My good neighbors down the road, down the
road, Lon and Nancy Henderson, own and manage the Sunset Hill House ---
http://www.sunsethillhouse.com/
They are also building a new house down a bit on Lafayette Road.
The Hendersons just adopted a young boy (age five) and his sister (age eight)
from China, and the joy in the Henderson family is one of boundless
anticipation.
You may share their joy (with pictures) and read about a request for a swatch of
cloth at
http://chengduodyssey.blogspot.com/
Perhaps some of you can send them a swatch of cloth at the following address:
Sunset Hill House
231 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
The entire family's desire to love and care for these orphan children from so
far away brings tears to my eyes.
The snow is
about knee high on the level in my lawn, which is less than normal for this time
of year. Judging from the tracks in front of my window, one huge moose walked
across my yard in the night. Although deer tracks are common all winter (deer
sometimes eat on my cedar trees, grrrr), it's not at all common too see moose
tracks in the heart of winter, especially when temperatures are well below zero
in the night. In order to conserve energy, a moose normally stands like a statue
deep in the woods this time of year,
Although he
looks as big as a bear in my front lawn, the picture below is that of Woody, my
woodchuck, who lives under my studio beside our cottage. There's no basement
under the curved-roof studio, so Woody could dig his deep hole under my desk. Actually I
don't really know if this is Woody below or his wife Birch. Their studio
digs are between our house and our white barn on the other side of the trees.
Windy Mt. Washington
Winter
in Norway (slide show) ---
Click Here
Forwarded by Gene and Joan
It's winter in New Hampshire
And the gentle breezes blow
Seventy miles an hour
At thirty-five below.
Oh, how I love New Hampshire
When the snow's up to your butt
You take a breath of winter
And your nose gets frozen shut.
Yes, the weather here is wonderful
So I guess I'll hang around
I could never leave New Hampshire
Cuz my feet are frozen to the ground!
Have a great day!
Tidbits on January 27, 2009
Bob Jensen
For earlier editions of Tidbits go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/.
Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Bob Jensen's Home Page is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
Bob Jensen's Search Helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
Free Telephone Directory (you must listen to an opening advertisement) ---
800-FREE411
Free Online Telephone Directory ---
http://snipurl.com/411directory [www_public-records-now_com]
Free online 800 telephone numbers ---
http://www.tollfree.att.net/tf.html
Google Free Business Phone Directory --- 800-goog411
To find names addresses from listed phone numbers, go to
www.google.com and read in the phone number
without spaces, dashes, or parens
To find some cell phone numbers (for a fee):
The "Free Cell Phone Tracer" only indicates that it has found the cell phone
owner's name and address. Then your must pay to see that name and address.
http://www.b2byellowpages.com/directory/b2b_directory_guide/800-phone-directory.shtml
Bob Jensen's essay on the financial crisis bailout's aftermath and an alphabet soup of
appendices can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
Essay
-
Introductory Quotations
-
The Bailout's Hidden, Albeit Noble, Agenda
(for added details see Appendix Y)
-
A Step Back in History Barney's Rubble
Appendix A: Impending Disaster in the U.S.
Appendix B: The Trillion Dollar Bet in 1993
Appendix C: Don't Blame Fair Value Accounting
Standards This includes a bull crap case based on an article by the former
head of the FDIC
Appendix D: The End of Investment Banking as We
Know It
Appendix E: Your Money at Work, Fixing Others’
Mistakes (includes a great NPR public radio audio module)
Appendix F: Christopher Cox Waits Until Now to
Tell Us His Horse Was Lame All Along S.E.C. Concedes Oversight Flaws Fueled
Collapse And This is the Man Who Wants Accounting Standards to Have Fewer
Rules
Appendix G: Why the $700 Billion Bailout
Proposed by Paulson, Bush, and the Guilty-Feeling Leaders in Congress Won't
Work
Appendix H: Where were the auditors? The
aftermath will leave the large auditing firms in a precarious state?
Appendix I: 1999 Quote from The New York Times
''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the
way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''
Appendix J: Will the large auditing firms
survive the 2008 banking meltdown?
Appendix K: Why not bail out everybody and
everything?
Appendix L: The trouble with crony capitalism
isn't capitalism. It's the cronies.
Appendix M: Reinventing the American Dream
Appendix N: Accounting Fraud at Fannie Mae
Appendix O: If Greenspan Caused the Subprime
Real Estate Bubble, Who Caused the Second Bubble That's About to Burst?
Appendix P: Meanwhile in the U.K., the
Government Protects Reckless Bankers
Appendix Q: Bob Jensen's Primer on Derivatives
(with great videos from CBS)
Appendix R: Accounting Standard Setters
Bending to Industry and Government Pressure to Hide the Value of Dogs
Appendix S: Fooling Some People All the Time
Appendix T: Regulations Recommendations
Appendix U: Subprime: Borne of Sleaze, Bribery,
and Lies
Appendix V: Implications for Educators,
Colleges, and Students
Appendix W: The End
Appendix: X: How Scientists Help Cause Our
Financial Crisis
Appendix Y: The Bailout's Hidden Agenda
Details
Appendix Z: What's the rush to re-inflate
the stock market?
Personal Note from Bob Jensen
On May 14, 2006 I retired from Trinity University after a long
and wonderful career as an accounting professor in four universities. I was
generously granted "Emeritus" status by the Trustees of Trinity University. My
wife and I now live in a cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm
Bob Jensen's blogs and various threads on many topics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
(Also scroll down to the table at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ )
Global Incident Map ---
http://www.globalincidentmap.com/home.php
Set up free conference calls at
http://www.freeconference.com/
Also see
http://www.yackpack.com/uc/
Bob Jensen's Search Helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
Free Telephone Directory (you must listen to an opening advertisement) ---
800-FREE411
Free Online Telephone Directory ---
http://snipurl.com/411directory [www_public-records-now_com]
Free online 800 telephone numbers ---
http://www.tollfree.att.net/tf.html
Google Free Business Phone Directory --- 800-goog411
To find names addresses from listed phone numbers, go to
www.google.com and read in the phone number
without spaces, dashes, or parens
To find some cell phone numbers (for a fee):
The "Free Cell Phone Tracer" only indicates that it has found the cell phone
owner's name and address. Then your must pay to see that name and address.
http://www.b2byellowpages.com/directory/b2b_directory_guide/800-phone-directory.shtml
U.S. Social Security Retirement
Benefit Calculators ---
http://www.socialsecurity.gov/estimator/
After 2017 what we would really like is a choice between our full social
security benefits or 18 Euros each month ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
Free Online Tutorials in Multiple Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Chronicle of Higher Education's 2008-2009
Almanac ---
http://chronicle.com/free/almanac/2008/?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on economic and social statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Tips on computer and networking
security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
If you want to help our badly injured troops, please check out
Valour-IT: Voice-Activated Laptops for Our Injured Troops ---
http://www.valour-it.blogspot.com/
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Welcome to the White House (under new tennants) ---
http://www.whitehouse.gov/
Welfare for the Rich
Bailout Plan by Wanda Sykes on Jay Leno Show ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXznKV7rw7k
Wipeout things (not recommended for those on Social Security)
---
Click Here
Automatic Confession ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgmQM9cDPHk
A 10-Minute Government Lesson ---
http://www.wimp.com/thegovernment
Hulu's Large Library of Contemporary Videos ---
http://www.hulu.com/
From MIT: Beetle Boat Runs on Surface Tension ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=209
Budweiser 9/11 Commercial (aired once) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtf3gNfVlkg
National Geographic: Endangered Species Photo Map ---
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/01/endangered-species/photo-map-interactive
From CBS: The Animal Odd Couple (following a commercial)
---
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4696315n
Gas Right Strips (video humor) ---
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/2238347/gas_right/
Creative License (card animation from Adobe) ---
http://www.adobecards.com/
Who Packed Your Parachute? (slide show) ---
http://www.slideshare.net/bmw53/who-packed-your-parachute-presentation
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
TheRadio (my favorite commercial-free
online music site) ---
http://www.theradio.com/
Slacker (my second-favorite commercial-free online music site) ---
http://www.slacker.com/
Gerald Trites likes this
international radio site ---
http://www.e-radio.gr/
Songza:
Search for a song or band and play the selection ---
http://songza.com/
Also try Jango ---
http://www.jango.com/?r=342376581
Sometimes this old guy prefers the jukebox era (just let it play through) ---
http://www.tropicalglen.com/
And I listen quite often to Soldiers Radio Live ---
http://www.army.mil/fieldband/pages/listening/bandstand.html
Also note U.S. Army Band recordings
---
http://bands.army.mil/music/default.asp
Only You (Platters slide show) ---
http://worriersanonymous.org/Share/OnlyYou.htm
Adele And Angel Taylor, Recorded Live ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99420931
Jenny Lewis: Drawn Back To Country ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99468180
Take Me Back to the 1960s (snippets only)---
http://objflicks.com/TakeMeBackToTheSixties.htm
Howard University Band Bound For Inauguration ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99467288
Photographs and Art
Pictures of Science: 700 Years of Scientific and
Medical Illustration ---
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/?collection=SeeingIsBelieving700&col_id=197
The MacKinney Collection of Medieval Medical
Illustrations ---
http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/mackinney/
National Geographic: Endangered Species Photo Map
---
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/01/endangered-species/photo-map-interactive
SFMOMA: Explore Modern Art ---
http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/multimedia
Natural England ---
http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/
The Art of African Exploration ---
http://www.sil.si.edu/Exhibitions/ArtofAfricanExploration/
Aluka (art history in Africa) ---
http://www.aluka.org/
Winter in Norway (slide show) ---
Click Here
Who Packed Your Parachute? (slide show) ---
http://www.slideshare.net/bmw53/who-packed-your-parachute-presentation
Julian Beever has made pavement drawings for over
ten years. He has worked all over the world ---
http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm
Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various
types electronic literature available free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Electronic Literature Directory ---
http://directory.eliterature.org/
International War Veterans' Poetry Archives ---
http://iwvpa.net/index.php
Bob Jensen's Helpers
for Writers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob3.htm#Dictionaries
Bob Jensen's Grammar Helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob3.htm#Dictionaries
Bob Jensen's links to Dictionaries, Thesauruses, Encyclopedias, and
Almanacs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob3.htm#Dictionaries
- Internet
Resources ---
http://www.internet-resources.com/writers/wrlinks-wordstuff.htm
-
- Carnegie Mellon
Libraries: Digital Library Colloquium (video lectures) ---
http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/DLColloquia.html
-
- Free Merriam
Webster Online Dictionary/Thesaurus ---
http://www.m-w.com/
Literary
Terms ---
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/index.html
Literary
Criticism ---
http://www.ipl.org/div/litcrit/
Internet
FAQ Archives ---
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/
Origins of Words and Phrases ---
http://www.meghan-mccarthy.com/articles_sayings.html
Shakespeare
Quotations ---
http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/themes/love
Type in a word to
find its rhymes, synonyms, definitions, and more ---
http://rhyme.poetry.com/r/rhyme.cgi?Word=picket&typeofrhyme=perfect&org1=syl&org2=l&cbr=pc
Accounting, Finance, and Business
Glossaries ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbus.htm
Common Errors in
English ---
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/
Welcome to the White House ---
http://www.whitehouse.gov/
The joyous crowd, an estimated two million strong,
did not seem ready to let President Obama speak when he took the podium; they
were cheering, clapping and shouting and didn't seem to want to stop. The new
president seemed prepared for this, and barreled through and on, saying "My
fellow Americans" with a quieting authority. The audience settled down. But it
was a real expression of the feeling of the day, the wave upon wave of cheers
and chants that came from the sea of people. This is what Mr. Obama said: In a
time when all wonder if our nation's best days are behind us, we need to know
that the answer is no. We continue. We go on. This is not journey's end. That, I
think, is what the-18 minute speech came down to. Are we in a difficult moment?
Yes, it is a time of "gathering clouds and raging storms." There is "a nagging
fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must
lower its sights." We face great challenges, but "know this, America—they will
be met." How? We will meet them by being who we are. Our success depends on the
American "values" of "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance
and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism." He said, "These things are old. These
things are true." Like those who've long fought in our armed forces, Americans
have shown "a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves."
Peggy Noonan, "Meet President Obama:
He Begins With a Serious, Solid Inaugural Address," The Wall Street Journal,
January 21, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123248758908299555.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
To believe, suspend disbelief. We have been through
this before, the flags and fine speeches, the brass donkey paperweight, the
glass elephant, the rise and fall of administrations, the coming and going of
figures great and small. It's good to put that aside for a few days, to remove
yourself from politics, partisanship and faction, to suspend your disbelief, to
be grateful that the signs and symbols endure, as does the republic, and raise a
toast: "To the president of the United States."
Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street
Journal, January 16, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123206567998588075.html?mod=djemEditorialPage&mg=com-wsj
After generations of finding their voice in
dissidence, some on America's left wing are adjusting not only to a new,
postelection comfort with patriotic symbols, but the political reality they
represent. Believing in Obama after inauguration day will mean identifying with
the machinery of American power. "There's a left-wing tradition of being
systematically opposed to the US government, knee-jerk reactionary--most of our
presidents have made it fairly easy to do," said Jo Freeman, author of "At
Berkeley in the Sixties," a memoir of her student activism. "Those who view
everything the US does as automatically suspect already have a problem doing
that with Obama."
Sasha Issenberg ,"Something new
brews in Berkeley: patriotic pride Left wing looks to Obama," Boston Globe,
January 4, 2009 ---
Click Here
The stimulus bill currently steaming through
Congress looks like a legislative freight train, but given last week's analysis
by the Congressional Budget Office, it is more accurate to think of it as a time
machine. That may be the only way to explain how spending on public works in
2011 and beyond will help the economy today. According to Congressional Budget
Office estimates, a mere $26 billion of the House stimulus bill's $355 billion
in new spending would actually be spent in the current fiscal year, and just
$110 billion would be spent by the end of 2010. This is highly embarrassing
given that Congress's justification for passing this bill so urgently is to help
the economy right now, if not sooner. And the red Congressional faces must be
very red indeed, because CBO's analysis has since vanished into thin air after
having been posted early last week on the Appropriations Committee Web site.
Officially, the committee says this is because the estimates have been
superseded as the legislation has moved through committee. No doubt.
David Obey, "The Stimulus Time
Machine That $355 billion in spending isn't about the economy," The Wall
Street Journal, January 26, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123292987008414041.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
The House made its first down payment on President
Obama's health-care plans last week, passing 289-139 a major expansion of the
State Children's Health Insurance Program. The Senate is scheduled to take it up
soon and pass it easily as well. These days tens of billions in new spending is
a mere pittance, but Schip is also the Democratic model for a quantum jump in
government health care down the line. The bill became a liberal Pequot after
President Bush repeatedly vetoed it in 2007 (while supporting a modest
expansion). The GOP has no hope of stopping it now, so Schip will more than
double in size with $73.3 billion in new spending over the next decade --
not counting a budget gimmick that hides the true cost.
The program is supposed to help children from working-poor families who earn too
much to qualify for Medicaid, but since it was created in 1997 Democrats have
used it as a ratchet to grow the federal taxpayer share of health-care coverage.
With the new bill, Schip will be open to everyone up to 300% of the federal
poverty level, or $63,081 for a family of four. In other words, a program
supposedly targeted at low-income families has an eligibility ceiling higher
than the U.S. median household income, which according to the Census Bureau is
$50,233. Even the 300% figure isn't really a ceiling, given that states can get
a government waiver to go even higher. Tom Daschle's folks at Health and Human
Services will barely read the state paperwork before rubberstamping these
expansions.
"The Latest Entitlement: Federal health care at 300% of
poverty," The Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123249769747600423.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
My unfinished essay of the pending collapse of the United States ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/entitlements.htm
There is a major social and cultural message in the
current economic collapse for the future retirees of America: Forget retirement.
That's right. The recession is making clear what we've suspected for a long
time. The concept of not working and embracing leisure for the last third of
one's life isn't practical for most people.
Chris Farrell, "Why You'll Work
Through Your Retirement: The recession is only one of several trends
combining to change the way Americans live out their golden years," Business
Week, January 21, 2009 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/jan2009/pi20090121_749273.htm?link_position=link1
In a few hours, George W. Bush will walk out of the
Oval Office for the last time as president. As he leaves, he carries with him
the near-universal opprobrium of the permanent class that inhabits our nation's
capital. Yet perhaps the most important reason for this unpopularity is the one
least commented on. Here's a hint: It's not because of his failures. To the
contrary, Mr. Bush's disfavor in Washington owes more to his greatest success.
Simply put, there are those who will never forgive Mr. Bush for not losing a war
they had all declared unwinnable.
William McGurn, "Bush's Real Sin Was
Winning in Iraq," The Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123241360913796235.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Jensen Comment
There's a lot more to pick on now that Bush will be writing his memoirs. I blame
Bush for the Seniors' Medicare Drug Plan. This is an entitlement program that I
benefit big time largely because my wife has so many expensive medications. But
I'm benefitting at the great expense of future generations who will be paying
our bills when they eventually come due ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/entitlements.htm
Forwarded by Paula
Economic Stimulus Payment Plan
This year, taxpayers will receive an Economic
Stimulus Payment. This is a very exciting new program that I will explain
using the Q and A format:
Q. What is an Economic Stimulus Payment?
A. It is money that the federal government will send to taxpayers.
Q. Where will the government get this money?
A. From taxpayers.
Q. So the government is giving me back my own
money?
A. Only a smidgen.
Q. What is the purpose of this payment?
A. The plan is that you will use the money to purchase a high-definition TV
set or a new computer, thus stimulating the economy.
