It's the time of year when we see a lot of
tin buckets on maple trees.
Even though it still feels like winter, something tells the maple trees to
commence springtime.
Sap travels up from the roots to give renewed life to winter's naked canopy.
Each spring the sap is collected from the maple trees and boiled down into
syrup.
It takes 40 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of pure maple syrup.
With so many maple trees up here, our village was named Sugar Hill.
A labor saving device is shown below.
Good thing the sap is boiled down
Easter season's chocolate taxpayers forwarded by Lisl
Things that make us dream of spring in the
White Mountains: Maple Sap, St. Patrick's Day, and Easter
And then I stop dreaming about springtime in
March.
Reality in March is that springtime is still two months off in the White
Mountains (Sigh!)
This is one of the windows next to my desk where I sit and type out Tidbits.
Looking out from my desk over Erika's
elevator shaft (needed because she had 12 spine surgeries)
Erika cannot wait to get out into her garden
with a hoe.
I can wait for that part.
What's the best thing in
the world?
June-rose, by May-dew impearled;
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain;
Truth, not cruel to a friend;
Pleasure, not in haste to end;
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain;
Love, when, so, you're loved again.
What's the best thing in the world?
-- Something out of it, I think.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (The Best Thing in the World)
---
http://www.online-literature.com/elizabeth-browning/3701/
Funny Buttons for St. Patrick’s Day
http://buttons.cafepress.com/st-patricks_funny
(Be patient – loads slowly – but worth the wait!)
Tidbits on March 17, 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/
CPA
Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
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
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
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
IOUSA (the most frightening movie in American history) ---
(see a 30-minute version of the documentary at
www.iousathemovie.com
)
Expert Financial Predictions (Jon Stewart's hindsight video scrapbook) ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=354&bpid=23077&nlid=1840
You have to watch the first third of this video before it gets into the
scrapbook itself
The problem unmentioned here is one faced by auditors and credit rating agencies
of risky clients every day: Predictions are often self fulfilling
If an auditor issues going concern exceptions in audit reports, the exceptions
themselves will probably contribute to the downfall of the clients
The same can be said by financial analysts who elect to trash a company's
financial outlook
Hence we have the age-old conflict between holding back on what you really
secretly predict versus pulling the fire alarm on a troubled company
There are no easy answers here except to conclude that it appears auditors and
credit rating agencies appeared to not reveal many of their inner secret
predictions in 2008
Auditing firms and credit rating agencies lost a lot of credibility in this
economic crisis, but they've survived many such stains on their reputations in
the past
By now we're used to the fact that the public is generally aware of the fire
before the auditors and credit rating agencies pull the alarm lever
On the other hand, financial wizards who pull the alarm lever on nearly every
company all the time lose their credibility in a hurry
Milton Freedman on Greed and Capitalism ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A
U.S. State Department: News Video
http://www.state.gov/video/
What a tiny spark can do? ---
http://www.thequantumleapsmovie.com/
American Experience: A Class Apart [PBS Television] ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/class/
Regeneration of Body Parts (Amazing) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxhi4Q8EDTU
Birds versus the Jet Engine (makes me a little afraid to fly
again) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-8_Gnbp2JA&feature=related
Community Video Education Trust ---
http://www.cvet.org.za/
You Don't Look Jewish ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubdGjzzJiVs
Pussy versus the Printer ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REQRHdMRimw&feature=related
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Dancing for all life's seasons ---
http://www.libertyhigh56.net/special pages/dancing.htm
How to Drive in Ireland ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFrgz1FoB60
River Dance ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W22gpBv00gg
Great Irish Dancing ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSaa-2t2zmQ
Elizabeth Claro - Irish Dancing Champion ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJKXIhdanIs
25th World Irish Dance Championship Ladies 17-19 years ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC08VEyTGdA
Irish Music in Dublin ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5JyVFfBsIg
Irish Music Evergreen Band Live ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnR4j1tZ-L8
Irish music Seamus Egan Reel ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu26Y0DXyT8
The Best of Free Online Radio Music
TheRadio (my favorite commercial-free
online music site) ---
http://www.theradio.com/
Pandora (choose an artist like Enya) ---
http://www.pandora.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
Bob Jensen listens to music free online (and no commercials)
---
http://www.slacker.com/
Photographs and Art
Great Western Paintings (slide show with music background) ---
http://www.greatdanepro.com/Western Paintings/index.htm
National Geographic: Blue Whales ---
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/blue-whales/brower-text
Water Photographs ---
http://outdoors.webshots.com/album/319937759yXyKKi
Animal Science Image Gallery ---
http://anscigallery.nal.usda.gov/
Western New York Legacy ---
http://www.wnylegacy.org/index.php
Botanical and Cultural Images of Eastern Asia,
1907-1927 ---
http://www.arboretum.harvard.edu/programs/eastern_asia/overview.html
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
MIT OpenCourseWare: Major European Novels ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Literature/21L-472Fall-2008/CourseHome/index.htm
Introduction to Security Edition 7, by Robert J.
Fischer and Gion Green (Elsevier, 2004)
Note that this link provides a very generous preview ---
Click Here
Parts could be used by students for free and other readers gainfully for no
charge.
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
IOUSA (the most frightening movie in American history) ---
(see a 30-minute version of the documentary at
www.iousathemovie.com
).
A Must Read for All Americans --- The Fact Accountant That Liberals
Progressives Will Never Interview or Even Discuss
Jon Stewart, Chris Mathews, and Keith Olbermann would not dare interview David
Walker
They do not want facts about the non-sustainability of $100 trillion in
entitlement programs.
The most important article for the world to read now is the following interview
with a former Chief Accountant of the United States:
"Debt Crusader David Walker sounds the alarm for America's financial
future," Journal of Accountancy, March 2009 ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2009/Mar/DebtCrusader.htm
David Walker is a man on a mission. As
U.S. comptroller general, he used the bully pulpit to fuel a campaign of
town hall meetings highlighting the country’s ballooning federal deficit.
The Fiscal Wake-Up Tour and the publicity it generated begat the documentary
I.O.U.S.A. Walker hopes the film will do for fiscal irresponsibility what Al
Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming—mobilize new citizen
activists and pressure politicians to act.
A year ago, Walker stepped away from the
five-plus remaining years on his term as comptroller general and head of the
Government Accountability Office. He had been recruited by billionaire Pete
Peterson, a co-founder of the private- equity fund The Blackstone Group, to
become president and CEO of Peterson’s foundation. The Peter G. Peterson
Foundation, a nonprofit to which Peterson has pledged $1 billion, focuses on
issues such as the deficit, savings levels, entitlement benefits, health
care costs, and the nation’s tax system.
Walker talked with the JofA recently about
the deficit and the financial crisis. What follow are excerpts from that
conversation.
JofA: What did you hope to
accomplish when you set out on your speaking tour and got involved with the
documentary I.O.U.S.A., and what progress has been made on those goals?
Walker: I have been to over 42 states,
giving speeches, participating in town hall meetings, meeting with business
community leaders, local television and radio stations, and editorial boards
with the objective of trying to state the facts and speak the truth about
the deteriorating financial condition of the United States government and
the need for us to start making some tough choices on budget controls, tax
policy, entitlement reform and spending constraints. And the good news is
that people get it. The American people are a lot smarter than many people
give them credit for—especially elected officials
Well, a lot has happened since we started
the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour. Two significant events would be the 60 Minutes
piece, which ran twice in 2007, and that led to the commercial documentary
I.O.U.S.A. (see a 30-minute version of the documentary at
www.iousathemovie.com
). So there’s a lot more visibility on our issue, and I think that’s
encouraging. The other thing that has happened is the recent market meltdown
and bailouts of some very venerable institutions in the financial services
industry have served to bring things home to America. The concept of “too
big to fail” is just not reality anymore, and when you take on too much debt
and you don’t have adequate cash flow, some very bad things can happen.
Here’s the key. The factors that led to
the mortgage-based subprime crisis exist for the federal government’s
finances. Therefore, we must take steps to avoid a super subprime crisis,
which frankly would have much more disastrous effects not only domestically
but around the world.
JofA:
How does the economic crisis affect your message and the outlook for the
kind of wide-scale changes you think need to be made?
Walker:
What’s critical is that we take advantage of the teachable moment associated
with the market meltdown and the failure of some of the most prominent
financial institutions in the country to help the American people know that
nobody can live beyond his means forever. And that goes for government, too.
We have a new president, and therefore we
have an opportunity to press the reset button, and I hope President Obama
will do two things: That he will assure Americans that he will do what it
takes to turn the economy around. I think it is critically important that he
also focus on the future and be able to put a mechanism in place like a
fiscal future commission so that once we turn the corner on the economy, we
have a set of recommendations Congress and the president would be able to
consider about budget controls, tax reform, entitlement reform—things that
are clear and compelling that we need to act on.
Individuals need to understand that the
government has overpromised and under-delivered for far too long. It is
going to have to engage in some dramatic and fundamental reform of existing
entitlement programs, spending policies and tax policies. The government
will be there to provide a safety net through Social Security, a foundation
of retirement security, and it will be there to help those that are in need.
In general, most individuals are going to have to assume more responsibility
for their own financial future, and the earlier they understand that the
better off they are going to be. They need to have a financial plan, a
budget, make prudent use of debt, save, invest their savings for specified
purposes and, very importantly, preserve their savings for the intended
purpose, including retirement income.
I believe the government policies are
going to have to encourage people to work longer by increasing the
eligibility ages for many government programs. So if people want to retire
at an earlier age, they are going to have to plan, save, invest and preserve
those savings for retirement purposes.
JofA:
You’ve called the current U.S. health care system unsustainable. How can the
system be fixed without negatively affecting the care Americans need?
Walker:
Our current health care system is not really a system. It’s an amalgamation
of a bunch of different things that have occurred over the years, and it’s
unacceptable and unsustainable. We spend twice per capita what any other
country on the Earth does. We have the highest uninsured population of any
industrialized nation. We have below average health care outcomes. So the
value of the equation just does not compute.
We are going to need to do two things on
health care. We are going to need to take some steps quickly to reduce the
rate of increase in health care cost. We are also going to have to better
target taxpayer subsidies and tax preferences for health care.
We are also going to end up needing to
move toward trying to achieve comprehensive health care reform that
accomplishes four key goals. First: achieve universal coverage for basic and
essential health care—based on broad-based societal needs, not unlimited
individual wants—that’s affordable and sustainable over time and that avoids
taxpayer-funded heroic measures. Secondly, the federal government has to
have a budget for health care. We are the only nationEarth dumb enough
to write a blank check for health care. It could bankrupt the country. We
have to have constraints. Thirdly, we need national evidence-based practice
standards for the practice of medicine and for the issuance of prescription
drugs to improve consistency, enhance quality, reduce costs and dramatically
reduce litigation risks. And last, but certainly not least, we have to
require personal responsibility and accountability for our own health and
wellness in a whole range of areas including obesity.
JofA:
What drives you?
Walker: My family has been in this country
since the 1680s, and I have ancestors who fought and died in the American
Revolution. So I care very deeply about this country, and I am a big history
buff. I believe you need to study history in order to learn from it in order
not to make some of the same mistakes that others have made in the past.
Secondly, I am only the second person in
my direct Walker line to graduate from college. My dad was the first.
Therefore, I am somewhat of an example of what someone can accomplish in
this great country if you get an education, if you have a positive attitude,
if you work hard, if you have good morals and ethical values.
My personal mission in life is to be able
to make a difference, to try and make a difference in the lives of others,
to try and help make sure our country stays strong, that the American dream
stays alive, and that the future will be better for my children and my
grandchildren.
Links to David Walker's videos, including his famous CBS
Sixty Minutes bell ringer that is far more frightening and sobering than
anything Rush Limbaugh is screaming about. You never, ever hear Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid so much as
whisper the name of David Walker ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/entitlements.htm
The ultimate result of shielding men from the
effects of folly is to fill the world with fools Al Gores. --
Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)
Here are couple of economic crisis budget spending earmarks: Gosh these
are real stimulus priorities
The bill includes $5.8 million for the planning and design of a building to
house a new Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The funding may also
help support an endowment for the institute. The bill also includes $22 million
to expand facilities at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum.
But for many people, the science of climate change
is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore
insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate
about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of
science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and
zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global
warming has gone, those aren't the tools we need.
Jeff Jacoby, "Where's global
warming?" Boston Globe, March 8, 2009 ---
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/03/08/wheres_global_warming/
But it isn't such hints of a planetary
warming trend that have been piling up in profusion lately. Just the
opposite.
The United States has shivered through an
unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as
New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On Dec. 25, every Canadian
province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn't happened in 37
years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave
that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome
Zoo had to be plied with hot tea. Last week, satellite data showed three of
the Great Lakes - Erie, Superior, and Huron - almost completely frozen over.
In Washington, D.C., what was supposed to be a massive rally against global
warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which paralyzed
the capital.
Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data
Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had
been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles -
an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin
researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming
could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling "is
nothing like anything we've seen since 1950," Swanson told Discovery News.
Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade - global
temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998,
notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide that human beings continue to pump into
the atmosphere.
None of this proves conclusively that a
period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic
carbon dioxide emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or
that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather
episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate
trends.
But considering how much attention would
have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend
that was plainly accelerating, shouldn't the recent cold phenomena and the
absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little
more notice? Isn't it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of
global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?
This means that the Modern Warming will probably
remain cooler than the Medieval Warming (950-1300). It was 0.3 degrees warmer
than the 20th century based on Craig Loehle’s study of 2000 years of temperature
proxies. Willi Dansgaard’s 10,000-year reconstruction from ice cores shows the
Roman Warming as warmer than the Medieval—but the two Holocene Warmings centered
on 4,000 and 7,000 years ago were lots warmer than either. The IPCC rejects the
cycle evidence. They have concluded that the variability of the sun is “too
small” to account for the earth’s recent warming 1976-98. They want us to
sacrifice trillions of dollars to displace fossil fuels based on computers that
couldn’t even predict the current cooling.
Dennis Avery, "Natural Global
Warmings Have Become More Moderate," Canada Free Press, March 8, 2009 ---
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/9137
"... one of the most important and most prominent
special actions, executed by the Palestinian revolution by sea, on the coast
between Haifa and Tel Aviv. This action, which was carried out by a group of
heroes and led by the heroic fighter Dalal Mughrabi, had a great impact on
continuing events of the Arab-Israeli conflict."
Palestinian Authority Television (Fatah) March 11 2009 as quoted
in an email message from
nragen@netvision.net.il
Jensen Comment
This "special action" was the March 11, 1978 killing of 37 innocent civilians on
a hijacked bus. Bravo! There should be a special award from the United Nations
on this type of heroism.
My bank returned a check of mine today and marked it
“insufficient funds”. Does that mean me or themselves?
Blan McBride
So
where does that leave us? The writer and philosopher Laurens van der Post, in
his memoir of his friendship with Carl Jung, said, "We live not only our own
lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time." We are actors
in a moment of history, taking part in it, moving it this way or that as we move
forward or back. The moment we are living now is a strange one, a disquieting
one, a time that seems full of endings.
Peggy Noonan,
"Declarations: Six months after the collapse, a 'pandemic of fear'," The Wall
Street Journal, March 13, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123689292159011723.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
See "The End" at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#TheEnd
And while you are at it, you might read another book
published the same year as Hayek's book was: The Great Transformation by
Karl Polanyi. It is Polanyi who is truly in the tradition of Adam Smith in that
he incorporates ethics and sociological considerations into his economics. Smith
was a moral philosopher before he was an economist. Hayek was used as a
spokesperson by the ultra-conservative anti-Keynesians of the time. Life
magazine even put out a cartoon version of Hayek's book. Academics might want to
get a fuller picture and read both Polanyi and Hayek to understand two major
currents of thought at the time.
Sue Ravenscroft, Iowa State University
Speaking of students, though, there’s an awful lot
of money being spent to drive tuition revenue. $879 million was spent by U.S.
colleges and universities on advertising in 2008, according to TNS Media
Intelligence. Of that amount, $294 million was loaded into TV advertising; $282
million was invested in online advertising; print garnered $154 million; $90 was
pumped into radio; outdoor advertising raked in $59 million. Now all of a sudden
my annual five-dollar loss in the NCAA March Madness basketball pool at my old
firm doesn’t seem so bad.
Rob Nance, Publisher AccountingWEB, Inc.
Jensen Comment
Some of the really tough decisions for universities involve tradeoffs between
increased numbers of students on Pell grants that will strain research budgets
due to increased instructional costs, especially for first-year students.
But the worst is yet to
come for colleges and universities.
As part of his four-point pledge, President Obama
promises that the massive 2009-2011 Federal aid to states for education, energy
subsidies, and health care cannot continue with trillions in spending deficits
exploding exponentially each year. He pledges to greatly cut back on 2012
deficit spending after his progressive launch of social and education programs.
In part this is because he will be up for re-election in 2012.
States should use the breathing
room provided by the stimulus package to mute and spread out baseline spending
cuts and/or tax increases they will need to make, to restructure programs, and
to allow for orderly decision making. But they cannot count on it to substitute
for these difficult decisions."
"What Will Happen to State Budgets When the Money Runs Out?
Donald J. Boyd, February 19, 2009,
The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government
http://www.rockinst.org/pdf/government_finance/2009-02-19-What_Will_Happen_to.pdf
Jensen Comment
Of course there is the more likely prospect that progressive political pressures
will remain so great that the unrestrained deficits compound exponentially.
This, however, will most certainly make matters much worse in the long run. Even
the liberal press is beginning to turn on President Obama’s progressive and
deceitful gamble with the economic future of the nation.
Real Estate Nobody Wants
Sharon Little says she was shocked to find out she was
still listed as the owner of a rental property on a busy Cleveland street. She
walked away from the house in 2006 when she declared bankruptcy. Since then,
thieves have stripped the house of siding, copper plumbing, and even windows.
