Featured Book: Thinking Fast and Slow

Our copy here.

Should you think fast or slow? Some people say your Zen like first instinct reaction is the correct one. And that's a legitimate point of view.

Some people say no – saying that your first instinct is almost always wrong and you should stop and think carefully.

Thinking Fast and Slow is the title of this book by Daniel Kahnemann. He delights in pointing out how simple tricks like anchoring bias affect people's cognition. The book lists several other cognition failures that produce incorrect short-term judgment. It's worth reading to get an idea of these pitfalls.

Both schools of thought - be Zen, be cautious - probably have merit.

New Marketline Video

I made a new video about getting market share, size, and company/brand shares in Marketline.

Texas Exports

See specifically what Texas exports and to where. You can search by industry and where the products end up.
Exports by metropolitan area.

Also check out our database USA TRADEONLINE (available only in the library unfortunately).

Helping You Analyze Simply Map And Other Economic Demographic Data

Enrico Moretti's The New Geography Of Jobs can help you understand the significance of demographic and economic data like you would find a database like Simply Map.

With all the different variables out there, how can you predict the future based on the data and what data should you be looking for?  What is the significance of some of these numbers?

You'll find what to look for - the type of work, size of firms (this matters), nature of those industries, and more interesting ideas that you can use as an analytical tools. Some types of workers and industries can retool very quickly or take on new kinds of work.  Obviously this leads to much greater economic successful transitions.  The opposite is true in some cases, which leads to less successful transition and stagnation.

You'll be able to predict how a city might react to an economic transformation or what the future might hold for the city. 

This work seems to build very much on the conceptual ideas by Jane Jacobs in this book here.

Orbis Tutorial 2: Creating Your Custom Search

In this tutorial, learn to do custom searches in Orbis. Find companies by financial data, geography, ratios, industry and more.

Lynda.com: Computer Tutorials Database

Learn about Lynda.com here

Also available on the databases page.

Lynda.com is a great database you can now access for computer help tutorials. Learn how to use spreadsheets, image editing software, and any other computer program! People really like this database.

How To Find A Book Video Tutorial

This video shows you how to locate books at the Alkek Library.