Q. But isn't that stimulating the economy of China?
A. Shut up.
Jensen Comment
Actually current taxpayers aren't paying a penny of the stimulus funds.
Either the money is being borrowed (heavily from China) or now the Federal
government is simply creating new money by printing it. It's so much fun for
Congress to get over a trillion dollars without having to tax or borrow.
We've become the Zimbabwe of the Western Hemisphere ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#NationalDebt
Zimbabwe's central bank will introduce a 100
trillion Zimbabwe dollar banknote, worth about $33 on the black market, to try
to ease desperate cash shortages, state-run media said on Friday.
KyivPost, January 16, 2009 ---
http://www.kyivpost.com/world/33522
Jensen Comment
This is a direct result of raising money by simply printing it, and the U.S.
should take note since this is how our Federal government has decided to pay for
anticipated trillion-dollar budget deficits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#NationalDebt
The United States will "look like a banana republic"
unless it gains control over its budget deficit and federal debt, economist
Allen Sinai warned Congress on Thursday. "The deficit and debt prospects under
almost any scenario are daunting," Mr. Sinai, chief global economist for
Decision Economics Inc., told the Senate Budget Committee. "This territory is
uncharted, with no real historical analogue to this kind of financial situation
for a major global economic power." Asked by committee Chairman Kent Conrad,
North Dakota Democrat, whether the U.S. government's creditworthiness is at
risk, Mr. Sinai replied, "Unequivocally yes." Richard Berner, chief U.S.
economist at Morgan Stanley, told the committee one measure of America's
creditworthiness -- credit default swap spreads -- already shows some
deterioration. The worse a nation's credit rating becomes, the more its CDS
spread rises. U.S. sovereign CDS spreads have widened to about 0.6 percent from
0.1 percent last summer, Mr. Berner noted. "So the message is that you ignore
global investors at your peril," he told the committee.
David M. Dixon, "Congress warned about debt U.S.
advised to gain control," The Washington Times, January 16, 2009 ---
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/16/policies-on-debt-a-risk-to-economy/
Among other decisions at its annual convention, NCAA
clears way for 7th graders to be considered official prospects for Division I
men’s basketball.
David Moltz, "Hoop Dream or Recruiting Nightmare?" Inside Higher Ed,
January 16, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/16/ncaa
Jensen Comment
It might be nice if they waited until their voices change and they start
shaving.
JPMorgan chief says worst of the crisis still to
come: FT Wed Jan 14, 10:13 pm ET LONDON (AFP) – The chief executive of US bank
JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, told the Financial Times on Thursday that the worst
of the economic crisis still lay ahead as hard-hit consumers default on their
loans. "The worst of the economic situation is not yet behind us. It looks as if
it will continue to deteriorate for most of 2009," he told the business daily.
"In terms of our sector, we expect consumer loans and credit cards to continue
to get worse."
Yahoo News, January 14, 2009 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090115/ts_afp/financeeconomyusbankingjpmorgan;_ylt=AusZcGqq4T_PqK9lQKPv5Dt34T0D
Bank of America (BoA) has received an extra $20bn in
US government funding and a guarantee back-stopping the losses on $118bn of its
most toxic assets in the latest bail-out of a major US financial institution.
James Quinn, "Bank of America to
receive $138bn lifeline from US," Telegraph, January 16, 2009 ---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
The shame is that BoA owned the mortgage brokering company, Countrywide
Financial, that caused much of the mess with crappy sub-prime loans ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Introduction
Approximately 60 to 70 percent of the oil contracts
in the futures markets are now held by speculative entities. Not by companies
that need oil, not by the airlines, not by the oil companies. But by investors
that...don't actually take delivery of the oil.
"Did Speculation Fuel Oil Price Swings? 60 Minutes: Speculation Affected Oil
Price Swings More Than Supply And Demand," CBS 60 Minutes, January 11,
2009 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/08/60minutes/main4707770.shtml
About the only economic break most
Americans have gotten in the last six months has been the drastic drop in
the price of oil, which has fallen even more precipitously than it rose. In
a year's time, a commodity that was theoretically priced according to supply
and demand doubled from $69 a barrel to nearly $150, and then, in a period
of just three months, crashed along with the stock market.
So what happened? It's a complicated
question, and there are lots of theories. But as correspondent Steve Kroft
reports, many people believe it was a speculative bubble, not unlike the one
that caused the housing crisis, and that it had more to do with traders and
speculators on Wall Street than with oil company executives or sheiks in
Saudi Arabia.
To understand what happened to the price
of oil, you first have to understand the way it's traded. For years it has
been bought and sold on something called the commodities futures market. At
the New York Mercantile Exchange, it's traded alongside cotton and coffee,
copper and steel by brokers who buy and sell contracts to deliver those
goods at a certain price at some date in the future.
It was created so that farmers could gauge
what their unharvested crops would be worth months in advance, so that
factories could lock in the best price for raw materials, and airlines could
manage their fuel costs. But more than a year ago those markets started to
behave erratically. And when oil doubled to more than $147 a barrel, no one
was more suspicious than Dan Gilligan.
As the president of the Petroleum
Marketers Association, he represents more than 8,000 retail and wholesale
suppliers, everyone from home heating oil companies to gas station owners.
When 60 Minutes talked to him last summer,
his members were getting blamed for gouging the public, even though their
costs had also gone through the roof. He told Kroft the problem was in the
commodities markets, which had been invaded by a new breed of investor.
"Approximately 60 to 70 percent of the oil
contracts in the futures markets are now held by speculative entities. Not
by companies that need oil, not by the airlines, not by the oil companies.
But by investors that are looking to make money from their speculative
positions," Gilligan explained.
Gilligan said these investors don't
actually take delivery of the oil. "All they do is buy the paper, and hope
that they can sell it for more than they paid for it. Before they have to
take delivery."
"They're trying to make money on the
market for oil?" Kroft asked.
"Absolutely," Gilligan replied. "On the
volatility that exists in the market. They make it going up and down."
He says his members in the home heating
oil business, like Sean Cota of Bellows Falls, Vt., were the first to notice
the effects a few years ago when prices seemed to disconnect from the basic
fundamentals of supply and demand. Cota says there was plenty of product at
the supply terminals, but the prices kept going up and up.
"We've had three price changes during the
day where we pick up products, actually don't know what we paid for it and
we'll go out and we'll sell that to the retail customer guessing at what the
price was," Cota remembered. "The volatility is being driven by the huge
amounts of money and the huge amounts of leverage that is going in to these
markets."
About the same time, hedge fund manager
Michael Masters reached the same conclusion. Masters' expertise is in
tracking the flow of investments into and out of financial markets and he
noticed huge amounts of money leaving stocks for commodities and oil
futures, most of it going into index funds, betting the price of oil was
going to go up.
Asked who was buying this "paper oil,"
Masters told Kroft, "The California pension fund. Harvard Endowment. Lots of
large institutional investors. And, by the way, other investors, hedge
funds, Wall Street trading desks were following right behind them, putting
money - sovereign wealth funds were putting money in the futures markets as
well. So you had all these investors putting money in the futures markets.
And that was driving the price up."
In a five year period, Masters said the
amount of money institutional investors, hedge funds, and the big Wall
Street banks had placed in the commodities markets went from $13 billion to
$300 billion. Last year, 27 barrels of crude were being traded every day on
the New York Mercantile Exchange for every one barrel of oil that was
actually being consumed in the United States.
"We talked to the largest physical trader
of crude oil. And they told us that compared to the size of the investment
inflows - and remember, this is the largest physical crude oil trader in the
United States - they said that we are basically a flea on an elephant, that
that's how big these flows were," Masters remembered.
Yet when Congress began holding hearings
last summer and asked Wall Street banker Lawrence Eagles of J.P. Morgan what
role excessive speculation played in rising oil prices, the answer was
little to none. "We believe that high energy prices are fundamentally a
result of supply and demand," he said in his testimony.
Continued in article
"Why Economics Is Important! (Mises & Keynes, Think So!)" Simolean
Sense, January 22, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/why-economics-is-important-mises-keynes-think-so/
“Practical men, who
believe themselves to be quite exempt from any
intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of
some defunct economist.”
“Economics must not
be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices
and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the
philosophy of human life and action and concerns
everybody and everything. It is the pith of
civilization and of man’s human existence…”
“In such vital
matters blind reliance upon
“experts” and uncritical acceptance of
popular catchwords and prejudices is
tantamount to the abandonment of self-determination
and to yielding to other people’s domination.”
“Economics deals
with society’s fundamental problems; it concerns
everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and
proper study of every citizen.”
How much to bail out the banks now? $3.5 trillion by one estimate
A federal program to guarantee or buy bad assets from
the ailing U.S. bank sector could come with a $3.5 trillion price tag. That
would push the accumulated costs of rescuing the financial markets over the last
year through various federal loan, stock purchase, debt guarantee and other
programs close to $9 trillion and counting, with practically no end in sight for
the bad news battering the banking industry. That figure doesn't count the $825
billion economic stimulus plan also under consideration. "We expect massive
federal intervention into the financial sector from the new administration in
the coming months," says Keefe Bruyette & Woods analyst Frederick Cannon, who
calculated the $3.5 trillion figure, which is one-quarter of the banking
sector's $14 trillion in combined assets.
Liz Moyer, "A TARP In The Trillions?"
Forbes, January 21, 2009 ---
http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/21/tarp-banking-treasury-biz-wall-cx_lm_0121tarp.html
Lesson One: What Really Lies Behind the Financial Crisis?
According to Siegel: Financial firms bought, held and
insured large quantities of risky, mortgage-related assets on borrowed money.
The irony is that these financial giants had little need to hold these
securities; they were already making enormous profits simply from creating,
bundling and selling them. 'During dot-com IPOs of the early 1990s, the firms
that underwrote the stock offerings did not hold on to those stocks,' Siegel
says. 'They flipped them. But in the case of mortgage-backed securities, the
financial firms decided these were good assets to hold. That was their fatal
flaw.'
"Lesson One: What Really Lies Behind the Financial Crisis?" Knowledge@Wharton,
January 21, 2009 ---
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2148
Jensen Comment
Lesson Two of what lies behind the financial crisis is that investment banks and
others like AIG wrote credit derivatives on the on the CDO collateralized debt
obligations that used mortgage backed securities as collateral. The companies
that wrote these derivatives did not have the insurance reserves to cover the
melt down of those CDOs. To avoid bankruptcy of giants such as AIG, the U.S.
treasury gave billions in bailout funds to cover the credit derivatives.
See Appendix E ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout
I think there was a hidden agenda with respect to why Hank Paulson's first
billions in bailout funds went to cover the credit derivative obligations.
See Appendix Y ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#HiddenAgendaDetails
Given that a share of General Motors is selling for
less than a cup of Starbucks coffee, it's likely our new President will be busy
putting chickens in pots and Americans in jobs. That's good news for public
education. The last thing American schools need is another educator-in-chief
with enough time on his hands to foist misguided education policy on the nation.
Unfortunately, experts and policymakers can do more than enough damage armed
with rhetoric alone. They're already turning back the education philosophy clock
to the 1970s, those golden years when self-esteem, the whole child, and our
current state of academic bankruptcy were born. We were almost headed in the
right direction for about five minutes. No Child Left Behind, with all its
faults -- and its faults are legion -- properly refocused schools on academic
content and fundamental skills like reading. Unfortunately, NCLB promptly
plunged off the testing deep end, taking its credibility with it. Now, right on
schedule, here comes the education pendulum, hurtling toward the other policy
extreme.
Poor Elijah (Peter Berger),
"Predicting the Past," The Irascible Professor, January 12, 2008 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-01-12-09.htm
Venezuelan predident and general all-around jerk (I
can think of better descriptors, but this is a generally family-friendly blog)
Hugo Chavez was a very good example of a free cash flow problem on a national
scale. He was flush with cash from Venezuela's huge oil reserves, and used oil
wealth to play the part of loudmouth and anti-US demnagogue. Along the way, he
hammered many of the large-multinational oil companies with increased taxes,
nationalization of their oil fields, and raids on their offices. Now, with oil
prices dropping, the Venezuelan economy is sputtering, and Chavez is suffering
from cash shortages. So, he's reaching out to the same companies he previously
gave the boot to (while seizing their assets). He's offering them access to
Venezuela's oil fields. But it looks like his past actions might be causing some
second thoughts . . .
"Hugh Chavez and Reputation Capital," Financial Rounds,
January 16, 2009 ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Saturday
Barack Obama had the "stench" of his predecessor as U.S. president and was at
risk of being killed if he tries to change the American "empire." Most world
leaders expect a new era of U.S. foreign relations when Obama, a Democrat, is
sworn in as president on Tuesday after Republican George W. Bush's eight years
in the White House. But Chavez said frayed ties with Washington were unlikely to
improve despite the departure of Bush, who the Venezuelan leader has often
called the "devil." "I hope I am wrong, but I believe Obama brings the same
stench, to not say another word," Chavez said at a political rally on a historic
Venezuelan battlefield. "If Obama as president of the United States does not
obey the orders of the empire, they will kill him, like they killed Kennedy,
like they killed Martin Luther King, or Lincoln, who freed the blacks and paid
with his life."
"Venezuela's Chavez says Obama has "stench" of Bush," Reuters. January
17, 2009 ---
Click Here
Say what? ACLU to sue Twin Cities charter school that caters to Muslims
The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota said it
will file suit today against a publicly funded charter school, alleging that it
is promoting the Muslim religion and that it is leasing school space from a
religious organization, the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, without
following state law. The suit was to be filed this afternoon in U.S. District
Court against Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, known as TIZA, and the Minnesota
Department of Education, which the ACLU says is at fault for failing to uncover
and stop the alleged transgressions. The suit names the department and Alice
Seagren, the state education commissioner, as co-defendants. The department
investigated the Twin Cities school last year, and the school said it had taken
corrective actions in response to concerns about the practicing of religion in
the school. TIZA officials have previously said they are in compliance with
federal and state regulations.
Randy Furst and Sarah Lemagie, "The
Minnesota ACLU is set to file suit against TIZA, a charter school in Inver Grove
Heights and Blaine, which the suit claims is promoting the Muslim religion," by
Star Tribune, January 21. 2009 ---
Click Here
The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as
the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential
complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed
Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year. The militant,
Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the
United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to
Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for
former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.
Robert F. Worth, "Freed by the U.S.,
Saudi Becomes a Qaeda Chief," The New York Times, January 23, 2009 ---
Click Here
Also see
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28800516/
California Leftists are stopping the delivery of
electricity from windmills and solar farms. CA reportedly has built over 100
such "clean energy" sites. But the Lefties have spent the last five years in
court blocking the construction of the power lines over which such green
electricity has to be sent. Too many dangers to the environment, it seems. So
the sites are ready but the Dems refuse to allow any transmission lines to be
built that would "despoil the pristine environment." LOL!
Fox News, January 16, 2009 ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2165772/posts
As immigrant rights activists demand immigration
reform from the Obama administration, it is critical to acknowledge that
concrete reform cannot be achieved as long as the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration
Services (USCIS) is riddled with corruption and criminal abuse. Crime and
corruption at the USCIS formerly the Immigration and Nationalization Services,
(INS) is the dirty secret few politicians dare mention within their vaulted
rhetoric calling for urgent immigration reform that never materializes. Thus
far, their hollow words and legislative tinkering over the last 20 years
produced few results except costing taxpayers a fortune. Story here. Worse, this
U.S. $2.6 billion agency, under the Clinton and Bush administrations, grew into
a dysfunctional anti-lawful immigrant bureaucracy that invites corruption. The
USCIS, often the antithesis of law and order, is a ticking bomb with potential
to cause severe damage to America. Tasked to protect national security by
keeping terrorists out, the USCIS’s responsibilities include granting visas,
residency, and citizenship to law abiding foreign-born workers while balancing
economic needs, and honouring America’s tradition as a nation of immigrants. But
the USCIS’s checkered history is stained with bribery indictments.
Marinka Peschmann, "Crime and
Corruption at the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services," Canada Free Press,
January 21, 2009 ---
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/7787
The Budget. Bush represented the alleged party of
small government, yet under him, federal outlays exploded. During his
presidency, spending was up by 70 percent, more than double the increase under
Bill Clinton. When Bush arrived, the federal government was running surpluses.
Since then—not counting the horrendously expensive financial bailout—the
national debt has nearly doubled. You can't blame Congress for all this: Bush
was the first president in 176 years to go an entire term without vetoing a
single piece of legislation.
Steve Chapman, "Where Did Bush Go
Wrong? A depressing look back on eight years of arrogance, power lust, and
incompetence," Reason Magazine, January 15, 2009 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/131068.html
Smith is also Michelle Obama’s interior designer and the White House paid him
$100,000 (thus far) for his services
When John Thain became Merrill Lynch’s CEO in early 2008, he hired Michael S.
Smith Design to revamp his office suite, spending approximately $1.22 million
according to documents . . . Smith is also Michelle Obama’s interior designer
and the White House paid him $100,000 for his services . . . Thain was appointed
as Merrill’s CEO as the firm suffered massive losses from investments tied to
the depressed real estate market under his predecessor Stan O'Neal, who was
ousted in late 2007. Those losses continued through 2008, forcing Thain and his
management team to sell the brokerage firm to Bank of America in mid September
or face near certain liquidation as investors fearing further losses began
pulling lines of credit and other financing.