She found out her name was still on the deed only when she got a summons last
October to appear in housing court. "Eventually, they're going to tear this
house down," Little says. "Somebody's going to have to foot the bill, and
frankly I think it should be the bank because it's their house. It's not my
house really, so ..."
Mhari Saito, "Banks Refusing to Take
Back Foreclosed Properties," NPR, March 8, 2009 ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101386052
Jensen Comment
The former owner doesn't want the property. The mortgage holder forgave the loan
but does not want title to the foreclosed property. The city by all rights
should take title to the property for back taxes, but the city knows nobody will
even pay the back taxes on the property. These properties are like hazardous
waste sites without the hazardous wastes. It's simply that the value of the
property is less than the cost of property taxes, maintenance, and insurance
with no improvement in the property's value in sight.
As the liberal press turns: And you thought Rush Limbaugh could be
rough on Obama
Among people I talk to there's a growing sense of frustration, even panic, over
Mr. Obama's failure to match his words with deeds. The reality is that when it
comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy
is stuck in a holding pattern. . . . Why do officials keep offering plans that
nobody else finds credible? Because somehow, top officials in the Obama
administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that
troubled assets, often referred to these days as "toxic waste," are really worth
much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them--and that if these
assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away.
Paul Krugman,
The (Gasp) New York Times, March 9, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/06/opinion/06krugman.html?_r=1
Krugman is a liberal Princeton economics professor with a Nobel Prize who hated
the guts of George Bush and had nothing but praise for Obama until now. What's
going wrong Paul? You just gave up your chances of appearing on Keith
Olbermann's Countdown.
Last month, in his big speech to Congress,
President Obama argued for bold steps to fix America’s dysfunctional banks.
“While the cost of action will be great,” he declared, “I can assure you
that the cost of inaction will be far greater, for it could result in an
economy that sputters along for not months or years, but perhaps a decade.”
Why do officials keep offering plans that
nobody else finds credible? Because somehow, top officials in the Obama
administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that
troubled assets, often referred to these days as “toxic waste,” are really
worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them — and that
if these assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away.
This is the same A.I.G. that, unable to
honor its promises to pay off other financial institutions when bonds
default, has already received $150 billion in aid and just got a commitment
for $30 billion more.
The truth is that the Bernanke-Geithner
plan — the plan the administration keeps floating, in slightly different
versions — isn’t going to fly.
As the liberal press turns: And you thought Rush Limbaugh could be
rough on Obama
With our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his
budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health
care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks
after his swearing-in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking
crisis. What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said
chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do
things that you could not do before."
Charles Krauthammer, The (Gasp) Washington Post, March 6, 2009
---
Click Here
The Washington Post edited
Krauthammer's columns for 15 years and called his weekly column "independent and
hard to peg politically.
Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget
the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the
scourge of earmarks. Forget the "2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we
have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget
director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq
until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after
even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.
Forget all of this. This is
run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with
strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not
principle.
All presidents do that. But few undertake
the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically
transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly
offered that few noticed.
The logic of Obama's address to Congress
went like this:
"Our economy did not fall into decline
overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What
did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas:
energy, health care and education -- importing too much oil and not finding
new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the
Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too
many bad schools.
The "day of reckoning" has arrived. And
because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that
we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to
redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized
health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of
education with universal access to college as the goal.
Amazing. As an explanation of our current
economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing
joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide
recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the
American people.
At the very center of our economic
near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic
failure of the banking industry. One can come up with a host of causes:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident
loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and
exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed,
irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan
instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful home
buyers.
The list is long. But the list of causes
of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of
universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the
absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of
college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if
anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs
inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt
instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe.
And yet with our financial house on fire,
Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his
presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy.
Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing-in,
Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.
What's going on? "You never want a serious
crisis to go to waste," said chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis
provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
Things. Now we know what they are. The
markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of
any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees
the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological
conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for
enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care,
education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.
Clever politics, but intellectually
dishonest to the core. Health,
education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the
cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent
claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an
ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social
transformation seen in our lifetime.
Instead of reducing government spending, just a few
weeks ago he adopted the largest increase in government spending in world
history through his so-called economic stimulus bill, which will only stimulate
the increased welfare and Big Government that Obama believes in ideologically.
Obama's new budget proposes the largest increase in Federal spending since World
War II, an insane one-year increase of 33% over the prior budget, from $3
trillion in fiscal 2008 to $4 trillion for fiscal 2009. That whopping $4
trillion is the largest Federal spending total in U.S. history. Obama says in
his budget message that we have arrived at this present crisis "as a result of
an era of profound irresponsibility…." Does this wild spending increase to
record levels sound responsible to you?
Peter Ferara, "Obama's Fantasy
Budget," American Spectator, March 4, 2009 ---
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/03/04/obamas-fantasy-budget
A Stanford University Economics Professor's Lament
"Obama's Radicalism Is Killing the Dow: A financial crisis is the
worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism," by Michael J.
Boskin, The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123629969453946717.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
It's hard not to see the continued
sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at
least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are
designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just
mitigate the recession and financial crisis.
The illusion that Barack Obama will lead
from the economic center has quickly come to an end. Instead of combining
the best policies of past Democratic presidents -- John Kennedy on taxes,
Bill Clintonwelfare reform and a balanced budget, for instance --
President Obama is returning to Jimmy Carter's higher taxes and Mr.
Clinton's draconian defense drawdown.
Mr. Obama's $3.6 trillion budget
blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our
economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by
the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents -- from
George Washington to George W. Bush -- combined. It reduces defense spending
to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while
increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in
U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again,
relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion
in Social Security and Medicare costs.
To be fair, specific parts of the
president's budget are admirable and deserve support: increased
means-testing in agriculture and medical payments; permanent indexing of the
alternative minimum tax and other tax reductions; recognizing the need for
further financial rescue and likely losses thereon; and bringing spending
into the budget that was previously in supplemental appropriations, such as
funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The specific problems, however, far
outweigh the positives. First are the quite optimistic forecasts, despite
the higher taxes and government micromanagement that will harm the economy.
The budget projects a much shallower recession and stronger recovery than
private forecasters or the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office are
projecting. It implies a vast amount of additional spending and higher
taxes, above and beyond even these record levels. For example, it calls for
a down payment on universal health care, with the additional "resources"
needed "TBD" (to be determined).
Mr. Obama has bravely said he will deal
with the projected deficits in Medicare and Social Security. While reform of
these programs is vital, the president has shown little interest in reining
in the growth of real spending per beneficiary, and he has rejected
increasing the retirement age. Instead, he's proposed additional taxes on
earnings above the current payroll tax cap of $106,800 -- a bad policy that
would raise marginal tax rates still further and barely dent the long-run
deficit.
Increasing the top tax rates on earnings
to 39.6% and on capital gains and dividends to 20% will reduce incentives
for our most productive citizens and small businesses to work, save and
invest -- with effective rates higher still because of restrictions on
itemized deductions and raising the Social Security cap. As every economics
student learns, high marginal rates distort economic decisions, the damage
from which rises with the square of the rates (doubling the rates quadruples
the harm). The president claims he is only hitting 2% of the population, but
many more will at some point be in these brackets.
As for energy policy, the president's
cap-and-trade plan for CO2 would ensnare a vast network of covered sources,
opening up countless opportunities for political manipulation, bureaucracy,
or worse. It would likely exacerbate volatility in energy prices, as permit
prices soar in booms and collapse in busts. The European emissions trading
system has been a dismal failure. A direct, transparent carbon tax would be
far better.
Moreover, the president's energy proposals
radically underestimate the time frame for bringing alternatives plausibly
to scale. His own Energy Department estimates we will need a lot more oil
and gas in the meantime, necessitating $11 trillion in capital investment to
avoid permanently higher prices.
The president proposes a large defense
drawdown to pay for exploding nondefense outlays -- similar to those of
Presidents Carter and Clinton -- which were widely perceived by both
Republicans and Democrats as having gone too far, leaving large holes in our
military. We paid a high price for those mistakes and should not repeat
them.
The president's proposed limitations on
the value of itemized deductions for those in the top tax brackets would
clobber itemized charitable contributions, half of which are by those at the
top. This change effectively increases the cost to the donor by roughly 20%
(to just over 72 cents from 60 cents per dollar donated). Estimates of the
responsiveness of giving to after-tax prices range from a bit above to a
little below proportionate, so reductions in giving will be large and
permanent, even after the recession ends and the financial markets rebound.
A similar effect will exacerbate tax
flight from states like California and New York, which rely on steeply
progressive income taxes collecting a large fraction of revenue from a small
fraction of their residents. This attack on decentralization permeates the
budget -- e.g., killing the private fee-for-service Medicare option -- and
will curtail the experimentation, innovation and competition that provide a
road map to greater effectiveness.
The pervasive government subsidies and
mandates -- in health, pharmaceuticals, energy and the like -- will do a
poor job of picking winners and losers (ask the Japanese or Europeans) and
will be difficult to unwind as recipients lobby for continuation and
expansion. Expanding the scale and scope of government largess means that
more and more of our best entrepreneurs, managers and workers will spend
their time and talent chasing handouts subject to bureaucratic diktats, not
the marketplace needs and wants of consumers.
Our competitors have lower corporate tax
rates and tax only domestic earnings, yet the budget seeks to restrict
deferral of taxes on overseas earnings, arguing it drives jobs overseas. But
the academic research (most notably by Mihir Desai, C. Fritz Foley and James
Hines Jr.) reveals the opposite: American firms' overseas investments
strengthen their domestic operations and employee compensation.
New and expanded refundable tax credits
would raise the fraction of taxpayers paying no income taxes to almost 50%
from 38%. This is potentially the most pernicious feature of the president's
budget, because it would cement a permanent voting majority with no stake in
controlling the cost of general government.
From the poorly designed stimulus bill and
vague new financial rescue plan, to the enormous expansion of government
spending, taxes and debt somehow permanently strengthening economic growth,
the assumptions underlying the president's economic program seem bereft of
rigorous analysis and a careful reading of history.
Unfortunately, our history suggests new
government programs, however noble the intent, more often wind up delivering
less, more slowly, at far higher cost than projected, with potentially
damaging unintended consequences. The most recent case, of course, was the
government's meddling in the housing market to bring home ownership to
low-income families, which became a prime cause of the current economic and
financial disaster.
On the growth effects of a large expansion
of government, the European social welfare states present a window on our
potential future: standards of living permanently 30% lower than ours.
Rounding off perceived rough edges of our economic system may well be called
for, but a major, perhaps irreversible, step toward a European-style social
welfare state with its concomitant long-run economic stagnation is not.
Mr. Boskin is a professor of economics at Stanford
University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He chaired the
Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.
As goes the Dow so goes TIAA-CREF pension funding and
career opportunities of our graduates who are not aspiring to public works
jobs. Our graduates will be like atheists in coffins --- all dressed up with
nowhere to go!
The Job Market Has Business Students Worried (Business
Week slide show) ---
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/02/0226_best_undergrad_bstudents/index.htm
Jensen Comment
As goes the Dow so goes business opportunity, TIAA-CREF pension funding,
university endowment funds, and career opportunities of our graduates who are
not aspiring to public works jobs. Tenured professors who are no longer able to
afford retirement will continue on into their feeble years instead of making way
for new doctoral graduates.
Our college graduates at all levels will be like atheists
in coffins --- all dressed up with nowhere to go in terms of careers!
Facing mounting criticism of a
spending package packed with billions of dollars in earmarks, the Obama
administration made a vow Sunday: This president will bring a halt to pork-laden
bills.
"Obama budget director: We'll cut pork after '09 spending bill,"
CNN, March 8, 2009 ---
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/08/obama.earmarks/index.html
Jensen Comment
If you believe this, I have a great deal on ocean front property in Arizona just
for you. I'll also let you have the Brooklyn Bridge for $5,000.
A democracy cannot exist as a
permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that
they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on,
the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from
the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over
loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
Alexander Tyler. 1787 - Tyler was a Scottish history professor that had
this to say about 2000 years after "The Fall of the Athenian Republic" and about
the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution.
As quoted at
http://www.babylontoday.com/national_debt_clock.htm (where the debt clock in
real time is a few months behind)
The National Debt Amount This Instant (Refresh
your browser for updates by the second) ---
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
America, what is happening to you?
“One thing seems probable to me,” said Peer
Steinbrück, the German finance minister, in September 2008....“the United States
will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system.” You
don’t have to strain too hard to see the financial crisis as the death knell for
a debt-ridden, overconsuming, and underproducing American empire . . .
Richard Florida,
"How the Crash Will Reshape America," The Atlantic, March 2009 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography
The inherent vice of
capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of
socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill
(Good thing Obama sent Churchill's bust back to the U.K. from the Oval Office
and replaced it with a bust of Lincoln who wrote that Government should print
all the money it needs without borrowing)
The Abraham Lincoln School of Finance
The government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits
needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of
consumers. By adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense
sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of
humanity.
Abraham Lincoln
(I wonder why this just does not work in Zimbabwe where Robert Mugabe adopted
Lincoln's fiscal policy?)
The Abraham Lincoln School of Finance in Action
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
Who stands between the Obama and the Abraham Lincoln School of Finance?
If China won't lend trillions more to the U.S., Obama may have to print those
trillions of dollars: Watch inflation/trade deficits soar like a NASA
rocket
The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, expressed
unusually blunt concern on Friday about the safety of China’s $1 trillion
investment in American government debt, the world’s largest such holding, and
urged the Obama administration to provide assurances that the securities would
maintain their value in the face of a global financial crisis.
Michael Wines and Keith Bradsher,
"China’s Leader Says He Is ‘Worried’ Over U.S. Treasuries," The New York
Times, March 13, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/world/asia/14china.html?_r=1&hp
America, what is happening to you?
“One thing seems probable to me,” said Peer Steinbrück,
the German finance minister, in September 2008....“the United States will lose
its status as the superpower of the global financial system.” You don’t have to
strain too hard to see the financial crisis as the death knell for a
debt-ridden, overconsuming, and underproducing American empire . . .
Richard Florida, "How the Crash Will
Reshape America," The Atlantic, March 2009 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography
If the snub of British PM Gordon Brown at the hands
of President Obama and his wife weren't enough, now British Cabinet Secretary
Sir Gus O'Donnell is saying that Downing Street is finding it "unbelievably
difficult" to get hold of officials from Obama's administration. British
officials can't seem to ever get past the administration's answer machines as
they call here to try and coordinate plans for the coming G20 summit.
Free Republic, March 11, 2009 ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/news-forum/index
Top federal regulators say they were taken aback
when they learned that a California congresswoman who helped set up a meeting
with bankers last year had family financial ties to a bank whose chief executive
asked them for up to $50 million in special bailout funds. Representative Maxine
Waters, Democrat of California, requested the September meeting on behalf of
executives at OneUnited, one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks. Ms.
Waters’s husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank’s board until early
last year and has owned at least $250,000 of its stock.
Eric Lipton and Jim Rutenberg,
"Congresswoman, Tied to Bank, Helped Seek Funds," The New York Times,
March 13, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/us/politics/13waters.html?ref=business
Jensen Comment
Maxine was once named the "most corrupt" legislator in the U.S. Congress. For
nearly 20 years, taxpayers have funded her extended family's piggy bank.
"A.I.G., Where Taxpayers’ Dollars Go to Die," by Gretchen Morgenson,
The New York Times, March 7, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/business/08gret.html
For details on credit derivative disasters see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout
Throwing money at education without a plan
The stimulus bill throws an unprecedented $100 billion at the nation's 14,000
school districts, but it subsidizes the status quo and demands little from
recipients in return. The Milwaukee school system is receiving millions of
dollars for additional school construction though it has excess capacity and
stagnant enrollment. Detroit Public Schools, according to a recent Detroit Free
Press story, "stands to reap $530 million -- $355 million with no strings
attached -- from the federal stimulus package that will hand Michigan nearly $7
billion over two or three years. . . . In all, the state and local school
districts could have at least $2.5 billion to spend as they see fit." (Our
emphasis.) Detroit graduates a mere 24% of its students and has a history of
corruption. Audits in 2001 and 2004 found $2.5 million missing or misspent, and
the city's schools superintendent was fired in December for incompetence. How
does shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars more into such a system advance
Mr. Obama's reform agenda?
"Obama's Education Opening," The Wall Street Journal,
March 13, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123698771319725901.html?mod=article-outset-box
Obama is Not Raising Taxes on the Lower and Middle Class: Yeah
Right!
Watch your utility bill go through the roof as a hidden tax
"People are learning," says William Kovacs, vice president of environment,
technology and regulatory affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which has
been cautious about embracing a climate plan). "The Obama budget did more to
help us consolidate and coalesce the business community than anything we could
have done. It's opened eyes to the fact that this is about a social welfare
transfer system, not about climate." Truth is, any cap-and-trade system is a
tax, even if Mr. Obama's plan has only started to force business proponents to
admit it. The government sets a cap on how much greenhouse gas can be emitted
annually. Companies buy and sell permits that allow them to emit. Customers bear
the price of those permits. But the political question was always how that first
batch of permits would end up with companies. Corporate support rested on the
belief they'd be "allocated," for free. This would allow them to delay the day
when they'd have to pass costs on to consumers, and ignore, for now, the "tax"
question. It didn't take long for the pols to
figure out they could auction off permits and spend the loot.
President Obama's auction bonanza would earn the feds $650 billion in 10 years,
according to the administration's budget estimate -- and that's a low, low, low
estimate (meaning more power rate increases to
come).
