By Anna Boiko-Weyrauch
@AnnaBoikoW

"Hacking the Census" was a collection of lightning talks on tools, tricks and codes to hack the Census and American Community Survey, ranging from introductory to advanced.

Steve Doig, professor at Arizona State University, said the Census has information about people and households, of course, but there’s also info on business, education, foreign trade, and more. The McCormick SRI project gathered speakers and taped 17 lectures of 45 minutes where each expert addressed these different facets of the data.

Ron Campbell of The Orange County Register demonstrated how to use the New American FactFinder, the ...

By Kyle Deas
Graduate student, University of Missouri

It’s that time of year again: the school supply aisles at your local stores are crammed with people; the summer heat is giving its last dying gasps; and education beat reporters across the country are being asked, for the second or fifth or fifteenth time, to write a back-to-school story.

It’s only a little more than two years since The Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 1.0. The new open-source browser on the block quickly became the new browser on the block, playing David to Internet Explorer’s Goliath. In January, Information Week reported that Internet research firm WebSideStory measured Firefox’s share of the browser market at 14 percent. That includes a large following within the computer-assisted reporting community. Users are attracted by the reputation Firefox quickly earned as more stable and secure than IE and loaded with features that IE didn’t have. What even sophisticated users may ...