"Merrill Lynch CEO Thain Spent $1.22 Million On Office," CNBC,
January 22, 2009 ---
http://www.cnbc.com/id/28793892/site/14081545
The problem with the current bailout is that the
government may be giving money to companies that don't have a long-term future:
zombies. On paper, for example, the Treasury Dept. says it invests Troubled
Asset Relief Program (TARP) money only in "healthy banks—banks that are
considered viable without government investment" because "they are best
positioned to increase the flow of credit in their communities." That's the
right idea. In practice, though, the criteria aren't so stringent. Banks like
Citigroup still aren't strong enough to lend. "The bailout model is socialism,"
says R. Christopher Whalen, senior vice-president for consultancy Institutional
Risk Analytics. He advocates selling failed institutions in pieces, as was done
to resolve the savings and loan crisis in the late '80s and early '90s. In fact,
Washington may be moving toward something like that with Citigroup. When a big
employer runs into trouble, it's tempting to keep it going at any cost.
Economists call this "lemon socialism"—the investment of public money in the
worst companies rather than the best. The impulse is misguided, says Yale
University economics professor Eduardo M. Engel. "You don't want to protect the
jobs," he says. "What you want to protect is workers' income during the
transition from one job to another."
Peter Coy, "A New Menace to the
Economy: 'Zombie' Debtors Call them "zombie" companies. Many more has-been
companies will be feeding off taxpayers, investors, and workers—sapping the
lifeblood of healthier rivals," Business Week, January 15, 2008 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_04/b4117024316675.htm?link_position=link2
SNL's Tina Fey can dish out
criticism, but she can't take it (video) ---
http://gawker.com/5129103/meet-the-haters-tina-fey-told-off
Spike Lee Renames Washington DC "Chocolate City" (video) ---
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/01/spike-lee-renames-washington-dc.html
Reid snapped, “Purchase a pizza for a quarter? I don’t like pizza, and I
especially don’t like Papa John’s Pizza!”
Sen. Reid on the floor of the U.S. Senate ---
Betsy Rothstein, The Hill, January 18, 2009 ---
Click Here
"How to spend $350 billion in 77
days: In two-and-a-half months, the Treasury has used up half
of the money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Here's how it
came and went so fast," by Jeanne Sahadi, CNN, December 19,
2008 ---
http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/19/news/economy/tarp_tale_of_first350b/
By Friday, Oct.
3, Congress had passed a 451-page bill that President Bush
signed into law within hours. The law granted Treasury up to
$700 billion, half of which was made available right away.
Since then,
Treasury has:
- sent checks totaling $168
billion in varying amounts to 116 banks;
- committed another $82
billion to capitalize more banks;
- bought $40 billion in
preferred shares of American International Group (AIG,
Fortune 500) so the troubled insurer could pay off an
earlier loan from the Federal Reserve;
- committed $20 billion to
back any losses that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
might incur in a new program to
lend money to owners of securities backed by credit card
debt, student loans, auto loans and small business loans;
- committed to invest
$20 billion in Citigroup on top of $25 billion the bank
had already received;
- committed $5 billion as a
loan loss backstop to Citigroup;
- agreed to
loan $13.4 billion to GM and Chrysler to get them
through the next few months.
That next $350B? Maybe not yet,
Hank
Now, it's likely that Treasury
will ask for the second tranche of $350 billion.
The Perfect (Stimulous) Storm
A new analysis shows that California
would get a whopping $21.5 billion under an economic stimulus plan
that's expected to be approved by the House next week, making it the
biggest winner among the 50 states. That's according to the National
Conference of State Legislatures, which analyzed the new spending
proposals offered by House leaders.
Rob Hotakainen ,
"California could reap $21.5 billion from U.S. stimulus plan,"
The Sacramento Bee, January 24, 2009 ---
http://www.sacbee.com/capitolandcalifornia/story/1569761.html
The Perfect (Stimulus) Storm
An analysis by Forbes publications of where
most jobs will be created singles out engineering, accounting,
nursing, and information technology, along with construction
managers, computer-aided drafting specialists, and project managers.
Unemployment rates among most of these specialists are not high. The
rebuilding of "crumbling roads, bridges, and schools" highlighted by
in various speeches by President Obama is likely to make greater use
of unemployed workers in the construction sector. However, such
spending will be a small fraction of the total stimulus package, and
it is not easy for workers who helped build residential housing to
shift to building highways . . . The likelihood that such a rapid
and large public spending program will be of low efficiency is
compounded by political realities. Groups that have lots of
political clout with Congress will get a disproportionate amount of
the spending with only limited regard for the merits of the spending
they advocate compared to alternative ways to spend the stimulus.
The politically influential will also redefine various projects so
that they can fall under the "infrastructure" rubric. A report
called Ready to Go by the U.S. Conference of Mayors lists $73
billion worth of projects that they claim could be begun quickly.
These projects include senior citizen centers, recreation
facilities, and much other expenditure that are really private
consumption items, many of dubious value, that the mayors call
infrastructure spending. Recessions would be a good time to increase
infrastructure spending only if these projects can mainly utilize
unemployed resources. This does not seem to be the case in most of
the so-called infrastructure spending proposed under various
stimulus plans.
Nobel Laureate Gary Becker,
The Becker-Posner Blog, January 18, 2009 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
One objection to public-works spending as an
anti-depression measure is that by the time work on the public projects actually
begins, the depression will be over and all that remains will be the bill for
the projects, in the form of an increased national debt, since public-works
spending that is financed by taxes rather than borrowing has no effect on
increasing demand for goods and services. What is given with one hand is taken
away with the other. But construction projects, especially those interrupted or
postponed because of the economic collapse, can be started up (or resumed)
pretty quickly. Moreover, this depression (as I think it is, and not merely a
recession) is likely to last at least two more years, and that should be time
enough for much of the $90 billion (plus additional money allocated to
construction) to be spent.
Richard Posner, The Becker-Posner
Blog, January 18, 2009 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
A Famous Economist Explains What's Wrong With Obama's Stimulus Program
But, in terms of fiscal-stimulus proposals, it would be unfortunate if the best
Team Obama can offer is an unvarnished version of Keynes's 1936 "General Theory
of Employment, Interest and Money." The financial crisis and possible depression
do not invalidate everything we have learned about macroeconomics since 1936.
Much more focus should be on incentives for people and businesses to invest,
produce and work. On the tax side, we should avoid programs that throw money at
people and emphasize instead reductions in marginal income-tax rates --
especially where these rates are already high and fall on capital income.
Eliminating the federal corporate income tax would be brilliant. On the spending
side, the main point is that we should not be considering massive public-works
programs that do not pass muster from the perspective of cost-benefit analysis.
Just as in the 1980s, when extreme supply-side views on tax cuts were
unjustified, it is wrong now to think that added government spending is free.
Robert J. Barro, "Government
Spending Is No Free Lunch: Now the Democrats are peddling voodoo
economics," The Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2009 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Borro
Robert Barro is an economics professor at Harvard
University and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Current U.S. budget policy is unsustainable because
it violates the intertemporal budget constraint. While the resulting fiscal gap
will eventually be eliminated whether we like it or not, the big issue in
current budget debate is whether the ultimately unavoidable course corrections
should start now or be left for later. This paper argues that concerns of
generational equity, which often are relied on by those demanding a prompt
course correction, do not convincingly settle the issue, given empirical
uncertainties about future generations' circumstances. However, efficiency
issues create powerful grounds for urging a course correction sooner rather than
later, on three main grounds: to eliminate the risk of a catastrophic fiscal
collapse, achieve the advantages of tax smoothing, and smooth adjustments to the
consumption made possible by various government outlays. Political economy
considerations suggest that the risk of a catastrophic fiscal collapse may be
significant even though in principle it could easily be avoided.
Danial Shaviro, "The Long-Term
Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity?" ---
Click Here
Also see Paul Caron's blog from the NYU Law School on January 15, 2009 ---
Click Here
Bob Jensen's threads on the bailout mess are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
Federal securities class action lawsuits increased 19 percent
in 2008, with almost half involving firms in the financial services sector
according to the annual report prepared by the Stanford Law School Securities
Class Action Clearinghouse in cooperation with Cornerstone Research ---
http://securities.stanford.edu/scac_press/20080106_YIR08_Press_Release.pdf
Especially note the Year in Review link at
http://securities.stanford.edu/clearinghouse_research/2008_YIR/20080106.pdf
Three Fatah men had their eyes put out during
"interrogation" by Hamas thugs and as many as 80 Fatah members were either shot
in the legs or had their hands broken for defying Hamas' house-arrest orders.
"What's happening in the Gaza Strip is a new massacre that is being carried out
by Hamas against Fatah," said a Fatah activist in Gaza City.
"Where were these cowards when the Israeli Army was here?"
Mathew Kalman, Erica Silverman, and Helen Kenned,
"Hamas makes revenge bid against Fatah members, suspected collaborators," New
York Daily News, January 19, 2009 ---
Click Here
The IDF's Gaza Coordination and Liaison
Administration has already compiled a list with 900 names of Palestinians killed
during the operation, out of which 750 are believed to be Hamas operatives. The
IDF estimated that two-thirds of those killed were gunmen affiliated with Hamas,
Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian terror factions. At least 500 are believed
to have been members of Hamas's military wing. Hamas, defense officials said,
purposely covered up the number of dead and on Sunday claimed that only 48
members of its military wing had been killed. Many bodies belonging to Hamas
operatives were being stored - officials said - in the morgue in Shifa Hospital
in Gaza City. The vast majority of the Hamas operatives killed were not wearing
uniforms to disguise their affiliation, another reason for the exaggerated
estimate of civilian casualties by the United Nations. The IDF's Military
Intelligence has set up a team to come up with a comprehensive list including
the names and affiliation of all of the Palestinians killed during Operation
Cast Lead. The list, officials said, would be completed in the coming two weeks
. . . Other Palestinians told Cremonesi of Hamas operatives donning paramedic
uniforms and commandeering ambulances. A woman identified as Um Abdullah, 48,
spoke of Hamas using UN buildings as launch pads for rockets. Cremonesi reported
that he had difficultly gathering evidence as the local population was terrified
of Hamas.
Naoimi Regan's Newsletter, "Casualty
Figures in Gaza," January 22, 2009
In the Arab world, an atmosphere of skepticism about
Hamas's claims of achievements on the battlefield prevailed, since, for the most
part, these claims have turned out to be little more than transparent lies. The
growing criticism was best expressed on the important Arabic electronic
newspaper ELAPH by Abd al-Fattah Shehadeh, who wrote on January 9 that Hamas is
hiding behind the civilian population instead of defending it, as it had
promised. Hamas, wrote Shehadeh, dug bunkers and tunnels, instead of building
shelters for the residents of Gaza. They brought catastrophe upon the
Palestinians with the misguided calculation they had learned from Hizballah:
"They turned houses and mosques into battlegrounds so that the people would
protect them and those who trusted them now regret it."
Ehud Ya'ari, "Hamas simply abandoned
the arena and fled," Jerusalem Post, January 19, 2009 ---
http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=42400
The Wife of a Hamas Fighter Reveals Her Preference
"Hamas Fighters Display Mix of Swagger and Fear," by Taghreed el-Khodary
and Sabrina Tavernise, The New York Times, January 13, 2009
---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/world/middleeast/14gaza.html?_r=1
“It’s either victory while alive, or
martyrdom,” he said. “Both ways are victory.”
His wife, in a white head scarf, agreed.
“Two days ago, he was very tired and he
didn’t want to leave the house,” she said. “I told him you have to leave,
you have a responsibility.”
But the sight of her brother unconscious
in the hospital bed seemed to jolt the couple into an alternate reality, one
where they were vulnerable and afraid. The man’s eyes glistened with tears
as he asked the doctor question after question.
Back outside, the woman regained her
composure.
“I prefer you as a martyr,” she said to
her husband.
“What if I am injured?” he asked.
She repeated her preference for death.
He took up the accusation that Hamas
fighters hid behind civilians. Fighters, in a way, are both, he argued, and
are accepted by many residents as defenders. People bring them food, he
said. Sometimes they oppose rockets being launched nearby, but often they do
not.
. . .
Senior fighters are mostly in hiding, the
fighters said. Many have not moved for days, staying in basements or
bunkers. With limited access to phone networks, in part because of fear that
signals will draw missile fire, some have been cut off altogether during the
military operation, and sit alone.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It would seem that "senior fighters" are not so eager to be martyrs or take
possession of 72 virgins after dying fighting. They prefer to stay alive
deep in hiding while encouraging the young and impressionable to become
martyrs.
It's shameful and unlawful how Israel is stealing West Bank land and Water
from Palestinians
Palestinians had hoped to establish their state
on the West Bank, an area the size of Delaware. But Israelis have split it up
with scores of settlements, and hundreds of miles of new highways that only
settlers can use. Palestinians have to drive - or ride - on the older roads.
When they want to travel from one town to another, they have to submit to
humiliating delays at checkpoints and roadblocks. There are more than 600 of
them on the West Bank. Asked why there are so many checkpoints, Dr. Barghouti
said, "I think the main goal is to fragment the West Bank. Maybe a little bit of
them can be justified because they say it's for security. But I think the vast
majority of them are basically to block the movement of people from one place to
another."
"Time Running Out For A Two-State Solution? 60 Minutes: Growing
Number Of Israelis, Palestinians Say Two-State Solution Is No Longer Possible,"
CBS Sixty Minutes, January 25, 2009 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/23/60minutes/main4749723.shtml
Jensen Comment
Israel has been totally unfair in recent dealing on the West Bank.
From Best of the Web Today (WSJ newsletter) on January 15, 2009
Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control
• "Historic
Conker Trees Dying"--headline,
Daily Telegraph (London), Jan. 15
• "U.S.
Military Warns 'Sudden Collapse' of Mexico Is
Possible"--headline,
El Paso Times, Jan. 13
• "USDA
Worker Accused of Running Prostitution Ring"--headline,
Associated Press, Jan. 14
• "Man
Accidentally Shoots Toilet After Gun in His Pants Goes
Off"--headline,
FoxNews.com, Jan. 14
• "Shelter
Overflows With Dachsunds"--headline,
Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville), Jan. 15
• "Web
Surfing Leaves Trail of Pollution"--headline,
Toronto Star, Jan. 13
News You
Can Use
• "Gaping Hole
in Street Poses Driving Risks"--headline,
Journal Star (Peoria, Ill.), Jan. 13
• "Found:
Hormone That May Make Women More Likely to Commit
Adultery"--headline,
Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 14
• "Cows
Can't Detect Earthquakes: Official"--headline,
TheRegister.co.uk, Jan. 14
• "Key
to Battling Cold: Dress Warmly, Experts Say"--headline,
Chicago Tribune, Jan. 15
|
|
Learn the fundamentals of the game and stick to them. Band-aid remedies never
last.
Jack Nicklaus as quoted by Mark Shapiro at
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-01-12-09.htm
My Recent Saga With Malware
Since viruses vary in terms of how difficult they are to disinfect from
your computer, some of the remedies that failed for my deep-seated infections
may not fail in all instances. In my case I had to give up and rebuild the hard
drive, which is tantamount to getting a new computer.
I tried a number of different software downloads (some free and some
fee-based) to rid my computer of infections that kept returning even when my
main computer was disconnected from any network. Some of the disinfectants
worked, but they also created more problems than the malware itself.
In the end I gave up and had the hard drive cleaned and started over with the
same hardware and re-installed software. I suspect the problem is that I just don't
know enough fundamentals of the game when it comes to disinfecting malware from
the system, although the pros tell me that some malware just cannot be
disinfected
without cleaning out (called rebuilding) the entire hard drive and starting over.
That's like killing the patient to rid her of chronic headaches. Sometimes the
bad guys win. Sigh!
In my case I think I got the infection from a site that pretends to improve
computer efficiency and security. Since I can't be certain, the site will remain
anonymous. I'm told the most dangerous sites to visit include gambling sites,
porn sites, and computer protection sites from sources other than trusted
sources. Except when a computer-protection site is recommended by a trusted magazine like PC
Magazine, a trusted newspaper like the tech section of The Washington
Post, or trusted friends like your employer's tech support team, don't go
there and most certainly don't download anything from that site even though it
promises improved computer security and efficiency. Remember that some bad guys
put up Web documents claiming some downloads are safe when in fact they are not
at all safe. Don't trust all Google or Yahoo hits in this regard. The bad guys
have Web documents and YouTube videos that lie big time.
Google searches can be hazardous to your computer's health. Of course there's
a gray zone where I think taking chances are necessary to scholarship. Be more
cautious about downloading files than merely visiting a site. Also some types of
download files are more dangerous than others.
Don't be led into complacency that your anti-virus shields stop all the
serious bad stuff. Wikipedia has a pretty good module on computer security ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_security
I think my next new computer will be a Mac where computer and networking
security is enormously better than PCs operating under Windows, but certainly
Mac security is not perfect. The most popular Mac browser, Safari, had had some
known security problems in the past. Before buying a Mac I will further
investigate the current Safari risks. Fortunately Firefox makes a browser
version for Mac computers. Unfortunately I will still mostly use a Windows
machine since my Web servers, LAN servers, and email server are all at Trinity
University. The Trinity University network service is only Windows-friendly. And
I can only get Trinity's free and excellent tech support for a Windows computer.
In my case it's not the cost of a new computer that frustrates me. What
frustrates me is that all the installed software must be dug out of my barn or
repurchased. Training a new computer is even more
frustrating than training a new puppy.
By Comparison, My Malware Problems are Rather Insignificant
Tens of millions of credit cards could be at risk of
fraudulent use thanks to a serious computer-security breach at
financial-transactions company Heartland Payment Systems. Earlier this week,
Heartland revealed that a piece of malicious software, apparently installed
inside the company's transaction-processing system last year, had compromised
credit-card data as it crossed the network. The breach was announced on
Tuesday--the day of the U.S. presidential inauguration--and, according to some
experts, it shows that attackers are successfully defeating the financial
industry's tough computer-security rules. "The potential is certainly there for
this to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest breach we've seen," says Rich
Mogull, founder of computer-security consulting company Securosis. "Something
huge had to have gone wrong here." It's not clear precisely what kind of
malicious software was used, or how many credit-card accounts were compromised.
