for the book mark: - Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's RECON - Brief Article

American Demographics, Feb, 2001 by American Demographics Staff

www2.fdic.gov/recon If you're looking for economic data, this is the site for you. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's RECON: Regional Economic Conditions site - once the domain of bank examiners to help them track changes in local economies - is now available to the public. With this user-friendly site, just point and click to find tables and charts of data on employment, income, wages, and home sales, among other variables. Data is available for states, metro areas, and counties. For example, you can get information on Philadelphia's total payroll and government employment growth for the past 20 years and compare it to the state of Pennsylvania and the U.S. You can use the drop-down menus to take a gander at graphs, tables, and maps depicting economic conditions and how they have changed over time. This site also computes location quotients and offers an annual state-level measure of economic diversity. An added attraction: A "shopping cart" feature lets you assemble a series of charts and tables, and then print these out at the end of your session.

www.tdcj.state.tx.us/statistics/stats-home.htm The Lone Star State's Department of Criminal Justice Web site provides visitors with all sorts of stats on its criminals and incarceration rates. This includes data on death row inmates, probation, prisons, financial and health services, substance abuse, felony punishment, and risk management in the prison population. You can also click to view scheduled executions, and even gender and racial statistics for death row offenders. Curious about who's on death row? Read the profiles of current and executed inmates, documenting their crimes and vital statistics.

www.africa.com If you're looking for resources on all things African, this site is the mother lode. Need stats on Kenya's population and employment rates? Search by country or continent to find information on this and much more, including daily news articles and colorful relief maps that you can click for a closer look into geography, climate, health, religion, history, business, government, sports, and travel and tourism. The site also provides a wealth of links to African embassies; political, conservation, and health organizations; business and education sites; and media, among others. As a bonus, Afri-facts provides quick and interesting tidbits on the continent and individual territories. For your memory bank, Africa forms nearly a quarter (22 percent) of the world's total land area.

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