrat seeking the 17th district House of Delegates seat vacated by the retiring William Fralin.

The source of candidates’ funds are a matter of public record all across the country, but the reports aren’t always easy to learn about. In Virginia, we’re fortunate to have the Virginia Public Access Project.

VPAP is a non-profit organization funded by a consortium of newspapers. Led by former Roanoke Times reporter David Poole, it’s purpose is to collect process and present online all manner of candidate and elected official financial disclosure information, from the gifts elected officials have received, to the activities of lobbyists, to the money raised by political candidates.

So, if you want to know where Republican candidate for governor Bob McDonnell got the impressive $2.2 million he’s raised since Jan. 1, you can find out at vpap.org. Nearly half of it came from the Republican Governors Association, by the way. Some $15,000 of it came from four donors in the 24018 zip code in Roanoke. And yes, you can drill down to see exactly who the individual donors are.

You can also see where fundraising front runner Terry McAuliffe, a democrat, turned up the stunning $4.2 million he raised in the same period. The names can be pretty fascinating, like Donald Trump, who gave $25,000, and Bill Clinton, who gave $10,000. And you can also see that darn little of his money came from the western half of Virginia.

And you can see that Democrat Gwen Mason, running for the 17th House seat, has raised close to $40,000, while her five Republican opponents, who are still jockeying for their party’s nomination, aren’t even out of the gate yet.

The information’s all there, and in a bunch of different ways. If you care to look, it’s an engrossing tale of power and influence and the making of favors. All brought to you by the wisdom of open government.

It seems like a step backwards to some.

Some proposals for re-drawing school attendance zones in Roanoke City would do away with zones that go back to the early 1970s and the need to bus kids out of their neighborhoods to schools across town in search of a greater racial balance in classrooms.

Two of the options presented by the school board call for single, contiguous attendance zones around schools, in effect creating something more like neighborhood schools than the city has seen for many a decade.

But in some cases those neighborhood schools will come at the cost of racial integration.

That’s a fact decried by some as a return to a segregated past that we’re supposed to have left far behind by now. But is it fair to expect the school system to accomplish what the vast, vast majority of Roanokers have not?

You’ve probably heard, and if you pay any attention at all, you could have surmised on your own, that Roanoke is a deeply segregated city. How segregated?

Read more »

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.

For years now, the Roanoke Times has told you where to find the most audacious holiday lighting displays in the area. It used to be in print, and last year we added an interactive map online. This year, we're going one better: a searchable database of displays with mapped results so you know right where to go.

Search by locality or even zip code.

Come back and search often, because that database will continue to grow as our local display artists submit their information.

And if you're one of those types who starts untangling and tacking up lights in September because it takes that long to put up 65,000 twinklers and 27 Santas, we're your place to tell people where to find your display. Just use our simple online form. Once you hit submit, it may take up to a day for your submission to be approved and added to the database, but I'll work as fast as I can.

So take a break from seaching for that aggravating bad bulb and tell us about your display.