But company president Robert Baldwin has said that Heartland handles as many as
100 million transactions per month.
John Borland, "Malware Swipes Millions of Credit Cards A security breach shows
failings in security rules," MIT's Technology Review, January 22, 2009
---
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22007/?nlid=1714&a=f
Bob Jensen's helpers regarding network and computer security are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection
Blackboard’s Update Plan – integrate Moodle and Sakai courses into the
Blackboard interface
January 20, 2009 message from Richard Campbell
[campbell@RIO.EDU]
Interesting video on Blackboard’s plans – It is
interesting how they are integrating Moodle and Sakai courses into their
interface.
http://www.blackboard.com/projectng/
Richard J. Campbell
School of Business
218 N. College Ave.
University of Rio Grande
Rio Grande, OH 45674
Voice:740-245-7288
http://faculty.rio.edu/campbell
Bob Jensen's threads on Blackboard and WebCT are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Blackboard.htm
Question
What are the latest emerging technologies for teaching, learning, research, and
creative expression.?
2009 Edition of the Horizon Report ---
http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/
The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing
work of the New
Media Consortium (NMC)’s Horizon Project, a
long-running qualitative research project that seeks to identify and
describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching,
learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused
organizations. The 2009 Horizon Report is the sixth annual report in the
series. The report is produced again in 2009 as a collaboration between the
New Media Consortium
and the
EDUCAUSE Learning
Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program.
Each edition of the Horizon Report introduces six
emerging technologies or practices that are likely to enter mainstream use
in learning-focused organizations within three adoption horizons over the
next one to five years. Challenges and trends that will shape the way we
work in academia over the same time frame are also presented. Over the six
years of the NMC’s Horizon Project, more than 200 leaders in the fields of
business, industry, and education have contributed to an ongoing primary
research effort that draws on a comprehensive body of published resources,
current research and practice, and the expertise of the NMC and ELI
communities to identify technologies and practices that are either beginning
to appear on campuses, or likely to be adopted in the coming years. Through
a close examination of these sources, and informed by their own
distinguished perspectives, the 2009 Advisory Board has considered the broad
landscape of emerging technology and its intersection with the academic
world as they worked to select the six topics described in these pages. The
precise research methodology is detailed in a special section following the
body of the report.
The format of the Horizon Report reflects the focus
of the Horizon Project, which centers on the applications of emerging
technologies to teaching, learning, research, and creative expression. Each
topic opens with an overview to introduce the concept or technology involved
and follows with a discussion of the particular relevance of the topic to
education or creativity. Examples of how the technology is being — or could
be — applied to those activities are given. Each description is followed by
an annotated list of additional examples and readings which expand on the
discussion in the Report, as well as a link to the list of tagged resources
collected by the Advisory Board and other interested parties during the
process of researching the topic areas. Many of the examples under each area
feature the innovative work of NMC and ELI member institutions.
"'Horizon Report' Names Top Technology Trends to Watch in Education," by
Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3569&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
More services will be running on cellphones or
handheld computers, and more devices will be able to broadcast their
location to others, says a new report from Educause's Learning Initiative
and the New Media Consortium.
The "2009 Horizon Report," the latest edition of
the annual list of technology trends to watch in education, is compiled
based on news reports, research studies, and interviews with experts.
Topping the list of hot technologies are smart
phones and other mobile devices. The authors noted that smart phones can now
run third-party applications, which could revolutionize how such devices are
used in education by consolidating numerous teaching, learning, and
administrative tools into devices that fit into the palms of students'
hands.
Another top trend identified in the report is cloud
computing, which refers to Web-based applications and services. Such
services, many of which are free, will allow campus users to access more
tools and information at a lower cost—although it may make users
increasingly dependent on their hosts, the report says.
The prevalence of electronics that have
"geo-locators"—that is, that are capable of knowing where they are—could
have important applications for field research, specifically with regard to
tracking the movement of animal populations or mapping data sets to study
weather, migration, or urban development patterns, the report says.
Similarly, “smart” objects—which are aware not only of their locations but
of themselves and their environment—are already used in some libraries for
tracking and tagging materials and may have analogous applications across a
number of academic disciplines.
Though the Internet has proved to be a helpful
resource for many students and professors, the sheer volume of its content
can make finding relevant information a tedious chore at times. According to
the report, the personal Web—i.e., widgets and services that help connect
individual users to the Web-based information relevant to them—will allow
students, professors, and administrators to use the Web more efficiently.
In a similar vein, semantic-aware applications will
emerge to allow students to use one of the Internet’s more popular
features—Web search—more efficiently, the authors predict. Semantic-aware
applications refer to technology designed to analyze the meaning of phrases
typed into search boxes, rather than just the keywords. Beyond search
technology, the report says that semantic-aware applications may eventually
help researchers organize and present their findings in ways that more
easily describe conceptual relationships among collected data.
Educause, the higher-education technology group,
has released its list of
top
teaching and learning challenges of 2009.
The top five challenges were selected by a
combination of focus groups, surveys of interested professionals,
face-to-face brainstorming, and a final vote. The challenges are:
1. Creating learning environments that promote
active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge
creation.
2. Developing 21st-century literacies — information, digital, and visual —
among students and faculty members.
3. Reaching and engaging today’s learners.
4. Encouraging faculty members to adopt, and innovate with, new technology
for teaching and learning.
5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning with technology in an era
of budget cuts.
Educause officials say they will now begin
soliciting a volunteers to collaborate on solutions for each challenge using
the
project’s wiki.
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
In particular note
the link
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm
Theory versus Practice in Engineering Studies
Engineering education needs an overhaul, and must do a
better job of introducing students to the actual practice of the profession,
says a
new report from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The
report calls for programs to have “a professional spine” in which each year
includes “practice-like experiences,” and for an emphasis on how concepts are
used and connected. Further, the report calls for more education that shows how
engineering fits into the world. These changes will require considerable new
thinking about course and program structure, and who teaches, the report
suggests.
Inside Higher Ed, January 16, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/16/qt
"Students Can Test Drive Their Career in Science, Engineering:
Experienced scientists and engineers mentor interns in research laboratory,"
Converge Magazine, January 19, 2009 ---
http://www.convergemag.com/story.php?catid=422&storyid=108342
Aiming to reach out to students interested in
science and engineering, the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC) is
looking for participants in a summer-long apprentice program that offers
them the opportunity to test out a future career at the nation's premier
research laboratory.
Sponsored by George Washington University and the
Department of Defense (DoD), the Science and Engineering Apprentice Program
(SEAP) is an eight-week internship that enables high school and college
students to apprentice in fields of their choice with experienced scientists
and engineers serving as mentors.
SEAP enabled 12 of the more than 400 students who
participated in the 2008 program to work at ECBC. Other students were
assigned to one of 16 other DoD laboratories. Organizers are hoping this
year's program, which runs from June 22 to Aug. 14, attracts an even greater
number of students to ECBC.
"We are hopeful that the program will continue to
expand each year," said Barbara Hawk, the Center's SEAP coordinator. "The
SEAP program enables ECBC to provide students with information about the
work done here at ECBC. When we get young people excited about science and
engineering I believe it will ultimately help to ensure the continuous
growth of our workforce."
Treated as research assistants, students
collaborate with their mentors on a project that provides them an
opportunity to work in a laboratory while learning how their research can
benefit the Army and the civilian community.
Outside the lab, students are invited to attend
lectures, tours and demonstrations aimed at educating them about various
research techniques and the significance of the work done for the purpose of
non-medical chemical and biological defense.
"SEAP provides an opportunity for young engineers
and scientists to receive hands-on experience in an environment which
closely resembles conditions in their proposed field," said ECBC
Simulationist Analyst Chris Gaughan. "An apprenticeship at ECBC affords
young people the chance to contribute positively to the organization while
they explore career suitability."
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
Political Rights Theory Versus (Questioned) Practice at the University of
Iowa
"U. of Iowa Staff Member Sues Law School for Discrimination," by Katherine
Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2009 ---
Click Here
A
staff member in the law-school writing center at the University of
Iowa has sued the school and its dean, saying she was turned down
for teaching positions because of her conservative political views,
Iowa City Press-Citizen reported.
Teresa Wagner filed the lawsuit against the
school and its dean, Carolyn Jones, on Tuesday in U.S. District
Court.
In the lawsuit, she states that in 2006,
she applied for an advertised job as a full-time writing instructor,
and that later, she applied for a part-time adjunct position
teaching writing. She was rejected for both positions, even though
she had collegiate teaching experience and strong academic
credentials, the lawsuit says. She argues that affiliations listed
on her résumé, including stints with groups like the National Right
to Life Committee, did her in with a liberal-leaning faculty.
To bolster her case, the lawsuit dissects
the political affiliations of the approximately 50 faculty members
who vote on law-school faculty hires; 46 of them are registered as
Democrats and only one, hired 20 years ago, is a Republican, the
lawsuit states. Ms. Wagner also says that a law-school associate
dean suggested that she conceal her affiliation with a conservative
law school and later told her not to apply for any more faculty
positions.
Steve Parrott, a spokesman for the
University of Iowa, says the discrimination claim is “without
merit.” |
A better case can probably be made in the Colleges of Humanities and Social
Sciences where a conservatives most likely have not been hired in years. I read
that nationwide conservative anthropologists are on the endangered species list.
Not Even One Conservative for Tokenism: Duke is for Democrats and so is
the University of Iowa
The University of Iowa's history department and
Duke's history department have a couple of things in common. Both have made
national news because neither has a Republican faculty member. And both rejected
the application of Mark Moyar, a highly qualified historian and a Republican,
for a faculty appointment. Moyar graduated first in the history department at
Harvard; his revised senior thesis was published as a book and sold more copies
than an average history professor ever sells. After earning a Ph.D. from
Cambridge University in England, he published his dissertation as "Triumph
Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965" with Cambridge University Press, which has
received even more attention and praise. Moyar's views of Vietnam are
controversial and have garnered scorn and abuse from liberal historians,
including the department chair at the University of Iowa, Colin Gordon. Moyar
revealed on his resume that he is a member of the National Association of
Scholars, a group generally to the right of the normal academic organization.
Gordon and his colleagues at Iowa were undoubtedly aware of Moyar's conservative
leaning and historical view. Moyar is undoubtedly qualified. He is
unquestionably diverse; his views are antithetical to many of the Iowa
professors' views. Yet the Iowa department hired someone who had neither
received degrees from institutions similar to Cambridge and Harvard nor
published a book despite having completed graduate school eight years earlier
(history scholars are expected to publish books within approximately six years
of finishing their doctorates). In the Iowa history department there are 27
Democrats and zero Republicans. The Iowa hiring guidelines mandate that search
committees "assess ways the applicants will bring rich experiences, diverse
backgrounds and ideology to the university community." After seeking a freedom
of information disclosure, Moyar learned that the Iowa history department had,
in fact, not complied with the hiring manual. It seemed that Moyar was rejected
for his political and historical stands. Maybe it was an unlikely aberration.
But Moyar told the Duke College Republicans earlier this fall that he is
skeptical because an application of his a few years ago at Duke for a history
professorship progressed in much the same way it proceeded in Iowa.
The Duke Chronicle, November 1, 2007 ---
Click Here
Question
What is most like a zoo animal on a college campus?
The University of Colorado at Boulder, a campus
where political attitudes lean to the left, is looking for a conservative
scholar.
The Wall Street Journal
reported on a fund raising drive to endow a chair in conservative thought. The
move is attracting criticism not only from some liberals on campus but from
David Horowitz, who has led a national campaign charging that many colleges lack
ideological diversity on their faculties. While Horowitz praised Colorado for
focusing on the issue of ideological diversity, he said he feared that this
approach would lead the professor selected to be seen as an unusual token, like
“an animal in the zoo.”
Inside Higher Ed, May 13, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/13/qt
"The Liberal Skew in Higher Education," by Richard Posner, The
Becker-Posner Blog, December 30, 2007 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
It is no secret that professors at
American colleges and universities are much more liberal on average than the
American people as a whole. A recent paper by two sociology professors
contains a useful history of scholarship on the issue and, more important,
reports the results of the most careful survey yet conducted of the ideology
of American academics. See Neal Gross and Solon Simmons, “The Social and
Political Views of American Professors,” Sept. 24, 2007, available at
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~ngross/lounsbery_9-25.pdf (visited Dec. 29.
2007); and for a useful summary, with comments, including some by Larry
Summers, see “The Liberal (and Moderating) Professoriate,” Inside Higher Ed,
Oct. 8, 2007, available at www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/08/politics
(visited Dec. 29. 2007).) More than 1,400 full-time professors at a wide
variety of institutions of higher education, including community colleges,
responded to the survey, representing a 51 percent response rate; and
analysis of non-responders indicates that the responders were not a biased
sample of the professors surveyed.
In the sample as a whole, 44 percent of
professors are liberal, 46 percent moderate or centrist, and only 9 percent
conservative. (These are self-descriptions.) The corresponding figures for
the American population as a whole, according to public opinion polls, are
18 percent, 49 percent, and 33 percent, suggesting that professors are on
average more than twice as liberal, and only half as conservative, as the
average American. There are interesting differences within the professoriat,
however. The most liberal disciplines are the humanities and the social
sciences; only 6 percent of the social-science professors and 15 percent of
the humanities professors in the survey voted for Bush in 2004. In contrast,
business, medicine and other health sciences, and engineering are much less
liberal, and the natural sciences somewhat less so, but they are still more
liberal than the nation as a whole; only 32 percent of the business
professors voted for Bush--though 52 percent of the health-sciences
professors did. In the entire sample, 78 percent voted for Kerry and only 20
percent for Bush.
. . .
My last point is what might be called the
institutionalization of liberal skew by virtue of affirmative action in
college admissions. Affirmative action brings in its train political
correctness, sensitivity training, multiculturalism, and other attitudes or
practices that make a college an uncongenial environment for many
conservatives.
"The Liberal Skew in Higher Education," by Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, The
Becker-Posner Blog, December 30, 2007 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
The study by Gross and Simmons
discussed by Posner in part confirms what has been found in earlier studies
about the greater liberalism of American professors than of the American
population as a whole. Their study goes further than previous ones by having
an apparently representative sample of professors in all types of colleges
and universities, and by giving nuanced and detailed information about
attitudes and voting of professors by field of expertise, age, gender, type
of college or university, and other useful characteristics. I will try to
add to Posner's valuable discussion by concentrating on the effects on
academic political attitudes of events in the world, and of their fields of
specialization. I also consider whether college teachers have long-lasting
influences on the views of their students.
. . .
Given the indisputable evidence that
professors are liberal, how much influence does that have on the long run
attitudes of college students? This is especially relevant since some of the
most liberal academic disciplines, like the social sciences and English,
have close contact with younger undergraduates. The evidence strongly
indicates that whatever the short-term effects of college teachers on the
opinions of their students, the long run influence appears to be modest. For
example, college graduates, like the rest of the voting population, split
their voting evenly between Bush and Kerry. The influence of high incomes
(college graduates earn on average much more than others), the more
conservative family backgrounds of the typical college student (but less
conservative for students at elite colleges), and other life experiences far
dominate the mainly forgotten influence of their college teachers.
This evidence does not mean that the
liberal bias of professors is of no concern, but rather that professors are
much less important in influencing opinions than they like to believe, or
then is apparently believed by the many critics on the right of the
liberality of professors.
"Leveling the Playing Field: A university is forced to treat
white professors equally," The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2006 ---
http://opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110008521
Talk about back wages due: A federal judge in
Phoenix this month said that Northern Arizona University owes $1.4 million
to a group of professors who have been pursuing justice through the courts
since 1995. The 40 teachers, all white men, argued that they were
discriminated against when the public university gave raises to minority and
female faculty members in the early 1990s but not to white males. Not only
that--the plaintiffs said in a Title VII civil-rights suit--the salary bumps
resulted in some favored faculty members earning more than white men in
comparable positions.
The lawsuit and its outcome are yet another
striking illustration of the perils of affirmative action, with its often
contorted logic of redress and blame and its tendency to commit exactly the
sort of discrimination that it was designed to prevent.
The university may persuade U.S. District Court
judge Robert Broomfield to lower the bill for what is effectively back pay
to the professors. But the school is also facing a claim for the plaintiffs'
legal expenses. Their attorney, Jess Lorona, tells us that, with more than a
decade of litigating on both sides totted up, the cost to Arizona taxpayers
could soar to $2.5 million.
What happened here? The professors' victory, it
should be said, is not a sweeping defeat of affirmative action, and the
plaintiffs didn't ask for one. The university maintains that when it raised
pay for certain faculty it was simply following a federal mandate to
eliminate race or gender wage disparities. What got the school in trouble
was not "catch up" payments per se but the way it made them. Even so, "the
reverberations are going to be tremendous," attorney Lorona predicts. He
explains that this decision "sets out case law about what needs to be done
when you're trying to cure pay inequity."
Lesson One: You should probably prove that
discrimination exists rather than just infer it from dodgy statistics. In
1993, the university's then-president, Eugene M. Hughes, assumed there had
been discrimination, based partly on a study he'd commissioned. The study
used salaries at other schools to help determine a theoretical median wage
that should prevail at Northern Arizona. A lot of white males there fell
below the median, but the significant finding for President Hughes was the
one that showed minorities and women under a "predicted" par.