"The Climate Change Lobby Has Regrets: Cap and trade is going to cost
them," The Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123630254209847245.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Jensen Comment
In a way this is a regressive hidden tax. Often coal fired electric plants
producing the most carbon generate power in the poorest/rural parts of the
United States while natural gas, nuclear, and hydro generate power for the upper
crust. For example, the land of Babylon, Las Vegas, gets its power from Hoover
Dam --- no carbon problem above this enormous dam. I wonder if poor folks in
Birmingham will ever catch on that they're being had with a regressive tax when
they turn on their fans in the summer while the millionaires in Las Vegas get
relatively cheap air conditioning.
What's worse is that power intensive companies will soon figure this out,
shut down factories in Birmingham, and move the plants to Las Vegas, Houston,
and even Los Angeles --- well maybe not Los Angeles since California is the
least desirable place to locate business firms and executives at the moment
because of high state taxation. Although real estate prices have come down in
California, housing prices are not as cheap as housing in tax havens like Nevada
and Texas.
"Obama’s last hope on housing," by Christopher Joye, Financial
Times, March 3, 2009 ---
http://blogs.ft.com/economistsforum/2009/03/obamas-last-hope-on-housing/
Make no mistake: President Obama’s $75bn
housing plan is a policy disaster. It merely treats the symptoms of the
calamity in an extremely costly manner via short-term interest rate relief
and remarkably does nothing to prevent the next generation of borrowers
experiencing the same problems.
The administration’s response also
exacerbates the underlying dysfunction that is the root cause of the US’s
housing market woes by, for example, offering defaulting borrowers scope to
wriggle out of their contracts through the judicial system.
This will only undermine the
enforceability of US mortgages and embed a new risk premium that will
inevitably lead to higher interest rates and likely funding uncertainty.
By reinvigorating Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac without genuine reforms, the administration has demonstrated that it
does not understand the fundamental flaws inherent in the US financing
system, which precipitated this crisis in the first place.
There remains, however, hope that the more
thoughtful decision-makers will search for superior long-term reforms. In
this context, I was fortunate enough to be able to present a tractable
solution to the US’s housing market problems at a summit in New York for
Obama administration officials.
The plan I presented directly cauterises
the US’s housing market dysfunction, delivers far greater and more permanent
interest rate relief for distressed borrowers, allows banks to immediately
recapitalise their balance-sheets with a $77bn cash injection, and costs
taxpayers much less than the administration’s initiative. On all objective
counts I feel that it is an unambiguous improvement on the administration’s
alternative.
As I’ve noted previously, one of the most
critical lessons from the global financial crisis has been that many
households had far too much leverage, particularly in the US where the
average borrower’s mortgage is now worth an astonishing 95 per cent of their
home. The only genuine policy solution to the desire to deleverage is the
development of external markets in housing equity – or ‘shared equity’ –
which borrowers can use synergistically in combination with traditional debt
finance.
Here’s how a government ‘debt for equity
swap’ programme would allow distressed US borrowers to radically deleverage
their balance-sheets:
Assume that the average ‘distressed’
borrower’s loan-to-value ratio is, say, 115 per cent. Under the
debt-for-equity swap, the traditional lender would only write off 15 per
cent of the value of their loan to bring the LTV back to 100 per cent (as
opposed to writing off most of the loan). A similar write-down is
anticipated in the administration’s scheme.
Yet instead of making a gift to lenders to
temporarily cut borrowers’ repayments, the government would refinance 25 per
cent of the reset home loan by swapping it with a taxpayer-funded ‘shared
equity’ loan (this could be operationally achieved by having borrowers pay
down 25 per cent of the reset loan).
Importantly, the shared equity loan
carries no monthly repayments during its maximum 30-year life. In exchange,
taxpayers receive half of the property’s future capital growth in lieu of
interest when the home owner elects to repay the loan either on refinancing
or sale of the property. The lender also owns no legal interest in the home
since it is structured using a traditional mortgage contract; i.e. the owner
retains control over what they do with their property.
The traditional lender is now left with a
dramatically less risky 75 per cent LTV. They are also directly paid 25 per
cent of the face value of their reset loan by the government and thus get
the benefit of a significant cash injection – which is worth about $77bn –
onto their balance-sheets.
The borrower is now only paying a full
rate of interest on a home loan that is 65 per cent of its original value.
They therefore benefit from a permanent 35 per cent reduction in their
interest and principal repayments over the 30 year life of the package. In
contrast, the lower repayments realised by borrowers under the
administration’s proposal only last five years – after which rates are
ratcheted back up, thereby raising the risk of ‘redefault’.
Assuming that house prices increase at a
rate no greater than nominal gross domestic product during the next 30
years, which given the recent 25 per cent correction seems defendable,
taxpayers could expect to earn a 5-10 per cent annualised, ungeared rate of
return. This is patently superior to the 100 per cent losses that taxpayers
will realise on their $75bn ‘gift’ to distressed borrowers under the
existing plan.
How much would this cost? According to the
Mortgage Bankers’ Association, 6.6 per cent of the circa $11tn of US home
loans are in 60 days or more arrears. Assume that half of these borrowers go
into foreclosure and need to access the programme. That gives $363bn worth
of loans in distress. If the average LTV is 115 per cent, and the lender
wears a 15 per cent write-down, a 25 per cent debt for equity swap would
cost taxpayers roughly $77bn, which, coincidentally, is almost exactly the
same size as the administration’s package.
Importantly, once the shared equity loans
are repaid the government can recycle the capital to assist the next
generation of households in distress. The $77bn equity fund could therefore
be used to reduce the risk of families facing foreclosure in perpetuity. And
since traditional lenders are minimising their foreclosure risk, they could
ultimately contribute.
Successful private and publicly markets in
housing equity now exist in Australia, NZ, and the UK. Combined with the
fact that leading academics such as Ian Ayers and Barry Nalebuff, Luigi
Zingales, and Edward Glaeser have recently made similar calls for the US
government to help borrowers swap their debt for equity, it is hard not to
acknowledge that there is immense merit to this plan.
Nobody would begrudge the administration
the opportunity to refine their response to this calamity. I just hope they
have the humility and foresight to listen.
Can the investment banking failure be traced to a math error?
Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street ---
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all
Link forwarded by Jim Mahar ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/recipe-for-disaster-formula-that-killed.html
Some highlights:
"For five years, Li's formula, known as a
Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive
breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely
complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever
before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it
possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities,
expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.
His method was adopted by everybody from bond
investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And
it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that
warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.
Then the model fell apart." The article goes on to show that correlations
are at the heart of the problem.
"The reason that ratings agencies and investors
felt so safe with the triple-A tranches was that they believed there was
no way hundreds of homeowners would all default on their loans at the
same time. One person might lose his job, another might fall ill. But
those are individual calamities that don't affect the mortgage pool much
as a whole: Everybody else is still making their payments on time.
But not all calamities are individual, and
tranching still hadn't solved all the problems of mortgage-pool risk.
Some things, like falling house prices, affect a large number of people
at once. If home values in your neighborhood decline and you lose some
of your equity, there's a good chance your neighbors will lose theirs as
well. If, as a result, you default on your mortgage, there's a higher
probability they will default, too. That's called correlation—the degree
to which one variable moves in line with another—and measuring it is an
important part of determining how risky mortgage bonds are."
I would highly recommend reading the entire thing that gets much more
involved with the actual formula etc.
The
“math error” might truly be have been an error or it might have simply been a
gamble with what was perceived as miniscule odds of total market failure.
Something similar happened in the case of the trillion-dollar disastrous 1993
collapse of Long Term Capital Management formed by Nobel Prize winning
economists and their doctoral students who took similar gambles that ignored the
“miniscule odds” of world market collapse ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#LTCM
The
rhetorical question is whether the failure is ignorance in model building or
risk taking using the model?
Also see
"In Plato's Cave: Mathematical models are a
powerful way of predicting financial markets. But they are fallible" The
Economist, January 24, 2009, pp. 10-14 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout
The Short and Simple Video About What Caused the Credit Crisis ---
http://vimeo.com/3261363
Also at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0zEXdDO5JU
Ed Scribner forwarded the above video links
The White House this week was consumed by extreme
interest in a celebrated radio critic, reportedly coordinating an attack line
with antic Clinton-era political operatives who don't know what time it is. For
them it's always the bouncy '90s and anything goes, it's all just a game.
President Obama himself contributes to an atmosphere of fear grown to panic as
he takes a historic crisis and turns it into what he imagines is a grand
opportunity for sweeping change. What we need is stabilization—an undergirding,
a restrengthening so things can settle and then rise. What we're given is
multiple schemes, and the beginning of a reordering of financial realities
between the individual and the state. The Obama people think they are playing
big ball, not small ball, and they no doubt like the feeling of it: "We're
making history." But that, ironically, was precisely the preoccupation of the
last administration—doing it big, being "consequential," showing history. Watch:
Within six months, the Obama administration will be starting to breathe the word
"legacy." What they're up to will win and hold support, at least for a while,
until the reaction. But is it responsible? Or is it only vain?
Peggy Noonan, "A Tragedy of Errors,
and an Accounting After a crash, the Marines set an example," The Wall Street
Journal, March 6, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123629513232645561.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Results of a 2006 Fox News Poll
Yes, that says 51 percent of Democrats and 34 percent
of Independents didn't want President Bush to succeed...even though our nation
was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sure media outlets will be reporting
this revelation real soon, and expressing their apologies to Mr. Limbaugh.
Noel Sheppard, "Most Democrats
Wanted Bush to Fail in 2006 Poll, Will Media Care?" Newsbusters, March 9,
2009 ---
Click Here
Liberals like Keith Obermann doubled Rush Limbaugh's audience: Nice
going Keith!
The far left has found a rallying point (allegedly planned months ago) accusing Rush Limbaugh of wanting the
Recovery Act to fail so that Obama will fail. I'm no Limbaugh fan, but I can
think back to when Keith Olbermann and many other progressives wanted the Surge
in Iraq to fail ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGmLasxsYqk&feature=related
MSNBC's Olbermann, who never ever disagrees with Obama, was inspired by then
Senator Obama's repeated 2006 claims that the Surge had zero chance ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJbsQ7oUQWw
At the time it was not clear that Surge success would not revive GOP hopes for
the 2008 election. In order to destroy the chances of the GOP in this election,
many liberals hoped the Surge would fail and, thereby, destroy the GOP. The
Surge succeeded but the GOP managed destroy itself anyway. Abruptly, Senator
Obama's criticisms of the Surge disappeared from his Website. I think Olbermann,
who still keeps throwing shoes at former President Bush, still wishes the Surge
had failed. His hate for conservatives runs deeper than anybody I can think of
except, well maybe, not deeper than MSNBC's Chris Matthews.
I wanted the Bush policy on Iraq to fail because the
war and the ideas it was based were in complete opposition to my basic
principles about how The United States should use its wealth and power. . . .
Not because I hate our country or hate the troops but for the exact opposite
reason--because I love my country and I value the lives of the people sworn to
protect it. If you opposed the war, I bet you feel the same way. . .
Lee Stranahan (Huffington Post)
as quoted by James Toranto, Best of the Web Today, The Wall Street Journal,
March 3, 2009
This notion that I want the president to fail,
folks, this shows you a sign of the problem we've got. That's nothing more than
common sense and to not be able to say it, why in the world do I want what we
just described, rampant government growth, indebtedness, wealth that's not even
being created yet that is being spent, what is in this? What possibly is in this
that anybody of us wants to succeed? Did the Democrats want the war on Iraq to
fail! . . . "You can't say, Mr. Limbaugh, that you want the president to fail
because that's like saying you want the country to fail." It's the opposite. I
want the country to survive. I want the country to succeed.
Rush Limbaugh,
as quoted by James Toranto, Best of the Web Today, The Wall Street Journal,
March 3, 2009
Jensen Quote
I did not include this quotation because I'm a big fan of Rush Limbaugh. Too
often he fires from the hip. I think many of his criticisms are superficial and
not adequately researched. But his audience has doubled thanks to efforts to
squelch his freedom of speech.
Many media outlets wanted TARP to fail when Bush was still in charge ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCBQTdhOq28
Something the media would not dare publish ---
http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/monsoor.asp
The Way Financial Media Fraud
Works
Video from YouTube
(not sure how long it will be online)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwUXx4DR0wo
From Jim Mahar's Blog on March 152, 2009 ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
While
there was much hype in the days leading
up to the show, the actual interview was
pretty good. Jon Stewart vs Jim Cramer.
Here is the
link from The DailyShow
for the entire
episode.
It is also available (at least
temporarily) on
YouTube
Jon Stewart vs Jim
Cramer Interview Fight on Daily Show
---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LceizefhP4k
Some talking
points:
* Stewart's main point seems to be that
while Cramer and CNBC claim to be
looking out for investors, in actuality
they are are nothing more than
entertainment at best and accomplices at
worst.
* It is interesting to see the
discussion on Short Selling and the way
that Cramer (and by inference other
hedge fund managers) essentially lied to
drive the price down. I would have to
think the SEC might be interested in
this.
* Stewart maintains that the financial
media plays a role in governance. They
dropped the ball.
* Cramer was good in admitting that
success (year after year of 30% returns)
changes our view and we forget that
things go wrong.
* Line of the day from Stewart: "We are
both snake oil salesmen, but I let
people know I sell snake oil.:
* Line of the day from Cramer: "No one
should be spared in this environment."
The whole interview (unedited) is also
available. Here is the 3rd part:
Video
from YouTube (not sure how long it will
be online)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwUXx4DR0wo
Bob Jensen's Rotten to the Core threads are
at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
One Way Real Estate Appraisal
Fraud Operates
This scheme was greatly enabled by the ability to sell mortgages
upstream at loan amounts based upon fraudulent appraisals that
allowed loan balances greatly in excess of honest estimates of
value.
"Real estate appraiser pleads guilty in
mortgage case: Michael Gee faces up to 30 years in prison, $1 million fine,"
by Gary L. Wright, Charlottesville Observer, March 11, 2009 ---
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/local/story/588976.html
Mooresville real estate appraiser Michael Gee
pleaded guilty Tuesday in connection with his role in a mortgage fraud case
involving about $15 million in loans and more than 200 properties.
Gee is accused in the indictment of participating
in a house flipping scheme, where properties were purchased and then resold
at much higher prices in simultaneous closings arranged by an attorney who
knew about the scheme.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Martens said in
court Tuesday that prosecutors believe the loss attributable to Gee is in
excess of $2.5 million.
Prosecutors accused the participants in the
mortgage fraud case of lying about buyers' income, providing false bank
statements and tax returns, and paying bribes to local businesses and
kickbacks to real estate agents and investors.
The defendants and others also were involved in
preparing fraudulent real estate appraisals, according to the indictment.
Mortgage fraud has helped fuel the nation's
foreclosure crisis.
Gee pleaded guilty to making a false statement to a
bank. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to dismiss eight other charges,
including bank fraud and conspiracy to commit mail, wire and bank fraud.
The maximum punishment for his crime is 30 years in
prison and a $1 million fine. His sentence will depend on his record and the
extent of his role in the crime.
Gee surrendered his license in 2005 during an
investigation by the N.C. Appraisal Board.
Four of the other five defendants charged in the
mortgage fraud case have also pleaded guilty.
Real estate agents Gregory Mascaro and Gregory
Rankin and mortgage brokers Michael Pahutski and Jules Springs are awaiting
sentencing.
Victoria Sprouse, a Charlotte real estate lawyer,
has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go on trial March 23.
Neither Gee nor his lawyer, Joseph Zeszotarski,
would discuss the case as they left the courthouse Tuesday.
One of the largest bank failures in the
subprime scandal was Washington Mutual (WaMu)
"Report and Recommendations Pursuant to Section 133 of the Emergency Economic
Stabilization Act of 2008: Study on Mark-To-Market Accounting," SEC, December
30, 2009, Page 133 ---
http://www.sec.gov/news/studies/2008/marktomarket123008.pdf
As more fully described in the remainder of this
section, for most of the failed banks studied, the immediate cause of
failure was the inability to become adequately capitalized. For some failed
banks, the immediate cause of failure was the inability to meet depositors’
needs. Some failed banks that were closed due to liquidity also had
inadequate capital, but others had adequate capital at the time of closure.
Most notably, the largest bank to fail, WaMu, was well-capitalized according
to the applicable capital adequacy standards at the time of failure.
. . .
General reports of
fraudulent mortgage underwriting practices in the industry, as well as
specific charges alleged against certain appraisal firms utilized by
WaMu,195 only contributed to the uncertainty
surrounding the quality of loans it held. For instance, news outlets
reported that the stock price of WaMu fell as much as 14% after an analyst
report released in June 2008 suggested WaMu was underestimating losses on
home loans. (Page 133)
. . .
New York A.G. Cuomo Sues First American, Alleges
Fraud, Forbes, November 11, 2007.
In its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2008, WaMu describes the
case as follows: On November 1, 2007, the Attorney General of the State of
New York filed a lawsuit against First American Corporation and First
American eAppraiseIT. The People of the State of New York by Andrew Cuomo v.
First American Corporation and First American eAppraiseIT, No. 07-406796
(N.Y. Sup. Ct. Filed Nov. 1, 2007). According to the Attorney General's
Complaint, eAppraiseIT is a First American subsidiary that provides
residential real estate appraisal services to various lenders, including the
Bank. The Attorney General asserts that, contrary to various state and
federal requirements and the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal
Practice, the Bank conspired with eAppraiseIT
in various ways to falsely increase the valuations done by appraisers
eAppraiseIT retained to perform appraisals on Bank loans.
First American Corporation and First American eAppraiseIT are not affiliates
of the Company, and neither the Company nor the Bank is a defendant in the
case.
