Think For Yourself is a well‐designed Macintosh CD‐ROM. The software and the interface are user‐friendly, requiring no previous computer literacy. Users can be at the high school, college, or research level. The sections are organized in Hypercard stacks, an environment familiar to most Mac users. A Starter Stack contains all the basics and leads us into a description of the contents and an overview of the system requirements (System 7.0 or later, Hypercard player 2.1 or later, 4MB RAM).
A demo stack leads into a practical review of the functions of the interface. Other stacks are dedicated to individual time series of data such as: World Environment, Demographics, Health and U.S. Economics. The U.N. Population Division and the U.S. Census Bureau provide most of the data. The CD includes particularly interesting environmental data related to global climate change from the World Ozone Data Center published in Trends ‘93 (released September, 1994) about the atmospheric ozone levels. It also contains data about food & agriculture from the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, about U.S. energy from the U.S. Department of Energy, about the World Energy Projection System from the U.S. Department of Energy, and about U.S. and global temperatures & precipitation from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center.
The CD also includes worldwide demographic data from the United Nations Population Division, U.S. economic data from the Regional Economic Information System and from the U.S. Department of Commerce. It contains U.S. health data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System Health Data. The CD also encapsulates data on sexually transmitted diseases from the Centers For Disease Control and AIDS data from the World Health Organization. Think For Yourself includes the Declaration of the Rio Conference on Environment and Development together with other supporting documents.
The interface has two main cards: a Summary Card and a Data Card. The search capabilities are limited to the most common statistical combinations although the criterion predictions feature allow detailed selection and automated projections of data. Selected data can be exported to a text editor, to a spreadsheet of choice or to PEMD Discovery TM, a program of visual analysis, that allows manipulation as well as charting and plotting of the data. The charting functions are very limited, however.
The software comes with a brief system requirement sheet for
printed documentation. The ondisc documentation about the data is extensive and formatted in Adobe Acrobat as is the documentation for the stacks and for the visual analysis program. The Acrobat Reader TM comes with the CD; and the manuals can be easily printed or consulted on the screen. There is no hard copy manual; and customer support does not have a toll‐free number.
This product fits into the lower end as far as the interface is concerned and into the upper end for the quality of the contents and data. It contains an extensive library of data and problems related to broad environmental issues. I recommend this software to whomever may be interested in having access to updated data on world environment and health and especially to libraries and public institutions.