As Judge Broomfield noted in 2004, the initial
study ignored factors such as whether people held doctorates. At any rate,
the study's own figures indicated that white faculty were earning only about
$87 a year more than minorities, and men were making about $751 more than
women. Mr. Hughes's solution: raises of up to $3,000 for minorities and
$2,400 for women. White men got nada.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Web Searches That Really Bear Fruit: New Free Tools Aim to Make
Online Results More Relevant by Tracking Your Reactions,"
by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123189045689079109.html
There's nothing more frustrating than a fruitless
Web search -- or one that returns results that distract you from your
original goal. Search giant Google knows this all too well and realizes that
there's a chance you might switch to another search engine if you get tired
of poor results.
This week I tested two free tools that attempt to
make your Web searches more relevant by learning from users' reactions to
search results: Google's SearchWiki and Surf Canyon Inc.'s namesake tool for
Web browsers. These two don't necessarily compete against each other; in
fact, they can be used in tandem. But after initially entering a search
query, SearchWiki requires additional work on the part of the user that many
people may not want to do. Surf Canyon works automatically as you go,
sorting results according to real-time user behavior.
But who wants to do all this work? Google says your
votes don't influence the way other Google users see search results, nor do
they affect your search results if you aren't logged into Google. You can
see the number of votes a URL got from fellow voters, as well as comments
made about the URL -- but only after you select a link at the bottom of the
search-results page. If you promote a URL, you'll automatically see what
other people think about this link.
SearchWiki depends on people to rank their own
search results by promoting favored URLs to the top of a screen and knocking
others to the bottom. It is available to most people who are logged into a
Google account, and these user preferences are remembered if the same
searches are performed at other times.
This sorting is done using elegant animation;
preferred URLs float to the top of the screen when selected and unwanted
results disappear in a magic-trick-like poof when removed. Comments about a
link can be typed into a word bubble beside the URL and all comments are
available to the public, labeled as posted by "Searcher" unless you create
another nickname for yourself. People can also add preferred URLs to a
search-results page if, for example, they know a better link about something
than those that show up.
But who wants to do all this work? Google says your
votes don't influence the way other Google users see search results, nor do
they affect your search results if you aren't logged into Google. You can
see the number of votes a URL got from fellow voters, as well as comments
made about the URL -- but only after you select a link at the bottom of the
search-results page. If you promote a URL, you'll automatically see what
other people think about this link.
SearchWiki depends on people to rank their own
search results by promoting favored URLs to the top of a screen and knocking
others to the bottom. It is available to most people who are logged into a
Google account, and these user preferences are remembered if the same
searches are performed at other times.
This sorting is done using elegant animation;
preferred URLs float to the top of the screen when selected and unwanted
results disappear in a magic-trick-like poof when removed. Comments about a
link can be typed into a word bubble beside the URL and all comments are
available to the public, labeled as posted by "Searcher" unless you create
another nickname for yourself. People can also add preferred URLs to a
search-results page if, for example, they know a better link about something
than those that show up.
For your efforts, you'll create a small collection
of results that are saved in your account, sorted by date and time should
you ever want to revisit them. This could come in handy in some
circumstances, such as if you were researching a topic and you forgot to
save Web pages as you went. Google confusingly calls these "SearchWiki
notes," though they really include all of the links you voted on, as well as
typed-in notes about links.
SearchWiki is a tough sell because most of us are
already trained to surf the Web quickly, skipping ahead and back through
links without taking the time to rank those results or comment on them. And
it only works with Google searches.
If you like the idea of more personalized Web
searches but would like to use other search engines or don't want to do
extra work, you might like Surf Canyon. Once downloaded, this tool displays
bull's-eyes beside certain results to show that Surf Canyon has found
additional related hits. Clicking on this bull's-eye reveals those suggested
links, pulled from deeper down in the search results, and these links might
have bull's-eyes of their own. This cascade of data goes on and on as an
algorithm studies which of the returned results you do or don't choose.
You might be deterred from using Surf Canyon
because it must be downloaded before it works on Internet Explorer or
Firefox. (A version of Surf Canyon for Apple's Safari browser is due out
within a month.) This tool works with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search
and Craigslist, and just started working with LexisNexis's LexisWeb.com
legal-search engine.
Surf Canyon might not seem to be doing much at
first, but it changes and reflects your preferences as you make them. For
example, a search for "Obama dog" originally returned results about how the
President-elect and his family are narrowing their search for a puppy. But
as I opened more links related specifically to Mr. Obama's daughters, more
results appeared on screen about Sasha and Malia. Each time I hit the
browser's Back button to return to the original search page, Surf Canyon
offered a new set of relevant URLs.
I tried looking at Craigslist.com for last-minute
inauguration tickets, and one hit listed an inauguration-appropriate dress
that someone was giving away free. The Surf Canyon bull's-eye appeared
beside this result, and when I selected it, three more dress listings
appeared.
Surf Canyon recently released an option for users
who want long-term personalization, found at my.surfcanyon.com. It lets
people select sources from which they prefer to receive news, shopping,
research, or sports and entertainment results. Individual sites not listed
on this page can also be added to a list of sources to use; likewise, sites
can be added to a blacklist so results never come from them.
Unlike Google, Surf Canyon doesn't save your
history or usage profile. And if you haven't created personalized
preferences using the link above, it responds solely using your
as-they-happen signals, like when you choose one link over another.
Google's SearchWiki is asking users to do extra
work, which may not be practical for many users. But if you do use it, this
tool's personalized, saved results could be a real boon. Surf Canyon worked
well for me with multiple search engines, retrieving data from result pages
I likely wouldn't have opened. Either way, your days of futile Web searching
are numbered.
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
"Imagining College Without Grades," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher
Ed, January 22, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/22/grades
Kathleen
O’Brien, senior vice president for academic affairs at
Alverno College, said she realized that it might seem like
the panelists were “tilting at windmills” with their vision
for moving past grades. But she said there may be an
alignment of ideas taking place that could move people away
from a sense that grades are inevitable. First, she noted
that several of the nation’s most
prestigious law schools have moved away from traditional
letter grades, citing a sense that
grades were squelching intellectual curiosity. This trend
adds clout to the discussion and makes it more difficult for
people to say that grades need to be maintained because
professional schools value them. Second, she noted that the
growing use of e-portfolios has dramatized the potential for
tools other than grades to convey what students learn.
Third, she noted that just about everyone views grade
inflation as having destroyed the reliability of grades.
Fourth, she said that with more students taking courses at
multiple colleges — including colleges overseas — the idea
of consistent and clear grading just doesn’t reflect the
mobility of students. And fifth, she noted the reactions in
the room, which are typical of academic groups in that most
professors and students are much more likely to complain
about grading than to praise its accuracy or value. This is
a case of an academic practice, she noted, that is
widespread even as many people doubt its utility.
At the same
time, O’Brien said that one thing holding back colleges from
moving was the sense of many people that doing away with
grades meant going easy on students. In fact, she said,
ending grades can mean much more work for both students and
faculty members. Done right, she said, eliminating grades
promotes rigor.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
"Assessing Assessment," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
January 23, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/23/assess
Margaret Spellings may be secretary emerita, but
the assessment and accountability movements— which of course predated her
commission — are alive and well. And if colleges think they can ignore these
pushes, they are seriously misguided. That was the message behind speeches
and the announcement of two new national education campaigns here Thursday
at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and
Universities.
One effort — further along than the other — is to
create the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. The
institute is attempting to gather information from every college about
assessment practices in place in order to produce a national picture of the
state of the efforts to measure student learning. Then the institute plans
to conduct research on what colleges tell the public about assessment, to
study which practices are most successful, and to produce case studies of
how assessment works (or doesn’t) in certain situations. The second effort —
still formative — is to create the Alliance for New Leadership for Student
Learning and Accountability, which would act as something of a public voice
for higher education in national discussions about assessment and
accountability.
Both efforts involve to some extent some of the
leading national organizations that represent colleges and are receiving
backing from such prominent funders as the Lumina Foundation for Education
and the Teagle Foundation.
Explaining the efforts, backers said that colleges
must get out ahead of these issues — or others will set up systems that
could damage higher education. Higher education “cannot be playing defense,”
said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education.
“That is the message of the day.”
The new institute will be led by Stanley O.
Ikenberry and George Kuh — two figures with extensive experience in the
politics of higher education and assessment. Ikenberry is former president
of the American Council on Education and of the University of Illinois. Kuh
is director of the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University
at Bloomington, and is best known as the founder of the National Survey of
Student Engagement.
Ikenberry raised the question that is no doubt on
the minds of those who have hoped that assessment debates might fade with
the end of the Spellings era. “Why now?”
The answer, he said, is that assessment has been
the subject of debate for 25-plus years “but for a long time has seemed
stuck on Page 1.” With the visibility brought to the issue by Spellings,
with moves by leading college groups to create new accountability systems,
and with a proliferation of testing systems, “the next three to five years
present a period of significant opportunity” and the future of assessment is
“likely to be shaped in important ways,” he said. Higher education needs to
take the lead, he argued.
Ikenberry also reminded audience members of
something they were all talking about anyway: College budgets are being cut
everywhere. Reliable, respected systems of assessment and accountability, he
said, will help leaders “make wise choices.”
Broad said that the current debates about
assessment reminded her, somewhat painfully, of discussions 25 years ago
about overhead costs paid by federal agencies on research grants. That
seemingly arcane topic became controversial when members of Congress
questioned some of the expenses universities were reimbursed for, and
proposals and counter-proposals flew.
Some in higher education resisted the discussions,
saying that what universities did was “so intrinsically valuable that these
bean counters in the federal government” didn’t understand the issues and
weren’t worth taking seriously. The result, Broad said, was 25 years of
“tremendously onerous” regulations that might have been averted had higher
education engaged more successfully in the process.
And she noted that President Obama has said, with
regard to numerous issues, that “transparency is the best form of
accountability,” so the new administration will care about these issues.
Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for
Higher Education Accreditation, also endorsed the work of the new institute.
She said she hoped that better knowledge about assessment would improve the
relationship between accreditors and institutions, and that a sustained
commitment by higher education to accountability would preserve the
principles of self-regulation for higher education.
Both accreditors and colleges “need to take a
commitment to credibility with the public further than we’ve taken it,”
Eaton said. While “some folks from institutions don’t like to hear that
[because] they think it’s an implied criticism,” Eaton said they need to
acknowledge that “the world has changed.”
She also said that she hoped the new effort would
“strengthen the academic leadership of our colleges and universities.” Eaton
said that there was considerable strength among those leaders, but that
Spellings Commission members and others had encouraged “an undermining” of
that leadership by suggesting that colleges are against accountability.
Continued in article
Controversial Advice for Potential Doctoral Students in the Humanities
Jensen Comment
To the extent that professors mislead prospective doctoral students about the
academic job market, the following article is somewhat appropriate. However, it
may make too much of the career motivation of humanities doctoral students. Many
humanities doctoral students are seeking to become researchers, writers, and
just plain scholars irrespective of the rather dismal (highly competitive)
professorial job market for doctoral graduates in humanities. Some graduates
hope to be supported by spouses while they pursue a "career" in research and
writing. Some hope to pursue learning for learning sake even if they have to be
under placed in terms of actually making a living such as being a literary
scholar while having to teach second grade in an elementary school. I truly
respect people who pursue scholarship, research, and writing passions apart from
having to earn a living doing something else. May the fruits of their dedication
pay off in many ways other than money, and if they also pay off in money I say
congratulations!
The biggest problem with the academic job market in humanities and social
science is that it's somewhat snobbish. Given that hundreds of PhDs might apply
for a given tenure track opening in the humanities or social science division,
colleges sometimes are inclined to weight doctorates from prestigious
universities more heavily, especially the Ivy League-level universities. In the
professional schools, the most prestigious universities often trade their own
doctoral graduates, but for the most part doctoral graduates from most any
regionally accredited university or college generally have good shots for top
jobs.
"Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go; It's hard to tell young
people that universities view their idealism and energy as an exploitable
resource," by Thomas H. Benton, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2009
---
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/01/2009013001c.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
Nearly six years ago, I wrote a column called
"So You Want to Go to Grad School?" (The
Chronicle,
June 6, 2003). My purpose was to warn undergraduates away from
pursuing Ph.D.'s in the humanities by telling them what I had
learned about the academic labor system from personal observation
and experience. It
was a message many prospective graduate students were not getting
from their professors, who were generally too eager to clone
themselves. Having heard rumors about unemployed Ph.D.'s, some
undergraduates would ask about job prospects in academe, only to be
told, "There are always jobs for good people." If the students
happened to notice the increasing numbers of well-published, highly
credentialed adjuncts teaching part time with no benefits, they
would be told, "Don't worry, massive retirements are coming soon,
and then there will be plenty of positions available." The
encouragement they received from mostly well-meaning but
ill-informed professors was bolstered by the message in our culture
that education always leads to opportunity.
All these years later, I still get
letters from undergraduates who stumble onto that column. They tell
me about their interests and accomplishments and ask whether they
should go to graduate school, somehow expecting me to encourage
them. I usually write back, explaining that in this era of grade
inflation (and recommendation inflation), there's an almost
unlimited supply of students with perfect grades and glowing
letters. Of course, some doctoral program may admit them with full
financing, but that doesn't mean they are going to find work as
professors when it's all over. The reality is that less than half of
all doctorate holders — after nearly a decade of preparation, on
average — will ever find tenure-track positions.
The follow-up letters I receive
from those prospective Ph.D.'s are often quite angry and incoherent;
they've been praised their whole lives, and no one has ever told
them that they may not become what they want to be, that higher
education is a business that does not necessarily have their best
interests at heart. Sometimes they accuse me of being threatened by
their obvious talent. I assume they go on to find someone who will
tell them what they want to hear: "Yes, my child, you are the one
we've been waiting for all our lives." It can be painful, but it is
better that undergraduates considering graduate school in the
humanities should know the truth now, instead of when they are 30
and unemployed, or worse, working as adjuncts at less than the
minimum wage under the misguided belief that more teaching
experience and more glowing recommendations will somehow open the
door to a real position.
Most undergraduates don't realize
that there is a shrinking percentage of positions in the humanities
that offer job security, benefits, and a livable salary (though it
is generally much lower than salaries in other fields requiring as
many years of training). They don't know that you probably will have
to accept living almost anywhere, and that you must also go through
a six-year probationary period at the end of which you may be fired
for any number of reasons and find yourself exiled from the
profession. They seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a
reliable prospect — a more responsible and secure choice than, say,
attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a
professional athlete — and, as a result, they don't make any
fallback plans until it is too late.
I have found that most prospective
graduate students have given little thought to what will happen to
them after they complete their doctorates. They assume that everyone
finds a decent position somewhere, even if it's "only" at a
community college (expressed with a shudder). Besides, the
completion of graduate school seems impossibly far away, so their
concerns are mostly focused on the present. Their motives are
usually some combination of the following:
- They are excited by some
subject and believe they have a deep, sustainable interest in
it. (But ask follow-up questions and you find that it is only
deep in relation to their undergraduate peers — not in relation
to the kind of serious dedication you need in graduate
programs.)
- They received high grades and
a lot of praise from their professors, and they are not finding
similar encouragement outside of an academic environment. They
want to return to a context in which they feel validated.
- They are emerging from 16
years of institutional living: a clear, step-by-step process of
advancement toward a goal, with measured outcomes, constant
reinforcement and support, and clearly defined hierarchies. The
world outside school seems so unstructured, ambiguous, difficult
to navigate, and frightening.
- With the prospect of an
unappealing, entry-level job on the horizon, life in college
becomes increasingly idealized. They think graduate school will
continue that romantic experience and enable them to stay in
college forever as teacher-scholars.
- They can't find a position
anywhere that uses the skills on which they most prided
themselves in college. They are forced to learn about new things
that don't interest them nearly as much. No one is impressed by
their knowledge of Jane Austen. There are no mentors to guide
and protect them, and they turn to former teachers for help.
- They think that graduate
school is a good place to hide from the recession. They'll spend
a few years studying literature, preferably on a fellowship, and
then, if academe doesn't seem appealing or open to them, they
will simply look for a job when the market has improved. And,
you know, all those baby boomers have to retire someday, and
when that happens, there will be jobs available in academe.
I know I experienced all of those
motivations when I was in my early 20s. The year after I graduated
from college (1990) was a recession, and the best job I could find
was selling memberships in a health club, part time, in a shopping
mall in Philadelphia. A graduate fellowship was an escape that
landed me in another city — Miami — with at least enough money to
get by. I was aware that my motives for going to graduate school
came from the anxieties of transitioning out of college and my
difficulty finding appealing work, but I could justify it in
practical terms for the last reason I mentioned: I thought I could
just leave academe if something better presented itself. I mean,
someone with a doctorate must be regarded as something special,
right? |
Continued in article
"The Relevance of the Humanities," by Gabriel Paquette, Inside
Higher Ed, January 22, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/01/22/paquette
The deepening
economic crisis has triggered a new wave of budget cuts and
hiring freezes at America’s universities. Retrenchment is
today’s watchword. For scholars in the humanities, arts and
social sciences, the economic downturn will only exacerbate
existing funding shortages. Even in more prosperous times,
funding for such research has been scaled back and scholars
besieged by questions concerning the relevance of their
enterprise, whether measured by social impact, economic
value or other sometimes misapplied benchmarks of utility.
Public funding
gravitates towards scientific and medical research, with its
more readily appreciated and easily discerned social
benefits. In Britain, the fiscal plight of the arts and
humanities is so dire that the Institute of Ideas recently
sponsored a debate at King’s College London that directly
addressed the question, “Do the arts have to re-brand
themselves as useful to justify public money?”