Continued in over 200 pages of this research study mandated by Congress
Bob Jensen's threads on Subprime:
Borne of Sleaze, Bribery, and Lies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze
Note especially the appraisal fraud in the case of Marvene ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudMarvene.htm
FTC Identity Theft Center ---
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft/
Identity Theft Resource Center
---
http://www.idtheftcenter.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on phishing ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#Phishing
Kids Think Auschwitz is a beer brand ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/Page 2
A Learning-Based Use of Wikipedia
Students individually or in teams can be assigned writing projects for Wikipedia
modules
But it's not only college
writing which works on Wikipedia. After hearing about my class, a colleague in
Biology recently created a class assignment where his students created a page in
Wikipedia to define Dictyostelium discoideum. And we're not alone. Though some
Wikipedians debate whether it is appropriate to use Wikipedia as an assignment
space, there is a rapidly growing
community of college instructors who are doing just
that. And what has been surprising in students' attitudes toward Wikipedia?
Though my evidence is anecdotal, in the years of teaching with Wikipedia I have
found almost no difference in the range of opinions about Wikipedia held by
student writers and those held by their - mostly - older teachers. I find that
roughly the same proportion of people have concerns about reliability, open
access, and information literacy among students and faculty, just as I find
roughly the same number of enthusiastic adopters among teachers and students.
But when I query reluctant students about how and where they formed their
negative opinions about Wikipedia, they usually
point to a classroom environment where they were penalized for using it as a
source. They almost never have had an experience
which encouraged them to move from simply using Wikipedia to writing for it. As
we move from seeing Wikipedia as only a resource to an online intellectual
community, students are more than ready to accompany us.
Robert Cummings, Inside Higher Ed, March 12, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/03/12/cummings
When all the grades are above average
"Grade Inflation Seen Rising," by Scott Jaschik,
Inside Higher Ed, March 12, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/12/grades
A professor who has crusaded against grade
inflation by gathering and publicizing data has released his largest
analysis to date -- suggesting that grade inflation continues to be a broad
problem across much of higher education. The figures may embarrass some
colleges and renew a debate over whether students experience enough rigor.
The new analysis found that the average grade-point
average at private colleges rose from 3.09 in 1991 to 3.30 in 2006. At
public colleges and universities, the increase was from 2.85 to 3.01 over
the same time period. The study also examines -- and seek to refute -- the
idea that students are earning better grades simply because they are better
prepared. The greatest increases in grades appear to be coming at flagship
public universities in the South and at selective liberal arts colleges.
The study was done by Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired
Duke University professor who created
GradeInflation.com
to document these trends. For this study, he
significantly expanded the numbers of institutions examined, and the time
frame.
In addition, Rojstaczer says that his new study
shows that it is possible to tame grade inflation. He finds that Princeton
University has largely done so -- by making an issue of grades and
encouraging professors to give a broader distribution of grades. Further, he
finds that there is one sector that has held the line against inflated
grades: community colleges.
Rojstaczer's findings will likely resonate with
professors, many of whom regularly bemoan grade inflation and say that
students are conditioned to expect good grades just for showing up, and that
professors who refuse to go along get punished with harsh course
evaluations. Many professors who are off the tenure track or who are
pre-tenure report great fear of being punished by students (and then not
rehired) if they gain a reputation for tough grading, and studies have found
correlations between being an easy grader and earning good ratings
at RateMyProfessors.com. But other researchers
question this study and conventional wisdom and say that reports of grade
inflation are themselves inflated.
Various professors start campaigns against grade
inflation, but Rojstaczer has stuck with the issue. He gained national
attention in 2003 with an op-ed in The Washington Post called
"Where All Grades Are Above Average," an article
in which he confessed to having let two years pass without awarding a C. The
Web site followed, but the new data represent more colleges than ever before
and come after several years in which he didn't update the statistics.
In an interview, he said that he releases this
information because he believes that not much more is really needed to
tackle grade inflation. "People say this issue is complicated and difficult.
It really isn't. It's incredibly simple," he said. "You get so fat that it
effects your health. You lose weight. I really don't see all the problems in
reducing GPAs that everyone else seems to see."
He noted that once Princeton deans said that the
issue mattered and encouraged tougher grading,
there was a significant change. "How difficult is
this?" Rojstaczer asked. Other colleges and universities have seen the
opposite trend. At Brown University last year was the first time, for
example,
a
majority of undergraduate grades were A's, up from
42.5 percent a decade earlier.
The issue matters, Rojstaczer said, because "the
alternative is a student body that frequently misses class, never prepares
in advance, studies about 11 hours a week if they are 'full time' students,
and drinks itself into a constant stupor out of boredom. That's not an
acceptable alternative anywhere."
Clifford Adelman, a senior analyst at the Institute
for Higher Education Policy and a leading education researcher, has
conducted extensive studies of grades and degrees, using national data sets,
and he believes that grade inflation is marginal -- and that the issue
receives far too much attention. (Adelman has criticized the quality of
Rojstaczer's past work, and Rojstaczer has in turn been critical of the
critique.)
"If grade inflation is so rampant, how come at
least a third of kids who start in four-year colleges don't graduate?"
Adelman asked.
"My point is not that there is no grade inflation,
rather that inflation in the judgment of human performance is something that
cannot be proved," he said. In many cases, he said, there is a far more
significant shift going on that gets missed in the discussion of grade
inflation. "A significant proportion of grades that are not really grades"
are being given, Adelman said, as students and professor embrace
"alternative signs of student academic behavior" in a way that "devalues
grading."
Added Adelman: "I see grade devaluation as a more
serious problem for a variety of reasons that Stuart would never consider,
but that academic administrators and enrollment managers everywhere
instantly understand when the trend is pointed out." Adelman said that he
stands by his earlier work, based on national data, that there is not a
national surge in grades.
Community College Standards
Rojstaczer's work focuses on four-year
institutions, and most of his criticisms relate to traditional college age
students. But he notes in his new report that data from community colleges
suggest that professors in that sector have been getting tougher in recent
years, and have never abandoned the C. Rojstaczer had data from the entire
California Community College system (the largest in the United States) and
selected other community colleges -- and he found none of the patterns that
bothered him in the four-year sector.
Michael R. Chipps, president of Mid-Plains
Community College in Nebraska, said his institution and other community
colleges take grades seriously for a number of reasons. One is that
community colleges use grades to track how their students do when they
transfer to four-year institutions (and he noted that many community college
graduates perform better than students who started at four-year
institutions). In addition, he noted that because community colleges admit
students with a range of academic backgrounds, accurate assessment is seen
as important to help students enter the best possible programs and to track
their progress.
"Community colleges want the rigor to be
sufficient, so that our students can not only prosper in the world of work,
but seriously compete with students at the senior level institutions,"
Chipps said.
At a reception for college composition instructors
Wednesday night in San Francisco, professors from community colleges were
not surprised that grade inflation seemed less present at their institutions
than at four-year institutions -- and they were proud of their standards
too.
Sandie McGill Barnhouse, chair of the Two-Year
College English Association, who teaches at Rowan Cabarrus Community
College, said that community college professors see it as part of their
missions to teach students of a "diversity of entering skills," so there is
no assumption that everyone in the class will do well. She said that many
community college students haven't had great high school experiences and so
aren't those demanding an A on everything.
Sharon Mitchler, associate professor of English and
humanities at Centralia College, a community college in Washington State,
said that she thinks grading at community colleges may be more honest
because that's the way students want it. Her students, she said, are focused
on how improving their writing will help them professionally, and they want
to see that the course will give them new skills they can use, not a letter
grade.
"If I gave out all A's, my classes would think I'd
lost my mind," she said.
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
Questions
What do airline fares and Congressional budgets have in common?
Answer
There are a lot of surprises that are revealed only after you're struck with the
deceptions (especially about baggage fees in both instances).
What you end up with is not necessarily what you'd planned on getting.
In 2009 the airline seat demand is expected to drop off
a cliff for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the economy.
Beware of increasingly deceptive ticket deals.
Travel companies say that by
the end of this year, consumers will be able to comparison shop for airfares
that for the first time will include the fees airlines have been tacking on to
advertised fares only after you hit the "buy" button. Already
TripAdvisor.com and
FlyingFees.com
offer elementary tools for calculating fees, and advanced
technology that can fold fees into fare quotes at travel agencies, online
vendors and airline Web sites is likely to hit the market later this year.
"Airfare Quotes That Lay Bare Hidden Fees: Sites Build Tools to Compare
the Actual Costs of Flights; When Baggage Tips the Scale," by Scott Macartney,
The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123664662318478683.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal
Shop for airline tickets online or through a travel
agent and the price quotes you get don't tell the whole story these days.
But that's about to change.
Travel companies say that by the end of this year,
consumers will be able to comparison shop for airfares that for the first
time will include the fees airlines have been tacking on to advertised fares
only after you hit the "buy" button. Already TripAdvisor.com and
FlyingFees.com offer elementary tools for calculating fees, and advanced
technology that can fold fees into fare quotes at travel agencies, online
vendors and airline Web sites is likely to hit the market later this year.
"This has tremendous potential to turn air-travel
shopping on its end," said Kyle Moore, vice president of product marketing
for Sabre Travel Network.
A $200 ticket on one airline may look like a good
deal, but could ultimately be more expensive than a $250 ticket on another
carrier if that first airline charges fees for checking baggage,
transporting pets or unaccompanied minors. Even perks like seats with extra
legroom, priority security-line privileges or
one-day passes to an airport lounge can significantly boost the price of a
ticket.
Airlines have found customers willing to pay more at the airport when fees are separate from fares. Folding fees into fares could limit airlines' ability to dig deeper into traveler wallets.
Sabre Holdings Corp. and Amadeus IT Group SA, two leading airline booking companies, say they'll have tools out to travel agents, Web sites and airlines beginning later this year that will add fees consumers plan to use into ticket prices, showing bottom-line prices much as car-rental companies were pressured into showing the total price of a rental with all fees, taxes and surcharges included.
Rough early attempts to fold fees into prices give travelers a better idea of the fees they may incur, but still leave a lot of the math to travelers. TripAdvisor, a company owned by Expedia Inc. that built a following collecting travelers' hotel and destination reviews, added airline ticket search capabilities to its site on Feb. 27 and unveiled a "fee estimator" that can re-rank prices based on how many bags you plan to check. The fee estimator, developed in-house by TripAdvisor, can also calculate expected fees for each flight for meals, drinks, snacks and
"Customers are looking for
clarity in pricing," says Bryan Saltzburg, general manager of new
initiatives for TripAdvisor.
Without fees, a $193 round-trip fare between New
York and Fort Lauderdale for travel later this month on US Airways Group
Inc. looks cheaper than a $197 fare at JetBlue Airways Corp., for example.
But if you're checking two bags, you'll pay $80 in fees on US Airways and
only $40 on JetBlue.
The fee estimator takes into account whether you
have elite status at an airline that may exempt you from some fees. But
there are lots of limitations. TripAdvisor's estimator only works for
domestic flights and does not price out the costs of overweight or oversized
luggage, priority seating, pets, unaccompanied minors or other charges.
TripAdvisor says it concentrated on the most frequently incurred fees; more
fees may be coming.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on consumer fraud and reporting
are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm
Jensen Comment
Add-on fee collecting greatly complicates product costing since most of these
fees are in essence for separate products and services. But the products are in
no way independent since the all depend on the purchase of the main ticket. Also
these products share many common fixed costs such as the cost of baggage
handling. The airline needs a baggage system to serve both the "free baggage"
that is part of the ticket price and the "fee baggage" that is charged baggage
not covered in the price of a ticket. Cost accounting and pricing decisions are
very complicated and offer an opportunity for new case studies in cost and
managerial courses. Add this to the problem of frequent flier liabilities and
you may write up a case that nobody can solve. Those incomprehensible telephone
bills demonstrated that consumers really hate complicated billings with lots of
hidden surprises in the fine print.
A Small But Important Step in Breaking the Accountics
Stranglehold on Accountancy Doctoral Programs
"A Profession's Response to a Looming Storage: Closing
the Gap in the Supply of Accounting Faculty," by Michael Ruff, Jay C. Thibodeau,
and Jean C. Bedard, Journal of Accountancy, March 2009 ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2009/Mar/AccountingFaculty.htm
March 10, 2009 reply from Roger Debreceny
[roger@DEBRECENY.COM]
The website for the ADS program is
http://www.adsphd.org/
. The list of participating institutions is at
http://www.adsphd.org/participatingschools.asp
Doyle Williams is chairing this effort. He has been
strong in holding the line, saying, for example, that if a student starts in
auditing and tax and then decides to switch to financial accounting, they
must give up their scholarship. Of course, the reality is that capital
markets research can be applied to many decision frames and the centrifugal
forces are so strong that we will see:
1) Students using capital markets approaches to
study auditing (think audit fees) or tax
2) Switching to largely financial accounting, capital markets research
after graduation
Having said that, I think this will apply to only a
minority (albeit a significant minority) of students. It was a great
experience to interact with other faculty and potential students in December
last year. I think we can see this effort as an important first step in
righting the listing ship of accounting academia.
Roger
Bob Jensen's threads on the doctoral program mess are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
Wikipedia in Hardcover?
Yes in terms of selected modules you want in hard copy near your desk
"The Open-Source Encyclopedia,
Now in Hardcover," by Brock Read, Chronicle of Higher Education, March
10, 2009 ---
Need a gift for that open-source enthusiast in your
life who happens to have some bookshelf space to fill? A German company
called PediaPress
has come to the rescue: For a not-unreasonable fee, it
will create a book that compiles your favorite Wikipedia articles.
PediaPress has been at this since January, when it
started printing volumes drawn from Wikipedia’s German-language edition, but
late last month it added to its repertoire six new languages: French,
Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Simple English (from a version of
the encyclopedia written for children and for adults learning English as a
second language). Regular English is on its way soon. It’s taking longer to
work out the kinks, though, since that encyclopedia is so massive.
Assembling a book is pretty easy: Wikipedia has set
up
a Web
site that lets you drag-and-drop your way through
the process. A 100-page book will set you back $8.90 (additional pages cost
more), plus shipping, and it’ll be at least halfway handsome — if the photo
below, from Wikipedia user He!ko, is any guide. (photo not shown
here)
So the books look perfectly
good. But then comes the $64,000 question: Will people really pay for a
hardbound copy of something they can view online for free? As like-minded
books-on-demand projects such as the Espresso Book Machine have shown,
there’s at least some kind of a market for readers of made-to-order books,
so it’s not inconceivable that some Wikipedia visitors will order special
volumes as gifts or buy texts that they can mark up with marginalia.
Wikipedia says the press is doing brisk business: It sold more than 1,000
German-language books in its first month of operations.
Jensen Comment
Whereas finance is one of the best topics covered in Wikipedia, accountancy
sadly has terrible coverage. My additions tend to be rejected on the basis of
their length.
It sort of puts accountants in their places when
aardvarks get better coverage than accountancy.
Free Credit Courses for Parents, Guardians, and
Grandparents
Barton College, in North Carolina, has announced that
it will give the parents, guardians and grandparents of students the right to
take two courses in the college's weekend program for adult students -- without
paying tuition. College officials said that the program was inspired by
President Obama's call for all Americans to gain at least one year of higher
education. About one third of Barton's students are first generation college
students, so any participation by their parents would advance Obama's goal. The
three-credit courses open to these potential new students normally have a
tuition charge of $339 per credit hour. Kelly Thompson, vice president for
external relations, said that because the program is new, the college has no
idea how widespread participation will be. But she said that the college is
willing to hire extra instructors if needed to meet the demand.
"Barton's Response to Obama's Call for More Higher Ed," Inside Higher Ed,
March 11, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/11/qt#193672
The Barton College Homepage is at
http://www.barton.edu/
The College is named for Barton Warren Stone, a founder of the Christian Church
(Disciples of Christ). In addition to Stone's early ministry in eastern North
Carolina, he also had roots in private higher education in this state.
Jensen Comment
Although this is a well-intended program, it may have some financial returns.
Qualifying adults who take six credits for free might be motivated to take more
courses by paying for more weekend courses. Barton does have an an undergraduate
accountancy program in its School of Business.
The Slow Sex Movement: No need for "love, romance and even
flirtation"
A commune dedicated to female orgasms
"The Pleasure Principle," Patricia Leigh Brown and Carol Pogash, The New
York Times, March 13, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/fashion/15commune.html?_r=1&ref=fashion
EVEN in a culture in which sex toys are a booming
business and Oprah Winfrey discusses living your best life in the bedroom, a
coed live-in commune dedicated to the female orgasm hovers at the extremes.
The founder of the One Taste Urban Retreat Center,
Nicole Daedone, sees herself as leading “the slow-sex movement,” one that
places a near-exclusive emphasis on women’s pleasure — in which love,
romance and even flirtation are not required.
“In our culture, admitting our bodies matter is
almost an admission of failure,” said Ms. Daedone, 41, who can quote the
poet Mary Oliver and speak wryly on the intricacies of women’s anatomy with
equal aplomb. “I don’t think women will really experience freedom until they
own their sexuality.”
A core of 38 men and women — their average age the
late 20s — live full time in the retreat center, a shabby-chic loft building
in the South of Market district. They prepare meals together, practice yoga
and mindfulness meditation and lead workshops in communication for outside
groups as large as 60.
But the heart of the group’s activity, listed
cryptically on its Web site’s calendar as “morning practice,” is closed to
all but the residents.
At 7 a.m. each day, as the rest of America is
eating Cheerios or trying to face gridlock without hyperventilating, about a
dozen women, naked from the waist down, lie with eyes closed in a
velvet-curtained room, while clothed men huddle over them, stroking them in
a ritual known as orgasmic meditation — “OMing,” for short. The couples, who
may or may not be romantically involved, call one another “research
partners.”
A commune dedicated to men and women publicly
creating “the orgasm that exists between them,” in the words of one
resident, may sound like the ultimate California satire. But the Bay Area
has a lively and venerable history of seekers constructing lives around
sexual adventure.
