technology

Over the past 20 years, virtual public schools have become a popular alternative to traditional bricks-and-mortar schools. School choice advocates promote them as a way for children to complete their coursework online and at their own pace in almost any location, a significant benefit for families in rural areas as well as students who need or want more flexible academic schedules.

For those uninitiated in the art of charting and visualizing data, the options and possibilities can seem overwhelming. But data visualization is a field that can be accessed at multiple levels, and there are some very intuitive applications and tip sheets that can make the execution of visualizations a lot easier for beginners.

Far from being recent acquaintances, mass journalism and high technology have long been inseparable companions. When the London Times installed the first steam-powered presses in 1814, they not only quadrupled the speed of page production, they also vastly increased the paper’s reach and power. Later advances such as cameras, telegraphs and telephones — to say nothing of computers large and small — only deepened the relationship between the press and technology.

The Internet is an endlessly rich world of sites, pages and posts — until it all ends with a click and a “404 page not found” error message. While the hyperlink was conceived in the 1960s, it came into its own with the HTML protocol in 1991, and there’s no doubt that the first broken link soon followed.