I love Lexis Nexis. But I’m in the info biz. Most of you don’t (and probably shouldn’t) pay that kind of fee for info. Besides, you have us.But everyone once in a while, you might want to find some law-related info.

You can search the law easily (and free!) at the Public Library of Law.

PLoL is the largest free law library in the world; they assemble law available for free scattered across many different sites and put it neatly together – all in one place.

A loyal reader asks: Please don’t think less of me, but I am absolutely totally bored by economics. So imagine my joy when my boss asked me, yes me, track economic data to crosstab (not literally) with our business trends. I don’t know where to turn. And make it easy, please. I don’t have the stomach for this.

Seriously, this is nothing to fret about. Check out Economagic.

It’s a breeze. And you’ll look smart as a whip.

You’ll find free, easily available economic time series data useful for economic research. It provides easy access to large amounts of data, and you can quickly get charts of that data. There are more than 200,000 time series for which data and custom charts can be retrieved.

The majority of the data is USA data. The core data sets involve US macroeconomic data (that is, for the whole US), but the bulk of the data is employment data by local area — state, county, MSA, and many cities and towns.

Now go be a star!

Find interesting blogs at BlogCatalog

We’re listed – so it must be great! Seriously, it’s a nice way to drill down by category to find blogs. We like it and think you will too.

eMolecules searches the Internet for chemistry-related information — more specifically, information about molecules.

You can draw a molecule or molecule substructure – using a popup Java applet. Once you’ve drawn the molecule, eMolecules “translates” your drawing to a search engine query.

We know – this is kind of geeky. But don’t you agree it’s pretty cool?

If you want to do text-based searching, you can do that too. Even by trade name.

Here is Advil. Who would have thought?

Need a “crash course” on social networking applications? Or just want a way to explain the social media world to your client (or your mother) in really simple terms?

Go to this OpenCourseWare site for blogs, wikis and new media. Here is the course description:

Innovation continues to occur on the internet at an extremely lively pace. What was once the realm of email, FTP, Gopher, and the Web is barely recognizable a mere 10 years later. Keeping up with the speed of innovation and maintaining a familiarity with the most recent tools and capabilities is handy in some professions and absolutely critical in others. This course is designed to help you understand and effectively use a variety of “web 2.0? technologies including blogs, RSS, wikis, social bookmarking tools, photo sharing tools, mapping tools, audio and video podcasts, and screencasts.

A loyal reader asks: I know that if I have a question, I can search for the answer online or ask you (of course asking you is the best choice), but what if I need to show someone something. Just yesterday, I was trying to identify a funky tool that I found. How can I figure out what it is?

Your timing is excellent. Read on.

PicAnswers launched just a couple weeks ago. It is the coolest! Billed as a picture question and answer site, it is fun and seriously educational. And, I might add, as time sink!

It is designed to help you identify things in everyday life that you’re not sure what that thing is! Like a plant or a tool or a symbol or a rash. You get the picture. (sorry for the pun.)

We love it. And we think it’s going to catch on.

We’re extremely excited that our new website is live. One of the features that we’re thrilled about is the What We’re Reading Now section – over on the left hand side.  Our groovy web guy set it up so that when we bookmark in del.icio.us it will show up so you all can see it. I know you’ll find some great links here (that is what we do!) so check back often.

Before long, we’ll have our brand spanking new branded newsletter out and we’ll archive the previous issues here on the site. So you’ll be able to search for that site you know you saw but can’t remember. (Admit it. It happens to us all!)

So welcome. Look around.

And don’t forget to submit a question to Stump the Researcher. We’re always looking for fodder!

No need for Andrew to worry. I mean the ERIC database. The Educational Resources Information Center – with free access to more than a million records of journal articles and education-related materials and links to full text, when it’s available. Which it often is not. But I can then retrieve many studies from the academic journal databases to which we subscribe! Admittedly, sometimes we need to purchase the articles from the publisher, but getting the right article to augment the knowledge search is key.

The archives go back to the mid-1960’s. There is some amazing information here. Such as this abstract that caught my eye. (I’m sure it’s not just because I have pre-teen sons!)

Title: A Short-Term Longitudinal Study of Internet and Computer Game Use by Adolescent Boys and Girls: Prevalence, Frequency of Use, and Psychosocial Predictors

Author: Willoughby, Teena

Descriptors:Friendship; Grade 12; Grade 10; Internet; Longitudinal Studies; Psychological Patterns; Video Games; Grade 9; Grade 11; Gender Differences; Parent Child Relationship; Peer Relationship; Well Being; High School Students; Age Differences; Predictor Variables; Social Influences

Source: Developmental Psychology, v44 n1 p195-204 Jan 2008

Peer-Reviewed: Yes

Publication Date: 2008-01-00

Pages: 10

Abstract: Prevalence, frequency, and psychosocial predictors of Internet and computer game use were assessed with 803 male and 788 female adolescents across 2 time periods, 21 months apart. At Time 1, participants were in the 9th or 10th grade; at Time 2, they were in the 11th or 12th grade. Most girls (93.7%) and boys (94.7%) reported using the Internet at both time periods, whereas more boys (80.3%) than girls (28.8%) reported gaming at both time periods. Girls reported a small decrease over time in the frequency of hours spent per day on overall technology use, mostly due to a decrease in gaming. Both linear and curvilinear relations were examined between parental relationships, friendship quality, academic orientation, and well-being measured in early high school and the frequency of technology use in late high school. Being male significantly predicted both computer gaming and Internet use. There also were trends in favor of higher friendship quality and less positive parental relationships predicting higher frequency of Internet use. Importantly, moderate use of the Internet was associated with a more positive academic orientation than nonuse or high levels of use.

I am often surprised at the variety of subjects that are associated with education and how frequently our projects can benefit from a literature search of academic, educational articles.

It might come in handy for you one day, too.

A reader asks: I frequently have the need to get input from my large and very geographically dispersed team. When I send an email out, I get all these answers in different formats and, frankly, it’s a pain in the neck. Any suggestions?

Why yes, thanks for asking!

You can poll your team (or customers or anyone!) without typing a single line of code. Some popular polling tools are Polldaddy, Quibblo, and Zoho Polls. All easy and all well-reviewed!

Still, our favorite is Wufoo. Wufoo is a very simple way to build amazing online forms. When you design a form with Wufoo, it automatically builds the database, backend and scripts needed to make collecting and understanding your data easy, fast and fun. You can send it by email or send the link. Seriously, this is easy.

Happy polling!

A reader asks: I’m not a visual guy. But I need to create charts and visuals to make my concepts clearer for my presentations. Like I said, this does not come easy to me. I’ve seen Ven Diagrams, Pyramids, Flow Charts. But are there others?

Answer: Are there ever!

We recently found about the coolest collection ever.
Check out the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.

Let it load. It takes a minute. Then run your cursor over each part of the table. You’ll see a neato flash window with an example of the visualization method. It gave us some great ideas and we bet it will do the same for you.

A few are:
Radar Chart
Scatterplot
Concentric Circles
Cognitive Mapping
Tree
Metro Map
Histogram
Continuum
Magic Quadrant
Failure Tree
Value Chain
S-Cycle

Well, you get the picture!