Will Russia and the rest of the CIS soon face a period of unrest and upheavals similar to the “Arab Spring,”  which has spread throughout the MENA region? A free publication by the Economist Intelligence Unit, called the Democracy Index 2011, discusses this issue in more depth and covers a host of other issues pertaining to the state of democracy worldwide.

Click on the following link and enter your information for instant access  Democracy Index 2011

Come to the MCOM 320 Open Lab, Leticia Camacho, Business Librarian and David Cluff, Phil Bicker & Kimball Hicks, Business Student assistants will be there ready to assist you with your library research. Free printing!

The Encyclopedia of Global Industries is a fantastic resource for understanding different industries on a worldwide scale. Over 125 separate industries are represented under 23 broad categories, selected by a group of business experts. Each article provides an industry snapshot, details on the organization of companies within the industry, historical background, current conditions, new technologies, work force demographics, industry leaders, and countries involved.

Unfortunately, there is no direct link to this resource, but it can be found by searching for Gale Virtual Reference Library in the “find a database” search bar on this site or the library’s website. Browse for this specific title in the business list of e-books. Once you have clicked on The Encyclopedia of Global Industries 5th Edition, use the drop-down menus under the Table of Contents to find an industry of interest or type the name of the industry in the search bar on the left side of the page. Gale also allows the entries to be viewed as a PDF, emailed, downloaded in an audio format, or translated into another language.

There’s a new kind of options market where the answer to questions like that could earn you a nice return on investment. The Allstate Sugar Bowl, which hosts next year’s game, is selling what amounts to options on the game’s tickets. For as little as $30 you can buy an option to purchase tickets at face value should BYU make it into the championship game. No refunds, should BYU fail to make the championship.

Want a less risky investment? Starting at $115 you can buy options for this year’s teams, Oregon or Auburn. Of course, if BYU were to be 12-0 at the end of next season, how much profit do you think you could make by selling your $30 options to other BYU fans?

They’re calling these “Team Ticket Reservations,” and you can find the market here.

So whether you’re willing to part with $30 just in case BYU somehow makes it to the championship and you want a guaranteed spot at low cost, or whether you’re willing to spend $85 for options on Alabama, knowing that if they make it to the game you could gain a huge return selling your options to the Crimson Tide faithful, in either case we have one more reason to pay as much attention to ESPN as NYSE.

Do you want to find information on a subject but don’t know where to begin? Try one of our  subject guides! (right hand column of this page)

We have subject guides on everything from Marketing to Bloomberg as well as on specific courses like Mcom 320. If you are unsure how to use a database suggested by the subject guides, please feel free to visit our video tutorials on various databases (top left of this page).

Please visit http://lib.byu.edu/sites/scholarsarchive/ for these posters and for economic and student published market reports such as A complete market study for graduate student textbook bundling and Racial Bias in the NBA: Implications in Betting Markets

To this point I came across an apt quote yesterday, from Thomas Mann at the Library of Congress:

“The belief that ‘everything’ will be freely available to everyone on the Internet, from anywhere, at anytime, is based on unworkable Marxist assumptions about human nature.”

Mann makes a strong argument that as long as copyright exists information will be for sale (3). I’d add that as long as tools and processes are developed that add value to information, access to those technologies will also be for sale. But I do think Mann underestimates the ingenuity of market forces. Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, makes the case in his latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (4), that money can be made by giving things away. After all, Google has no trouble turning a profit without charging people to use its search engine.

Will this hold true to the point where ‘everything’ will become freely available on the Internet? Probably not. If there’s one thing that’s certain in business it’s that there will never be only one business model. As much as the phenomenon of “Free” has put unprecedented amounts of information at our fingertips, there’s even more that’s available for a price, and as Mann points out, short of a worldwide disavowal of intellectual property, there always will be.

Common wisdom has it that information wants to be free, but common sense dictates that people want to get paid.

“I noticed some parallels between our own finances, banks, toxic real estate assets, and economic recovery plans and those of Austria in earlier years.”

Here are four of the titles he mentions, with translations:

1862: Die dringende Nothwendigkeit zur unverzüglichen Expropriation des Privilegiums der Bank zu Gunsten der gesammten Völker Oesterreichs…
1862:  The Acute Need for Immediate Expropriation of Bank Privileges for the Benefit of the Entire Austrian People…

1912:  Zur Lösung der Wohnungsfrage in Österreich…
1912:  On Solving the Housing Problem in Austria…

1927:  Bankenskandal: Eine Billion Steuergelder verschleudert!
1927: Bank Scandal: One Trillion (yes, trillion – false cognate) in Tax Money Down the Rat Hole!

1932: Wiederaufbau der Wirtschaft durch international organisierte Selbsthilfe…
1932: Economic Recovery through Internationally Organized Self-Help…