Thomas Stowe

I strive to provide the best service I can by presenting the information and solution you seek with one-hundred percent transparency into where the information came from. If I give you a non-patented solution to your problem to enhance fertility of soil that came from research done at a university, I won't claim I thought of it myself. I strive to provide honesty and give credit where credit is due and only claim that I will provide you a solution by any means I have at my disposal. "Impossible" is in my vocabulary, but not when applied to finding information that does exist. I will work on any problem, whether it's for free and an action that I can add to my resume or career portfolio or for a large amount of money as compensation.

I'm particular knowledgeable in tracking down information. To be specific, information that which is obscure and has not been "pioneered" yet. I'm interested and knowledgeable in all the areas I specified. I tend to focus on engineering and materials sciences.

I research using all resources I have available.

Generally I start with the use of an online search engine which in all cases begins with google. Google has many resources at its' disposal, including JSTOR and other scholarly journals which I've subscribed to at times to get information on a particular topic.

I then move to documents published on many of the document sharing and storage sites, for example scribd.com and Google Books.

Following that I tend to focus on those websites I know have more authority and likely relevant and factual information -- .edu and .gov websites. Top level domain extension doesn't mean anything for the most part, but these are 100% sure bets for "good" information that may help me in the solution I'm providing to a client.

I then turn to tools such as Paterva Maltego - a very, very, very powerful information gathering tool and if it turns up many many lines of interest relating that someone or an entity (company or group) might be experts on it I might consult them for information and it reveals sources related to both the topic and also to my prior searches of .edu and .gov sites.

Next I generate a list of "key words" generated with the Google Keyword tool, a commercial software sold privately and a search-engine based text mining tool that searches for keyword density in relation to the main subjects and topics I'm searching for and run these through the same searches.

This has not failed me in finding the information I seek.