Continued in article
"Tax-Prep Software Doesn't Add Up," by Rob Pegoraro, The Washington
Post, March 12. 2005 ---
Click Here
I knew I was doomed about five
minutes into this year's tax-prep ordeal. Two different programs -- having
been fed nothing more than basic personal info and the contents of a pair of
W-2s -- did not agree on the total tax bill for my wife and me.
H&R Block's TaxCut Online and Intuit's TurboTax
Online should have coughed up identical responses to such a simple input,
but instead they were $857 apart.
Sadly, I wasn't surprised to see the two dominant
home tax-preparation programs disagree, merely disappointed to see them part
company so quickly. I have long since abandoned all hope of understanding
how these applications compute my tax bill; I just want to know which one
can end the agony first.
When judged on those limited criteria,
tax-preparation software has improved a little -- especially the Web-based
versions that most people use, which need no software installation, securely
encrypt work online and are free for simple returns. Others can try them for
free, then pay to print or file (or, at no cost, copy data from them into
the IRS's
new, free Web-filing system).
This year, I tried roughly comparable Web
applications: Block's $19.95 TaxCut Online Basic and Intuit's $29.95
TurboTax Online Deluxe. Each worked in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3 in
Windows; Safari 3 on a Mac. Intuit supports Windows 2000 or newer and Mac OS
X 10.2 or newer, while Block only allows Win XP or Vista and OS X 10.3 or
newer.
After some long nights of plugging in numbers for
two salaries, a little freelance income, multiple bank accounts and
investments, a mortgage and too many other details, TurboTax left me with a
slightly higher tax bill than TaxCut. And yet I felt more comfortable with
TurboTax's estimate and less annoyed by its performance.
That's partially because TurboTax required less
work. While both Web applications could import tax-prep files saved by
2008-vintage desktop programs, TaxCut kept asking me to type in information
it should have pulled from that file, such as names of mutual funds.
TurboTax can download tax-return data from many
employers and brokerages. It also linked to Intuit's ItsDeductible site for
quick estimates of in-kind charitable donations (if you don't need that
feature, get the $14.95 TurboTax Basic edition that Intuit doesn't list on
its home page). Block doesn't offer its comparable DeductionPro service to
any of its TaxCut Online users.
That oversight wasn't TaxCut's only unforced error.
It demanded too much scrolling up and down and clicking through consecutive
screens to enter data on one form. And when I left a field blank instead of
typing a zero -- a common occasion with investments, thanks to all the
flavors of capital gains the tax code serves up -- the site scolded me to
finish the form.
Other TaxCut issues went beyond mere aesthetics.
Its Web version lacks important features available in the disc-based
edition, like the ability to inspect the 1040 form the program is creating,
then save an offline copy of your data. It also omits such lesser-known
options as the tax credit for first-time homebuyers in the District.
And if you decide you'd rather not use TaxCut,
there's no one-click way to wipe your data from the site.
TaxCut does include the extra-cost option of a
consultation with one of Block's own tax advisors. But you have to put up
with a lot of aggravation first.
Intuit's pricier program
offered its own annoyances. It kept asking questions only an accountant
could answer, such as the chunk of a mutual fund's dividends subject to
foreign tax -- a detail absent from the fund's 1099 form.
At other times, TurboTax's overall edge in
efficiency vanished, like its plodding tour of deductions and credits
repeatedly held up by a prompt to "Find More Deductions," or its clumsy
method of recording cash donations to charity.
TurboTax, however, allowed more confidence in its
numbers by showing more of its work. I could click the running total in the
top-right corner to see a summary of the factors behind that number, with my
1040-in-progress another click away. At the end of the process, a
semi-plain-English explanation added context.
But both of these programs, along with every other
tax-prep application I've tried, too often fail to explain why we must
subject ourselves to these contortions.
The tax code represents the single worst interface
-- bloated, inefficient, unreadable, unreliable, downright grotesque -- I
have ever seen. And to what end? We try to reward good behavior and punish
bad conduct with all these cryptic little rules, but how can people
Along the way, we've corrupted a basic obligation
of citizenship -- paying the cost of civilization -- into a Kafkaesque game
that only lawyers, lobbyists and accountants seem capable of winning.
I would like to see tax-prep applications deal with
this misery more effectively. But I would rather see them made obsolete by a
tax code that people can understand and follow without any extra software.
Bob Jensen's taxation helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation
The Whole World is Tweetable: Updates on
Twitter and Stocktwits
Twitter ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
March 10, 2009 message from Roger Debreceny
[roger@DEBRECENY.COM]
Gerry Trites asked about Investor
Relations on Twitter. I follow his countryman, Dominic Jones (http://twitter.com/irwebreport
and
http://www.irwebreport.com/) closely. He points to
much going onTwitter. See, for example,
http://preview.tinyurl.com/amw98y on “eBay’s
lawyers are wrong to delete earnings call information” and
http://preview.tinyurl.com/avv4yl on “SEC
disclaimers in the age of Twitter”.
BTW, if you want to see your
portfolio bump around rock bottom in real time, you can get stocktwits at
http://stocktwits.com/ ..
Of course, you can also follow me
on Twitter at
www.twitter.com/debreceny and see very important,
indeed earth shattering, information such as “OMG I fractured my big toe and
can’t ride my bike for a month” and “Yeah, my toe is OK and I can ride
again!” <Bg>
Regards
Roger
"How Twitter Could Bring Search Up to Speed: Some
say that Twitter may be as important to real-time search as YouTube is to
video," by Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, March 11, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22272/?nlid=1848&a=f
When Twitter was
introduced in late 2006, asking users to post a
140-word answer to the question "What are you doing?," many criticized the
results as nothing more than a collection of trivial thoughts and inane
ramblings. Fast-forward three years, and the number of Twitter users has
grown to millions, while the content of the many posts--better known as
"tweets"--has shifted from banal to informative.
Twitter users now
cover breaking news,
posting links to reports, blog posts, and images. Twitter's search box also
reveals what people think of the latest new gadget or movie, letting
visitors eavesdrop on often spirited conversations and some insightful
opinions.
Earlier this week, on The Charlie Rose Show,
Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, was asked directly whether Google might be
interested in acquiring Twitter. He responded, somewhat coyly, that his
company was "unlikely to buy anything right now."
Nonetheless, as Twitter grows in size and
substance, it's becoming clear that it offers a unique feed of real-time
conversation and sentiment.
Danny Sullivan,
editor of the blog
Search Engine Land,
compares this to the unique real-time feed of new video content offered by
YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006, and says that Twitter could help
improve real-time search. Notably, says Sullivan, this is something that
Google
isn't particularly good at. Even by scouring news
sites, Google simply can't match the speed and relevancy of social sites
like Digg and Twitter, he says.
Twitter's ability to capture the latest fad is
evident from its "trends" feature, which reveals the most talked about
topics among Twitterers. At the time this article was written, Twitter users
were discussing topics including National Napping Day, DST (daylight savings
time), and the new movie Watchmen. A quick search also reveals that
five people within the past half hour have posted tweets about last
weekend's Saturday Night Live skit called "The Rock Obama." The
most recent tweet includes a link to the video and was posted just three
minutes ago.
Bruce Croft, a professor of computer science at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says that Twitter search could
perhaps help make news alerts more relevant. "If you could search or track
large numbers of conversations, then there would be the possibility of
developing alerts when something starts happening," he says. "And, of
course, it's yet another opportunity to do massive data mining on people's
activities to learn even more about what they are doing and when they are
doing it."
Continued in article
March 12, 2009 reply from Steven Hornik
I use Twitter in my Financial
Accounting class. I have an account set up just for that course:
http://twitter.com/acg2021 I use it for sending
out extra credit questions randomly throughout the week so that they receive
about 1 tweet per chapter. Here is an example of the latest tweet I sent
out:
In a period of rising inventory costs, Gross Profit will be __
(higher/lower) under LIFO because COGS are __ (H/L) than under FIFO.
In the tweet I tell the students when they must get the answer to me and I
award extra points for the first n responses. I find the students really
enjoy this and it forces them to keep up the material or bring their
textbooks with them wherever they go! The concept behind it is to have
students thinking about accounting all the time!
Hope this is helpful,
Steven
PS I also have a regular twitter account:
http://twitter.com/shornik if you wish to follow
me. I'm not sure my tweets will be as exciting as Roger's broken and now
healed toe but feel free to follow.
_____________________________
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
"Firms Take to The Tweetable Business Model," by
Kim Hart, The Washington Post, March 9, 2009 ---
Click Here
Twitter, that microblogging tool that caught on
with teens and twentysomethings using it to tell loyal followers what
they're doing at any given time -- in 140 characters or less -- is now
becoming part of the business strategy for a wide range of brands, from
Skittles to Fairfax County.
As exciting as it may be to hear about what your
friends, or total strangers for that matter, ate for breakfast, some
companies are realizing that a more effective use of Twitter is to mine it
for clients, recruit employees and answer customer service questions.
To that end, some businesses are starting to host
Twitter tutorials for employees.
Network Solutions, a Web-hosting and online
marketing company based in Herndon, held a brown-bag lunch session last week
to teach staffers how to sign up for a Twitter account, how to send messages
to individuals and how to search for people who may be talking about the
company in messages, or "tweets."
Twitter is an easy way to create buzz for a new
product launch or to alert customers to a service outage. Earlier this week,
the Skittles Web site directed visitors to a Twitter search for the term
"skittle" to see what people were saying about the candy. Attendees at
conferences and other business-related gatherings already use the service to
relate details on an unusually interesting session or to share news
announcements.
For example, at a conference focused on global
health last month, philanthropist Bill Gates released a jarful of mosquitoes
into a room to make a point about the spread of malaria.
"And people found out about that first on Twitter,"
said Steven Fisher, community and social media manager at Network Solutions.
Shashi Bellamkonda, Network Solutions' social media
swami (yes, that's his real title), organized the tutorial, attended by
about 30 people. He's a more prolific Twitterer than most, posting anywhere
from five to 15 tweets per day about anything from his daily routine to the
news. Big companies such as Dell are active in the Twitterverse addressing
customer service issues, he said.
Fairfax County government is also experimenting
with Twitter, sending out announcements about snow-induced school closings
and county board meetings.
Companies are now accustomed to monitoring blogs
and other consumer-generated content for mentions of brands -- in fact,
companies such as Arlington-based New Media Strategies have made a
profitable business out of it. Similarly, Bellamkonda wants Network
Solutions employees to take notice of any questions, complaints or other
mentions of the company that pop up on Twitter.
W. Roy Dunbar, the firm's chief executive, said it
is even more important to communicate with customers during an economic
downturn. He said he gives his social media team free rein to experiment
with new tools.
"Next time, we'll conduct the meeting entirely in
tweets," Bellamkonda said.
It may be a short meeting.
Rediscovering the Internet
The crusade for government transparency and open
data -- two of the biggest buzzwords in Washington since President Obama put
them on his agenda -- has gained momentum over the past week.
Vivek Kundra, the District's chief technology
officer, was officially named as the federal chief information officer
Thursday, ending months of speculation about what the brand-new job entails
and what it means for how government agencies use technology.
While the answers to those questions are still
unclear, the announcement prompted a collective cheer from some local
developers. As an example of what Kundra may do with federal technology
projects, many of them point to the contest he held last year called Apps
for Democracy, which challenged independent Web developers to come up with
interesting ways to use government data.
District-based Development Seed, a Web consulting
group, mashed together government data and other online resources to create
DC Bikes, a site with information about bike thefts, popular bike trails and
other information for local bike enthusiasts.
Continued in article
Parker Bros. monopoly and some variations have been
popular learning tools in accounting and disciplines outside accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
March 3, 2009 update messaging from instructors can be found at the above
site.Our David Albrecht wrote a book about his use of the game in accounting
education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Question
Did your grandparents give you a prepaid college 529 savings account?
"Volatility Hits Prepaid 529s," by Jillian Mincer, The Wall Street
Journal, March 9, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123663406748876025.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal
The market volatility that has squeezed pension
plans is having a similar impact on one kind of college 529 savings account
-- the prepaid plan.
Like pensions, almost all of the plans have seen
their assets significantly drop as their investments have plunged. At the
same time, college costs have kept rising.
At least one state -- Alabama -- has notified plan
participants that it will be considering options, which could include
closing enrollment, later this month.
"It's a potential crisis for at least some of these
plans," says Joe Hurley, founder of
www.savingforcollege.com, an independent Web site
that provides information about 529 plans. "They may go to the state and ask
for funds."
About a dozen prepaid 529 college savings plans are
available. While details of the plans vary, all allow families to buy all or
part of a college education at today's prices. Typically, the accounts are
guaranteed by states to at least match in-state tuition increases.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's investment helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
Academic Fraud and Friction at Florida State University
On Friday,
the
National Collegiate Athletic Association announced
that more than 60 athletes at the university had cheated in two online courses
over a year and a half long period, one of the most serious cases of academic
fraud in the NCAA's recent history. Yet just about all anyone seemed to be able
to talk about -- especially Florida State fans in commenting on the case and
news publications in reporting on it -- is how the
NCAA's penalties (which include requiring Florida State to vacate an
undetermined number of victories in which the cheating athletes competed) might
undermine the legacy of the university's football coach, Bobby Bowden. Bowden
has one fewer career victory than Pennsylvania State University's longtime
coach, Joe Paterno, and if Florida State has to wipe out as many as 14 football
wins from 2007 and 2008, it could end Bowden's chance of being the all-time
winningest coach in big-time college football.
Inside Higher Ed, March 9, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/09/fsu
Compounding FSU's problem is an earlier cheating scandal
20 Florida State University Football Players
Likely to Be Suspended in Cheated Scandal
Source: Multiple suspensions likely for
Music City Bowl, plus 3 games in 2008," by Mark Schlabach, ESPN.com,
December 18, 2007 ---
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=3159534
As many as 20
Florida State football players will be suspended from playing
against Kentucky in the Dec. 31 Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl, as
well as the first three games of the 2008 season, for their roles in
an alleged cheating scandal involving an Internet-based course, a
source with knowledge of the situation said Tuesday morning.
Florida State
officials are expected to announce the results of the investigation
this week. The source said university officials determined Monday
night the exact number of football players who will be suspended.
Federal privacy laws prohibit the school from releasing names.
. . .
The investigation
already has led to the resignations of two academic assistance
employees who worked with FSU student-athletes. The school revealed
in September that as many as 23 student-athletes were given answers
before taking tests over the Internet.
Further
investigations revealed additional student-athletes were involved in
the cheating, according to the source.
"If the players
fight the suspensions, they'll risk losing all of their
eligibility," a source with knowledge of the situation said Tuesday
morning.
The school's
investigation found that a tutor gave students answers while they
were taking tests and filled in answers on quizzes and typed papers
for students.
Florida State
president T.K. Wetherell, a former Seminoles football player,
reported the initial findings in a letter to the NCAA in September.
Wetherell ordered an
investigation by the university's Office of Audit Services in May
after receiving information an athletics department tutor had
directed one athlete to take an online quiz for another athlete and
then provided the answers.
The tutor implicated
in the audit told investigators he had been providing students with
answers for the test since the fall of 2006, according to a
university report.
Wisconsin was the
last football program to suspend as many as 20 players. Days before
the start of the 2000 regular season, 26 Badgers were given three-
or one-game suspensions for getting unadvertised price breaks at a
shoe store.
Florida State
announced in October that athletics director Dave Hart Jr. will
resign Dec. 31. Wetherell appointed State Rep. William "Bill"
Proctor interim athletics director. Proctor also is a former FSU
football player.
The school announced
last week that longtime football coach Bobby Bowden had agreed to a
one-year contract extension through the 2008 season that will pay
him at least $1.98 million. Bowden, who is in his 32nd season at the
school, is major college football's all-time winningest coach with
373 career victories.
Florida State also
designated offensive coordinator Jimbo Fisher as Bowden's eventual
successor. Fisher's new contract calls for him to replace Bowden by
the end of the 2010 season. If Fisher isn't named FSU's new coach by
then, the school's booster organization would owe him $2.5 million.
Under the terms of the new contract, Fisher would owe Seminoles
boosters $2.5 million if he leaves the school before the end of the
2010 season.
The Seminoles
struggled for the fourth consecutive season in 2007, finishing 7-5
overall, 4-4 in ACC play. It is the fourth consecutive season they
failed to win 10 games, after winning at least 10 games in 14
consecutive seasons, from 1987 to 2000.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It ended up being 25 players who were suspended ---
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/sports/content/sports/epaper/2007/12/18/1218fsu.html
Florida State lost to Kentucky in the Music Bowl (35-28)
Bob Jensen's threads on college athletics controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
Bernard Madoff's Gangster Family Seems to Have Been Overlooked by
Investors
"Pretty v. Ugly at the University," University Diaries Blog, Inside Higher
Ed, February 24, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university_diaries
Bernard Madoff is a
classic Mafia-style gangster. He comes from gangsters - his mother was a
crook. Investigators are looking into his
father-in-law. A lot of his friends and investors
are crooks. He was born a crook, has always been a crook.
"The FBI believes
Madoff may never have properly invested any of the money entrusted to him,"
writes Stephen Foley in
The Independent. That's <em>never</em>. Madoff is
in his seventies.
Psychopathically evil,
Madoff makes an exception - again, Mafia-style - for his closest family and
friends. His last act before turning himself in was writing big checks to
the inner circle.
Tomorrow,
Harry Markopolos will tell Congress how easy it
was, ten years ago, for him to prove that Madoff was a crook, and how
difficult it was for him to convince the SEC, or anyone else, of this
obvious truth.
An ugly story, isn't
it.... Ugh. Let us turn to the verdant paths of Brandeis University, and
walk to the door of
its art museum, where
pretty canvases hang on the walls and rekindle our sense of the beauty of
the world and the goodness of mankind.
Yet all of this beauty will
soon be shuttered, because that ugly world is all over Brandeis. It's all
over a number of other universities, too -- Yeshiva, Bard, NYU, all the
schools who loved charitable Bernie Madoff and his charitable friends.
