Link fest

I've made a few discoveries.

1.Bill Goeff's Econ Search Engine (Google Trial III) is a customized search engine that "lets you use Google to search the contents of some 10,000 economics web sites (the URLs are from RFE and EDIRC)." The best part is that you can add his search engine directly to your Google homepage.

How useful is it? Very. For example, if you search for the word "toilet" using Google, you'll find The Home of Toilet Art, Humor, and Fun Facts. But use Bill's Econ Search Engine and you'll be led to worldwide portable toilet sales. Voila. No more humour, fun, and all that crap. Thanks Bill! Log into your Google account, click on Google Gadgets For Your Webpage, and run a search for "Econ Search Engine Google Trial III."

2. I'm really digging the Vancouver Housing blog. Don't let the name fool you. There's a lot to learn here. For example, here, he/she asks if immigration is driving the Vancouver housing boom. And here he/she looks at median family incomes in cities across Canada. And if you need more convincing, it won best Canadian business blog this year. Unfortunately, the author is on a holiday hiatus, but the archives are worth reading for now.

3. I often wish that Canada would catch up to the U.S. and the U.K. when it comes to the frequency in which (some) data is collected, as well as the accessibility of (some) data.

But now we have Swivel available to us, which could possibly, maybe, perhaps improve the data accessibility problem as long as people use it, and use it well. Tech Crunch has an explanation (h/t Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science).