In
addition to decrying the rising tide of philistinism, some
scholars might also be tempted to agree with Stanley Fish,
who
infamously asserted that
humanities “cannot be justified except in relation to the
pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.” Fish rejected
the notion that the humanities can be validated by some
standard external to them. He dismissed as wrong-headed
“measures like increased economic productivity, or the
fashioning of an informed citizenry, or the sharpening of
moral perception, or the lessening of prejudice and
discrimination.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
The original lawsuit against
Capella University sounds a lot like fraud
Capella University
announced today that it has settled a countersuit
against a former student who
sued the online university in June 2005, alleging
an antidisability bias.
The countersuit, which was filed in 2005, claims
that the the student, Jeff La Marca, defamed the university and interfered
with its business relationships. Mr. La Marca posted online comments and
images critical of the university and its lawyers during the course of the
original litigation, the university said.
Mr. La Marca — whose original suit claimed that
Capella had violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by using technology
that did not accommodate his learning disabilities — has issued
an apology and will hand over his Web sites to
Capella for removal, the university said.
Mr. La Marca’s original suit was
thrown out in November by a federal judge, who
ruled that the student was not considered disabled under the Americans With
Disabilities Act and that the institution had provided reasonable
accommodation. As part of the settlement, Mr. La Marca has also withdrawn
his appeal of that decision, the university said.
Bob Jensen's threads on handicap access in distance education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped
"Plagiarist Punished (severely) at Florida," by Jack Stripling,
Inside Higher Ed, January 15, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/15/plagiarism
James Twitchell, a University of Florida English
professor, was sanctioned for plagiarism.
A University of Florida professor who confessed
this spring to committing plagiarism was suspended for five years without
pay, and opted to retire shortly after the punishment was handed down,
university officials confirmed Wednesday.
The professor, James Twitchell, was a longtime
faculty member who was highly regarded for his writings about consumerism
and popular culture. He was frequently quoted by national media
organizations, including The New York Times and The Wall Street
Journal. But when confronted with a significant body of evidence, collected
by The Gainesville Sun, Twitchell admitted that he had “cheated by using
pieces of descriptions written by others.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The punishment runs counter to the hand slapping that is more frequent faculty
punishment for plagiarism ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
It's Rare for Universities to Fire Tenured Professors Who Plagiarize
"Columbia U. Says It Will Fire Professor Accused of Plagiarizing a Former
Colleague and Students," by Thomas Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher
Education," June 24, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/06/3520n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"President of U. of Texas-Pan American, Accused of Plagiarism, Will Retire,"
by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 20, 2009 ---
Click Here
The embattled president of the University of
Texas-Pan American announced today that she would retire at the end of the
month, saying the pressures of the job had taxed her health, the Associated
Press reported.
The president, Blandina Cárdenas, faced anonymous
accusations last year that she had plagiarized parts of her 1974 doctoral
dissertation. She has denied the accusations, which the university system
had been investigating.
David B. Prior, the system’s executive vice
chancellor for academic affairs, said this afternoon that the system had
dropped the investigation, now that Ms. Cárdenas has announced her plans to
retire.
Ms. Cárdenas explained her decision in a written
statement posted on the university’s Web site. It said, in part: “The
pressures of the last several months have seriously taxed my health and
well-being, and impaired my ability to lead the university with the
intensity and focus I believe necessary.” She added that, after four and a
half years as president, “it is time for me to move on.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
You would’ve thought that she would insist on completing the investigation just
to clear her name and save her reputation. If she’s innocent the investigation
will be all benefit and no cost to her since she resigned.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in higher education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Mrs Madoff is also a book cooking fraud
"A Madoff Cookbook Has a Secret, Too," by Alison Leigh Cowan, The New
York Times, January 14, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/business/15cook.html?_r=1
The picture comes from a 1996 cookbook called “The
Great Chefs of America Cook Kosher: Over 175 Recipes From America’s Greatest
Restaurants.” Mrs. Madoff and her friend, as co-authors, wrote in the book
of a high-minded mission: exposing kosher palates to new sensations by
collecting dishes from famous restaurant chefs that could be prepared in
keeping with Jewish dietary restrictions.
For all the book’s talk of wanting to serve the
interests of a “strictly Kosher” crowd, The Daily Mail in London recently
reported that Ruth’s husband, Bernard, was quite fond of pork sausages,
taboo under any definition of kosher cooking.
Karen MacNeil, a food and wine expert who was given
the title of editor of the project, beneath the two executive editors — Mrs.
Madoff and her friend Idee Schoenheimer — disclosed in an interview with The
New York Times that she was paid to write the cookbook in its entirety. She
said Mrs. Madoff “was interested in having her name on something that would
allow for some sort of fun.”
Continued in article
Why Madoff's Hedge Fund Could Be Audited by
Non-registered Auditors
We all know that Bernie Madoff's brokerage firm was
audited by an obscure 3-person accounting firm that is not registered with the
Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. This was permitted because the SEC
exempted privately owned brokerage firms from the SOX requirement that firms are
audited by registered accountants. Floyd Norris reports, in today's NY Times,
that the SEC has now quietly rescinded that exemption. As a result, firms that
audit broker-dealers for fiscal years that end December 2008 or later will have
to be registered. However, under another SOX provision, PCAOB is allowed to
inspect only audits of publicly held companies. NYTimes,
Oversight for Auditor of Madoff.
"Why an Obscure Accounting Firm Could Audit Madoff's Records," Securities Law
Professor Blog, January 9, 2008 ---
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/securities/
All Reported Trades in Madoff's Investment Fund Were Fakes for 28 Years:
How could the "auditors" not be complicit in the Ponzi fraud?
"BERNIE'S FAKE TRADES REGULATORS: NO TRACE OF MADOFF STOCK BUYS SINCE
1960s," by James Doran, The New York Post, January 16, 2009 ---
http://www.nypost.com/seven/01162009/business/bernies_fake_trades_150467.htm
The mystery surrounding Bernard Madoff's alleged
$50 billion Ponzi scheme deepened further yesterday after the securities
industry's watchdog said there was no evidence that the accused swindler
ever traded a single share on behalf of his clients, suggesting financial
irregularities going back to the 1960s.
Officials at the Financial Industry Regulatory
Authority, known as FINRA, told The Post that after examining more than 40
years' worth of financial records from Madoff's now-defunct broker dealer,
there are no signs that Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities ever traded
shares on behalf of the investment-advisory business at the center of the
scandal.
The startling findings contradict statements that
Madoff's advisory clients received showing hundreds, if not thousands of
trades, completed by the broker dealer every year.
"Our investigations of Bernard Madoff's broker
dealership showed no evidence that any shares were ever traded on behalf of
his investment advisory business," a FINRA spokesman said, adding that the
regulator has looked at Madoff's books going back to 1960.
Ira Lee Sorkin, a Madoff lawyer, declined to
comment.
Madoff was arrested last month after his sons said
their father had confessed to them that his investment-advisory business was
a Ponzi scheme that had bilked $50 billion out of wealthy friends,
vulnerable charities and universities. Madoff remains free on $10 million
bail.
While his advisory business is at the center of the
scandal, all signs point to Madoff's broker dealer being a legitimate
business that traded shares wholesale on behalf of investment banks, mutual
funds and other institutions.
Madoff was previously vice chairman of FINRA's
predecessor NASD. He was also a member of the Nasdaq stock exchange, where
he served as chairman of its trading committee.
Richard Rampell, a Florida-based certified
accountant who counts as clients several of Madoff's victims, said his
review of dozens of statements supports FINRA's findings.
"Everything I saw on those statements told me that
Madoff was clearing his own trades," he said. "There was no third party
mentioned on any of those statements."
Steve Harbeck, CEO of Securities Industry
Protection Corp., the outfit overseeing the Madoff bankruptcy to ensure
clients get some sort of compensation, said his findings are similar to
FINRA's.
"I do not have any evidence to contradict that," he
said. "This is an amazing story that something like this could have gone on
undetected for so long."
Harbeck added that he believed Madoff has been
defrauding clients for at least 28 years. "I have seen evidence to that end
and I have nothing to contradict it," he said.
Why Madoff's Hedge Fund Could Be Audited by Non-registered Auditors?
We all know that Bernie Madoff's brokerage firm was
audited by an obscure 3-person accounting firm that is not registered with the
Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. This was permitted because the SEC
exempted privately owned brokerage firms from the SOX requirement that firms are
audited by registered accountants. Floyd Norris reports, in today's NY Times,
that the SEC has now quietly rescinded that exemption. As a result, firms that
audit broker-dealers for fiscal years that end December 2008 or later will have
to be registered. However, under another SOX provision, PCAOB is allowed to
inspect only audits of publicly held companies. NYTimes,
Oversight for Auditor of Madoff.
"Why an Obscure Accounting Firm Could Audit Madoff's Records," Securities Law
Professor Blog, January 9, 2008 ---
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/securities/
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Question
Is the history of Arthur Levitt Jr. at the SEC so pure?
He does charge out at $900 per hour ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Levitt
When he was Director of the SEC, Arthur Levitt and his Chief SEC Accountant
gave the large auditing firms considerable trouble (unlike SEC Chairmen Harvey
Pitt and Chris Cox). But to my knowledge Levitt was pretty much hands off on
free-wheeling Wall Street financial institutions and is now probably given too
much credence in terms of cleaning up the mess after Chris Cox was the
disastrous head of the SEC ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#SEC
Levitt was easily duped by his close friend Bernie Madoff, probably not
separating church and state when Levitt was head of the SEC and Madoff was
committing fraud (for over 28 years of phony stock trades in his investment fund
that Levitt, Pitt, and Cox left unregulated to the point of not even requiring
audits by registered auditing firms).
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on January 23,
2009
Good and Bad Ideas on How to Thwart Another Madoff
by Kevin
Rosenberg, Paul L Comstock, Eunice Bet-Mansour, Ph.D., and
Porter Landreth
The Wall Street Journal
Jan 10, 2009
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
TOPICS: Auditing,
Fraudulent Financial Reporting, SEC, Securities and Exchange
Commission
SUMMARY: These
letters to the editor express a range of opinions on another
op-ed piece by Arthur Levitt Jr., former Chairman of the SEC. In
Levitt's January 5 Op-Ed piece, he stated that he "never saw an
instance where credible information about misconduct was not
followed up by the agency."
CLASSROOM
APPLICATION: Understanding the role of the SEC and the skill
set needed to fulfill its mission are the primary uses of this
article.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory) Who is Arthur Levitt? Summarize his
recent opinion-page piece that led to these letters in response.
2. (Introductory) What concerns the CPA, Kevin
Rosenberg, who describes the types of audit and accounting firms
associated with recent financial reporting frauds and failures?
3. (Advanced) One op-ed writer, Paul L. Comstock,
argues that "the SEC can only do so much to protect without
paralyzing our capital markets." But does Eunice Bet-Mansour,
Ph.D., necessarily call for a greater quantity of regulatory
steps to avoid another Ponzi scheme or fraud such as that
committed by Mr. Madoff?
4. (Advanced) What level of skill set does Dr. Bet-Mansour
say is needed among SEC staffers? What level of education
provides this analytical skill set? In your answer, consider the
level of education held by Harry Markopoulos.
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
RELATED
ARTICLES:
How the SEC Can Prevent More Madoffs
by Arthur Levitt, Jr.
Jan 05, 2009
Online Exclusive
|
Bob Jensen's threads on fraud are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm
Bob Jensen's Rotten to the Core threads are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
Another Hedge Fund Ponzi Fraud
"Police find car of missing Sarasota hedge fund manager," TampaBay.com,
January 18, 2009 ---
http://www.tampabay.com/news/article968540.ece
Police found the car of a missing investment fund
manager at the airport this week, authorities confirmed Saturday.
Arthur G. Nadel, 75, and $350-million of investor
money were believed to have vanished this week after Nadel's family reported
him missing. Managers of the fund have told investors that the money is
gone, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported.
Police at the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport found his
light green Subaru on Thursday, the Herald-Tribune reported on its Web site
Saturday.
Local authorities were working with the Securities
and Exchange Commission and the FBI in the ongoing fraud investigation.
Investigators were interviewing investors and
looking into claims that Arthur G. Nadel stole from them, said Sarasota
police Capt. Bill Spitler.
It was too soon to say how much was invested, but
there were reports the hedge fund could be out $350-million. Investors had
last heard that their money earned more than 8 percent as of November,
despite market losses in a historic economic downturn.
"The victims that I know of, I know some of them
personally, they have no reason to lie," Spitler said.
Nadel, who operated under the name Scoop Management
in Sarasota, was last heard from on Wednesday.
That morning, his wife, Peg Nadel, saw him getting
ready for work, Sarasota Lt. Chuck Lesaltato told the Herald-Tribune.
About 1:20 p.m., Nadel called stepson Geoff
Quisenberry and told him to go home and read the note he left. After doing
so, his family reported him missing.
"It was enough to alarm the family and to show that
Mr. Nadel was distraught," Lesaltato said of the note, adding that
investigators are concerned about his welfare.
The missing persons report lists his disappearance
as a possible suicide, but Lesaltato was reluctant to describe the letter as
a suicide note.
Quisenberry said Saturday that the family is not
yet ready to comment. "We love him. We miss him. We hope that he is safe,
and we hope that he comes home," Quisenberry said.
Art Nadel's ex-wife, Virginia Hoffman, a Sarasota
artist, said she ran into her ex-husband six weeks ago. She said she
immediately knew something was amiss.
"I knew something had to be going on," Hoffman
said. "I think things must have been coming down around his head, and he was
holding on for dear life."
The couple divorced in 1991 after four years of
marriage, though she said they had seen each other for a decade before
marrying.
Continued in article
A federal law intended to restrict children's
access to Internet pornography died quietly Wednesday at the Supreme Court,
more than 10 years after Congress overwhelmingly approved it.
The Child Online Protection Act would have barred
Web sites from making harmful content available to minors over the Internet.
The law had been embroiled in challenges to its constitutionality since it
passed in 1998 and never took effect.
Also Wednesday, the court ruled unanimously in
favor of a Massachusetts schoolgirl and her parents in their effort to sue a
local school district under both a 1972 law against sex discrimination in
education and a post-Civil War civil rights law.
Federal courts had said that the newer law, Title
IX, barring sex discrimination at schools that receive federal money, was
the only avenue open to the parents.
The high court disagreed, although several justices
commented when they heard arguments in December that the family probably
would lose their lawsuit, even if they won the right to pursue it.
Their daughter was a 5-year-old kindergarten
student when she told them said she was subjected to repeated harassment by
a third-grade boy on their school bus.
The Internet blocking law did not make it as far as
a high court hearing. The justices rejected the government's final attempt
to revive the law, turning away the appeal without comment.
The American Civil Liberties Union led the
challenge to the law on behalf of writers, artists and health educators.
"For over a decade the government has been trying to thwart freedom of
speech on the Internet, and for years the courts have been finding the
attempts unconstitutional," said Chris Hansen, the ACLU's lead attorney on
the case. "It is not the role of the government to decide what people can
see and do on the Internet. Those are personal decisions that should be made
by individuals and their families."
A federal appeals court in Philadelphia earlier
ruled that the law would violate the First Amendment, saying filtering
technologies and other parental control tools are a less restrictive way to
protect children from inappropriate content online.
The act was passed the year after the Supreme Court
ruled that another law intended to protect children from explicit material
online -- the Communications Decency Act -- was unconstitutional.
The Bush administration had fought hard to have the
law take effect.
Continued in article
Question
What's the difference in expected income when a finance graduates in a bull
market relative to a bear market?
Is it bad
timing or is it “The End?”
Timing may be everything in
life from getting the right spouse to getting the best job opportunities,
But for finance majors the career timing factor is huge relative to other
college majors such as majors in accounting and engineering
I
estimate that a person who graduates in a bull market and goes to work in
investment banking after graduation earns an additional $1.5 million to $5
million relative to what the same person would have earned if he or she had
graduated during a bear market and had started his or her career in some other
industy.
Paul Oyer, Stanford University, "The Making Of A Banker: Macroeconomic Shocks,
Career Choice, and Lifetime Income," as quoted in the Financial Rounds Blog on
January 21, 2009 ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Jensen Comment
Actually, the high flying opportunities for finance majors and MBAs hired by
Wall Street firms are probably "ended" for good.
See "The End" at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#TheEnd
Liars Poker II is called "The End"
The Not-Funny Punch Line is Not Until Page 9 of This Tongue in Cheek Explanation
of the Meltdown on Wall Street!
Now I asked
Gutfreund about his biggest decision. “Yes,” he said. “They—the heads of
the other Wall Street firms—all said what an awful thing it was to go public
(beg for a government bailout)
and how could you do such a thing. But when the
temptation arose, they all gave in to it.” He agreed that the main effect of
turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk
to the shareholders. “When things go wrong, it’s their problem,” he said—and
obviously not theirs alone. When a Wall Street investment bank screwed up
badly enough, its risks became the problem of the U.S. government. “It’s
laissez-faire until you get in deep shit,” he said, with a half chuckle. He
was out of the game.
This is a must read to understand what went wrong on Wall Street ---
especially the punch line!
"The End," by Michael Lewis December 2008 Issue The era that defined Wall Street
is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s
Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true
To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street
investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense
investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old,
with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and
bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street
is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not.
Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.
I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a
business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job
at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later,
and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still
strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy
to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather
than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people
more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come
a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not
thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with
other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.
When I sat down to write my account of the
experience in 1989—Liar’s Poker, it was called—it was in the spirit of a
young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was
merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle
for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future.
Unless some insider got all of this down on paper,
I figured, no future human would believe that it happened.
I thought I was writing a period piece about the
1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s
would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between
Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I
expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O.
of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them
to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had
moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be
shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the
risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future
reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.”