Madoff, after all, was a
philanthropist.
Not that he, as the word
suggests, loves people. He hates people.
But he (and
benefactors like
Carl Shapiro, his closest business associate) gave
lots of money to pretty places like universities, places that stand for
love, not hate, and beauty, not ugliness. Why did he do that?
For the same reason many
other crooks do it. To get their names on buildings, and, much more
importantly, to launder their images. Madoff's been cleaning himself up for
public consumption all his life, and there's nothing like gifts to
universities to do oneself up <em>real</em> good.
University Diaries has
covered, over the years, many amusing stories of universities using the
latest in stone-blasting technology to get the names of crooks off of
buildings the crooks endowed. At any given time, some university in this
country is using power tools on its walls in a desperate effort to
dissociate itself from scum. Here's
the latest case. One of the most amusing was
Dennis Kozlowski at Seton Hall.
Even if it doesn't
call for power tools, the problem of taking crooks' money can be just as
troublesome, as with the University of Missouri-Columbia's
Kenneth L. Lay Chair in International Economics.
Sometimes things call for
quick-action internet prowess. Recall how, deep in the pre-exposure night,
Yeshiva University deleted from its webpages the once-sainted names of
Bernard Madoff and his partner, Ezra Merkin.
Our wretched economy will
continue to reveal the reputation-laundering enterprise some of our
universities have been running.
Just as every Madoff
associate or victim claims to be a deceived innocent, so these campuses will
tell us they never suspected a thing.
The farce would be fun to
watch if it weren't so incredibly destructive.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on security frauds are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
"Facebook Gives College Officials Better Tools to Reach Alumni and
Students," by Josh Keller, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 6,
2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3646&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Facebook announced new features on its Web site on
Wednesday that will allow colleges and other organizations to create a
centralized public profile and publish a live stream of announcements for
their followers.
The changes expand the tools available to college
administrators to communicate with students, alumni, and others who have
Facebook accounts. Previously, the central pages for a college or university
on Facebook were essentially walled off from the rest of the site, making it
difficult for administrators to know whether any announcements or content
that they posted were being seen.
Campuses will soon be able to create their own
central public profiles, where they can post announcements and multimedia to
a live, public feed. Students and others who choose to subscribe to the feed
will see those updates on their home pages and be able to comment on any
items posted.
Facebook executives said they hoped the changes
would make the site less like an address book and more like Twitter, another
social networking site that allows users to post minute-by-minute status
updates.
Public profiles will be widely available starting
next week. Stephanie Balmer, dean of admissions and financial aid at
Dickinson College, said the changes would “open up a whole new angle” for
colleges to communicate on Facebook. Establishing a central, official place
for students to find information about a college will make it easier for
students to engage than the current approach, which encourages highly
specialized groups.
“You’ve got this composite, rather than a number of
appendages, which I think a lot of us have right know when it comes to
Facebook,” she said. “I think it’s pretty exciting that there’s this
jump-off point.”
At Stanford University, which partnered with
Facebook to try out the feature early, campus representatives said they
expected that
its new Facebook
profile would reach more people and encourage more
of a conversation with the campus community than the old one.
“What this does for us is it’s more and more a
really powerful comunication platform for the university,” said Lisa Lapin,
a spokeswoman. In addition to venues like YouTube, Twitter, and iTunes, she
said, “this is yet one more tool to bring the communication to where much of
our audience already is.”
NEW E-LEARNING PREDICTIONS MADE, OLD PREDICTIONS
GRADED
Each year ELEARN MAGAZINE invites e-learning
experts to provide predictions for the coming year. This year thirty people
from educational institutions and businesses in several countries weighed in
with their forecasts. Not surprisingly, most addressed the challenges
resulting from the current global economy crisis.
"Predictions for 2009" by Lisa Neal Gualtier is
available at
http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=72-1
In "Reviewing Last Year's E-Learning Predictions,"
Stephen Downes examines the predictions made for 2008 and gives each expert
a grade for his or her prediction. Downes awarded "A" grades for such
predictions as "we will see universities begin to provide institutional
support for Facebook and other Web 2.0 tools, not as replacements for the
LMS but as adjuncts to them" (eLiterate blogger Michael Feldstein) and "2008
will be the year that serious games get serious attention from corporate
training departments" (Red Hot Learning vice-president Philip Lambert).
He gave an "F" to MIT's Richard Larson's
prediction, "The year 2008 will be the year in which open source educational
materials will be co-invented by educators from around the world and will be
as easily uploaded onto a searchable website as are the videos on YouTube."
Read all the 2008 predictions and Downes' comments
at
http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=73-1
eLearn magazine is published by ACM (Association
for Computing Machinery, Inc.), a not-for-profit educational association
serving those who work, teach, and learn in the various computing-related
fields. For more information, contact: eLearn magazine, eLearn Magazine ACM,
2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-07016 USA; Web:
http://www.elearnmag.com/
......................................................................
ASSESSMENT AND E-PORTFOLIOS
"Several trends in higher education shape the
context in which an e-portfolio implementation may be advantageous. First,
e-portfolios can help address the call to facilitate and document authentic
learning experiences. . . . Second, e-portfolios can help respond to the new
era of accountability . . . . Third, e-portfolios can help universities and
colleges connect to today's undergraduates . . ."
In "Assessing the Future: E-Portfolio Trends, Uses,
and Options in Higher Education" (ECAR Research Bulletin, Issue 4), Michael
Reese and Ron Levy analyze the benefits and obstacles to adopting and using
e-portfolios. They base their conclusions on interviews with faculty and
staff and on six pilot programs at The Johns Hopkins University.
The report is available online to members of ECAR
subscribing institutions at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ecar_so/erb/ERB0904.pdf
To find out if your institution is a subscriber, go to
http://www.educause.edu/ECARSubscribingOrganizations/957
ECAR (EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research)
"provides timely research and analysis to help higher education leaders make
better decisions about information technology. ECAR assembles leading
scholars, practitioners, researchers, and analysts to focus on issues of
critical importance to higher education, many of which carry increasingly
complicated and consequential implications." For more information go to
http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?SECTION_ID=4
......................................................................
NEW EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH JOURNAL
The JOURNAL OF APPLIED RESEARCH IN HIGHER
EDUCATION, which began publication in January 2009, is an online
peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the University of Glamorgan in Cardiff,
Wales. Formed to "promote improved practice by encouraging informed debate
into pedagogic and related matters in higher education," the journal
welcomes papers "from all disciplines and subject areas covering higher
education policy and management, learning and teaching (including
technology-enhanced learning and work-based learning), assessment,
curriculum development and quality enhancement." Papers are available at no
cost at
http://jarhe.research.glam.ac.uk/
For more information, contact: Dr Elaine Huntley,
Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, University of Glamorgan,
Pontypridd, CF37 1DL, Wales, UK; tel: +44 (0)1443 482316; email:
jarhe@glam.ac.uk ; Web:
http://jarhe.research.glam.ac.uk/
......................................................................
FEDERAL RESOURCE FOR TEACHING MATERIALS
FREE (Federal Resources for Educational Excellence)
is a collection of teaching and learning resources from U.S. government
agencies. The website provides links to over 1,500 resources in several
categories: arts & music, health & physical education, history & social
studies, language arts, mathematics, and science. Resource formats include
primary documents, photographs, videos, and animations.
While the audiences for much of the material are
the K-12 grades, educators at any level can find materials to illustrate
their instruction. Works by the U.S. government are not eligible for U.S.
copyright protection so using these materials does not require seeking
permission from the creating agency.
You can access FREE's materials at
http://www.free.ed.gov/
......................................................................
RECOMMENDED READING
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been
recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly
interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published
by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu
for possible inclusion in this column.
"What's Wrong with Copyright: Educator Strategies
for Dealing with Analog Copyright Law in a Digital World" By J. Patrick
McGrail and Ewa McGrail INNOVATE vol. 5, no. 3, February/March 2009 http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=630
Registration is required to access the paper; registration is free.
"In this article, we explore how the technological,
social, cultural, and legal developments of the digital age challenge
educators and students who seek to make use of copyrighted material for
educational purposes and offer educators strategies for dealing with today’s
copyright challenges. We conclude with a call to revise the copyright law
and suggest the direction that a revised copyright law should take to
support responsible, creative use of both traditional and new media content,
both within and beyond the physical walls of the classroom."
A liberal-arts education is supposed to provide you
with a value system, a standard, a set of ideas,
not a job.
Caroline Bird
"We Need the Liberal Arts Now More Than Ever," by Sanford Pinsker, The
Irascible Professor, March 6, 2009 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-03-06-09.htm
I hope my last paragraph makes it clear that I
don't live on a cloud (or under a rock) and have somehow missed the global
economic crisis. I know, I know -- and that's why I want to argue that a
liberal arts education is more essential than ever. Students will not only
have to learn how to recognize when somebody is speaking rot (the last
election should have provided plenty of practice) but also how to have
nimble, adaptable minds. At its best, a liberal education prepares a student
to be a lifetime learner. An exposure to, say, a Socratic dialogue or a
James Joyce short story can, in future decades, become an extended study of
The Republic or Ulysses -- read with others or alone. As recent events have
dramatically shown, those who put their stock in big apartments, fancy cars,
and shiny diamonds have had many moments to ruminate about what is permanent
and what can be passing. Unfortunately, most of these people don't have the
intellectual scaffolding necessary to prop them up in bad times.
We badly need people with cutting edge ideas, but I
would argue that thinking "outside the box" can only occur when people know
what a box is, and what was originally in it. The liberal arts provides both
a history and a context for contemporary assessments. Given the world most
undergraduates will inherit, they will need liberal arts study more than
ever. A trained mind and a willingness to pursue ideas wherever they might
lead us is essential to a democracy. I have no doubt that cheaper models of
undergraduate education will expand in the next few years (online sites are
but the beginning), but I have my doubts about how much real education they
can deliver. As with most things of importance, the bottom line is the wrong
place to look for the things that truly matter, and this is doubly so when
assessing the lifetime worth of a genuine liberal arts education.
March 6, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
I do wish
Sanford provided more evidence for his opinions.
As is typical
of Sanford Pinsker he provides a lot of opinion that is not backed up by
research. The worst of the worst crooks in these Wall Street scandals were
typically liberal arts, social science (often economics), and engineering
majors in their undergraduate studies. Almost none of them majored in
business or professional schools until, possibly, graduate school. Many were
MBA students at places like Harvard and Wharton (Penn) that typically does
not even admit undergraduate business majors. As you might guess, others
became lawyers.
For example,
Andy Fastow had dual majors in economics and Chinese as an undergraduate.
Jeff Skilling majored in science philosophy and application. Bernie Madoff
was a political science undergraduate student. Ken Lay and Mike Milken
majored in economics . Ken Lay went on to get a PhD in, of all things,
economics.
If this is an
attempt to beat down professional studies like business, journalism, and
engineering in undergraduate school it is a sorry attempt. If it’s an
attempt to beef up the liberal arts proportion of studies in professional
studies then my hat is off to Pinkster. But there are many problems with
liberal arts since the liberal arts faculty main are engaged in turf wars to
protect their departmental budgets. They offer easy-A courses to attract
students and often have little interest in basic liberal arts courses
vis-à-vis their specialized seminars on the history of early Italian
printing presses.
Cornell
University did an enormous study of why students seek out particular liberal
arts and other undergraduate courses. It is not a pretty picture ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
If
median grades for each course are made publically available on the Internet,
will students seek out the high grade average or low grade average courses?
Examples of such postings at Cornell University are at
http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/Student/mediangradesA.html
Charles B. Reed,
chancellor of the California State University system, explains why he wants the
federal government to provide billions of dollars in direct aid to four-year
colleges, based on the number of students they enroll who are eligible for Pell
Grants or who are from underrepresented minority groups.
"To Reach Obama's Goal, Colleges Should Get Billions From U.S., Cal State Chief
(Video)," Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v55/i26/reed/?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
The new graduates with their
free training and education will be like dead atheists in open coffins. They’ll
be all dressed up with no place to go. Congress is creating public works job
opportunities while destroying career opportunities. The reason is that the
progressives, with all their good intentions, will have placed trillions of
stimulus money into part-time laboring jobs like road building that are
physically demanding and not at all suited for people with career aspirations.
Only so many can work in the health care and education fields, and careers there
will become pretty low paying due to the need to minimize the cost of free
health and education services and rationing.
"Graduation is what President
Obama is all about," says the U.S. Cal State Chief in the above video
Jensen Comment
Prosperous businesses create career opportunity growth. Congress at present is
destroying business opportunity. It is only creating government work
opportunity. Paul Williams cringes at thinking of his university as a socialist
organization owned and operated by government. By whatever name it’s owned and
managed by the government and it’s principle service graduates students into the
working world. I would like this to be a business world with career
opportunities. Yes I know that he will counter this by saying that for the past
four decades business has depended upon government in one way or another for its
prosperity, often with subsidies in one form or another. But until George W.
Bush went to war and could not say no to Congress on progressive spending
programs like the Medicare Drug Plan, the National Debt was only $6 trillion and
entitlements were perhaps around $30 trillion. Virtually all college graduates
had career hopes and most of these were hopes for careers in some type of
business or profession.
An education is never worthless in terms of all things in life that we
cherish.
What is happening, however, is that we are beginning to offer false hopes
that education is a ticket to a career. For most it will not be a lifelong
career ticket because new entitlements are destroying business opportunity such
that careers will only be available in government such as careers in a national
health care system or a greatly expanded education system and a military system
that will still be necessary. Over supply of applicants for careers in
government will keep incomes relatively low and equalized. Most government work
will be jobs on a time clock and not rewarding careers.
Rewarding careers in business are being taken away by big government and
egalitarian efforts to equalize income distribution.
America has historically been the land of opportunity where risk takers had
an opportunity to enjoy the returns of risk taking. Who will want to start
new businesses if the net after-tax rewards are the same for risk takers and
non-risk takers?
Question
Could students in a college organize to buy and sell used textbooks, solutions
manuals, and whatever?
"Buying and Selling Among Friends," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall
Street Journal, March 4, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123612347768623581.html
Gone are the days when giving away your old stuff
involved getting in the car and hauling bags to the local Salvation Army.
Now, with a little Web know-how, you can find a number of ways to turn your
trash into someone else's treasure -- from companies that send you prepaid
shipping materials to people who will pick up the items from your house.
But even though you can use these services without
leaving home, many of them still require you to go to a specific Web site --
one you wouldn't necessarily visit regularly. Sites like Gazelle.com and
Venjuvo.com that pay cash for old electronics (or just recycle them) aren't
exactly online destinations.
Now one of those ways to unload your stuff involves
a Web site you might visit many times a day. A site that has considerable
sway in the social-networking world, where over 175 million active users go
to share personal stories, photos and videos with hundreds of "friends."
That's right, I'm talking about Facebook. Tuesday,
the social-networking giant announced its new Facebook Marketplace,
Facebook.com/marketplace, an integrated application powered by Oodle, known
for its work with online classified ads. Marketplace uses colorful icons to
represent four actions you can take in its app: Sell It; Sell for a Cause;
Give it Away; and Ask for It.
Oodle granted me early access to the Marketplace
app before it became available Tuesday. A friend of mine and I were both set
up with test accounts so that we could see one another's fake Marketplace
items and interact with one another within Marketplace; hundreds of Oodle
employees also were testing this. (It was fun to see what people offer for
sale when they're just pretending, like one person who offered to sell
everything on a colleague's desk when he was out.)
Facebook's original iteration of Marketplace
started back in 2007, but was geared toward services like housing and jobs.
The Oodle-powered Marketplace is merchandise-centric and includes more
detailed organization, deeper integration with Facebook, and ways to buy or
sell things to raise money for 1.7 million causes.
It still lacks a built-in electronic payment
system, such as PayPal or Discover card, for exchanges between users or
donations to causes. Instead, Marketplace encourages its users to exchange
money however they choose, like traditional classified ads. And that could
cause some obvious problems. For instance, if an item were sold for a cause,
the seller could later donate the amount via credit card after closing a
listing. But there's no guarantee that the seller will actually do this.
Oodle says it will listen to feedback from the Facebook audience and will
try to integrate e-payments, if preferred.
Every posted item can include a location,
description, category, photo and an explanation of why it's in the
Marketplace. Each item is reviewed by Oodle's fraud-detection program, which
looks for inappropriate content and suspicious activity, and a post could
take up to 30 minutes to appear online after you submit it. My posts
displayed almost instantly in the Marketplace newsfeed. Users also can opt
to publish their posts to their Facebook profiles.
One example of Marketplace's newly detailed
organization comes in its browsing options. The old version of Marketplace
had options to browse through jobs and housing, but not specific categories
of items for sale. Now, users can browse through 12 categories of specific
items including "Home & Garden," "Baby & Kid Stuff," "Tickets" and "Musical
Instruments." Items that don't fit into these 12 categories are put into an
"Everything Else" category.
Each item in Marketplace integrates with Facebook's
familiar format, like having its own online "wall" where questions and
comments appear. If you're looking for something in Marketplace by using the
"Ask for It" option, you can recruit people to help you find the item by
selecting from your list of friends, which works the same way people can
suggest Facebook people to friends who might know them. Glancing at an item
shows the seller's profile photo, a link to all of the person's listings and
a brief history of his or her overall Marketplace activity, such as "3
listings in the last month."
The integration of charitable causes into
Marketplace gives supporters new ways to raise money for a favorite group
like the World Wildlife Fund or Habitat for Humanity International. On the
Marketplace home page, causes are displayed in a right-hand panel with a
daily featured cause. This Featured Cause shows who else supports it and how
many items you can buy or sell to support it.
Privacy is a natural concern in online
marketplaces. By default, your posted listings are visible to any Facebook
member in Marketplace. Users can opt to remain anonymous -- they're listed
as "Facebook user is selling a bike," for example. In that case, the only
way someone can contact that person is by posting a comment and waiting for
the seller to respond.
