Manhattan ? America’s newest authorities on sin — an unassuming quartet of post-graduate geography students at (gasp!) Kansas State University — couldn’t exactly consult a road map before striking out on their path to unexpected fame and/or notoriety.

Actually, the authors of the report with the academic-sounding yet eye-catching title — “The Spatial Distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins Within Nevada” — can’t even lay claim to originating the idea that eventually generated such unholy interest beyond Seaton Hall’s walls of academia.

“It was an idea floating around the department for as long as I’ve been here,” said Mitch Stimers, 37, a doctorate candidate from Wisconsin. “It was probably 2005 when I first heard upper-level students tossing the idea around over lunch, or maybe in a bar. It was always, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat to look at this and that.’

“We were just the first ones to actually gather some data.”

What Stimers, Tom Vought, Ryan Bergstrom and Michael Dulin gathered was nationwide, county-by-county statistical data they interpreted as representing America’s peaks and valleys in matters of lust, wrath, gluttony, envy, greed, sloth and pride — the vices defined as the Seven Deadly Sins by Pope Gregory in the 6th century.

Using long-established cartographer principles, the four researchers applied the numbers to maps that immediately provided stunning visual realization to residents of, say, Wabaunsee County that they are living in a hotbed of lust without feeling as much as a warm breeze.

Especially surprising to both researchers and readers was seeing bright-red blotches — the color indicating a hot spot of activity — breaking out in areas most commonly associated with the Bible Belt.

The resulting media response to the K-State report — initially presented as something of a fun project to a national geographers convention in Sin City itself — all but floored the mild-mannered Midwest researchers following its initial publication last year in the Las Vegas Sun.

“I think we grievously underestimated the public’s interest in sin,” said a chuckling Vought, a 27-year-old teaching hopeful from the District of Columbia. “It’s been astounding. By the time we left Vegas, it was on blogs all over the world.”

“That very next day,” Stimers remembered, “we were on the front page of maybe 75 percent of the sites we checked. You know how blogs are. Something appears on one site, then gets picked up by two, then four, eight, 16, 32. Three days later, any blog that dealt with any kind of current events made some mention of it.”

Added Vought: “That’s when you start thinking, ‘What have we done?’ We were getting radio-show interview requests from everywhere. We’d get calls at 7:30 in the morning and be doing live radio without having had my first cup of coffee.

“I suspect I’d be much further along in my dissertation if I hadn’t spent four months playing 20 questions every day.”

One way to look at it

Though their results were derived from extensive research of census and other available databases, the K-State team never proclaimed the project to be the definitive analysis of sin in America.

Not that the public made that distinction when looking at maps projecting nothing more than data that falls above or below the standard deviation.

“These maps,” Vought noted, “don’t necessarily mean these are havens of crime, lust and corruption. It just means there are higher-than-average (incidents) when compared to the other variables.”

Added Stimers: “We don’t want people looking at a hot spot and thinking the people who live there are low-lifes. But the point of a map is to gain immediate visual information just by glancing at it.”

As is the often the case with research and analysis, people questioned the means used to reach the conclusions drawn. The team fully understands the second-guessing. They do a lot of it themselves.

“People will tell us, ‘You should have done yada yada yada,'” Stimers noted. “Well, yeah, that’s great, except there is no central database in yada yada yada.”

Some of the conclusions drawn were relatively easy to make. Violent crimes per capita, a figure obtained largely from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, were used to gauge wrath. Outbreaks of sexually transmitted diseases formed the basis of analyzing lust. Thefts provided the bottom line in assessing envy — wanting something somebody else possesses.

“Wrath, envy, greed — we cut through those pretty quickly,” Vought remembered. “Take away the silly names and our maps on wrath and envy are maps of crime in America.

“Lust, though, was a little trickier.”

“The big criticism we got about using STDs per capita (as a barometer for measuring lust) was that people said we mainly considered people in a socio-economic condition who weren’t educated enough to prevent STDs,” Stimers explained. “But as with every variable, you can find 10 reasons why something works and 10 reasons why it doesn’t.”

Difficult to measure

The team found it considerably more difficult to define gluttony and sloth. Not that all sorts of good ideas weren’t suggested. Using body mass index to gauge gluttony, for instance. Analyzing sales of video-game equipment to measure sloth — laziness — for another.

In the end, the K-Staters evaluated gluttony based on the concentration of fast food or limited services restaurants. For sloth, they evaluated expenditures on arts, entertainment and recreation compared to employment per capita.

They were not exactly pleased with their results.

“We took a lot of flak on gluttony because we didn’t use BMI, but we ruled that out quickly because it didn’t really get to the heart of the subject,” Vought said. “The classic definition of gluttony involves more than obesity.

“Finding a data source to measure gluttony was our biggest problem. You look at where fast food restaurants are — they’re everywhere! It may be that the pattern on gluttony is that there is no pattern.”

It was equally difficult measuring sloth.

“We wanted to look at the things that kept people at home, on the couch,” Vought said.

But finding county-by-county data on things like video and game rentals proved impossible, and the team eventually settled for other criteria as time ran out in the days approaching the Las Vegas presentation.

The researchers were pleased to see their work reviewed in a serious scientific journals, such as The Journal of Maps”; daily publications such as the Las Vegas Sun; and glossy-page magazines, including Wired. They hope to revisit the subject again, this time with a better analysis of gluttony and sloth.