I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I
took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then
asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have
said something like, “I hope that college students trying to figure out what
to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it
up and abandon their passions to become financiers.” I hoped that some
bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an
oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and
set out to sea.
Somehow that message failed to come across. Six
months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from
students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to
share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual.
In the two decades since then, I had been waiting
for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to
shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet
bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management:
Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some
narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums
of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious
social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture
never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy
it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?
At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There
was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system.
The New Order The crash did more than wipe out
money. It also reordered the power on Wall Street. What a Swell Party A
pictorial timeline of some Wall Street highs and lows from 1985 to 2007.
Worst of Times Most economists predict a recovery late next year. Don’t bet
on it. Then came Meredith Whitney with news. Whitney was an obscure analyst
of financial firms for Oppenheimer Securities who, on October 31, 2007,
ceased to be obscure. On that day, she predicted that Citigroup had so
mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust.
It’s never entirely clear on any given day what causes what in the stock
market, but it was pretty obvious that on October 31, Meredith Whitney
caused the market in financial stocks to crash. By the end of the trading
day, a woman whom basically no one had ever heard of had shaved $369 billion
off the value of financial firms in the market. Four days later, Citigroup’s
C.E.O., Chuck Prince, resigned. In January, Citigroup slashed its dividend.
From that moment, Whitney became E.F. Hutton: When
she spoke, people listened. Her message was clear. If you want to know what
these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy
assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what
they’d fetch in a fire sale. The vast assemblages of highly paid people
inside the firms were essentially worth nothing. For better than a year now,
Whitney has responded to the claims by bankers and brokers that they had put
their problems behind them with this write-down or that capital raise with a
claim of her own: You’re wrong. You’re still not facing up to how badly you
have mismanaged your business.
Rivals accused Whitney of being overrated; bloggers
accused her of being lucky. What she was, mainly, was right. But it’s true
that she was, in part, guessing. There was no way she could have known what
was going to happen to these Wall Street firms. The C.E.O.’s themselves
didn’t know.
Now, obviously, Meredith Whitney didn’t sink Wall
Street. She just expressed most clearly and loudly a view that was, in
retrospect, far more seditious to the financial order than, say, Eliot
Spitzer’s campaign against Wall Street corruption. If mere scandal could
have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they’d have vanished
long ago. This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt.
She was saying they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate
capital apparently didn’t even know how to manage their own.
At some point, I could no longer contain myself: I
called Whitney. This was back in March, when Wall Street’s fate still hung
in the balance. I thought, If she’s right, then this really could be the end
of Wall Street as we’ve known it. I was curious to see if she made sense but
also to know where this young woman who was crashing the stock market with
her every utterance had come from.
It turned out that she made a great deal of sense
and that she’d arrived on Wall Street in 1993, from the Brown University
history department. “I got to New York, and I didn’t even know research
existed,” she says. She’d wound up at Oppenheimer and had the most
incredible piece of luck: to be trained by a man who helped her establish
not merely a career but a worldview. His name, she says, was Steve Eisman.
Eisman had moved on, but they kept in touch. “After
I made the Citi call,” she says, “one of the best things that happened was
when Steve called and told me how proud he was of me.”
Having never heard of Eisman, I didn’t think
anything of this. But a few months later, I called Whitney again and asked
her, as I was asking others, whom she knew who had anticipated the cataclysm
and set themselves up to make a fortune from it. There’s a long list of
people who now say they saw it coming all along but a far shorter one of
people who actually did. Of those, even fewer had the nerve to bet on their
vision. It’s not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to believe that most
of what’s in the financial news is wrong or distorted, to believe that most
important financial people are either lying or deluded—without actually
being insane. A handful of people had been inside the black box, understood
how it worked, and bet on it blowing up. Whitney rattled off a list with a
half-dozen names on it. At the top was Steve Eisman.
Steve Eisman entered finance about the time I
exited it. He’d grown up in New York City and gone to a Jewish day school,
the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School. In 1991, he was a
30-year-old corporate lawyer. “I hated it,” he says. “I hated being a
lawyer. My parents worked as brokers at Oppenheimer. They managed to finagle
me a job. It’s not pretty, but that’s what happened.”
He was hired as a junior equity analyst, a helpmate
who didn’t actually offer his opinions. That changed in December 1991, less
than a year into his new job, when a subprime mortgage lender called Ames
Financial went public and no one at Oppenheimer particularly cared to
express an opinion about it. One of Oppenheimer’s investment bankers stomped
around the research department looking for anyone who knew anything about
the mortgage business. Recalls Eisman: “I’m a junior analyst and just trying
to figure out which end is up, but I told him that as a lawyer I’d worked on
a deal for the Money Store.” He was promptly appointed the lead analyst for
Ames Financial. “What I didn’t tell him was that my job had been to
proofread the documents and that I hadn’t understood a word of the fucking
things.”
Ames Financial belonged to a category of firms
known as nonbank financial institutions. The category didn’t include J.P.
Morgan, but it did encompass many little-known companies that one way or
another were involved in the early-1990s boom in subprime mortgage
lending—the lower class of American finance.
The second company for which Eisman was given sole
responsibility was Lomas Financial, which had just emerged from bankruptcy.
“I put a sell rating on the thing because it was a piece of shit,” Eisman
says. “I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to put a sell rating on
companies. I thought there were three boxes—buy, hold, sell—and you could
pick the one you thought you should.” He was pressured generally to be a bit
more upbeat, but upbeat wasn’t Steve Eisman’s style. Upbeat and Eisman
didn’t occupy the same planet. A hedge fund manager who counts Eisman as a
friend set out to explain him to me but quit a minute into it. After
describing how Eisman exposed various important people as either liars or
idiots, the hedge fund manager started to laugh. “He’s sort of a prick in a
way, but he’s smart and honest and fearless.”
“A lot of people don’t get Steve,” Whitney says.
“But the people who get him love him.” Eisman stuck to his sell rating on
Lomas Financial, even after the company announced that investors needn’t
worry about its financial condition, as it had hedged its market risk. “The
single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst,” says Eisman, “was after
Lomas said they were hedged.” He recited the line from memory: “ ‘The Lomas
Financial Corp. is a perfectly hedged financial institution: It loses money
in every conceivable interest-rate environment.’ I enjoyed writing that
sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.” A few months after he’d
delivered that line in his report, Lomas Financial returned to bankruptcy.
Continued in article
Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Playing the Money Markets (Coronet, 1999, ISBN
0340767006)
Lewis writes in Partnoy’s earlier whistleblower
style with somewhat more intense and comic portrayals of the major players
in describing the double dealing and break down of integrity on the trading
floor of Salomon Brothers.
Continued at at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#TheEnd
"Director Capture,"
The Icahn Report, January 20, 2009 ---
http://www.icahnreport.com/
Jonathan Macey is Deputy Dean and Sam Harris Professor of Corporate
Law, Corporate Finance, and Securities Law at Yale Law School. He is the
author most recently of Corporate Governance: Promises Made, Promises Broken
(Princeton University Press, 2008) available at
http://www.amazon.com
The Icahn Report has exposed: (1) abuses in the use
of golden parachute agreements; (2) many of the false premises behind the
faulty assumption that corporate elections are "democratic" event that
legitimize corporate boards; (3) the entrenchment effects of staggered
boards of directors and, most importantly perhaps; (4) the sheer corruption
of law and morality that is represented by the continued legality and
adoption of poison pill defensive devices.
In my next two blog postings I would like to bring
my own, admittedly academic perspective to two topics that are, I believe,
highly relevant to the agenda of this blog. The first topic is the problem
of "board capture" among boards of directors of public companies. The second
is the general problem with shareholder democracy caused by defects in the
shareholder voting process.
Director Capture
In the academic world, particularly among political
scientists and economists, "capture" occurs when decision-makers such as
corporate directors favor certain vested interests such as incumbent
management, despite the fact that they purport to be acting in the best
interests of some other group, i.e. the shareholders. The problem of capture
and the theories associated with the idea of capture are most closely
associated with George Stigler, and the free-market Chicago School of
Economic thought. Among the more interesting and important theories of
Stigler and other proponents of capture theory is the idea that capture is
not only possible, in many contexts it is inevitable.
In my recent Princeton University Press book
"Corporate Governance: Promises Made: Promises Broken" I apply capture
theory, which is usually used to describe and model the behavior of
bureaucrats in the public sector, to the directors of publicly traded
companies who come to their positions through the board nominating
committee.
In my view, such directors are highly susceptible
to capture… even more susceptible than bureaucrats and politicians. Capture
is inevitable because management controls the machinery of the corporate
election process. Management's narrow interest in having passive and
supportive boards manifests itself in the appointment of docile directors
who are likely to support management's initiatives and unlikely to challenge
management or to demand that managers earn their compensation by maximizing
value for shareholders.
The extension of capture theory to corporate boards
of directors is supported not only by foundational work in political science
and economics but also by important work in social psychology. Directors
participate in corporate decision-making. In doing so, these directors, as a
psychological matter, come to view themselves in a very real way as the
owners of the strategies and plans that the corporation pursues. And of
course, these plans and strategies inevitably are proposed by incumbent
management. Thus, directors inevitably risk simply becoming part of the
management "team" instead of the vigorous outside monitors and evaluators
that they are supposed to be. Management’s persistent support of and
acquiescence in the proposals of management consistently renders directors
incapable of objectively evaluating these strategies and plans later on. Of
course this is not the case when the directors represent hedge funds or
other large investors who have a large financial stake in making sure that
the company prospers.
Another factor leading to board capture is the fact
that boards of directors have conflicting jobs. They are supposed not only
to monitor management, but also to select and evaluate the performance of
top management. After top managers have been selected, the boards of
directors making the selection decisions are highly likely to become
committed to these managers. For this reason, as board tenure lengthens, it
becomes increasingly less likely that boards will remain independent.
The theory of "escalating commitments" predicts
that decision-makers such as corporate directors will come to identify
strongly with management once they have endorsed the strategies and
decisions made by management. Earlier board decisions supporting management,
once made and defended, will affect future board decisions such that later
decisions comport with earlier decisions. As the well-respected Cornell
psychologist Thomas Gilovich has shown, "beliefs are like possessions" and
"[w]hen someone challenges our beliefs, (for example the belief of directors
that management is highly competent) it is as if someone [has] criticized
our possessions."
The cognitive bias that threatens boards of
directors and other proximate monitors is a manifestation of what Daniel
Kahneman and Dan Lovallo have described as the "inside view." Like parents
unable to view their children objectively or in a detached manner, directors
tend to reject statistical reality (such as earnings performance or stock
prices) and view their firms as above average even when they are not. The
first step in dealing with the problem of board capture is to recognize that
the problem exists.
Boards should be free to choose whether they wish
to be trusted advisors of management or whether they want to be credible
monitors of management. They can’t be both. We should stop pretending that
they can.
One policy proposal would be for companies to have
two boards of directors (as they do in Germany and the Netherlands), one for
monitoring and one for assisting in the management of the company. Firms
that decide to retain the single board format should be required to choose
whether their board should devote itself to "monitoring" (or supervising)
management or to advising (or managing along with) the company’s CEO and the
rest of the management team. The farce that board can do both should end.
Boards that purport to monitor or supervise
management should be held to an extremely high standard of independence.
Management should not be involved in any way in the recruitment or retention
of these board members. Socializing and gift-giving should be prohibited.
And, of course, managers themselves should not be allowed to sit on
monitoring boards. Managers should not be allowed to serve as the chairmen
of monitoring boards.
Independence standards should be relaxed for the
boards of companies that elect to participate in management. Decisions that
involve a conflict between the interests of shareholders and the interests
of management should be subjected to close scrutiny. Such decisions include
decisions about executive compensation of all kinds, particularly bonus and
severance payments, as well as decisions about such things as the adoption
of staggered terms for the board or the adoption of a poison pill rights
plan.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on corporate governance are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Governance
Bob Jensen's threads on great minds in management are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory/00overview/GreatMinds.htm
Abbie Schubert figured it would be simple: She’d
buy a laptop and take an online course to keep up with her college career
while working two jobs to make ends meet. But when she accidentally bought a
Dell computer loaded with the free Linux operating system instead of
Windows, she encountered roadblocks that led her to cancel her class and
take the semester off.
This week her story—first
reported by her local television station in Madison, Wis.—made
her an online celebrity of sorts. More than 130,000 people viewed the
station’s story after it was
discussed on Slashdot and other popular technology
blogs. That drew an immediate response from Dell—and plenty of nasty
messages from Linux fans.
I called Ms. Schubert at one of her jobs today, and
she took a few minutes’ break to tell her story.
Ms. Schubert said she had never heard of Ubuntu, a
popular version of Linux, until she ordered a $1,100 laptop from Dell’s Web
site last fall and accidentally chose Linux as the pre-loaded operating
system. Once she realized her mistake, she called the company, and a Dell
employee told her that Ubuntu would do everything she needed as a college
student. So she gave it a try, hoping to take a course at Madison Area
Technical College.
But she said that she had been unable to install
the proper drivers to connect to her high-speed Internet provider, because
she said the drivers on the installation disk were not compatible with
Linux. Because she could not connect to the Internet, she decided to cancel
her online course—this was last semester—and take the term off.
For the past few months, she said, she has been
calling Dell and trying to get the company to give her Windows instead, to
no avail. So she contacted her local TV station’s consumer-reports tip line.
The story drew several angry letters from Linux
users to the television station,
according to the station’s Web site. Several
insulted the student’s intelligence, and called the television station
biased against Linux and technically inept. “Perhaps it’s for the best that
the young lady doesn’t attend college,” said one of the letters to the
station, “I don’t think it would be a good fit for her.”
Ms. Schubert told The Chronicle that reading
such comments has been frustrating. “I in no way intended to offend people
who like the Ubuntu system, it’s just not what I wanted,” she said. “My
issue is that I ordered this computer so that I could run with it, but I
don’t want to spend more time and money learning how to learn a new
operating system. I just think I was treated unfairly by Dell.”
A spokesman for Dell, David Frink, said that Ubuntu
is not a default option on any of the company’s laptops, and that customers
must go out of their way to select it. He also said that when consumers
choose Ubuntu, Dell’s Web site warns them that the product is not Windows.
Mr. Frink also said that Ms. Schubert did not call Dell to complain until
several months after her purchase, after the 30-day return period had
lapsed.
Today two different officials from Dell called Ms.
Schubert, and she said she is now confident her issues will be resolved. She
plans to take the online course this semester.
Linux fans pointed out, and some of them in kind
terms, that Ms. Schubert could indeed have connected to her Internet service
provider and run the software she needed to do her college work using the
free operating system. Perhaps the take-away point is that it’s not always
easy to get the technology needed to take courses online, despite all the
hype about how accessible online education can be.
From the Scout Report on January 16, 2009
MailStore Home 3.0.2.2448 ---
http://www.mailstore.com/en/mailstore-home.aspx
People who need to backup their emails with little
fuss will want to give MailStore Home a whirl. The programs works with a
variety of email account types (including Thunderbird and Outlook) to
provide a complete backup of all email files. After the backup is created,
users can leave it in the MailStore application or export it as a file. This
version is compatible with computers running Windows 2000 and newer.
Canaware NetNotes 5.0 ---
http://www.canaware.com/
If you use the Web quite a bit, you'll want to take
a closer look at Canaware's NetNotes application. This handy tool allows
users to save various webpages into their own knowledge base for easy
access. The application has some nice tools, including the ability to
capture select portions of webpages, such as specific paragraphs and images.
This version is compatible with computers running Windows 95 and newer.
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
This financial dictionary dictionary looks great
January 20, 2009 message from Financial Dictionary
[rachel@financialdictionary.net]
Dear Bob Jensen,
You have great collection of accounting, financial
and online resources! I find your page
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbus.htm
very helpful. Our site Financial Dictionary -
http://www.financialdictionary.net contains
articles about the most popular and commonly used financial terms. If you
find it a good resource for your visitors please, consider adding it to your
list of useful web sites.