People who aren't members of Facebook can see your
listings by browsing and searching Marketplace, but they can't post, comment
or contact users. Unlike online marketplaces or services that can be used by
anyone, Marketplace requires that users be members of the site to interact
with sellers, which can be a downside. Plenty of people who aren't on
Facebook might not want to join the social-networking phenomenon just to
offload the old couch gathering dust in the garage.
All user notifications -- messages indicated in red
at the bottom right of a Facebook page -- will reflect friends' activities
in the Marketplace, unless you reset the notifications of the Facebook
Marketplace app to not notify you. I suggest doing this, unless you really
want to know about all your friends' activities in Marketplace.
Four color-coded icons represent activities in
Marketplace and are useful when reading lists of items at a glance: A green
dollar sign represents Sell It and a red heart represents Sell for a Cause,
for example. And details about each cause are integrated within Marketplace.
The Oodle-powered Facebook Marketplace is
straightforward and well organized, and if you're a Facebook user, its
format will be familiar. If you're not, and you're looking for a way to sell
or give items away for a charity or otherwise, Marketplace might encourage
you to join the giant social network. But its payment program could be made
a lot easier with electronic options.
Low correlation between top business schools versus accountancy schools?
What sources of data does Business Week use to rank undergraduate business
programs?
Answer at
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/feb2008/bs20080226_182953.htm
There are five sources for the undergraduate
ranking: a student survey, a recruiter survey, median starting salaries for
graduates, the number of graduates admitted to 35 top MBA programs, and an
academic quality measure that consists of SAT/ACT test scores for business
majors, full-time faculty-student ratios in the business program, average
class size in core business classes, the percentage of business majors with
internships, and the number of hours students spend preparing for class each
week. The test scores, faculty-student ratio, and class size information
come from a survey to be completed by participating schools; the internship
and hours of preparation data come from the student survey.
The 2009 Business Week rankings (including a slide show) are at
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/09_10/B4122undergrad_business.htm?campaign_id=bschools_related
Jensen Comment
The relatively low rankings of top accountancy schools like USC, Illinois, Iowa,
Indiana, and Wisconsin lead me to suspect that this ranking outcome does not
correlate at all well with rankings of undergraduate accountancy programs.
1 |
2 |
Virginia (McIntire)
Charlottesville |
Public |
2 |
9,490 |
655 |
1 |
52 |
58,000 |
5 |
5 |
100.00 |
10.40 |
1355 |
30 |
A+ |
A+ |
A+ |
2 |
3 |
Notre Dame (Mendoza)
South Bend, Ind. |
Private |
3 |
36,847 |
1,669 |
2 |
12 |
55,000 |
11 |
16 |
97.29 |
18.57 |
1405 |
32 |
A+ |
A+ |
A+ |
3 |
1 |
Pennsylvania (Wharton)
Philadelphia |
Private |
4 |
37,526 |
2,528 |
13 |
13 |
61,001 |
10 |
1 |
95.78 |
10.89 |
1440 |
32 |
A+ |
A |
A+ |
4 |
6 |
Michigan (Ross)
Ann Arbor |
Public |
3 |
10,848 |
1,050 |
18 |
8 |
60,000 |
7 |
8 |
94.47 |
15.22 |
1346 |
30 |
B |
A |
A+ |
5 |
7 |
Brigham Young
(Marriott)
Provo, Utah |
Private |
2 |
4,110 |
1,783 |
6 |
1 |
50,000 |
17 |
40 |
93.12 |
19.00 |
1231 |
27 |
A |
A+ |
A+ |
6 |
11 |
UC-Berkeley (Haas)
Berkeley, Calif. |
Public |
2 |
8,932 |
668 |
24 |
2 |
55,000 |
3 |
16 |
92.85 |
25.70 |
1388 |
31 |
B |
A+ |
A |
7 |
9 |
MIT (Sloan)
Cambridge, Mass. |
Private |
3 |
36,390 |
225 |
5 |
43 |
60,000 |
4 |
12 |
92.41 |
2.70 |
1381 |
33 |
A+ |
A+ |
A+ |
8 |
4 |
Cornell
Ithaca, N.Y. |
Private |
4 |
20,364 |
712 |
3 |
46 |
55,000 |
2 |
21 |
92.18 |
19.24 |
1390 |
31 |
A+ |
A+ |
A+ |
9 |
5 |
Emory (Goizueta)
Atlanta |
Private |
2 |
36,336 |
622 |
4 |
24 |
55,000 |
8 |
12 |
91.26 |
9.90 |
1361 |
31 |
A+ |
A+ |
A |
10 |
10 |
Texas (McCombs)
Austin |
Public |
4 |
9,354 |
3,942 |
12 |
3 |
55,000 |
18 |
40 |
84.51 |
34.00 |
1301 |
29 |
A |
A+ |
A+ |
11 |
13 |
Villanova
Villanova, Pa. |
Private |
4 |
37,530 |
1,731 |
8 |
26 |
52,000 |
39 |
5 |
83.00 |
16.03 |
1302 |
30 |
A+ |
A |
A+ |
12 |
20 |
Richmond (Robins)
Richmond, Va. |
Private |
4 |
38,850 |
643 |
14 |
64 |
52,500 |
9 |
1 |
82.92 |
12.04 |
1280 |
29 |
A+ |
A+ |
B |
13 |
12 |
North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler)
Chapel Hill |
Public |
2 |
5,397 |
632 |
11 |
38 |
53,500 |
16 |
8 |
82.67 |
11.00 |
1343 |
30 |
A |
A+ |
A+ |
14 |
21 |
Wake Forest (Calloway)
Winston-Salem, N.C. |
Private |
2 |
36,975 |
399 |
34 |
19 |
51,000 |
15 |
1 |
82.55 |
14.25 |
1353 |
30 |
A+ |
A+ |
A |
15 |
8 |
NYU (Stern)
New York |
Private |
4 |
38,686 |
2,305 |
29 |
23 |
59,500 |
21 |
8 |
81.04 |
11.35 |
1435 |
32 |
A |
B |
A |
16 |
15 |
Washington U. (Olin)
St. Louis |
Private |
4 |
37,248 |
730 |
32 |
36 |
56,500 |
1 |
21 |
80.23 |
10.50 |
1432 |
32 |
A+ |
A+ |
C |
17 |
14 |
Boston College
(Carroll)
Boston |
Private |
4 |
37,410 |
1,936 |
20 |
15 |
55,000 |
14 |
27 |
80.00 |
21.00 |
1331 |
30 |
A+ |
A |
A+ |
18 |
24 |
Miami U. (Farmer)
Oxford, Ohio |
Public |
2 |
11,443 |
2,056 |
26 |
4 |
48,000 |
28 |
16 |
79.26 |
14.90 |
1225 |
27 |
A |
B |
A |
19 |
22 |
Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
Pittsburgh |
Private |
4 |
39,754 |
428 |
45 |
47 |
60,000 |
13 |
8 |
78.64 |
9.50 |
1393 |
31 |
A |
A |
A |
20 |
16 |
Indiana (Kelley)
Bloomington |
Public |
4 |
9,311 |
4,576 |
15 |
14 |
52,000 |
29 |
27 |
77.56 |
22.74 |
1266 |
29 |
B |
A |
A+ |
21 |
17 |
USC (Marshall)
Los Angeles |
Private |
4 |
37,694 |
3,509 |
42 |
5 |
53,000 |
24 |
27 |
76.31 |
26.79 |
1391 |
31 |
A |
A |
A+ |
22 |
18 |
Illinois
Urbana-Champaign |
Public |
4 |
13,394 |
2,850 |
28 |
7 |
54,000 |
23 |
40 |
76.14 |
21.10 |
1340 |
30 |
C |
A |
A+ |
23 |
28 |
Babson
Babson Park, Mass. |
Private |
4 |
36,096 |
1,851 |
21 |
37 |
50,000 |
30 |
12 |
74.79 |
22.00 |
1254 |
28 |
A+ |
A+ |
B |
24 |
19 |
Georgetown (McDonough)
Washington, D.C. |
Private |
4 |
38,122 |
1,345 |
72 |
51 |
60,000 |
6 |
12 |
72.69 |
25.00 |
1365 |
31 |
A |
C |
C |
25 |
33 |
U. of Washington
(Foster)
Seattle |
Public |
2 |
6,802 |
1,645 |
38 |
10 |
48,500 |
38 |
27 |
72.11 |
19.89 |
1268 |
28 |
B |
A+ |
B |
26 |
25 |
Lehigh
Bethlehem, Pa. |
Private |
4 |
37,550 |
1,472 |
44 |
31 |
55,000 |
33 |
16 |
71.48 |
21.50 |
1293 |
29 |
A+ |
A |
A |
27 |
34 |
Northeastern
Boston |
Private |
4 |
33,969 |
2,914 |
22 |
60 |
55,000 |
65 |
16 |
70.41 |
20.50 |
1294 |
29 |
A |
A |
A+ |
28 |
NA |
American (Kogod)
Washington, D.C. |
Private |
4 |
33,283 |
841 |
10 |
56 |
50,705 |
41 |
27 |
70.20 |
13.00 |
1218 |
27 |
A+ |
B |
A |
29 |
47 |
San Diego
San Diego, Calif. |
Private |
4 |
34,264 |
850 |
40 |
11 |
50,000 |
50 |
40 |
70.02 |
15.88 |
1190 |
26 |
A+ |
B |
B |
30 |
29 |
William & Mary (Mason)
Williamsburg, Va. |
Public |
2 |
10,246 |
454 |
35 |
62 |
52,500 |
12 |
21 |
69.92 |
11.35 |
1317 |
29 |
A+ |
A+ |
B |
31 |
23 |
SMU (Cox)
Dallas |
Private |
4 |
33,170 |
932 |
7 |
70 |
50,400 |
26 |
40 |
69.57 |
20.00 |
1413 |
32 |
A |
A |
A |
32 |
35 |
Santa Clara (Leavey)
Santa Clara, Calif. |
Private |
4 |
34,950 |
1,785 |
37 |
35 |
50,500 |
35 |
21 |
68.85 |
17.30 |
1218 |
27 |
A+ |
A |
A+ |
33 |
30 |
Bentley
Waltham, Mass. |
Private |
4 |
34,488 |
3,887 |
17 |
40 |
52,500 |
71 |
40 |
68.79 |
26.26 |
1230 |
26 |
A |
A+ |
A |
34 |
32 |
Texas Christian (Neeley)
Fort Worth |
Private |
4 |
28,250 |
1,640 |
9 |
88 |
50,000 |
43 |
27 |
67.15 |
17.50 |
1171 |
26 |
A+ |
A+ |
A |
35 |
43 |
Maryland (Smith)
College Park |
Public |
4 |
8,005 |
2,784 |
52 |
32 |
53,000 |
34 |
27 |
65.09 |
19.11 |
1360 |
31 |
B |
A |
B |
36 |
26 |
Rensselaer Polytech (Lally)
Troy, N.Y. |
Private |
4 |
37,900 |
407 |
30 |
59 |
50,000 |
47 |
21 |
64.93 |
16.00 |
1267 |
28 |
A |
A+ |
B |
37 |
31 |
Texas A&M (Mays)
College Station |
Public |
4 |
7,844 |
4,302 |
19 |
20 |
47,700 |
44 |
61 |
64.10 |
25.47 |
1172 |
26 |
B |
A |
A |
38 |
38 |
Penn State (Smeal)
University Park |
Public |
4 |
15,250 |
5,943 |
36 |
9 |
52,000 |
48 |
74 |
63.88 |
43.00 |
1221 |
27 |
B |
A |
A |
39 |
41 |
Case Western (Weatherhead)
Cleveland |
Private |
4 |
34,450 |
400 |
78 |
67 |
52,500 |
25 |
5 |
63.33 |
13.00 |
1270 |
27 |
A+ |
B |
C |
40 |
37 |
Wisconsin
Madison |
Public |
2 |
8,568 |
1,407 |
27 |
57 |
50,000 |
19 |
50 |
62.27 |
28.05 |
1293 |
28 |
B |
B |
A+ |
41 |
27 |
Fordham
New York |
Private |
4 |
35,257 |
2,004 |
64 |
39 |
55,000 |
59 |
27 |
61.96 |
20.70 |
1193 |
26 |
A |
B |
B |
42 |
59 |
Ohio State (Fisher)
Columbus |
Public |
4 |
9,810 |
3,536 |
23 |
17 |
47,000 |
80 |
66 |
61.19 |
35.00 |
1203 |
27 |
B |
A |
A+ |
43 |
42 |
Boston U.
Boston |
Private |
4 |
37,050 |
2,009 |
55 |
74 |
50,000 |
20 |
21 |
60.78 |
18.80 |
1294 |
29 |
B |
B |
C |
44 |
54 |
James Madison
Harrisonburg, Va. |
Public |
4 |
6,964 |
3,121 |
16 |
68 |
50,000 |
53 |
54 |
60.60 |
25.00 |
1102 |
24 |
A |
B |
A+ |
45 |
36 |
Baylor (Hankamer)
Waco, Tex. |
Private |
4 |
26,084 |
2,713 |
33 |
66 |
45,000 |
60 |
27 |
60.20 |
23.45 |
1193 |
25 |
A |
A |
B |
46 |
NA |
Chapman (Argyros)
Orange, Calif. |
Private |
4 |
34,700 |
877 |
68 |
21 |
48,000 |
55 |
40 |
59.51 |
21.00 |
1200 |
26 |
A+ |
A |
C |
47 |
NA |
Ohio
Athens |
Public |
4 |
8,907 |
1,843 |
25 |
79 |
49,030 |
72 |
48 |
59.08 |
29.80 |
1120 |
25 |
B |
B |
A |
48 |
40 |
Binghamton
Binghamton, N.Y. |
Public |
4 |
6,692 |
1,420 |
49 |
42 |
57,000 |
31 |
61 |
58.98 |
27.50 |
1304 |
28 |
A |
B |
A+ |
49 |
52 |
Syracuse (Whitman)
Syracuse, N.Y. |
Private |
4 |
35,398 |
1,815 |
70 |
58 |
53,000 |
58 |
27 |
57.09 |
24.20 |
1200 |
26 |
B |
B |
B |
50 |
49 |
U. of Miami
Coral Gables, Fla. |
Private |
4 |
36,836 |
2,161 |
47 |
93 |
50,000 |
49 |
27 |
57.08 |
14.50 |
1262 |
28 |
A |
A+ |
B |
51 |
55 |
Georgia Tech
Atlanta |
Public |
4 |
5,518 |
1,291 |
31 |
45 |
50,500 |
51 |
66 |
56.76 |
27.00 |
1270 |
28 |
B |
A |
A |
The Job Market Has Business Students Worried (Business Week slide
show) ---
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/02/0226_best_undergrad_bstudents/index.htm
Golleeey, just look at that woman's pair of shoes!
Gomer Pyle
"Bookkeeper accused of embezzling $10 million," by Kristina Davis,
SignOnSanDiego.com, March 7, 2009 ---
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/mar/07/bn07embezzle-shoes-north-county/
The bookkeeper
for a North County manufacturing business was arrested on
accusations of embezzling nearly $10 million from her
employer to fund her lavish shoe collection, remodel her
home, vacation in Italy and gamble, authorities said.
Sheriff's
investigators say Annette Yeomans, 51, siphoned an average
of $100,000 a month from
Quality
Woodworks, Inc., while she was chief financial officer
from 2001 to 2007.
As a result,
the San Marcos cabinetry business was forced to lay off
employees and restructure their operations, said Sgt. Mark
Varnau of the sheriff's Financial Crimes Unit.
Yeomans
surrendered to authorities Friday morning and was booked
into Vista jail on $10 million bail on suspicion of grand
theft and embezzlement. It was unclear Saturday whether
Yeomans had hired an attorney.
A nearly
yearlong sheriff's investigation revealed that Yeomans would
spend $25,000 on her credit card each week and then pay off
the balance the following Monday with company funds.
Her
purchases include spending nearly $25,000 to remodel her
closet to house about 400 pairs of shoes valued at $240,000,
as well as 160 designer purses valued at $2,000 each.
The posh
dressing room included a crystal chandelier, granite-topped
center island and 32-inch plasma television, Varnau said.
Investigators also found that Yeomans gambled heavily at
local casinos and lost extensive amounts of money.
Varnau said
Yeomans, who is scheduled to be arraigned Monday in Vista
Superior Court, was able to hide her alleged crime from the
company due to her position of trust.
But that
ended when American Express noticed the pattern of payments
made with company checks and made a phone call to the
business.
Yeomans was
fired last year and agreed to turn over her assets to the
company, which has recovered about $2 million from the sale
of her home, some cars and other property, Varnau said. Her
husband was a cabinet installer at Quality Woodworks but was
not suspected of any crime, Varnau said.
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Lotteries are taxes for people bad at math
"Fortune's Ticket," by Daniel Akst, The Wall Street Journal, March 12,
2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123683053354304817.html?mod=todays_us_opinion
'Imagine a standard NFL football field. Somewhere
in the field, a student has placed a single, small, common variety of ant
that she has marked with a spot of yellow paint. You walk onto the field,
blindfolded, and push a pin into the ground. If your pin pierces the marked
ant, you win. Otherwise you lose. Want to give it a go?"
Thus did one mathematician describe the odds of
winning a Powerball lottery. Is it any wonder that economists deride
state-run lotteries as a tax on stupidity? Bad enough that the government is
encouraging gambling; all the worse that it is encouraging such a bad bet.
What is more, lotteries are played disproportionately by the poor and thus
resemble a regressive tax. Some people get seriously hooked, ruining
themselves and their families. And yet, since the 1960s, taxpayers and
legislators have embraced lotteries as a means of generating public revenue,
and eager players have lined up for a remote chance of a payoff.
As Matthew Sweeney makes plain in "The Lottery
Wars," objections to lotteries have been around for as long as lotteries
themselves -- and that's a long time. Since the colonial period, lotteries
have combined entertainment and the promise of gain for the sake of all
sorts of causes. For much of this time Americans have oscillated between
enthusiasm and revulsion. Today lotteries are operated by all but eight
states, and in 2006 we spent roughly $500 per household on lottery tickets,
or $57 billion in total. Only a modest fraction of this money made its way
into state coffers -- most went to pay for prizes and other expenses -- with
the result that most lottery states get no more than 2% of their budget from
lottery ticket sales.
Mr. Sweeney does an excellent job of helping us
understand how we got here. Lotteries, he notes, were common in early
America: "Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and
Thomas Jefferson were all, at one time or another, involved with lotteries."
The emphasis wasn't on the gamble; rather, chance-buyers understood that
they were funding a public benefit. "Lotteries were the province of social
leaders," Mr. Sweeney writes. "Tickets were usually expensive. Winning was
not the be-all and end-all of the ventures." Lotteries helped fund colonial
infrastructure and even the French and Indian War.
Continued in book review
Jensen Comment
But Sweeny cannot tell us how to value a dream. Bob Jensen plays the New
Hampshire Lotto for $4 per week (two tickets per draw). That is the value I
place on a dream, although at my age most of the winnings would be given for
others in need.
Aldura Story, by Philippe Karsenty as quoted in an email message from
nragen@netvision.net.il
I'm writing to inform you of a new documentary by
the German public TV station ARD as well as unprecedented support from the
Israeli minister of Foreign Affairs. The German public TV, ARD, broadcast,
on March 4, 2009, a documentary which confirms that the news report,
narrated by Charles Enderlin and broadcast by France 2 on September 30,
2000, is a fraud. Here is the evidence revealed, and confirmed, by this
documentary:
Thanks to a biometric analysis of the faces, it has
been proven that the boy who was filmed by France 2 is not the boy presented
at the Gaza morgue and buried later. The eyebrows and the lips are very
different. • The German TV used the lip-reading technique to read the
father's lips. They discovered that Jamal al Dura gave instructions to the
people who were behind France 2's cameraman during the filming of the scene.
• The boy filmed by France 2 moves a red piece of cloth down his body for no
specific reason. • In France 2's news report, there is no blood - neither on
Mohammed nor on Jamal al Dura's body, whereas the two were supposed to have
received 15 bullets all together. • The boy shown at the funeral as Mohammed
al Dura arrived at the hospital before 10am, whereas France 2's news report
was filmed after 2:30pm.
German media outlets widely covered the ARD
documentary. Specifically, the prestigious Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
published two pieces about the film.
From the Scout Report on March 6, 2009
Evernote 3.1.0.1034 ---
http://evernote.com/about/download/
If you're having a hard time bringing all of your
different media files in line, you may want to try out Evernote. Evernote
can be used to move photos from mobile phones to the desktop, manage to-do
lists, record audio, and synchronize all of these materials across different
platforms and devices. Users can search all of these files at their leisure,
and the program can even recognize printed or handwritten text in photos and
images. This version is compatible with computers running Windows Vista and
XP. Other versions are available for computers running Mac OS X 10.5 or
later.
Opera 9.64 ---
http://www.opera.com/browser/
The Opera browser remains a popular browser for
many Mac users, and this latest version includes a few notable additions.
Users can use the "Quick Find" feature to perform full text searches from
the address field and the history panel. Additionally, the browser features
mouse-over previews and advanced bookmarking tools. This version is
compatible with computers running Mac OX 10.5 and newer.
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Introduction to Security Edition 7, by Robert J. Fischer and Gion
Green (Elsevier, 2004)
Note that this link provides a very generous preview ---
Click Here
Parts could be used by students for free and other readers gainfully for no
charge.
Education Tutorials
Free Federal Resources in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.free.ed.gov/
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Free Federal Resources in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.free.ed.gov/
Regeneration of Body Parts (Amazing) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxhi4Q8EDTU
Natural Resources Conservation Service: Backyard Conservation ---
http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/feature/backyard/
Implementing Physical and Virtual Food Reserves to Protect the Poor and
Prevent Market Failure ---
http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/bp/bp010.pdf
e-Agriculture ---
http://www.e-agriculture.org/
Agriculture, Climate Change, and Carbon Sequestration ---
http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/PDF/carbonsequestration.pdf
World Food Situation ---
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation
National Geographic: Blue Whales ---
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/blue-whales/brower-text
Animal Science Image Gallery ---
http://anscigallery.nal.usda.gov/
Botanical and Cultural Images of Eastern Asia, 1907-1927 ---
http://www.arboretum.harvard.edu/programs/eastern_asia/overview.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
Free Federal Resources in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.free.ed.gov/
American Experience: A Class Apart [PBS Television] ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/class/
The Study of the Spanish-Speaking People of Texas ---
http://www.cah.utexas.edu/ssspot/
Pew Research Center: Interactive ---
http://pewresearch.org/interactive/
Next America ---
http://nextamerica.csis.org/
Implementing Physical and Virtual Food Reserves to Protect the Poor and
Prevent Market Failure ---
http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/bp/bp010.pdf
e-Agriculture ---
http://www.e-agriculture.org/
Agriculture, Climate Change, and Carbon Sequestration ---
http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/PDF/carbonsequestration.pdf
World Food Situation ---
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation
The Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures ---
http://www.ifs.du.edu/index.aspx
World Bank: Global Challenges ---
http://www.worldbank.org/sixthemes
Asian Development Bank ---
http://www.adb.org/
Cornell Modern Indonesia Collection ---
http://cmip.library.cornell.edu/
U.S. State Department: News Video
http://www.state.gov/video/
Community Video Education Trust ---
http://www.cvet.org.za/
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
Free Federal Resources in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.free.ed.gov/
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Free Federal Resources in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.free.ed.gov/
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
Free Federal Resources in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.free.ed.gov/
MIT OpenCourseWare: Major European Novels ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Literature/21L-472Fall-2008/CourseHome/index.htm
George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers
http://www.lib.purdue.edu/spcol/aearhart/
America by Air [multimedia airplane history]
http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/gal102/americabyair/
Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition Centennial ---
http://content.lib.washington.edu/extras/ayp100.html
Western New York Legacy ---
http://www.wnylegacy.org/index.php
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
Free Federal Resources in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.free.ed.gov/
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Writing Tutorials
Free Federal Resources in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.free.ed.gov/
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
New Web Site Helps Predict Alcohol Problems (great site for teens and
college students to study)
Rethinking Drinking ---
http://www.rethinkingdrinking.com/
At
www.rethinkingdrinking.niaaa.nih.gov , you can plug in your average
consumption and see how you compare with the general population and problem
drinkers. Only 2% of regular drinkers become problem drinkers, but this
overlooks the sometimes bigger problem of binge drinkers who behave most of the
time but sometimes go on binges of heavy and dysfunctional drinking.
"Our Pigs, Our Food, Our Health," by Nicholas D. Krristoff, The New
York Times, March 12, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/opinion/12kristof.html?_r=1
There was no autopsy, but a blood test suggested a
heart attack or aneurysm. Dr. Anderson had himself suffered at least three
bouts of MRSA, and a Dutch journal has linked swine-carried MRSA to
dangerous human heart inflammation.
The larger question is whether we as a nation have
moved to a model of agriculture that produces cheap bacon but risks the
health of all of us. And the evidence, while far from conclusive, is growing
that the answer is yes.
A few caveats: The uncertainties are huge, partly
because our surveillance system is wretched (the cases here in Camden were
never reported to the health authorities). The vast majority of pork is
safe, and there is no proven case of transmission of MRSA from eating pork.
I’ll still offer my kids B.L.T.’s — but I’ll scrub my hands carefully after
handling raw pork.
Let me also be very clear that I’m not against hog
farmers. I grew up on a farm outside Yamhill, Ore., and was a state officer
of the Future Farmers of America; we raised pigs for a time, including a sow
named Brunhilda with such a strong personality that I remember her better
than some of my high school dates.
One of the first clues that pigs could infect
people with MRSA came in the Netherlands in 2004, when a young woman tested
positive for a new strain of MRSA, called ST398. The family lived on a farm,
so public health authorities swept in — and found that three family members,
three co-workers and 8 of 10 pigs tested all carried MRSA.
Since then, that strain of MRSA has spread rapidly
through the Netherlands — especially in swine-producing areas. A small Dutch
study found pig farmers there were 760 times more likely than the general
population to carry MRSA (without necessarily showing symptoms), and
Scientific American reports that this strain of MRSA has turned up in 12
percent of Dutch retail pork samples.
Now this same strain of MRSA has also been found in
the United States. A new study by Tara Smith, a University of Iowa
epidemiologist, found that 45 percent of pig farmers she sampled carried
MRSA, as did 49 percent of the hogs tested.
The study was small, and much more investigation is
necessary. Yet it might shed light on the surge in rashes in the now vacant
doctor’s office here in Camden. Linda Barnard, who was Dr. Anderson’s
assistant, thinks that perhaps 50 people came in to be treated for MRSA, in
a town with a population of a bit more than 500. Indeed, during my visit,
Dr. Anderson’s 13-year-old daughter, Lily, showed me a MRSA rash inflaming
her knee.
“I’ve had it many times,” she said.
So what’s going on here, and where do these
antibiotic-resistant infections come from? Probably from the routine use —
make that the insane overuse — of antibiotics in livestock feed. This is a
system that may help breed virulent “superbugs” that pose a public health
threat to us all. That’ll be the focus of my next column, on Sunday.
"Eating a Bit Less Salt Can Be a Big Health Boon," by Tiffany Sharples,
Yahoo News, March 13, 2009 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090313/hl_time/08599188486400
In the past four decades, Americans' salt
consumption has risen 50%, mostly as a result of eating more processed foods
and more food prepared in restaurants. "Over time, we have adapted our taste
buds and adapted our bodies to crave much, much higher levels of salt than
we require to function," says Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an epidemiologist
at the University of California, San Francisco. (See the top 10 food trends
of 2008.)
Some salt is crucial for good health, of course -
to regulate blood pressure and assist with muscle and nerve function - but
too much (that is, at the levels we currently consume) can lead to
hypertension, heart disease and stroke. If Americans halved their salt
intake, as many as 150,000 premature deaths could be prevented each year,
according to the American Medical Association. And new research presented
March 11 by Bibbins-Domingo at the AHA's annual conference shows that even
small reductions - as little as 1 g of salt per day - could have dramatic
effects, saving 200,000 lives over the course of a decade.
Using a sophisticated computer model to analyze
trends in heart disease over time among U.S. adults, Bibbins-Domingo and
colleagues discovered that incremental population-wide reductions could
drastically improve public health. Cutting out just 1 g of salt (or 40 mg of
sodium) per person per day could prevent 30,000 cases of coronary heart
disease across the U.S. population by 2019. Reducing consumption by half - a
more sizable 6 grams - could prevent 1.4 million cases of heart disease
during that same period. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.)
While eating less salt would improve the health of
the population across the board, researchers found that the benefits would
be greatest for African Americans and women. As a group, African Americans
tend to have higher blood pressure than the general population, and "many
studies suggest that they may be more sensitive to salt," Bibbins-Domingo
says. Her analysis found that a reduction of 3 g of salt per day would
reduce heart attacks 8% on average; among African Americans, that rate would
drop 10%. A similar result was found in women, whose stroke risk dropped 8%
with a 3-g reduction in salt intake; in men, the risk fell 5%.
The numbers certainly offer compelling incentives
to cut salt consumption, but that's no easy task. You can put down the salt
shaker and cut back on obviously salty snacks, but there's still so much
sodium packed into processed foods that trying to extract it from your diet
is a tricky business. "It's so pervasive in an average U.S. diet that it's
really hard to tell people, 'You have to avoid salt,' " says Bibbins-Domingo.
And there is salt hiding in places you wouldn't
think to look. According to a sodium chart from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, a single slice of commercially made whole-wheat bread has 148
mg of sodium; white bread has 170 mg. Cheerios contains 213 mg of sodium per
cup; Total Raisin Bran, 239 mg. And then there are the big offenders:
processed soups and sauces. Chicken noodle soup, for example, even after it
has been diluted with water during preparation, has a whopping 1,106 mg of
sodium per cup. "I think people don't have a clue," says Bibbins-Domingo.
"The recommended daily amount of salt is about a teaspoon," she says. "It's
easy to add that much if you're just adding salt," let alone all of the salt
that's in food before we break out the shaker. (See pictures of what makes
you eat more food.)
If you're dining out, all bets are off. According
to the British organization Consensus Action on Salt in Health, a
three-course meal in a restaurant can contain more than 15 g of salt, almost
three times the recommended daily amount.
Bibbins-Domingo says it's especially tough for
families with limited income, who tend to rely more on processed or packaged
foods and canned fruits and vegetables rather than fresh foods. Patients
tell her they've cut salted nuts, potato chips and pretzels from their diet
and started eating more soup instead. "You realize that they're actually
consuming more salt in their attempt to make healthy choices," she says.
Any large-scale success in salt-intake reduction
would have to involve policymakers and the food industry, say public-health
experts. "If you could reduce blood pressure by just a few points, you could
reduce hundreds of thousands of deaths," says Dr. Thomas Frieden,
commissioner of New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, who
recently announced a national campaign to diminish salt intake 20% in the
next five years and 40% in the next decade. Frieden, who has in the past
targeted trans fats and led the charge to require chain restaurants to list
calorie content on menus, has evoked less animosity from the food and
restaurant industries with his desalinization efforts than with his previous
initiatives.
"[Frieden] is looking for voluntary guidelines.
It's a national movement, and he's working closely with the industry on
developing these re-education guidelines," says Rob Bookman, an attorney for
the New York State Restaurant Association, but he adds wryly, "I don't know
if it's one big happy family." (See nine kid foods to avoid.)
Frieden points to a successful salt-reduction
campaign in the U.K. as a kind of proof of principle. Several years after
the British government launched an aggressive national campaign, which
included voluntary reductions in salt content by food manufacturers, British
citizens had reduced their annual sodium consumption roughly 10%. "If you
look at what happened in the U.K., at first the industry was very
concerned," Frieden says. "But after a few years, they saw that they could
drop their salt content 20% to 30% [without losing customers]."
Continued in article
Bumper Stickers
Honk if you're paying my mortgage
God will provide unless Obama gets there first
You voted for him, You pay!
America didn't vote for a rush to failure
Don't blame me, I voted for McCain
Forwarded by Paula
St. Patrick's Day is getting
close--
*The Errand*
McQuillan walked into a
bar and ordered martini
after martini,
each time removing the
olives and placing them
in a jar.
When the jar was filled
with olives and all the
drinks consumed,
the Irishman started to
leave.
"S'cuse me", said a
customer,
who was puzzled over
what McQuillan had done,
"what was that all
about?"
"Nothin', said the
Irishman,
"me wife just sent me
out for a jar of
olives!"
***********************************************
*_The Lost Luggage_*
An Irishman arrived at
J.F.K. Airport and
wandered
around the terminal with
tears streaming down his
cheeks.
An airline employee
asked him if he was
already homesick.
"No," replied the
Irishman.
"I've lost all me
luggage!"
"How'd that happen?"
"The cork fell out!"
said the Irishman.
***********************************************
*_Water to wine_*
An Irish priest is
driving down to New York
and gets stopped for
speeding.
The state trooper smells
alcohol on the priest's
breath
and then sees an empty
wine bottle on the floor
of the car.
He says, "Sir, have you
been drinking?"
"Just water," says the
priest.
The trooper says, "Then
why do I smell wine?"
The priest looks at the
bottle and says,
"Good Lord! He's done it
again!"
***********************************************
*_The Brothel_*
Two Irishmen were
sitting in a pub having
beer
and watching the brothel
across the street.
They saw a Baptist
minister walk into the
brothel,
and one of them said,
"Aye, 'tis a shame to
see a man of the cloth
goin' bad."
Then they saw a Rabbi
enter the brothel,
and the other Irishman
said,
"Aye, 'tis a shame to
see that the Jews
are falling' victim to
temptation."
Then they saw a Catholic
priest enter the
brothel,
and one of the Irishmen
said,
"What a terrible pity...
one of the girls must be
quite ill."
**********************************************
*_Lost at Sea_*
Two Irishmen, Patrick &
Michael,
were adrift in a
lifeboat following a
dramatic escape
from a burning
freighter.
While rummaging through
the boat's provisions,
Patrick stumbled across
an old lamp.
Secretly hoping that a
genie would appear,
he rubbed the lamp
vigorously.
To the amazement of
Patrick, a genie came
forth.
This particular genie,
however,
stated that he could
only deliver one wish,
not the standard three.
Without giving much
thought to the matter,
Patrick blurted out,
"Make the entire ocean
into Guinness Beer!"
The genie clapped his
hands with a deafening
crash,
and immediately the
entire sea turned into
the finest brew ever
sampled by mortals.
Simultaneously, the
genie vanished.
Only the gentle lapping
of Guinness on the hull
broke the stillness as
the two men considered
their circumstances.
Michael looked
disgustedly at Patrick
whose wish had been
granted.
After a long,
tension-filled moment,
he spoke:
**"Nice going Patrick!**
**Now we're going to
have to pee in the
boat!**
***********************************************
*_The Fall_*
Murphy was staggering
home with a pint of
booze
in his back pocket when
he slipped and fell
heavily.
Struggling to his feet,
he felt something wet
running down his leg.
"Please Lord," he
implored,
"let it be blood!!"
*************************************
|
|
Darwin awards are given to dimwits ---
http://www.darwinawards.com/
I kick myself for not going to this site on a more frequent basis. On occasion
my wife threatens to nominate me for one of these for my resume.
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 elaborationthe 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