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April 04, 2006

Old money

With the petrol price heading ever skywards, it can be fun to look back to the heady days (and it wasn't that long ago, either) when it only cost 65 cents or less a litre. Comparisons over time are always handy for journos who have to churn out pieces on the inexorable rise in the costs of living, borrowing, and so on. Economic History Services (http://eh.net/) has a How Much is That section for that very purpose. It has various sections: one is the Exchange Rate Between the United States Dollar and Forty Other Countries, 1913 - 1999, for example. There are several others. The focus is mostly US/UK but the site has lots of useful materials for economists or economic reporters.
Posted by belinda at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)

No effort for energy

Click a country on a map and a report on that country will tell you all about the energy situation there. Are they producing coal? Oil? Gas? Are they importing? Exporting? How is the economy there faring? All this information is available at the click of a mouse from the Energy Information Administration, a statistical agency of the US Department of Energy. You can get oil prices from 1970-2004 (those were the days ...) Custom reports (including country comparisons, and a vast array of options) can be requested and are delivered online within seconds. Find the site at http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/.
Posted by belinda at 02:48 PM | Comments (0)

Bill's big bucks

Sometimes being a gazillionaire can be useful, viz. Bill Gates' Microsoft's decision to underwrite an entire issue of the influential Nature magazine about the future of computing. Where will we be in 2020? Go to http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/futurecomputing/index.html to find out. Microsoft's sponsorship of this special issue means anyone, anywhere, can read the whole thing. Bravo, Bill. Money well spent.
Posted by belinda at 01:24 PM | Comments (0)

Online journals (some open access)

Open J-Gate (http://www.openj-gate.com/) is an electronic gateway to global journal literature in the open access domain. A related site is J-Gate (http://j-gate.informindia.co.in/), which covers e-journals that are not in the open access domain.
Posted by belinda at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)

Freebie articles

Congoo might prove handy for people who want to read subscription content without having to pay for it. The web site allows you to view subscription material from sites like the UK Financial Times without handing over any cash or needing passwords to get in. It's not open slather -- or the sites might go out of business -- but you can get limited content for free. You can read more about the Congoo concept at the site, which also links to recent news stories about the service and its launch. Go to http://www.congoo.com/. It currently works only with Internet Explorer, with a toolbar for Mozilla Firefox expected shortly.
Posted by belinda at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)