Thank you for your time Rachel Holberg
http://www.financialdictionary.net
rachel@financialdictionary.net
Bob Jensen's accounting and finance glossaries ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbus.htm
Bob Jensen's Technology Glossary ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm
Education Tutorials
Journal of Issues in Collegiate Athletics ---
http://csri-jiia.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Pictures of Science: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration ---
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/?collection=SeeingIsBelieving700&col_id=197
The MacKinney Collection of Medieval Medical Illustrations ---
http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/mackinney/
National Science Foundation: Classroom Resources ---
http://www.nsf.gov/news/classroom/
Chandra Chronicles (astronomy) ---
http://chandra.harvard.edu/chronicle/
Natural England ---
http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/
National Geographic: Endangered Species Photo Map ---
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/01/endangered-species/photo-map-interactive
NOVA: Absolute Zero ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/zero/
McGraw-Hill Online Biology Labs ---
http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072437316/student_view0/online_labs.html
3D Organic Chemistry Animations ---
http://138.253.125.24/~ng/external/
3D Organic Chemistry Animations ---
http://www.chemtube3d.com/
The World Health Report 2008 ---
http://www.who.int/whr/2008/en/index.html
Food Timeline ---
http://www.foodtimeline.org/index.html
Bob Jensen's threads on free online science,
engineering, and medicine tutorials are at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science
Social Science and Economics Tutorials
Native American Journalists Association ---
http://www.naja.com/
Occupational Safety and Health for Public Safety Employees: Assessing the
Evidence and the Implications for Public Policy ---
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG792.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Law and Legal Studies
Occupational Safety and Health for Public Safety Employees: Assessing the
Evidence and the Implications for Public Policy ---
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG792.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Mathematics Illuminated ---
http://www.learner.org/courses/mathilluminated/
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
Pictures of Science: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration ---
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/?collection=SeeingIsBelieving700&col_id=197
The MacKinney Collection of Medieval Medical Illustrations ---
http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/mackinney/
The Art of African Exploration ---
http://www.sil.si.edu/Exhibitions/ArtofAfricanExploration/
Aluka (art history in Africa) ---
http://www.aluka.org/
Bulletin of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity ---
http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/collection.php?alias=/bia
Christianity Missionary Archives
Internet Mission Photography Archive ---
http://digarc.usc.edu/impa/controller/index.htm
China Heritage Quarterly ---
http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/index.php
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History ---
http://ech.case.edu/
SFMOMA: Explore Modern Art ---
http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/multimedia
From the Scout Report on January 16, 2009
Research posits that Victorian novels may have aided the cause of
altruism and fairness in society Victorian novels helped us evolve into
better people, say psychologists
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/14/victorian-novels-evolution-altruism
Victorian novels like Pride and Prejudice teach us how to behave
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/4239733/Victorian-novels-like-Pride-and-Prejudice-teach-us-how-to-behave.html
Hierarchy in the Library: Egalitarian Dynamics in Victorian Novels ---
http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep06715738.pdf
Believing in 19th century novels
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan/14/literature-evolutionary-advantage-university-missouri
Gruel served up to hungry public
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7825015.stm
Medieval Food and Cooking: Gruel Recipes
http://www.medievalplus.com/food-cooking/recipes-gruel.html
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Writing Tutorials
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
January 15,
2009
January 20,
2009
January 21,
2009
Seriously, You Maybe Should Get a Tattoo
"The Glucose-Monitoring Tattoo: A novel nanosensor could be used
for skin-based glucose sensing," by Emily Singer, MIT's Technology Review,
January 26, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22014/?nlid=1717
It's a modern medical twist on an ancient art.
Scientists at Draper Laboratory, in Cambridge, MA, are developing a
nanosensor that could be injected into the skin, much like tattoo dye, to
monitor an individual's blood-sugar level. As the glucose level increases,
the "tattoo" would fluoresce under an infrared light, telling a diabetic
whether or not she needs an insulin shot following a meal. The researchers
have already tested a sodium-sensing version of the device in mice, and will
soon begin animal tests of the glucose-specific sensor.
The most reliable way to measure blood sugar is by
pricking the finger for a tiny blood sample and using enzyme-laden test
strips to detect glucose. In an attempt to free diabetics from this
time-consuming and expensive regime, a number of novel glucose-sensing
technologies are under development, from implanted devices that continually
monitor blood sugar and dispense insulin, to noninvasive sensors that detect
glucose through the skin via infrared light.
Heather Clark and her colleagues are developing
something designed to operate in between these two extremes. The material
consists of 120-nanometer polymer beads coated with a biocompatible
material. Within each bead is a fluorescent dye and specialized sensor
molecules, designed to detect specific chemicals, such as sodium or glucose.
When injected into the skin, the sensor molecule
pulls the target chemical--say, sodium--into the polymer from the
interstitial fluid, which surrounds cells. To compensate for the newly
acquired positive charge of a sodium ion, a dye molecule releases a positive
ion, making the molecule fluoresce. The level of fluorescence increases with
the concentration of the chemical target. Scientists can swap in different
recognition molecules to measure different targets, including chloride,
calcium, and glucose. The range of concentrations that the sensor can detect
can be varied by altering the ratio of the components, depending on whether
it is important to measure precise concentrations or more broad variability.
The sodium sensor, which could one day be used to
monitor dehydration, has shown early success in animals. When injected into
rodents' skin, the beads stay put and fluoresce in response to saline
injections. The researchers have developed a glucose sensor that works via a
similar mechanism. It has been shown to work in a solution but has not yet
been tested in animals.
In the long term, Clark envisions a sensor that
would be injected into the surface layers of the skin, shallower than tattoo
inks "so that it sloughs off over time," she says. A fluorescence monitor,
resembling an optical mouse, would then be used to measure the light emitted
by the tattoo, and the sensor would be reinjected periodically.
"It's unique because it doesn't have any components
to be used up," says Clark. Glucose strips, for example, use an enzyme to
detect glucose, which needs to be continually replaced. "Other monitors,
even nanosensors, have a limited lifetime, which makes implanting them
difficult," she says.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Think of it as a way for your partner to monitor just how sweet you really are,
especially with Valentine's Day approaching.
"A Virus That Rebuilds Damaged Nerves: Genetically engineered viruses could
form a scaffold for nerve cells. by Katherine Bourzac, MIT's Technology
Review, January 22, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21991/?nlid=1709
Viruses that mimic supportive nerve tissue may
someday help regenerate injured spinal cords. While other tissue-engineering
materials must be synthesized and shaped in the lab, genetically engineered
viruses have the advantage of being self-replicating and self-assembling.
They can be designed to express cell-friendly proteins on their surfaces
and, with a little coaxing, be made into complex tissuelike structures.
Preliminary studies show that scaffolds made using a type of virus called a
bacteriophage (or phage) that infects bacteria but cannot invade animal
cells can support the growth and organization of nerve cells.
Researchers working on tissue engineering hope to
eventually be able to use a patient's own cells to grow replacement tissue
for damaged hearts, livers, and nerves. But mimicking the structure and
function of the body's tissue has proved difficult. Matrices of supportive,
fibrous proteins sustain the cells of the heart, lungs, and other tissues in
the body. These scaffolds provide both structural support and chemical
signals that enable an organ or nerve tissue to function properly.
Some biological engineers are using scaffolds made
of polymers to try to mimic the supportive matrix of real tissue. Seung-Wuk
Lee, a bioengineer at the University of California, Berkeley, has turned to
viruses instead. "Viruses are smart materials," he says. "Once you construct
the genome, you can make billions of phages, and they're self-replicating
materials." The phage that Lee is working with, called M13, is long and thin
like the protein fibers that make up the cellular matrices inside the body.
First, Lee and his colleague Anna Merzlyak
genetically engineered M13 to display nerve-friendly proteins on their outer
coats. These proteins are known to help nerve cells proliferate, adhere, and
extend into long fiberlike shapes. Next, the researchers grew large numbers
of the viruses in bacterial-cell hosts and dropped them into a solution
containing neural-progenitor cells. These cells are more fully developed
than stem cells but are still young and need coaxing to form new tissues. In
the solution, the viruses align themselves like a liquid crystal, says Lee.
He and Merzlyak used pipettes to inject the solution into agar, a
Jell-O-like cell-culture medium, creating long, nerve-like fibers of the
virus interspersed with cells. The progenitor cells then multiplied and grew
the long branches characteristic of neurons. Lee says that the phage are
well suited to making long, fiberlike structures such as nerve tissue but
can also be made into more complex structures by varying their concentration
or manipulating their position with a magnetic field.
Lee is not the first to use a virus as an
engineering material. Other researchers have used the same virus to build
battery electrodes. Using the virus in this way was pioneered by Angela
Belcher, now a professor of materials science and engineering and of
biological engineering at MIT, and was the basis of Lee's graduate work
while he was in her lab. Genetically engineered phages have already been
approved as an antibacterial food preservative by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, for use in lunch meats like bologna, for example. Phages are
also under study as a potential treatment for chronic bacterial infections.
MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer says that
Lee's work is interesting from a materials perspective, but he cautions that
its practicality must be established through in vivo studies.
Lee says that his group plans to establish the
safety of phage scaffolds in live animals next. M13 has a good safety record
and is not capable of infecting people. Still, the Berkeley researchers will
need to investigate how an animal's immune system responds to the viral
scaffolds and prove that they encourage nerve regeneration once inside the
body. Lee hopes that the viral system will eventually be used to regenerate
neurons in patients with spinal-cord injuries.
"Caffeine Can Cause Hallucinations," LiveScience, January 13,
2009 ---
http://www.livescience.com/health/090113-coffee-hallucinations.html
People who take in the caffeine equivalent of three
cups of brewed coffee (or seven cups of instant) are more likely to
hallucinate, a new study suggests.
The researchers found that people with a caffeine
intake that high, whether it came from coffee, tea, chocolate or caffeinated
energy drinks or pills, had a three-times-higher tendency to hear voices and
see things that were not there than those who consumed the equivalent of a
half-cup of brewed coffee (or one cup of instant coffee).
Though most people who drink loads of coffee are
not known to hallucinate seriously, when these types of experiences
interfere with daily functioning, they are considered to be psychotic.
Seven cups of instant coffee contain a total of 315
milligrams of caffeine, according to data used by the researchers. That
translates to about six cups of strong tea, nine colas, four Red Bulls and
about one-and-a-half cups of coffee at a boutique café.
Wide range of effects
Caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant that
temporarily wards off drowsiness and restores alertness. Some 90 percent of
North Americans consume some of form caffeine every day. It is the world's
most widely used drug, researchers say.
Caffeine is completely absorbed by the stomach and
small intestine within 45 minutes of ingestion.
In moderation, caffeine can increase the capacity
for mental or physical labor, but when used in excess, it also can be
intoxicating, causing nervousness, irritability, anxiety, muscle twitching,
insomnia, headaches and heart palpitations, other studies have shown.
The researchers at Durham University say the
findings will contribute to the beginnings of a better understanding of the
effect of nutrition on hallucinations and other forms of psychotic behavior,
such as delusions and schizophrenia. Changes in food and drink consumption,
including caffeine intake, could help people cope with or prevent
hallucinations, say the scientists. The results are detailed in the journal
Personality and Individual Differences.
Caffeine exacerbates stress
In the study, funded by the Economic and Social
Research Council and the Medical Research Council, 200 non-smoking students
at a United Kingdom university were asked about their typical intake of
caffeine-containing products, such as coffee, tea and energy drinks, as well
as chocolate bars and caffeine tablets.
Their stress levels and their propensity to have
hallucinatory experiences were also assessed. Seeing things that were not
there, hearing voices, and sensing the presence of dead people were amongst
the experiences reported by some of the participants.
The explanation could be that caffeine has been
found to exacerbate the physiological effects of stress. When under stress,
the body releases a stress hormone called cortisol. More of this hormone is
released in response to stress when people have recently had caffeine.
This extra boost of cortisol may link caffeine
intake with an increased tendency to hallucinate, said study leader Simon
Jones, a graduate student at Durham's Psychology Department.
Hallucination links
Jones and his colleague assumed that psychotic
experiences, including hallucinations, "exist on a continuum stretching into
the healthy population," so they studied the relationship between caffeine
and hallucinations in a healthy population, rather than a population of
mental patients or those on antipsychotic medication. Previous research has
highlighted a number of factors, such as childhood trauma, which may lead to
clinically relevant hallucinations, Jones said.
Many such factors are thought to be linked to
hallucinations in part because of their impact on the body's reaction to
stress. Given the link between food and mood, and particularly between
caffeine and the body's response to stress, it seems sensible to examine
what a nutritional perspective may add.
"Hallucinations are not necessarily a sign of
mental illness," Jones said. "Most people will have had brief experiences of
hearing voices when there is no one there, and around three percent of
people regularly hear such voices. Many of these people cope well with this
and live normal lives."
Those who cannot cope should seek professional
help.
Caffeine for coping?
It is possible that the association between
caffeine intake and hallucinations was due to the fact that people who are
prone to associations tend to use caffeine to help them cope with their
experiences, said Durham psychologist Charles Fernyhough, who worked with
Jones on the research.
Continued in article
Caring for a family member is a responsibility many people bear. It can
also be a source of income
So-called "caregiver agreements" -- formal contracts
under which relatives are hired to care for elderly family members -- have been
around for a while. But with the economic downturn, more families may be open to
entering into such arrangements, some attorneys and caregiver advocates say.
Financial transfers made under a caregiver agreement generally aren't considered
gifts, an important consideration if an elderly person later hopes to qualify
for Medicaid, the joint federal/state program that covers nursing-home care. The
contracts can also provide assurances to other family members about the cost and
quality of care being delivered and reward caregivers for the long hours they
put in. The agreements need to be carefully crafted, and there are tax
consequences.
Gloria E, Knight, The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123197145248583055.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal
From the Scout Report on January 16, 2009
Research posits that Victorian novels may have aided the cause of
altruism and fairness in society Victorian novels helped us evolve into
better people, say psychologists
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/14/victorian-novels-evolution-altruism
Victorian novels like Pride and Prejudice teach us how to behave
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/4239733/Victorian-novels-like-Pride-and-Prejudice-teach-us-how-to-behave.html
Hierarchy in the Library: Egalitarian Dynamics in Victorian Novels ---
http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep06715738.pdf
Believing in 19th century novels
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan/14/literature-evolutionary-advantage-university-missouri
Gruel served up to hungry public
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7825015.stm
Medieval Food and Cooking: Gruel Recipes
http://www.medievalplus.com/food-cooking/recipes-gruel.html
"The top 25 Bushisms of all time," by Jacob Weisberg,
Slate, January 12, 2009 ---
http://www.slate.com/id/2208132/
Being able to laugh at yourself is a rare quality in a leader. It's one thing
George W. Bush can do that Bill Clinton couldn't. Unfortunately, as we bid
farewell to Bushisms, we must conclude that the joke was mainly on us.
1. "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never
stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do
we."—Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004
2. "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."—Greater
Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, Jan. 27, 2000
3. "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"—Florence, S.C.,
Jan. 11, 2000
4. "Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs
aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."—Poplar
Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004
5. "Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican."—declining to answer
reporters' questions at the Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, Canada, April
21, 2001
6. "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy
test.''—Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001
7. "I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don
Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."—Washington, D.C., April 18,
2006
8. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over
and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the
propaganda."—Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005
9. "I've heard he's been called Bush's poodle. He's bigger than
that."—discussing former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as quoted by the Sun
newspaper, June 27, 2007
10. "And so, General, I want to thank you for your service. And I appreciate
the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying
to defeat us in Iraq."—meeting with Army Gen. Ray Odierno, Washington, D.C.,
March 3, 2008
11. "We ought to make the pie higher."—South Carolina Republican debate, Feb.
15, 2000
12. "There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in
Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get
fooled again."—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002
13. "And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the
amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and
I'll work hard to try to elevate it."—speaking on National Public Radio, Jan.
29, 2007
14. "We'll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called
America will be the pacemakers."—Houston, Sept. 6, 2000
15. "It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important.
It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the
dark dungeons of the Internet."—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000
16. "One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some
fantastic pictures."—U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 3, 2000
17. "People say, 'How can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight
evil?' You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and
say I love you."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002
18. "Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it,
that's trustworthiness."—CNN online chat, Aug. 30, 2000
19. "I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep on the soil of a friend."—on
the prospect of visiting Denmark, Washington, D.C., June 29, 2005
20. "I think it's really important for this great state of baseball to reach
out to people of all walks of life to make sure that the sport is inclusive. The
best way to do it is to convince little kids how to—the beauty of playing
baseball."—Washington, D.C., Feb. 13, 2006
21. "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."—LaCrosse,
Wis., Oct. 18, 2000
22. "You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war
president. No president wants to be a war president, but I am one."—Des Moines,
Iowa, Oct. 26, 2006
23. "There's a huge trust. I see it all the time when people come up to me
and say, 'I don't want you to let me down again.' "—Boston, Oct. 3, 2000
24. "They misunderestimated me."—Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000
25. "I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what
happened inside this Oval Office."—Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008
Gas Right Strips (video) ---
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/2238347/gas_right/
Tidbits Archives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Three Finance Blogs
Jim Mahar's FinanceProfessor Blog ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
FinancialRounds Blog ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Karen Alpert's FinancialMusings (Australia) ---
http://financemusings.blogspot.com/
Some Accounting Blogs
Paul Pacter's IAS Plus (International
Accounting) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/index.htm
International Association of Accountants News ---
http://www.aia.org.uk/
AccountingEducation.com and Double Entries ---
http://www.accountingeducation.com/
Gerald Trites'eBusiness and
XBRL Blogs ---
http://www.zorba.ca/
AccountingWeb ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/
SmartPros ---
http://www.smartpros.com/
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Shared Open Courseware
(OCW) from Around the World: OKI, MIT, Rice, Berkeley, Yale, and Other Sharing
Universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Free Textbooks and Cases ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Mathematics and Statistics Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
Free Science and Medicine Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science
Free Social Science and Philosophy Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Free Education Discipline Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm
Teaching Materials (especially
video) from PBS
Teacher Source: Arts and
Literature ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/arts_lit.htm
Teacher Source: Health & Fitness
---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/health.htm
Teacher Source: Math ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/math.htm
Teacher Source: Science ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/sci_tech.htm
Teacher Source: PreK2 ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/prek2.htm
Teacher Source: Library Media ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/library.htm
Free Education and
Research Videos from Harvard University ---
http://athome.harvard.edu/archive/archive.asp
VYOM eBooks Directory ---
http://www.vyomebooks.com/
From Princeton Online
The Incredible Art Department ---
http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/
Online Mathematics Textbooks ---
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html
National Library of Virtual Manipulatives ---
http://enlvm.usu.edu/ma/nav/doc/intro.jsp
Moodle ---
http://moodle.org/
The word moodle is an acronym for "modular
object-oriented dynamic learning environment", which is quite a mouthful.
The Scout Report stated the following about Moodle 1.7. It is a
tremendously helpful opens-source e-learning platform. With Moodle,
educators can create a wide range of online courses with features that
include forums, quizzes, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and surveys. On the
Moodle website, visitors can also learn about other features and read about
recent updates to the program. This application is compatible with computers
running Windows 98 and newer or Mac OS X and newer.
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accountancy Discussion ListServs:
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a
ListServ (usually for free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM (Educators)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc
Roles of a ListServ ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
|
CPAS-L (Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo
(Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation
Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu