The Librarian's Internet Index highlights three sites of particular potential use to intel professionals and students this week:
Factors In Food Security Price Increases. The USDA has put together a list of their latest reports on food prices and the factors that are influencing them worldwide. Nice one-stop shopping page.
FBI Audio History. This site contains audio snippets from interviews with FBI Historian Dr. John Fox.
Routinely, on the lists and blogs to which I subscribe, someone will bring up a topic that involves the psychology of a particular culture. Typically, one person will make a recommendation based on a western notion of the issue under discussion and then someone will ask the quite legitimate question, "Yes, but is this how they think about it?"
The good professors at Western Washington University's Center For Cross-Cultural Research have gone a long way towards providing an answer. They have put together an online textbook in psychology and culture that should probably be the source of first resort to help answer these vexing questions. The text breaks this complex issue down into 16 units, provides an introduction at the beginning of each of the units and then includes the full text of critical studies and journal articles that address the issues covered by the particular unit (Note: I found the link to the site through the always useful Librarian's Internet Index -- another source I recommend).
The interface is clean and easy to use. One could easily imagine this as a typical edited collection gathering dust on a library shelf. Put into this online format, all this good research is likely to actually get used. Kudoes to the editors and staff of the Center For Cross-Cultural Research for breaking away from the ordinary (I sure hope their tenure committees take notice as well...).
The always helpful Librarian's Internet Index pointed me today towards some interesting charts at the Energy Information Administration showing "real" (i.e. inflation adjusted) gasoline and other petroleum product prices over time. Most of the charts date back to 1980 but the one below, dating back to 1919, seemed the most interesting. Of course, the importance of gasoline in the US economy is far more significant than it was in 1919 (and maybe than even in 1983), but it is still useful to get the historical perspective.
