POOP Research Tools

[Kea]

This thread is for research tools and resources to help your fellow Sluggites to find information on the web for free. This is not the place to post links to individual articles you find interesting - this isn't WOHPAH POOP. The rule of thumb is: only put it here if you think it'll come in useful in the future and if it will help someone find something.

Bugmenot.com
Contains free usernames and passwords that you can borrow to access many content-restricted news sites, including the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Just plug in the site name and see if it gives you a password. You can also share your passwords with others there, if you wish.

However, the website does not offer passwords to pay-subscription sites, such as Time.com, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times Select.

Technorati
A blogosphere search engine. If you can't read a restricted article yourself, one useful though potentially hazardous strategy is to search for references to the article in the blogosphere. Bloggers will often quote snippets of articles mixed in with their own commentary, so that you can get an idea of what the article is about. Of course, trust the accuracy of bloggers at your own peril.

Google Groups.
Also a good place to look for article snippets.

*Note: Some news sources do not let you read their archives. Articles older than 2 weeks or a month old will become pay-per-view, inaccessible even to account holders. If another poster's linked article seems to have gone dead, that's probably what happened.

Statistics and Data

US Bureau of Economic Analysis for your economic data.
Congressional Budget Office for statistics about US government spending.
Bureau of Labor Statistics is self-explanatory
US Census Bureau for social trend statistics.

If anyone wants to add (English language) sources for other countries' statistics, you're welcome to.

CIA World Factbook has useful and brief profiles of every country in the world.

The Economist Country Briefings offer data, economic forecasts, brief summaries of recent political situations, and some articles about 60 countries. Most of the information is free, but some articles are firewalled.

World Bank Data and Statistics for more international comparative data. It even has a function to build your own tables (somewhere). The site navigation on this website is a mess, so be warned.

Some Rules to Live By (when linking to blogs)
Linking to articles and data is encouraged here in POOP. If you hang around here long enough, you'll find that other posters will frequently ask you to provide links and cite your sources. However, a few restrictions on links apply.

1. As per general Community Standards, you may not link to other discussion forums and message boards. This is to prevent disputes in other parts of the internet from spilling over onto Sluggy.net.

2. You may link to blogs in POOP (but not the rest of the Sluggy.net) provided that these rules are followed:

a) You may not link to your own blog. This is not the place to advertise your own political commentary. The only exception to this rule is if you have written an incredibly long treatise and wish other sluggites to give you feedback on it, in that case we'd prefer you to host it offsite (if possible, not mandatory) to keep the Sluggy board easy on everyone's eyes.

b) Do not link to other blogs and ask Sluggites to go over there and post comments praising/criticizing the author. Do not go to blogs and ask their readers to come join arguments on Sluggy.net.

c) Link to blogs only if you want to discuss what's written in the blogger's own main post. Don't provide links to things that you or others have written in the blog's comments section. This is like linking to a message board.

d) Be cautious when linking to blogs to support your arguments. You can do it, but be aware that blogs represent the point of view of just one person and that their contents may be inaccurate. Don't be surprised if others challenge their veracity.

e) The general rules for quoting copyrighted materials on Sluggy.net apply to blogs too: don't quote people's entire blog posts here. You can quote selected snippets, but not the whole thing.

[MrJest]

Nifty idea for a thread!!

The US Constitution, DOI, and other document links from the Library of Congress can be handy.

[Surgoshan]

And that's why they made her a POOP mod. Go Kea!

[Kaintukee_Bob]

Since you're all going to argue about religion anyway, I guess I may as well give you this:

BibleGateway: Including 21 different (English) translations of the Bible. I personally like the New Living Translation, as it tries to keep it easily understandable and translates with context (for the most part).

[Kea]

The POOP policy for linking to blogs has been clarified. I've put the guidelines up in my OP above, and over in the POOP Rules thread too. Hope this helps.

[Grillick]

I've found this to be the most navigable, user-friendly, and helpful resource for the US Constitution.

[kirby1024]

As a brief note for statistical data (for at least a small segment of the various datas, anyway), people might be interested in Gapminder, a graphical presentation webapp that takes the publically accessible data and allows you to view it in graphical form, including across time. Certainly, it's useful for quite a few of the statistics we discuss on POOP!

[caffeine]

Eurostat (the Eu's office of statistics) in English! Enjoy.

[kirby1024]

Oh! I should point out the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Importantly, all ABS documents are free, so no money or registration is required to access them.

[arcosh]

http://www.parties-and-elections.de/countries.html

In case someone wants to look up election results or party landscapes. More for quick and dirty, has little in depth stuff like election systems used and such.

[Kea]

VoteGopher.com. Compares the positions of 2008's presidential candidates on 16 different issues.

[caffeine]

Just came across this website while arguing with someone about European employment laws today. Here you can find the full texts of all 17,047 pieces of European legislation currently in force.

[Weremensh]

FRED is probably the most useful site for economic data around. The St Louis Federal Reserve Bank aggregates data from all over the world, and serves it up in easy to read and customize charts (or the raw data if you prefer). Leans towards American statistics, but you can find almost anything here (or at least a link to a better source).