Tidbits on April 23, 2009
Bob Jensen
It was a close
call for Erika on April 16, 2009
The Good News
Erika is alive and home from the hospital. I thank you for the many get well
messages. She had minor abdominal outpatient surgery on April 15 that, one day
later, left her out of her head with a fever of nearly 105 degrees. She was
taken at midnight to our local (Littleton) hospital that managed to bring down
her fever. But the septic infection was so dangerous she was sent by ambulance
to the Dartmouth University Medical Center (where her suspect outpatient surgery
was originally performed ). After many tests the eight doctors who looked over
the CAT Scan and other test results came to the brilliant conclusion that they
had no clue what caused the septic infection. The best guess, my guess, is a
contaminated surgery instrument caused the infection. Fortunately, she did not
have to have major corrective surgery. My advice for anybody in the future ---
try not to be the last outpatient surgery scheduled for the day when the medical
staff is growing weary.
Erika’s my $2 million dollar
woman ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Erika2007.htm
She’s had more surgeries than any human should have to endure, including twelve
spine surgeries that left her with a titanium rack from her neck to her hips.
But she can still pick up a penny from the floor (the internal rack is jointed
in three places). The sad news is that her spine, hip, and leg pain got worse
with each spine surgery. She was originally injured in a operating room where
she worked as a surgical nurse. Slightly over 30 years ago surgeon asked her to
lift a 200 pound instrument table over a power cord. She spent a month in
traction after that injury, but she eventually had to begin the first of her 12
spine surgeries about ten years later.
Erika's story:
She describes how a Munich street
urchin became Cinderella filled with love and joy ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/erika/xmas00.htm
When we were living in Texas the picture
below was taken just after Erika's first spine surgery.
She had to wear an external back brace for about three months.
When we were flying to Munich, the passenger agent for American Airlines
upgraded us to Business Class after she saw Erika in that brace.
I don't think the agent noticed we were flying on free (frequent flier) tickets.
The picture below was taken in Amsterdam;
No back brace on that trip.
The picture below was taken in front of our
fireplace in Texas.
Erika was preparing to go to a party in
Texas
At the party with Dixie VanEynde
This was our back yard in San Antonio before
we moved to New Hampshire.
One of the joys in life is not having another swimming pool to clean.
Below is the palm tree that one day fell into the pool.
Before then it was fondly known as our French tickler.
My mother and father during a
Christmas past
Here's Erika partying with the Old Fart in
San Antonio
One time in the past I've stated that a huge
difference between a dog and a cat is that you can't train a cat to lead the
blind.
I admit now that I was totally wrong (well almost totally wrong),
Libby and Cashew
know what genuine love is all about --- caring.
What a wonderful world (slow loading slide
show of the good old days) ---
Click Here
Tidbits on April 23, 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
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For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
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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
Free Residential and Business Telephone Directory (you must listen to an
opening advertisement) --- dial 800-FREE411 or 800-373-3411
Free Online Telephone Directory ---
http://snipurl.com/411directory [www_public-records-now_com]
Free online 800 telephone numbers ---
http://www.tollfree.att.net/tf.html
Google Free Business Phone Directory --- 800-goog411
To find names addresses from listed phone numbers, go to
www.google.com and read in the phone number without spaces, dashes, or
parens
Bob Jensen's search helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
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
Intelligent YouTube: Smart Video Collections ---
http://www.openculture.com/2008/03/youtubesmartvideos.html
Evolution of Life ---
http://www.evolution-of-life.com/en/home.html
Susan Boyle's Amazing Talent Show Debut ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY
With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial
Exhibition ---
http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/lincoln/Pages/default.aspx
Video of the 1929 Stock Market Crash ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/video-on-1929-stock-market-crash.html
Rare Footage (Dancing 60 years ago) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOoNOs8Ql28
Exploratorium: Teacher Institute:
Podcasts [iTunes, five-minute podcast tips]
http://www.exploratorium.edu/ti/podcasts/index.php
National Endowment for the Arts: Audio
& Video ---
http://www.nea.gov/av/index_v.htm
The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989
---
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view-now/third-mind
PBS Video on Multinational Illegal Payments
FRONTLINE: Black Money ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/blackmoney/
2001 Economic Crisis Prediction of George W. Bush (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM&NR=1
Letterman - Stupid Pet Tricks: Playing Dead ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DalB-CvO7Qc
April 18, 2009 message from Barry Rice
[brice@LOYOLA.EDU]
Many of you may be familiar with
www.imdb.com, the Internet Movie Database, which
was launched in 1990 according to Wikipedia. It is the 41st most popular Web
site on the Internet today according to
http://mostpopularwebsites.net. However, did you
know that they have added the ability to
legally
view free feature-length movies and TV shows in the past few
months? Most of my friends and Loyola College colleagues as well as students
with whom I discuss this don't know about this feature. Go to
http://www.imdb.com/features/video/ and look at
the "Browse All Videos By Type" heading on the left for links to
"Full-Length Movies" and "Full-Length TV Episodes" to see the lists of
dozens of movies and
hundreds
of TV episodes that you can view in their entirety at no
cost. Yes, many of them are rather old, but they are free.
Just hook your computer or other Internet device to
your flat screen TV and become a couch potato again. Some information about
such devices is available at
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how_to/4213002.html in
a one-year-old article. I'm sure other AECMers have more current ways to
connect the Internet to TVs.
Finally, yes, I am aware that YouTube announced plans
for something similar earlier this week. See
http://www.pcworld.com/article/163320/youtube_adds_movies_and_shows_goes_after_hulu.html for
more information.
Barry Rice
AECM Founder
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
American Flag Parachute Jump ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpZg2m7QU6M
Deer for breakfast in Texas ---
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/316898/deer_for_breakfast_in_texas/ n
Talented Dog in Blue Sweater ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKviLGreBw
Susan Boyle's Amazing Talent Show Debut ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY
Picard Tagger ---
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardTagger
Dierks Bentley On Mountain Stage ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103294756
Web outfits like
Pandora, Foneshow, Stitcher, and Slacker broadcast portable and mobile content
that makes Sirius look overpriced and stodgy ---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090327_877363.htm?link_position=link2
TheRadio (my favorite commercial-free
online music site) ---
http://www.theradio.com/
Slacker (my second-favorite commercial-free online music site) ---
http://www.slacker.com/
Gerald Trites likes this
international radio site ---
http://www.e-radio.gr/
Songza:
Search for a song or band and play the selection ---
http://songza.com/
Also try Jango ---
http://www.jango.com/?r=342376581
Sometimes this old guy prefers the jukebox era (just let it play through) ---
http://www.tropicalglen.com/
And I listen quite often to Soldiers Radio Live ---
http://www.army.mil/fieldband/pages/listening/bandstand.html
Also note U.S. Army Band recordings
---
http://bands.army.mil/music/default.asp
Bob Jensen listens to music free online (and no commercials)
---
http://www.slacker.com/
Photographs and Art
With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln
Bicentennial Exhibition ---
http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/lincoln/Pages/default.aspx
National Endowment for the Arts: Audio & Video
---
http://www.nea.gov/av/index_v.htm
Deena Stryker Photographs, 1963-1964 and undated
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/stryker/
The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate
Asia, 1860-1989 ---
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view-now/third-mind
Stage Costumes ---
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/theatre_performance/features/Costume/index.html
All Sewn Up: Millinery, Dressmaking, Clothing, and Costume
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/HumanEcol/subcollections/MillineryBooksAbout.html
Edinburgh World Heritage --- http://www.ewht.org.uk/Home.aspx
Delaware Postcard
Collection ---
http://fletcher.lib.udel.edu/collections/dpc/indexm
Hampton Dunn Postcards
Collection ---
http://www.lib.usf.edu/public/index.cfm?Pg=HamptonDunnPostcardsCollection
Famous People Painting
(double click a person's head for details ---
http://cliptank.com/PeopleofInfluencePainting.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
United Nations World Digital Library ---
http://www.wdl.org/en/
Electronic Literature Directory ---
http://directory.eliterature.org/
(There are links to audio books here)
LibriVox Free Audio Books ---
http://librivox.org/
Free Classics (audio books) ---
http://www.freeclassicaudiobooks.com/
Poetry
Out Loud [mulitimedia] ---
http://www.poetryoutloud.org/
Find
music and audio books from Akuma ---
http://www.akuma.de/
Historical and Philosophical Audio Books ---
http://www.ejunto.com/
Stories
from the Heart of the Land (audio) ---
http://www.nature.org/heart/about/
Hear Carl
Sandburg ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6382389
"Why Students Don't Like Poetry," by Mark Bauerlein,
Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, April 19, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/article/?id=1312&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
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
Never ascribe to malice that which can
adequately be explained by incompetence.
Napoleon Bonaparte as quoted by Mark
Shapiro at
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-04-15-09.htm
If only Vice President Joe Biden had
stuck to plagiarism. But he apparently hasn’t learned. In 1987, he copied and
used a large chunk of a speech given by British labor leader Neil Kinnock, even
though some of the facts (related to family history) didn’t match his own. Since
then, he’s gone from plagiarism to smashmouth rhetorician. Last week, Biden was
called out by former Bush advisor Karl Rove because Biden repeatedly said he’d
chastised President Bush in person. And Biden came out of the ensuing discussion
with a lot of mud on his face. On April 6, 2009, Biden said: “I remember
President Bush saying to me one time in the Oval Office, 'Well, Joe, I'm a
leader.' And I said: 'Mr. President, turn and around look behind you. No one is
following.’” Three days later, on April 9, Rove said Biden’s conversation with
Bush did not happen. Candida P. Wolff, Bush’s White House liaison, concurred: “I
don't ever remember Biden being in the Oval. He was such a blowhard on all that
stuff -- there wasn't a reason to bring him in." Facts notwithstanding, Biden
has been telling stories that make it sound like he had unfettered access to
Bush for some time. On HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” in April 2006, Biden
said: “The president will say things to me, and I'll literally turn to the
president, say: 'Mr. President, how can you say that, knowing you don't know the
facts?' And he'll look at me and…say: 'My instincts. …I have good instincts.'
[To which I’ll say]: 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough.'"
A.W.R. Hawkins, Human Events,
April 14, 2009 ---
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=31447
Other Celebrity Plagiarists ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Celebrities
God may
have taken away George Bush, but he sent us Joe Biden.
Jay Leno, Readers
Digest, May 2009, Page 117
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this
world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains--and created a different
way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their
captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty
out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition
of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in
escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals.
Johann Hari, Huffington Post,
April 14, 2009 ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html
Jensen Comment
If she really studied the history of pirates Hari would find that many of them
were the most mean and vile killers and torturers in the world. Edward Teach was
certainly not somebody to hold up as a hero. If her Somali pirates are really
heroes why do they stay safe and send children out to do the dangerous work?
It's the same story over and over where evil people pray on the young and weak
to do the stealing, killing, and suicide bombings. The pirate leaders are no
better than capitalists exploiting the poor and hiding behind shields of mothers
and tiny children. How brave are you when you put a gun in the hands of a
teenager and set him off in a small boat to capture your booty?
Have the auditors resumed handing out rose colored glasses to
accompany banking's bad debt reserves?
Last week, Wells Fargo (WFC) said it will report record
Q1 earnings. It caused the stock to shoot up, but it also raised a few eyebrows
as analysts wondered how realistic the company is being with respect to loan
losses . . . The bottom line is that if bank earnings are across-the-board too
strong, then it looks like the game is just totally rigged. The economy is still
going to crap, defaults are still increasing rapidly, and commercial real estate
is finally set to teeter -- how does it make sense for banks to be reporting
anything near record earnings? It doesn't. Unless Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs
can explain exactly how they had such amazing quarters against the current
backdrop, the only conclusion will be that the banks are still fundamentally
black holes that can't be trusted or valued by investors and counterparties. And
when you factor in the stress test results -- which however ridiculous they may
be could result in forced capital raises -- the bloom could come off this rose
pretty fast.
Joe Weisenthall, "Banks Risk
Reporting Too-Good Earnings," Business Insider, April 13, 2009 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/banks-risk-reporting-too-good-earnings-2009-4
The U.S. portion of this new commitment (to the IMF)
is more than $140 billion. Yet Congress has debated neither the amount nor the
proposed use of the funds. Instead, President Obama and his fellow leaders
simply waved their hands, like a Star Trek captain, and said make it so. Recall
that the IMF was founded in 1944 when the world monetary system operated on a
gold standard. The fund's job was to act as a lender of last resort when
countries encountered balance-of-payments shortfalls. When the world went to a
fiat-currency system, the fund's original role became obsolete. It is possible
to argue that a modified version of the lender-of-last-resort remains important
for the global financial system. But over the past 30 years the fund has
increasingly strayed from that limited mission to become a vehicle for
transferring wealth to poor-country governments. The London agreement further
advances these foreign aid ambitions with no oversight from Congress.
"Presto: Another $750 Billion: How Treasury will conjure
that new money for the IMF," The Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123966889497015459.html
Oregon Beer Tax Up Nearly 2,000 percent
Today is the dreaded April 15, but at least in Oregon
it's even going to cost you more to drown in your tax sorrows. In their sober
unwisdom, the state's pols plan to raise taxes by 1,900% on . . . beer. The tax
would catapult to $52.21 from $2.60 a barrel. The money is intended to reduce
Oregon's $3 billion budget deficit and, ostensibly, to pay for drug treatment.
"This Tax Is for You: A levy on Joe Six Pack," The Wall Street Journal,
April 15, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123976316293519743.html
Jensen Comment
I wonder if some physicians will start prescribing beer in the drug treatment
programs that provide free or greatly discounted "drugs" in Oregon. When I was
on the faculty at the University of Maine, one of my colleagues made excellent
beer in a 39 gallon garbage can. I liked it better than any beer available in
stores. It's relatively easy to make beer and wine at home. Many wine
ingredients can be used, including those pesky dandelions in the yard. For
$85.77 Amazon sells the Chateau Classico 6 Week Wine Kit, Australian Cabernet
Shiraz, 40 Pound Box. But for hard core booze and beer lovers I suspect there
will be lots of runs for the border to Oregon's surrounding states (well maybe
not be the tax capitol of the United States that's south of Oregon). People
flock to New Hampshire for beer and booze --- parking lots are filled with cars
from Canada, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, and Maine. New Hampshire is
probably the only state in Union that has interstate highway exits that are
exclusively dedicated to New Hampshire State Liquor Stores. Unless you go to the
liquor store the only option is to get back on the highway.
You get four guesses as to why I retired in New Hampshire ---
(a) younger women, (b) older whiskey, (c) faster horses or (d) all of the above?
Don't Mess With Olga
A hairdresser from the small Russian town of Meshchovsk
has subdued a man who tried to rob her shop, and then raped him for three days
in the utility room, Life.ru reports . . . After that Olga raped her hostage for
three long days. She chained Viktor to the radiator with pink furry handcuffs
and fed him Viagra. She eventually let the man go on Monday, March 16, saying:
“Get out of my sight!” Viktor went straight to hospital as his genitals were
injured, and then to the police . . . Both Olga and Viktor may now face prison
terms. The woman could be convicted of rape, while the man of robbery.
Russia Today (with a
blurry picture of Olga), April 14, 2009 ---
http://russiatoday.ru/Top_News/2009-04-14/Hairdresser_turns_robber_into_sex-slave.html?fullstory
A new twist on protection money
The incident took place Saturday in Bahia's capital, Salvador, where 58-year-old
Ivonete Pereira was shot in the chest by one of two attackers who tried to rob
the bus. She was traveling to her summer home in the nearby town of Lauro de
Freitas and because of frequent bus attacks in the region, she hid 150 reals (69
dollars) in 20- and 10-real notes coiled inside the left side of her bra. When
the bus passed through the Boca do Rio neighborhood, the robbers suddenly
announced their intention. A shootout ensued with a police officer on the scene
and a stray bullet hit Pereira. Her bra was stuffed with just enough cash to
absorb most of the impact, although she still had to be taken to hospital to
have the bullet removed. A retired sergeant was gunned down during the shooting
with the assailants, who managed to escape.
Yahoo News, April 14, 2009 ---
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/090414/oddities/brazil_crime_offbeat
If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you
are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.
Yu Yongding, one of the Chinese
government's top monetary economists, discussing why China took the rare step of
selling US Treasuries in the first two months of the year. The saying is
originally attributed to John Maynard Keynes. As reported in The Economist,
April 13, 2009 ---
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/04/quote_of_the_day_2.cfm
Comment Alongside the Above Quotation: This does not bode wll for
Obama's planned trillion-dollar annual budget deficits
China was the most naive and faithful financial
partner of the Americans for twenty years. Now, the country (having 2
billion USDs) is in a trap, dollar is falling and (with the Obama budget) US
state is falling too.
China has mobilized it's most innovative thinkers
to break out from the dollar trap. Chinese are buying up companies and
natural resources. They are doing currency swaps with several states. And
they let some coastal metropolis to use the yuan for foreign trade. The
bamboo network (South-Asian ethnic Chinese business empires and networks)
can manage the dramatic change. It's developing.....
Tom Tancredo’s speech at UNC tonight was disrupted
multiple times and from what I understand may have never even began. Several
immature children who are students at the university ran up to the front of the
room when Tancredo entered and held up a banner and began chanting over and over
not allowing him to speak. A police officer eventually removed them and then
several members of the audience began getting belligerent and shouting
profanities at Tancredo. Ironically, they did all of this under the guise of
free speech, claiming it was their First Amendment right to continue preventing
Tancredo from speaking. Evidently free speech to them is only important when
it’s speech they agree with and Tancredo’s First Amendment rights don’t matter.
Don’t be surprised by this, however. Incidents like these go on all the time at
college campuses.
Bane Windlow, "Leftist Activists
Disrupt Tancredo Speech at UNC," Carolina Politics Online, April 14, 2009
---
http://www.carolinapoliticsonline.com/2009/04/14/leftist-activists-disrupt-tancredo-speech-at-unc/
"Message from the Chancellor: Free Speech at Carolina, UNC News, April
15, 2009 ---
http://uncnews.unc.edu/news/campus-and-community/message-from-the-chancellor-free-speech-at-carolina.html
I want to express how disappointed I am in what
happened last night when former Congressman Tom Tancredo wasn't able to
speak when a protest got out of hand, and our Department of Public Safety
had to take action. Congressman Tancredo felt threatened and left without
making his remarks.
Mr. Tancredo was scheduled to speak about
immigration. We expect protests about controversial subjects at Carolina.
That's part of our culture. But we also pride ourselves on being a place
where all points of view can be expressed and heard. There's a way to
protest that respects free speech and allows people with opposing views to
be heard. Here that's often meant that groups protesting a speaker have
displayed signs or banners, silently expressing their opinions while the
speaker had his or her say. That didn't happen last night.
On behalf of our University community, I called Mr.
Tancredo today to apologize for how he was treated. In addition, our
Department of Public Safety is investigating this incident. They will pursue
criminal charges if any are warranted. Our Division of Student Affairs is
also investigating student involvement in the protest. If that investigation
determines sufficient evidence, participating students could face Honor
Court proceedings.
Carolina's tradition of free speech is a
fundamental part of what has made this place special for more than 200
years. Let's recommit ourselves to that ideal.
Holden Thorpe
"The Ethanol Bubble Pops in Iowa: More evidence the fuel makes
little economic sense," by Max Schulz, The Wall Street Journal, April
18, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124000832377530477.html
Ethanol is also bad for the environment. Science
magazine published an article last year by Timothy Searchinger of Princeton
University, among others, that concluded that biofuels cause deforestation,
which speeds climate change. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
Administration noted in July 2007 that the ethanol boom rapidly increased
the amount of fertilizer polluting the Mississippi River. And this week,
University of Minnesota researchers Yi-Wen Chiu, Sangwon Suh and Brian
Walseth released a study showing that in California -- a state with a water
shortage -- it can take more than 1,000 gallons of water to make one gallon
of ethanol. They warned that "energy security is being secured at the
expense of water security."
For all the pain ethanol has caused, it displaced a
mere 3% of our oil usage last year. Even if we plowed under all other crops
and dedicated the country's 300 million acres of cropland to ethanol, James
Jordan and James Powell of the Polytechnic University of New York estimate
we would displace just 15% of our oil demand with biofuels.
But President Barack Obama, an ethanol fan, is
leaving current policy in place and has set $6 billion aside in his stimulus
package for federal loan guarantees for companies developing innovative
energy technologies, including biofuels. It's part of his push to create
"green jobs." Archer Daniels Midland and oil refiner Valero are already
scavenging the husks of shuttered ethanol plants, looking for facilities on
the cheap. One such facility may be the plant in Dyersville, which is for
sale. Before we're through, we'll likely see another ethanol bubble.
"Obama's Energy Policy Driven by Ideology, not Reason," by Tom Borelli,
Townhall, April 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/TomBorelli/2009/04/18/obamas_energy_policy_driven_by_ideology,_not_reason
"Why Students Don't Like Poetry," by Mark Bauerlein, Chronicle of
Higher Education's Chronicle Review, April 19, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/article/?id=1312&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Internet Fraud Prevention Helpers from the Federal Trade Commission
OnGuard Online ---
http://www.onguardonline.gov/default.aspx
Federal Trade Commission (Then and Now) ---
http://www.ftc.gov/index.html
Bob Jensen's fraud prevention helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm
Don't Believe Everything Advertised Widely on TV
FreeCreditReport.com is a Scam! ---
http://www.consumerismcommentary.com/2006/11/16/freecreditreportcom-is-a-scam/
This isn’t the first time, but now the State
of Florida Office of the Attorney General is investigating FreeCreditReport.com.
You’ll notice I don’t link to the site. This site, run by credit reporting
agency Experian is taking advantage of the ruling that anyone can receive a free
annual credit report from each of the three major agencies. FreeCreditReport.com
is not the website that offers free credit reports in conjunction with this
directive. It’s misleading, and here’s the fine print on the site:
When you
order your free report here, you will begin your free trial membership in
Triple AdvantageSM Credit Monitoring. If you don’t cancel your membership
within the 30-day trial period, you will be billed $12.95 for each month
that you continue your membership. If you are not satisfied, you can cancel
at any time to discontinue the membership and stop the monthly billing;
however, you will not be eligible for a pro-rated refund of your current
month’s paid membership fee.
Below I show you the legitimate place to go for a free credit report.
Your
FICO credit score is crucial to your credit to your good name. It can
be altered without your knowing it due to fraud and errors. Getting a
free credit report may not give you a FICO scores as well. The main
advantage of the
from
http://www.myfico.com/ is that it will give you your FICO score from
each of the three major credit reporting agencies. Consumer Reports
(August, 2005, Page 18) notes that credit scores nearly always differ
between the three major credit reporting agencies. You may miss
something if you only get one agency’s score.
To
monitor your FICO score, Consumer Reports (August 2005, Page 17)
recommends that you get the $44.85 package from
http://www.myfico.com/
The FTC site of
interest is at
http://www.ftc.gov/credit
If you want to dispute your credit score, note
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/menus/consumer/credit/reports.shtm
Also see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_scoring
Bob Jensen's fraud prevention helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm
According to Business Week Magazine
Top Business Education Programs by Specialty in 2009 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/apr2009/bs2009049_335536.htm?link_position=link1
Top Global Business Schools According to Business Week ---
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_43/b4006014.htm
Slide Show ---
Click Here
The 15 business schools included here are strong contenders among the world's
top MBA programs, but lower marks keep them just shy of the top tier
Top European Business Schools According the Business Week ---
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/europe/special_reports/03/31/2008europeanb-s.htm
"Mortgage Fraud at All-Time High Incidents of Mortgage Fraud Increase 26%
from 2007 to 2008," SmartPros, April 7, 2009 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x65845.xml
Reported incidents of mortgage fraud in the U.S.
are at an all-time high and increased by 26 percent from 2007 to 2008
according to a new report released by the Mortgage Asset Research Institute
(MARI).
Rhode Island, Florida and Illinois top the list of
states with highest mortgage fraud rates. The 11th Periodic Mortgage Fraud
Case Report to the Mortgage Banker's Association (MBA) examines the current
state of residential mortgage fraud and misrepresentation in the U.S. based
on data submitted by MARI subscribers.
The report found that, for the first time, Rhode
Island ranked first in the country for mortgage fraud with more than three
times the expected amount of reported mortgage fraud for its origination
volume. This is also Rhode Island's first appearance on the MARI report
Top-Ten list, indicating a problematic and overlooked mortgage fraud problem
in the state. Florida, ranked first in 2007 and 2006, dropped to second
place and is followed by Illinois, Georgia, Maryland, New York, Michigan,
California, Missouri and Colorado. The report was presented during MBA's
annual National Fraud Issues Conference in Las Vegas. It is available on the
MARI Web site at: www.marisolutions.com.
“With fewer loan originations today, the data
suggests that the economic downturn may have created more desperation,
causing more people than ever before to try to commit mortgage fraud,” said
Denise James, LexisNexis Risk & Information Analytics Group director of
Residential Mortgage Solutions. “Not only are we seeing traditional fraud
trends, such as application fraud, but we are also seeing new types of
emerging fraud occur,” said James. “It is therefore imperative that the
mortgage industry continue to share information and insights, and
collaborate in the fight against mortgage fraud.”
The top fraud incident type in 2008 – representing
61% of all reported frauds – was application fraud, the fifth year in a row
it topped the list. Second were frauds related to tax returns and financial
statements which jumped 60% from 17% of reported frauds in 2007, to 28% of
reported frauds in 2008. Additional documented fraud types included, in
order of volume, frauds related to appraisals or valuations, verifications
of deposit, verifications of employment, escrow or closing costs, and credit
reports.
“MARI data shows that mortgage fraud is more
prevalent today than it was at the height of the boom in mortgage loan
originations,” said John Courson, president and chief executive officer of
the Mortgage Bankers Association. “This report is essential reading for
mortgage bankers who need to understand where mortgage fraud is coming from,
what to watch for and how to protect our companies and communities.”
The report also found that:
After improving in 2006 and 2007, Georgia jumped
from seventh to fourth place in 2008; California, ranked fourth in 2007,
declined to eighth in 2008; Maryland jumped from fifteenth in 2007 to fifth
in 2008; and The volume of reported frauds related to credit reports dropped
from 9% to 4% between 2007 and 2008.
FBI, April 14, 2009 ---
http://cincinnati.fbi.gov/doj/pressrel/2009/ci041409.htm
Kamal J. Gregory, 35, of Centerville, pleaded
guilty in United States District Court here today to one count of conspiracy
to commit mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering and one count of
conspiracy to commit money laundering. Gregory committed the crimes in
connection with an extensive mortgage fraud scheme affecting 210 residential
properties, including 205 located in Montgomery County. The scheme affected
63 investors and led to foreclosure against owners of more than 90 percent
of the properties.
Gregory G. Lockhart, United States Attorney for the
Southern District of Ohio; Keith L. Bennett, Special Agent in Charge,
Federal Bureau of Investigation; Jose A. Gonzalez, Special Agent in Charge,
Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, and other members of the
Greater Dayton Mortgage Fraud Task Force announced the plea entered today
before U.S. District Judge Michael R. Barrett.
In court documents, Gregory admitted that, between
March 2002 and June 2008, he along with eleven other named individuals
prepared and submitted on behalf of various purchasers/investors certain
mortgage loan application packages to various lending institutions located
throughout the United States.
These loan applications included documents that
made fraudulent claims involving the income of the borrowers and values of
the properties involved. Most of the homes involved were dilapidated and
otherwise depressed properties located in the greater Dayton area. The loan
application packages claimed the properties were worth prices which had been
artificially inflated above legitimate fair-market values.
Gregory and his co-conspirators created the
fraudulent loans as a way of making money for their own benefit.
Gregory admitted during his guilty plea hearing to
participating in 46 separate fraudulent real estate closings between
February 2003 and April 2005. The net fraudulent loan amounts associated
with these closings exceeded $4,200,000. Gregory worked as a loan officer
under individual or company names including Alliance Mortgage, Gregory
Investments Inc., KG Enterprises, Mad River Properties, Premier Mortgage
Funding of Ohio, Star Point Mortgage, and Ohio Financial Group.
A federal grand jury indicted Gregory and five
co-conspirators, Julian M. Hickman, Robert Mitchell, Kenneth O. McGee,
Edward McGee, and Jessica A. Zbacnik, in June 2008. Hickman pleaded guilty
on December 12, 2008 to conspiracy and tax crimes and Mitchell pleaded
guilty on March 11, 2009 to two counts of conspiracy. Both are awaiting
sentencing.
Charges against Kenneth O. McGee, Edward McGee, and
Jessica A. Zbacnik are pending.
The conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud,
and money laundering is punishable by up to 30 years and a $1,000,000 fine.
The conspiracy to commit money laundering is punishable by up to 20 years
imprisonment and a fine in the greater amount of $500,000 or twice the value
of the property involved.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on how to prevent mortgage fraud are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm
History of Fraud in America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Rotten to the Core ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
Questions
What is American Airline's estimate of the labor cost per seat per mile?
What are the accounting issues in calculating and using this number?
Calculate the distance between airports ---
http://www.convertunits.com/distance/
Union Troubles at American
Airlines --- Among other things, pilots want a 50% pay increase
Unions do not seem to be swayed by the strong likelihood that AMR will declare
bankruptcy
Is American Airlines too big to fail?
Is labor counting, with a friend in the Whitehouse, on a government bailout of
American Airlines?
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on April 16,
2009
Labor Demands Cloud AMR Outlook
The Wall Street Journal
by Mike
Esterl
Apr 13, 2009
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123966126899114845.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC
TOPICS: Cost
Accounting, Cost Management, Derivatives, Financial Analysis,
Financial Statement Analysis, Managerial Accounting
SUMMARY: The
two articles cover current issues facing the airline industry.
Despite AMR Corp. facing liquidity concerns and a first-quarter
loss to be announced on Wednesday, 4/15, that is expected to
amount to about $400 million, American airlines pilots are
demanding a 50% increase in pay. The pilots gave pay concessions
in 2003 to help the company survive at that time, but now "the
2003 concessions 'are viewed by our pilots as a loan, and it's
time to restore [them],' says Sam Mayer, a pilot union spokesman
and 767 captain for American." Southwest Airlines is mentioned
in the first article; the related article focuses on its
difficulties after having entering into fuel cost hedging
transactions.
CLASSROOM
APPLICATION: The article may be used in management
accounting classes to discuss labor cost measurements, labor
negotiations, and other cost measurements unique to the airline
industry. To assess costs facing the airline industry, typical
financial statement ratios are measured in relation to passenger
miles: American's labor cost is identified as the highest of 13
biggest airlines complied by the Federal Bureau of
Transportation Statistics at $.0369 per available seat mile. The
related article also covers fuel costs and hedging activities
from a managerial accounting and financial accounting
perspective.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory) What is the current state of the
airline industry, inasmuch as you can glean from this article or
your general knowledge.
2. (Introductory) Why are American Airlines pilots
negotiating for significant pay increases in their next labor
contract? How are their negotiations with corporate management
undertaken--that is, who negotiates for the pilots?
3. (Introductory) Airline employees are expressing
discontent about management pay in the last few years. How is
this issue related to turmoil in other U.S. corporations about
that issue?
4. (Advanced) How are airline costs measured? Define
the formula you think may be used for these measurements. How
does this help compare costs amongst different carriers?
5. (Advanced) Who compiles statistics about airline
operating costs? How are this entity's needs satisfied by
general purpose financial reporting and financial reporting
requirements established by the Financial Accounting Standards
Board? In your answer, define the term "general purpose
financial statements".
6. (Advanced) Refer to the related article regarding
Southwest Airline's "fuel-hedging program". How do airlines
hedge fuel costs? Be specific in describing the types of
contracts the airline will enter into and the accounting
requirements for those contracts.
7. (Advanced) What does this mean to say that the
"value" of the Southwest fuel hedging program is declining?
8. (Advanced) What actions are Southwest taking
regarding future fuel needs? What do you think that behavior
says about the company's expectations for future oil prices?
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
RELATED
ARTICLES:
Southwest Airlines Swings to $91 Million Loss, Plans Buyouts
by Mike Esterl
Apr 16, 2009
Online Exclusive
|
"Labor Demands Cloud AMR Outlook." by Mike Esterl, The Wall Street Journal,
April 18, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123966126899114845.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC
American Airlines is mired in increasingly
contentious labor negotiations with its pilots, flight attendants and
maintenance crews -- six years after union concessions allowed the carrier
to avoid bankruptcy protection.
The AMR Corp. unit faces growing liquidity concerns
as it prepares to announce Wednesday a first-quarter loss that analysts have
forecast at about $400 million. American last month said it expected to end
the quarter with a cash and short-term investment balance of approximately
$3.1 billion, down from $3.6 billion at the end of December.
Wednesday's report will be the first in a series of
what are likely to be dismal earnings announcements from U.S. airlines. Even
as the recession is gutting corporate travel budgets, workers at many
carriers, emboldened by what they see as a more labor-friendly environment
in Washington, are trying to win back wage cuts that helped the industry
survive the last downturn.
The situation is especially tense at American.
Workers at the second-largest U.S. airline by traffic agreed in 2003 to $1.8
billion in payroll cuts, pushing compensation to levels of a decade earlier.
But many of the airline's rivals -- including Delta Air Lines Inc., US
Airways Group Inc. and UAL Corp. unit United Airlines -- secured bigger cuts
in recent years through bankruptcy courts.
American's labor cost, at 3.69 cents per available
seat mile as of last September, was the highest in a list of 13 biggest
airlines compiled by the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Southwest Airlines Co. was No. 2 at 3.44 cents. Also, employee benefits,
which were cut sharply at other airlines, have remained largely intact at
American.
Nevertheless, American's pilots are demanding a 50%
pay increase. The Allied Pilots Association has rented billboards near the
Dallas-Fort Worth and Chicago O'Hare airports, slamming $300 million in
bonuses to the company's top 1,000 executives over the past three years and
highlighting an ongoing government probe into possible safety violations at
the airline.
The 2003 concessions "are viewed by our pilots as a
loan, and it's time to restore us," says Sam Mayer, a pilot-union spokesman
and 767 captain for American.
American's pilots are among the most experienced in
the industry and among the highest paid. They earned an average of about
$225,000 in salary and benefits in 2007, depending on seniority and other
factors -- well above a 15-airline average of $188,268, according to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
American's management says its executive
compensation is in line with other airlines and that the airline's safety is
top-notch.
The Federal Aviation Administration is continuing
its investigation of wiring problems on American aircraft. The airline and
pilots union since last May have been in talks supervised by the National
Mediation Board. American has since entered federal mediation with
representatives of its flight attendants and maintenance crews.
Delta, the biggest U.S. airline, and Southwest
Airlines, the largest low-cost carrier, recently struck agreements for
increases well below what is sought at American. But talks are growing more
combative at US Airways, where pilots are pressing for federal mediation.
Negotiations with United's main unions are getting underway this month.
Negotiations at American could drag on for months.
Under federal labor law, airline employees are prohibited from striking
until mediators declare an impasse. If they strike, the White House can
order employees back to work, as it did 24 minutes after a pilot strike was
called at American in 1997.
Laura Glading, head of the Association of
Professional Flight Attendants, says American attendants also want to be
made whole after their salaries were cut by more than 25% six years ago. The
Transport Workers Union of America, which represents American's maintenance
crews, has called for annual pay increases of 6%, 4% and 3%, respectively,
over the next three years. Transport workers plan to shred and burn mock
executive pay checks at American's headquarters in Fort Worth on Tuesday.
American has yet to make wage counterproposals to
the pilots' union or flight attendants, preferring to first work on
productivity issues. The airline's most recent offer to transport workers
included a 5% bonus payment in return for scaled-back medical benefits.
American also said last week that it will freeze wages for nonunion
employees, which represent about a quarter of the airline's U.S. work force.
Analysts say big pay increases at American could
push the airline to the brink of insolvency.
American executives are making the same argument as
they urge unions to scale back demands. "If we don't exist, they don't
exist," says Jeffrey Brundage, American's senior vice president for human
resources.
Fitch Ratings slashed the airline's credit rating
last month to triple-C, pushing the rating deeper into speculative, or junk,
territory.
The deadlock with pilots already has stalled
American's plan to fly planes to Beijing from Dallas, which is subject to
the pilots' approval because it involves long-distance flights. Unions also
could step up opposition to possible job cuts from a proposed trans-Atlantic
alliance between American and British Airways PLC that is receiving
antitrust scrutiny. Unions hope their leverage will improve since President
Barack Obama nominated Linda Puchala, a former flight-attendant-union
official, last month to run the National Mediation Board. Ms. Puchala awaits
Senate confirmation and didn't respond to requests for an interview.
The current chairman, Read Van de Water, was a
former lobbyist for Northwest Airlines Corp. The board has been neutral in
all its work, she says, and has been equally strict with companies and
unions. Ms. Van de Water says negotiations between American and its pilots
have been "very, very tough" and that both sides remain far apart.
Jensen Comment
There are huge problems in computing the labor cost per seat per mile for
American Airlines. First of all there's the problem of defining "labor" cost.
Secondly, there are joint costs of providing services such as cargo and mail
hauling versus passenger hauling. Any joint cost allocation formula is
arbitrary. Thirdly, many airline labor costs such as maintenance labor costs and
pilot costs and passenger agent costs are fixed or semi-fixed such that adding
or eliminating flights does not correlate very well with changes in labor costs.
Reports are surfacing that CPA
auditors were warned about toxic assets and pending bank failures.
Yet virtually all of the failed banks in 2008 and early 2009 received clean
audit opinions not warning of "going concern" weaknesses
Aside from the massive lawsuits that have been or will soon
be filed against banks, mortgage finance companies, and their auditors, it the
big question will be investigations of the PCAOB into those failed audits. The
Federal Government PCAOB's reputation is somewhat at stake here ---
http://www.pcaobus.org/
"CPAs MIA," by Ralph Nader , Independent Political Report,
April 12, 2009 ---
http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2009/04/ralph-nader-cpas-mia/
Where were the giant accounting
firms, the CPAs, and the rest of the accounting profession while the Wall
Street towers of fraud, deception and cover-ups were fracturing our economy,
looting and draining trillions of dollars of other peoples’ money?
This is the licensed profession
that is paid to exercise independent judgment with independent standards to
give investors, pension funds, mutual funds, and the rest of the financial
world accurate descriptions of corporate financial realities.
It is now obvious that the
accountants collapsed their own skill, integrity and self-respect faster and
earlier than the collapse of Wall Street and the corporate barons. The
accountants—both external and internal—could have blown the whistle on what
Teddy Roosevelt called the “malefactors of great wealth.”
The Big Four auditors knew what was
going on with these complex, abstractly structured finance instruments,
these collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and other financial products
too abstruse to label. They were on high alert after early warning scandals
involving Long Term Capital Management, Enron, and others a decade or so
ago. These corporate casino capitalists used the latest tricks to cook the
books with many of the on-balance sheet or off-balance sheet structured
investment vehicles that metastasized big time in the first decade of this
new century. These big firms can’t excuse themselves for relying on
conflicted rating companies, like Moody’s or Standard & Poor, that gave
triple-A ratings to CDO tranches in return for big fees. Imagine the
conflict. After all, “prestigious” outside auditors were supposed to be on
the inside incisively examining the books and their footnotes, on which the
rating firms excessively relied.
Let’s be specific with names. Carl
Olson, chairman of the Fund for Stockowners Rights wrote in the letters
column of The New York Times Magazine (January 28, 2009) that
“PricewaterhouseCoopers O.K.’d AIG and FreddieMac. Deloitte & Touche
certified Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns. Ernst & Young vouched for Lehman
Brothers and IndyMac Bank. KPMG assured over Countrywide and Wachovia. These
‘Big Four’ C.P.A. firms apparently felt they could act with impunity.”
“Undoubtedly they knew that the state boards of accountancy,” continued Mr.
Olson, “which granted them their licenses to audit, would not consider these
transgressions seriously. And they were right…Not one of them has taken up
any serious investigation of the misbehaving auditors of the recent debacle
companies.”
“Misbehaving” is too kind a word.
The “Big Four” destroyed their very reason for being by their involvement in
these and other boondoggles that have made headlines and dragooned our
federal government into bailing them out with disbursements, loans and
guarantees totaling trillions of dollars. “Criminally negligent” is a better
phrase for what these big accounting firms got rich doing—which is to look
the other way.
Holding accounting firms like these
accountable is very difficult. It got more difficult in 1995 when Congress
passed a bill shielding them from investor lawsuits charging that they
“aided and abetted” fraudulent or deceptive schemes by their corporate
clients. Clinton vetoed the legislation, but Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) led
the fight to over-ride the veto.
Moreover, the under-funded and
understaffed state boards of accountancy are dominated by accountants and
are beyond inaction. What can you expect?
As for the Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC), “asleep at the switch for years” would be a charitable
description of that now embarrassed agency whose mission is to supposedly
protect savers and shareholders. This agency even missed the massive Madoff
Ponzi scheme.
The question of accounting probity
will not go away. In the past couple of weeks, the non-profit Financial
Accounting Standards Board (FASB)—assigned to be the professional conscience
of accountancy—buckled under overt pressure from Congress and the banks. It
loosened the mark-to-market requirement to value assets at fair market value
or what buyers are willing to pay.
This decision by the FASB is
enforceable by the SEC and immediately “cheered Wall Street” and pushed big
bank stocks upward. Robert Willens, an accounting analyst, estimated this
change could boost earnings at some banks by up to twenty percent. Voilà,
just like that. Magic!
Overpricing depressed assets may
make bank bosses happy, but not investors or a former SEC Chairman, Arthur
Levitt, who was “very disappointed” and called the FASB decision “a step
toward the kind of opaqueness that created the economic problems that we’re
enduring today.”
To show the deterioration in
standards, banks tried to get the FASB and the SEC in the 1980s to water
down fair-value accounting during the savings and loan failures. Then-SEC
Chairman Richard Breeden refused outright. Not today.
Former SEC chief accountant, Lynn
Turner, presently a reformer of his own profession, supports mark-to-market
or fair value accounting as part of bringing all assets and liabilities,
including credit derivatives, back on the balance sheets of the financial
firms. He wants regulation of the credit rating agencies, mortgage
originators and the perverse incentives that lead to making bad loans. He
even wants the SEC to review these new financial products before they come
to market, eliminating “hidden financing.”
Now comes the life insurance
industry, buying up some small banks to qualify for their own large federal
bailouts for making bad, risky speculations.
The brilliant Joseph M. Belth,
writing in his astute newsletter, the Insurance Forum (May 2009), noted that
life insurers are lobbying state insurance departments to weaken statutory
accounting rules so as to “increase assets and/or decrease liabilities.”
Some states have already caved. Again, voilà, suddenly there is an increase
in capital. Magic. Here we go again.
Who among the brainy, head up accountants, in practice or in academia, will
join with Lynn Turner and rescue this demeaned, chronically rubber-stamping
“profession,” especially the “Big Four,” from its pathetic pretension for
which tens of millions of people are paying dearly?
Bob Jensen's threads on the litigation woes of the large
auditing firms are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm
The most serious problem in the U.S.
audit model is that clients are becoming bigger and bigger due to
non-enforcement of anti-trust laws. For example, the merger of Mobile and Exxon
created an even larger single client. The merger of Bear Stearns and JP Morgan
created a much larger client. The number of potential clients is shrinking while
the size of the clients is exploding. According to the CEO of Bank of America,
in a CBS Sixty Minutes interview on October 19, 2008, half of all banking
customers in the United States now have accounts with Bank of America. That was
before Bank of America bought out Merrill Lynch.
As these giants merge to become bigger
giants, it gets to a point where their auditors cannot afford to lose a giant
client producing upwards of $100 million in audit revenue each year. Real
independence of audits breaks down because a giant client can become a bully
with its audit firm fearful of losing giant clients.
Enron was an extreme but not necessarily
an outlier. It will most likely be alleged in court over the next few years that
giant Wall Street banks bullied their auditors into going along with
understating financial risk before the 2008 banking meltdown. We certainly
witnessed the understating of financial risk in 2007 and 2008.
I think we need an Accounting Court to deal
with clients who become bullies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Professionalism
The Accounting Hall of Fame Citation for Leonard Spacek
---
http://fisher.osu.edu/acctmis/hof/spacek.html
It must be kept in mind that the
statements certified are not ours but are our clients--and our clients do not
care to mix explanations of accounting theory with explanations of their
business nor can we pass onto our readers the responsibility for appraisal of
differences in accounting theory. Those fields are for you and me to grapple
with, not the public. In general, clients are not primarily interested in
arguments of accounting theory at the time of preparing their reports. The
companies whose accounts are certified are chiefly interested in what is said to
their shareholders, and in the hard practical facts of how accounting rules
affect them, their competitors and other companies. Usually they are very
critical of what we call accounting principles when these called principles are
unrealistic, inconsistent, or do not protect or distinguish scrupulous
management from the scrupulous.
"The Need for An Accounting Court," by Leonard Spacek, The Accounting
Review, 1958, Pages 368-379 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudSpacek01.htm
Jensen Comment
Fifty years later I'm a strong advocate of an accounting court, but I envision a
somewhat different court than envisioned by the great Leonard Spacek in 1958.
Since 1958, the failure of anti-trust enforcement has allowed business firms to
merge into enormous multi-billion or even trillion dollar clients who've become
powerful bullies that put extreme pressures on auditors to bend accounting and
auditing principles. For example see the way executives of Fannie Mae pressured
KPMG to bend the rules (an act that eventually got KPMG fired from the audit).
In my opinion the time has come where auditors and clients
can take their major disputes to an Accounting Court that will use expert
independent judges to resolve these disputes much like the Derivatives
Implementation Group (DIG)
resolved technical issues for the implementation of FAS 133. The main
difference, however, is that an Accounting Court should hear and resolve
disputes in private confidence that allows auditors and clients to keep these
disputes away from the media. The main advantage of such an Accounting Court is
that it might restrain clients from bullying auditors such as became the case
when Fannie Mae bullied KPMG.
Who would sit on accounting courts is
open to debate, but the "judges" could be formed by the State Boards of
Accountancy much like a grand jury is formed by a court of law. Accounting court
cases, however, should be confidential since they deal with sensitive client
information.
I really don't anticipate a flood o
cases in an accounting court. But I do view the threat of taking client-auditor
disputes to such courts (in confidence) as a means of curbing the bullying of
auditors by their enormous clients.
The problem is that poor anti-trust
enforcement coupled with mergers of huge companies have combined to create
mega-clients that auditing firms cannot afford to lose after gearing up to
handle such large clients. I think we saw this in the "clean opinions" given to
all the enormous failing banks (like WaMu) and enormous Wall Street investment
banks (like Lehman). The big auditing firms just could not afford to question
bad debt estimates, mortgage application lies, and CDO manipulations of such
clients.
I find it hard to believe that auditors
failed to detect an undercurrent of massive subprime "Sleaze, Bribery, and Lies"
that transpired in the Main Street banks and mortgage lending companies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze
The sleaze was so prevalent the auditors must've worn their chest-high waders on
these audits
Bob Jensen's threads on the fate of the large auditing firms following the
subprime scandals ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008bailout.htm#AuditFirms
Harvard's Tale of Derivatives Speculation and Hedging and What
Happened When Larry Summers Was President of Harvard
"Harvard: the Inside Story of Its Finance Meltdown," by Bernard Condon
and Nathan Vardi, Forbes, March 16, 2009 ---
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0316/080_harvard_finance_meltdown.html
The superstars at Harvard defied markets for
years-- until now. Here's the inside story of how they finally tripped up.
Stocks were tumbling last fall as the new school
year began, but at Harvard University it was as if the boom had never ended.
Workers were digging across the river from Harvard's Cambridge, Mass. home,
the start of a grand expansion that was to eventually almost double the size
of the university. Budgets were plump, and students from middle-class
families were getting big tuition breaks under an ambitious new financial
aid program. The lavish spending was made possible by the earnings from
Harvard's $36.9 billion endowment, the world's largest. That pot was
supposed to be good for $1.4 billion in annual earnings.
Behind the scenes, though, a different story was
unfolding. In a glassed-walled conference room overlooking downtown Boston,
traders at Harvard Management Co., the subsidiary that invests the school's
money, were fielding questions from their new boss, Jane Mendillo, about
exotic financial instruments that were suddenly backfiring. Harvard had
derivatives that gave it exposure to $7.2 billion in commodities and foreign
stocks. With prices of both crashing, the university was getting margin
calls--demands from counterparties (among them, jpmorgan Chase and Goldman
Sachs (nyse: GS - news - people )) for more collateral. Another bunch of
derivatives burdened Harvard with a multibillion-dollar bet on interest
rates that went against it.
It would have been nice to have cash on hand to
meet margin calls, but Harvard had next to none. That was because these
supremely self-confident money managers were more than fully invested. As of
June 30 they had, thanks to the fancy derivatives, a 105% long position in
risky assets. The effect is akin to putting every last dollar of your
portfolio to work and then borrowing another 5% to buy more stocks.
Desperate for cash, Harvard Management went to
outside money managers begging for a return of money it had expected to keep
parked away for a long time. It tried to sell off illiquid stakes in private
equity partnerships but couldn't get a decent price. It unloaded two-thirds
of a $2.9 billion stock portfolio into a falling market. And now, in the
last phase of the cash-raising panic, the university is borrowing money,
much like a homeowner who takes out a second mortgage in order to pay off
credit card bills. Since December Harvard has raised $2.5 billion by selling
IOUs in the bond market. Roughly a third of these Harvard bonds are tax
exempt and carry interest rates of 3.2% to 5.8%. The rest are taxable, with
rates of 5% to 6.5%.
It doesn't feel good to be borrowing at 6% while
holding assets with negative returns. Harvard has oversize positions in
emerging market stocks and private equity partnerships, both disaster areas
in the past eight months. The one category that has done well since last
June is conventional Treasury bonds, and Harvard appears to have owned
little of these. As of its last public disclosure on this score, it had a
modest 16% allocation to fixed income, consisting of 7% in inflation-indexed
bonds, 4% in corporates and the rest in high-yield and foreign debt.
For a long while Harvard's daring investment style
was the envy of the endowment world. It made light bets in plain old stocks
and bonds and went hell-for-leather into exotic and illiquid holdings:
commodities, timberland, hedge funds, emerging market equities and private
equity partnerships. The risky strategy paid off with market-beating results
as long as the market was going up. But risk brings pain in a market crash.
Although the full extent of the damage won't be known until Harvard releases
the endowment numbers for June 30, 2009, the university is already working
on the assumption that the portfolio will be down 30%, or $11 billion.
The strain of market turmoil is visible in staff
turnover at the management company, which axed 25% of its staff recently and
is on its fifth chief in four years. Mendillo, 50, came to Harvard last July
after running Wellesley's small endowment. She declines to comment. But how
much blame she should get is unclear; the big bets on derivatives and exotic
holdings were in place before she got there. The bad bet on interest
rates--a swap in which Harvard was paying a high fixed interest rate and
collecting a low short-term rate--goes back to a mandate from former Harvard
president Lawrence Summers.
Jack R. Meyer, 64, a revered money manager who
headed Harvard's endowment until 2005, offers a few guarded comments. "The
liquidity thing most concerns me--that should not have happened," he says.
Though he wasn't there at the time, Meyer says Harvard Management bought the
commodity and foreign stock derivatives as a way to get exposure to those
asset classes while freeing up cash to put to work elsewhere. The strategy,
he says, "drained liquidity" from the endowment in recent months. "Many
endowments stretched too far, and I think Harvard did as well," he says.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
There were university endowments more devastated than Harvard by the economic
meltdown, most notably the University of Virginia.
April 14, 2009 reply from Jagdish Gangolly
[gangolly@GMAIL.COM]
Bob,
The following is one of the comments on the above
article that should be interesting to many on AECM.
Jagdish
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Posted by ConcernedCitizen2009 | 03/02/09 04:33
PM EST
Obama's Advisor Summers fired Derivatives whistleblower at Harvard
Management Co
Harvard alum Iris Mack, MBA/PhD communicated
with Larry Summers (former Harvard President and current Obama economic
advisor) to express her concerns about how her Harvard Management
Company (HMC) boss Jeff Larson used derivatives to manage an HMC
portfolio. Larson eventually left HMC to start Sowood hedge fund with
hundreds of millions of dollars of Harvard alums' donations. Sowood was
one of the first hedge funds to blow up during the subprime mortgage
derivatives crisis.
Dr. Mack communicated with Summers' office
regarding such derivatives trades. Perhaps, she could have saved Harvard
alums hundreds of millions of dollars if Summers had bothered to
continue to hear her out before forcing her resignation. There is a
wealth of information describing this derivatives whistleblowing case:
correspondence between Dr. Mack and Summer's office (emails, faxes,
snail mail, phone records, etc.); legal documents; reports from FBI and
DOJ interviews, etc.
Given all this, you have to wonder whether
Summers was either too (a) corrupt and wanted to coverup up some thing(s)
at HMC. (b) arrogant to think that Dr. Mack had anything of value to
tell him about mathematical finance and derivatives. Please recall
Summers' comments about women and math. Also, please note that Dr. Mack
has a doctorate in Applied Mathematics from Harvard and a Sloan Fellows
MBA from London Business School. (c) incompetent to understand what Dr.
Mack was trying to warn him about regarding derivatives trades in HMC
portfolios.
Did Summers try to silence Dr. Mack the way he
(as Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Treasury), Rubin,
and Greenspan tried to silence Attorney Brooksley Born of the CFTC
(who suggested under Bill Clinton's administration that
derivatives markets be regulated after a spate of frauds).
Bob Jensen's threads derivative financial instruments scandals (read that
frauds well beyond Harvard's legitimate speculation and hedging) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
Bob Jensen's free tutorials on how to account for derivative financial
instruments ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/000index.htm
Queer Studies Pioneer Dies
"Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: In memoriam," by Ann Pellegrini, Chronicle of
Higher Education's Chronicle Review, May 8, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i33/33b09901.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
After a long and public battle with breast cancer,
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died on Sunday, April 12th. She was 58. She was a
renowned literary critic who left her imprint on numerous fields, but most
distinctively on an interdisciplinary field she helped inaugurate: queer
studies.
. . .
As she wrote in Epistemology of the Closet, "Axiom
1: People are different from each another." She went on, "It is astonishing
how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this
self-evident fact." In the face of the dazzling and dizzying ways in which
people differ from each other (and themselves), sexual orientation is a
pretty blunt instrument. That is a deceptively simple argument, which
Sedgwick went on to unfurl without ever losing sight of how and why
self-identifying as gay or lesbian in the face of a homophobic world does
vitally, urgently continue to matter.
Sedgwick always understood the role she and gay
studies were playing in the culture wars of the 1990s, but she was never
cowed, as the neon signature of that long-ago T-shirt illuminated. Perhaps
the most powerful and politically catalyzing aspect of Epistemology of the
Closet was her devastating dissection of what she called the "regime of the
open secret" and the structures of knowing and not knowing
(heterosexuality's willful ignorance) that surround, sometimes
claustrophobically, the experience and possibility of gay identity. Sedgwick
was writing on the heels of Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court
decision upholding sodomy statutes (since overturned in Lawrence v. Texas,
in 2003), but her analysis of the dilemmas of disclosure, what it is
possible to know or say about homosexuality, and by whom, seems no less
vital today, nearly 20 years after its first publication.
Another major innovation was to allow for, rather
than to smooth over, the incoherences and contradictions that have
historically structured — and continue to do so — homosexual and
heterosexual definition. In so doing, Sedgwick helped to clear a path
through the debate on whether sexual identity is inherent or socially
constructed; that debate organized, often acrimoniously, some early
conversations among scholars in lesbian and gay studies. For one thing,
Sedgwick pointed out how homo/heterosexual definition is caught between two
apparently opposing views: the "minoritizing" claim that homosexuals
constitute a "small, distinct, relatively fixed minority" population (one
version of that is the claim that homosexuals are "born that way"); and the
"universalizing" claim that sexual desire is such an unpredictable, and
unpredictably powerful, solvent of stable identities that even the most
apparently heterosexual persons, and those to whom they are drawn, may be
marked by same-sex influences and desires (and vice versa for homosexual
persons and the people to whom they are drawn). Let's call the latter,
universalizing view the "queer possibility of possibility."
As Richard Kim pointed out in his own tribute to
Sedgwick on The Nation's blog, it is just that queer possibility that
frightens so many opponents of gay parenting, same-sex marriage, and gay
rights more generally: not just, what if gays recruit, but what if I am
recruitable?
Answering that worry with assertions of gay and
straight immutability — the minoritizing argument — would not, according to
Sedgwick, solve the problem. It would rather land us in a different set of
quandaries and perhaps play into what she diagnosed as the "genocidal
fantasy" of a world with, if not no homosexuals at all, at least with as few
as possible. It is less that Sedgwick refused to take sides — she was, after
all, resolutely for a world not just with many homosexuals but with the
space to be gay or "do" gay in lots of different ways, as her lesson plan
"How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys" suggests. It was
more that she was crucially attuned to the perils of both arguments and
humble in the face of the future either ushered in or foreclosed by choices
made in the present. ("How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay" is among the most
reprinted of Sedgwick's essays. It first appeared in the journal Social Text
in 1991, was subsequently reprinted in the book Tendencies, by Duke
University Press in 1993 and Routledge the next year, and has been included
in several anthologies.)
A through-line in Sedgwick's work is the way she
joins humility to fierce protectiveness of difference. Although she seemed
to land on the constructivist side of debates, seeing gay identity and
sexuality as constructed by social norms, she remained a passionate advocate
of attending seriously to the stories that gay men and lesbians have told
about themselves, whether they were "born" gay or made a radical choice. For
Sedgwick, the queer studies or queer theory that could not make room for
self-narratives that did not fit the frame of acacademic theory was not
worth having or preserving.
If Epistemology of the Closet and the earlier
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Duke University
Press, 1985) helped to spark a focus in Anglo-American literary studies on
lesbian and gay issues, with students inspired to read for gay or queer
subtexts in essays and books, we can see Sedgwick at once anticipating and
inaugurating new directions for lesbian and gay studies beyond the literary.
And that was so, even as her own essays were gorgeously literary. One
especially noteworthy example is "Queer Performativity: Henry James's The
Art of the Novel," which was the very first article in the very first issue
of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, in 1993. As the keyword "performativity"
suggests, the article found Sedgwick engaged both with the speech-act theory
of the late J.L. Austin and with Judith Butler's feminist and queer reuses
of Austin's concept of performativity.
The term "performativity" was introduced by Austin,
a British philosopher of language, to describe a class of utterances in
which speech acts: Saying is at the same time doing. The authority of such
utterances depends in large part on being utterly conventionalized. Austin's
ur-example (to which Sedgwick devoted her critical attention and sharp wit)
was the marital "I do," those two magic words that, if said in the right
way, in the right kind of company, under the right conditions, transform a
"man" and a "woman" into a "husband and wife." Butler, now a professor of
rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at
Berkeley, picked up on the notion that saying was authorized and authorizing
to propose gender as itself a kind of stylized performance: Gender
performatives create the illusion that gender is natural and stable.
Sedgwick stepped into this conversation to observe that performatives work
two ways: inwardly (à la French deconstruction) and outwardly (à la
theatricality). But Sedgwick also pointed out how discussions too easily
degenerated into debates about whether a particular performance was truly
subversive. "The bottom line," in her memorable words, "is generally the
same: kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic."
If the first iteration of Sedgwick's article placed
her right in the thick of conversations about identity as performative, it
also forecast later queer critical currents having to do with gay shame and
the matter of affect. Precisely because there is something contagious about
shame, she said, it could also provide surprising points of contact.
Sedgwick herself returned to "Queer Performativity" in the wake of September
11, 2001, and importantly revised it, lifting out and expanding her analysis
of shame to ask how shame delineates identity without being its endpoint.
How it can lead to something else, like the political collectivity that
other theorists have suggested. The final version of this essay appears in
Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press,
2003). That text, along with A Dialogue on Love (Beacon Press, 1999) and
Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Duke University Press,
1995), which she co-edited with Adam Frank, placed Sedgwick at the forefront
of queer investigations of affect, which is one of the liveliest areas of
truly interdisciplinary discussion and debate in queer studies (and beyond)
today.
A Dialogue on Love was a kind of cancer journal.
She wrote it in company with her therapist, Shannon Van Wey, after the
cancer she had been suffering with recurred and she underwent a mastectomy.
Sedgwick drew verbatim conversations with the therapist into the text. It is
neither a purely solo-written book nor co-written in any formal sense.
Standing somewhere in between, it's a hybrid text that rather reveals the
social life and generosity of Sedgwick's thought.
But the formal experimentation of the book was not
new for Sedgwick. Think here of the serious playfulness of the essay she
co-wrote with Michael Moon — their two voices braiding and unbraiding —
"Divinity: A Dossier, a Performance Piece, a Little-Understood Emotion" (in
Tendencies). In those essays, and in Fat Art, Thin Art (Duke University
Press, 1994), a book of poetry, Sedgwick broke form to suggest not only how
many new things we might discover with her, but also in how many unexpected
modes. The diversity and queerness of the forms to no small degree mime the
arguments themselves. As she puts it in Touching Feeling, she is less
interested in "prescriptive forms" than in the possibility of "a mind
receptive to thoughts, able to nurture and connect them, and susceptible to
happiness in their entertainment." Sedgwick seems to have achieved that for
herself. One of her enduring gifts to us — her readers, her students, her
colleagues — is the charge to just keep open to such receptivity, with all
the perils and possibilities it holds out.
There is some irony that Sedgwick should have died
on Easter. She who brilliantly analogized issues like the workings of the
homosexual closet and the dilemma of Jewish self-disclosures in Epistemology
of the Closet turned to Buddhism in the last decade of her life as a way to
undo some, in her words, "painful epistemological/psychological knots" to do
with illness and dying. In her essay "Pedagogy of Buddhism," which appears
in Touching Feeling, Sedgwick refused the either/or charge to believe or
disbelieve in rebirth. Rather, she opened herself to a space freed from the
demand to know and given instead to the meditative play of "picturing your
life, even your character, otherwise than as it is." As she wrote, "So many
questions emerge. Yet their emergence is not in the context of blame or
self-blame, nor of will or resolve. The space is more like — what? Wish?
Somewhere, at least, liberated by both possibility and impossibility, and
especially by the relative untetheredness to self."
Sedgwick's turn to Buddhism was not a turning away
from queer studies. In many ways, we can see her meditative practices, and
the lessons she gleaned from them and shared with her readers and students,
as participating in a larger turn in queer studies to think about religion
and spirituality in less rigid and rigidly hostile ways. As at so many other
turning points in queer studies, Sedgwick's generosity and imagination were
inspiring — she offered a pedagogy unafraid not to know, even when there
seemed so much to be scared about. Here, amid a meditation on Tibetan
Buddhism, we can see Sedgwick grappling with and expounding on some of the
fundamental ethical and political claims of queer theory: namely, the hope,
the risk, and the serious play of imagining otherwise, both in our deepest
relations with others and in ourselves — however fictive "the self" or
however fleeting Sedgwick herself's time among us.
Because of Eve Sedgwick's formative role in the
shaping of queer studies, the absence left in her wake looms large. And yet
her legacy lives on in the dazzling body of work she leaves behind, which we
can continue to read and teach and find happiness in. Sedgwick was also,
from all accounts, an amazing teacher and mentor to her students, so many of
whom have themselves gone on to leave their marks on queer and feminist
studies. She leaves us that other shining, pulsing legacy, then, in the form
of her many students, whom she touched and graced, and whose own teaching is
a kind of carrying forward of her torch and her touch.
Ann Pellegrini is an associate professor of performance studies and
religious studies at New York University, where she also directs the Center
for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.
Harvard teaches rejection acceptance to students who've probably never
experienced failure and never expected rejection as Harvard graduates
How bad is the
economy? Harvard University's career
services office has started a new seminar to
teach students how to deal with rejection,
The Boston Globe
reported. Among the
lessons for students: the idea that there
may be more qualified people than Harvard
graduates for some jobs.
Inside Higher Ed, April 22, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/22/qt#197100
It's so sad that Wall Street shot itself in the head rather than the foot!
With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King?
"With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King?" by Steve Lohr, The
New York Times, April 11, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/weekinreview/12lohr.html?pagewanted=1&hpw
In the Depression, smart college students flocked into
civil engineering to design the highway, bridge and dam-building projects of
those days. In the Sputnik era, students poured into the sciences as America bet
on technology to combat the cold war Communist challenge. Yes, the jobs beckoned
and the pay was good. But those careers, in their day, had other perks: respect
and self-esteem.Big shifts in the flow of talent
can ripple through the nation and the economy for decades with lasting effect.
The engineers of the Depression built everything from inter-city roads to the
Hoover Dam, while the Sputnik-inspired scientists would go on, often with
research funding from the Pentagon, to create the building-block innovations
behind modern computing and the Internet.
Today, the financial crisis and the economic downturn
are likely to alter drastically the career paths of future years. The contours
of the shift are still in flux, in part because there is so much uncertainty
about the shape of the economic landscape and the job market ahead.
But choosing a career is a guess about the future in
which economics is only part of the calculation. Prestige, peer expectations and
the climate of public opinion also matter. And early indications suggest new
career directions that are tethered less to the dream of an immediate six-figure
paycheck on Wall Street than to the demands of a new public agenda to solve the
nation’s problems.
The deep recession has clearly battered industries —
and professions — whose economics were at risk before the downturn. Law firms
are laying off lawyers as never before and questioning the industry’s
traditional unit of payment, the billable hour. Journalism is reeling from the
falloff in advertising and the inability of newspapers and magazines to make a
living on the Web.
Still, the industry whose troubles are having the
greatest impact on the rethinking of careers, especially at the nation’s elite
universities, is the one at the center of the country’s economic downturn —
finance. For years, the hefty paychecks and social status on Wall Street proved
irresistible to many of America’s brightest young people, but the jobs, money
and social respect there are much diminished today.
“In choosing careers, young people look for signals
from society, and Wall Street will no longer pull the talent that it did for so
many years,” said Richard Freeman, director of the labor studies program at the
National Bureau of Economic Research. “We have a great experiment before us.”
What will the new map of talent flow look like? It’s
early, but based on graduate school applications this spring, enrollment in
undergraduate courses, preliminary job-placement results at schools, and the
anecdotal accounts of students and professors, a new pattern of occupational
choice seems to be emerging. Public service, government, the sciences and even
teaching look to be winners, while fewer shiny, young minds are embarking on
careers in finance and business consulting.
For the highest-paid business fields, the outlook is
for a tempering correction instead of an all-out exodus. At Harvard, for
example, about 40 percent of undergraduates in recent years went into the most
lucrative corporate arenas like finance and consulting, based on surveys at the
school year’s end. “That certainly won’t be the case this year,” observed
Lawrence Katz, a professor and labor economist who has studied undergraduate
career choices at Harvard going back to the 1960s. “We’re seeing students who
would have been part of the Ivy League pipeline to Wall Street in the past
considering very different career paths.”
Kedamai Fisseha, a 21-year-old senior, is one of them.
An economics major, Mr. Fisseha says he always assumed he would go into finance,
and his summer internship last year was at the investment bank Morgan Stanley.
Yet after Wall Street’s meltdown, job prospects there have withered. Instead, he
is interviewing with Teach for America, a nonprofit group that recruits college
graduates to teach in hard-to-staff schools for two-year stints. (After that,
only one-third stay in the classrooms, though two-thirds remain in education.)
Mr. Fisseha regards the turn of events as an
opportunity to broaden his horizons. “It’s been liberating, and lucky for me,”
he said. “But your situation does dictate your preferences.”
Graduate schools of government and public policy are
seeing a surge of applications. In a survey of its members released last week,
the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration found
that 82 percent reported an increase in applications this year, and many saw the
largest percentage jumps in several years, or ever. The most-cited reason was
the expectation by students that government will be hiring.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In spite of continued strong career opportunities, with some of the best
opportunities for women, the above article ignores accountancy careers. I think
much of this is due to Lohr's focus on high ranked MBA programs. These MBA
Programs have not been major sources of public accountants in the past three
decades. One reason is that to take the CPA examination most states requires
more pre-requisite accounting course coverage than top MBA programs make
available in the curriculum. This makes it more difficult for graduates of top
MBA programs to sit for the CPA examination unless they were undergraduate
accounting majors. Top ranked MBA programs like Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, and
Darden generally prefer to admit students who were not undergraduate business
and/or accounting majors.
Following the conflicts of interest charges and/or the Sarbanes-Oxley
legislation, most CPA firms sold off their consulting divisions like Andersen
Consulting, Cap Gemini, PwC Consulting, and KPMG Consulting. Those divisions
were more apt to hire MBA graduates who had no intention of ever taking the CPA
examination. Also consulting firms have cut way back on their entry-level hiring
in favor of hiring persons with technical expertise and experience.
Although faculty in state-supported universities are somewhat different from
what we view as workers in the federal, state, and local bureaucracies, there
will be increased hiring opportunities for faculty careers as the government
pours upwards of a trillion dollars, over several years, into education
opportunities for lower-income students. But with declining career opportunities
as the private sector cuts back, the outlook is not particularly strong for
academic careers in schools of business and accounting. It's even bleaker for
undergraduate finance programs. The outlook is much better for science and
medical/nursing/pharmacy faculty openings.
What I find somewhat sad in Lohr's article is the prediction that government
careers are the long-term wave of the future. I've never been a fan of big
public sector relative to the private sector. It's so sad that Wall Street shot
itself in the head rather than the foot!
Bob Jensen's career helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
"Microsoft's Encarta, Rendered Obsolete by Wikipedia, Will Shut Down,"
by Brock Read, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3715&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Disproportionate Charges of Cheating Against University of Virginia
Minority Students
"University community reacts to diversity statistics from Committee:
Various minority organizations, administrators discuss racial issues,
discrepancies based on recently released statistics about cases reported,
brought to trial," by Cameron Feller, Cavalier Daily, April 14, 2009 ---
http://www.cavalierdaily.com/news/2009/apr/14/university-community-reacts-to-diversity-statistic/
The 2008-09 Honor Committee released statistics
last week about the demographics of cases reviewed during its term. Although
the data dealt specifically with cases reported, accused and brought to
trial, the information also lends itself to several discussions about some
students’ concerns pertaining to the University’s honor system and
diversity.
Reporting
One of the most obvious areas of interest within
the statistics were the numbers that dealt specifically with reporting.
According to the statistics, a total of 64 cases were brought before the
past Committee. Of these cases, 27 reports were brought against white
students, 21 against black students, 11 against Asian and/or Asian-American
students, four against Latinos and four against students of unknown race.
“When I saw [the statistics], I was a little bit
surprised at the disproportionate number of minority students reported
compared to [white] students,” said Vice Chair for Investigations Mary
Siegel, a third-year College student.
“Looking at these numbers, there are almost as many
[black] students reported as [white] students, which is not at all
proportional [to the actual number of students enrolled at the University],”
Siegel said.
These concerns with respect to reporting extend
beyond just Committee members, however.
“In terms of data collection, I can’t help but be
startled by the discrepancy,” African-American Affairs Dean Maurice Apprey
said.
Another alleged discrepancy is the ratio of cases
brought against males to those brought against females. The statistics show
that 48 males were reported of committing an honor offense, whereas only 18
females were reported.
Some members of the University attribute such
statistical discrepancies to spotlighting, which is when certain minorities
— such as blacks, athletes and Asians — are reported at a much higher rate
than white students for reasons like standing out in the room more, as well
as some reporters’ inherent biases.
“From a psychology point of view, sometimes you are
going to look at what’s different in the room,” said Black Student Alliance
President-elect Lauren Boswell, a third-year Architecture student.
Siegel said she hopes to help explore the reasons
behind allegedly biased reporting by speaking to reporters more frequently
than the current system allows.
“I think the first place we have to start is
reporters and ask them why they suspected this person of an the Committee
offense,” Siegel said. “If there seems to be a pattern, then the Committee
can try and correct that pattern.”
Currently reporters of an alleged honor offense are
involved in the first interview during the investigations process and then
during a rebuttal, but are removed from the investigations process, Siegel
said. Removing the reporter from the process ensures that his or her bias
does not play a part in investigations, Siegel added, but does not ensure
that there are not any biased motivations behind the initial report.
Accusations and Trials
After students are reported of having committed an
alleged honor offense, the case is taken up by the Investigative Panel,
which is comprised of three rotating Committee members, and examined to see
if an honor offense occurred. If the panel believes an offense occurred, the
student is formally accused and is brought to trial.
According to the statistics excluding last
weekend’s trials, 35 students were formally accused of committing an honor
offense by the I-Panel, 13 of whom were black. Twelve white students were
accused and 10 Asian and/or Asian-American students also were brought to
trial. A total of 29 trials, including last weekend’s trials, occurred
during the past Committee’s term. Of the 11 white students brought to trial,
six were found not guilty, whereas 14 of the 19 black students brought to
trial were found not guilty. A total of 32 males, meanwhile, were brought to
trial, nine of whom were found guilty. Comparatively, four of the 11 female
students brought to trial were found guilty.
After looking at the statistics, several Committee
members said they believe that any bias present in the beginning of the
honor trial process is lost during the process.
“Once a case comes into the system ... these
students are being found guilty at the same rate” regardless of race,
2007-08 Committee Chair Jess Huang said.
Fourth-year College student Carlos Oronce, co-chair
of the Minority Rights Coalition, disagreed, however.
“I challenge the notion that students of different
color are on par with white students” after trials, Oronce said, noting that
though Committee members have told him a “balance” eventually exists, his
own data analysis yields different conclusions. He explained that his
conclusions are based on a study done six years ago; the Committee has yet
to do a similar study since.
“You’ll see that there’s something like a 6 percent
difference in guilt rate between [white] students and black students,”
Oronce said. “Six percent comes off to me as a huge difference.”
Oronce added that he believes that a more formal
study needs to be done to accurately see and analyze the alleged
disparities. Siegel also said she believes the Committee “needs to look at
ways to correct these imbalances” regardless of whether the imbalances come
into play during the actual investigation and trial process.
Representation, Recruitment and Retention
Several members of the University community also
have expressed concern about representation within the actual Committee
itself in regards to diversity.
“I think if you look at the Committee and support
officer pools, they are admittedly not very diverse,” said Committee Chair
David Truetzel, a third-year Commerce student. La Alianza Chair Carolina
Ferrerosa, a fourth-year College student, agreed, noting that one of her
organization’s major concerns is increasing diversity within the Committee.
“We would like to see more of a push” to get more
minority representatives on the Committee, and make sure that “the Committee
is realistic when it looks in the mirror,” Ferrerosa said.
Members and non-members alike hope that by
increasing minority representation within the Committee, other diversity
issues can be addressed, like increasing outreach and personal relationships
between minority contracted independent organizations and the Committee.
Vice Chair for Education Rob Atkinson, a third-year
College student, said he already has had several meetings aimed at improving
education efforts with some of these groups. He added that he feels it is
important to create a personal relationship between these groups and the
Committee before more formal relationships can be developed.
“We want to take into account the concerns or views
of the different communities when we reach out to those communities,”
Atkinson said. Reaching out to these groups, Truetzel added, will help
ensure that all students feel like the system belongs to them, no matter
their race or gender.
“When you lack diversity ... you don’t have
diversity of thought, diversity of ideas,” Truetzel said.
Apprey, meanwhile, agreed that increasing minority
representation on the Committee could lead to “healthy conversation, healthy
debates” and could help promote “further cultural competence” and
understanding.
To help increase representation, the Committee has
taken steps to improve recruitment and students attracted to joining the
Committee. BSA President-elect Boswell noted that the Committee has made an
effort to help promote recruitment among the black student community,
holding two honor education classes during both the fall and spring
semesters this academic year that encouraged members of the black community
to join the Committee.
Boswell said that first-year students in the black
community often are approached by a lot of different programs focused on
black students their first semester to create “a sense of family and place
here” at the University. It is therefore sometimes difficult, however, to
attract first-year students that are minorities within the Committee and
other organizations during their first semesters, Boswell said. By holding
an education class during the spring, Boswell said, the Committee “got
outstanding turnout for minorities.”
The Committee and BSA also held a study hall that
discussed both the Committee and UJC. Although Boswell said she thought it
was a success, she hopes in the future that it will become more “casual” so
that students will feel comfortable enough to have personal conversations.
Despite these efforts, there are still many things
the Committee can do to encourage minorities to participate in the honor
system, Boswell said. Even though the Committee attends The Source, the
black community’s activities fair, Boswell said she does not know if it is
“the most effective way” to help recruitment.
Oronce said consistent outreach efforts to these
different communities, rather than just right before elections or the
beginning of the year, could prove helpful for recruitment or maintaining
relationships.
In addition to issues of recruitment and
representation, Oronce said that many minority students end up quitting the
Committee because they feel uncomfortable and marginalized. Boswell added
that officer pool meetings can be isolating as students generally sit with
their friends. Though she said this might be found in any organization, she
also noted that it is imperative that the Committee makes sure every
minority student feels comfortable and included if they wish to maintain
diversity.
“This past year, there has been a move towards
getting a group that is more representative,” Huang said.
Oronce also said he believes that “this year is
definitely a lot better than last year” in terms of representation within
both the Committee and the support officer pool, but that there is still
room for improvement.
“Once we fix our problems internally, we will be in
a better place to discuss” some of these other issues of diversity and the
Committee, Siegel added.
FAC and DAB
The Committee’s educational outreach efforts are
not limited to students. Within the Committee, the Faculty Advisory
Committee and the Diversity Advisory Board were created to help address
issues with faculty members and diversity organizations. The FAC chair meets
with faculty members once a month to discuss faculty concerns and teach
aspects of honor, while the DAB works with Honor to increase Honor relevancy
and understanding with diverse groups.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Students Lose, Fair Use Wins in Suit Targeting Anti-Plagiarism Tool,"
by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 20, 2009 --- Clickhttp://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3722/students-lose-fair-use-wins-in-suit-targeting-anti-plagiarism-tool?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Here
Students
have suffered another defeat in their legal fight against the
company that runs a plagiarism-detection tool popular among
professors.
A federal
appeals court last week affirmed a lower court’s decision that
the
Turnitin service does not violate the
copyright of students, even though it stores digital copies of
their essays in the database that the company uses to check
works for academic dishonesty.
The
opinion
from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit “will be
cheered by digital fair-use proponents,”
says the E-Commerce and Tech Law
blog.
Last
year’s decision in the plagiarism case — and I’m plagiarizing
here from
The Chronicle’s account of it —
was seen as carrying wider implications for other digital
services, such as Google’s effort to scan books in major
libraries and add them to its index for search purposes.
The legal battle
began in 2007, when four high-school students sued iParadigms,
the company that runs Turnitin, arguing that the company took
their papers against their will and profited from using them.
The students’ high schools required papers to be checked for
plagiarism using Turnitin. The service adds scanned papers to
its database.
U.S. District
Court Judge Claude M. Hilton had found that scanning the student
papers to detect plagiarism is a “highly transformative” use
that falls under the fair-use provision of copyright law. Mr.
Hilton ruled that the company “makes no use of any work’s
particular expressive or creative content beyond the limited use
of comparison with other works,” and that the new use “provides
a substantial public benefit.”
Steven J.
McDonald, general counsel at the Rhode Island School of Design,
reacted to the latest development in the case by calling the
fair-use analysis unsurprising “but welcome.”
“In particular,”
Mr. McDonald wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle
on Monday, “it underscores that the copyright owner’s rights are
simply not absolute and that ‘transformative’ uses deserve
protection themselves.”
More than
450,000 educators and millions of high school and college
students use Turnitin, according to a company fact sheet.
Last week’s
opinion also reversed and sent back for further consideration
the lower court’s decision on counterclaims made by iParadigms.
The company had put forward a claim against one of the
plaintiffs under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or
CFAA. iParadigms said it was forced to
launch an investigation — spending numerous man-hours in the
process — after the student allegedly gained unauthorized access
to Turnitin.
The E-Commerce
and Tech Law blog called attention to the reversal, saying it
“could leave Web users open to getting smacked with a large
CFAA award whenever a company suspects
someone has gained improper access to its Web site.”
Robert A.
Vanderhye, the plaintiffs’ pro bono lawyer, acknowledged that
the bulk of the opinion was a “stinging defeat.” But the lawyer
has not surrendered yet. He plans to petition for a rehearing.
He argued that
the court did not decide the issue of Turnitin sharing papers
with third parties. If a student’s paper is flagged as
unoriginal based on an earlier paper, he said, the company will
turn over that earlier paper to an instructor upon request.
“This is
not a complete, total defeat on the copyright issue,” he argued.
“That issue is still outstanding,” he said, referring to the
question of whether Turnitin infringes a copyright if it sends a
complete paper to a third party. “They didn’t decide that
issue.”
|
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Some regulations proposed for credit default swaps do not solve the
problems such as the AIG default problems
"A Central Clearing House Doesn’t Reduce CDS Risk," by Bill Snyder, Stanford
GSB News, April 2009 ---
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/duffie_clearinghouse.html?cmpid=kb0904
A plan by global financial regulators to fix the
mess created by the misuse of credit default swaps is flawed, says Darrell
Duffie, professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
In a preliminary research paper, Duffie, and GSB
doctoral student Haoxiang Zhu, conclude that the central clearing houses
founded to rationalize the $27 trillion market for credit default swaps will
not remove nearly as much risk as regulators might hope. What's more,
despite a mistaken belief by some commentators, the clearing houses are
unlikely to bring much needed transparency to trades of credit-default
swaps, or CDS, says Duffie.
Credit default swaps are essentially insurance
policies used to hedge risky bonds. Their misuse has been blamed for the
near-collapse of American International Group (AIG) and the subsequent
damage to the global financial system in an over-the-counter market, out of
view and off the public record.
Because there was, until recently, no central
clearing house for the CDS market, buyers and sellers have been
unnecessarily exposed to the risk of default. A clearing house stands
between buyers and sellers, ensuring that accounts are settled properly when
trades are made, and that margin requirements have been met. In effect, the
clearing house acts as a buyer to every seller and a seller to every buyer,
reducing the risk of default by either counterparty, as participants in such
trades are called.
Responding to pressure from regulators, dealers in
Europe and the United States, agreed to the establishment of CDS clearing
houses, and by early spring two had been opened and more are planned.
Duffie, a member of the Financial Advisory
Roundtable of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, supported the establishment
of a clearinghouse in testimony last year to the U.S. Senate Committee on
Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. He still supports that idea, but
maintains that the current implementation is flawed in several respects.
Although the worldwide market for credit default
swaps is huge at $27 trillion, it has shrunk by more than 50 percent in the
past year, and is too small—and the number of participating institutions is
too small—for a clearinghouse that deals only in CDS to efficiently reduce
counterparty risk, says Duffie. Instead, Duffie and Zhu suggest that the
clearinghouse should clear a much larger fraction of trades made in the $500
trillion market for over-the-counter (off-exchange) derivatives.
"Our results make it clear that regulators and
dealers should carefully consider the tradeoffs involved in carving out a
particular class of derivatives, such as credit default swaps, for
clearing," the research paper states. Here's why:
Banks reduce risk by trading across various classes
of options, derivatives, and other financial instruments. Ultimately,
positions between two counterparties tend to have offsetting exposures; some
are of positive market value to a given counterparty, and others are of
negative market value. These have a "netting effect," that is, only the net
amount of market value is at risk in a default by one of the counterparties
Duffie and his co-author built a theoretical model
to clarify an important tradeoff between two types of netting opportunities,
"namely bilateral netting between pairs of dealers across different
underlying assets, versus multilateral netting among many dealers across a
single class of underlying assets, such as credit default swaps." The latter
of these is the method by which the new clearinghouses will work.
Their model reveals that clearing only credit
default swaps can actually increase the risk to the counterparties because
the benefits of bilateral netting across asset classes is reduced in this
case.
For instance, if Dealer A is exposed to Dealer B by
$100 million on CDS, while at the same time Dealer B is exposed to Dealer A
by $150 million on interest-rate swaps, then the introduction of central
clearing for only credit default swaps increases the maximum loss between
these two dealers, before collateral and after netting, from $50 million to
$150 million. Additionally, CDS-only clearing would likely result in demands
for additional, expensive, collateral to protect the two parties.
A CDS-only clearinghouse would work if the market
were larger, say Duffie and Zhu. More precisely, their report finds that a
dedicated central clearing counterparty [a clearinghouse] improves netting
efficiency for these dealers if and only if the fraction of a typical
dealer's expected exposure attributable to CDS is the majority of the total
expected exposures of all remaining bilaterally netted classes of
derivatives. In fact, the credit-default swap market is now too small to
reach that threshold.
Making matters somewhat worse was the decision to
establish multiple clearing houses. Having more than one reduces the netting
effect even more, says Duffie, adding that each additional clearing house
exacerbates the problem.
Even though the clearinghouse plan is flawed with
respect to reducing counterparty risk, it has been suggested that
establishing these new entities would at least add much needed transparency
to the CDS market. Actually, the same level of information about CDS trades
that would be available to regulators in a clearing house is already
available through the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC). With
or without a clearing house, there is no plan to reveal trades to the
public. So, the stories of improved transparency are a red herring.
Public discussion, says Duffie, assumes that the
clearinghouses would act like exchanges, such as the New York Stock
Exchange, by systematically reporting all trades. "I’m sorry to disappoint,
but most of the information about default swaps remains confidential even
when cleared," he said during an interview.
Moreover, a clearinghouse can only clear standard
transactions. But most of the credit default swaps initiated by AIG, are not
standard, and would never have been cleared, even if a clearing house had
existed years ago.
Presented in mid-February of 2009, the preliminary
draft of the Duffie-Zhu paper is titled: "Does a Central Clearing
Counterparty Reduce Counterparty Risk?" The work is something of a departure
for Duffie, who says he rarely writes a paper to meet the immediate needs of
a policy debate, but felt compelled to weigh in because of the critical
nature of the discussion.
"During a research discussion over lunch, my
co-author and I had a hunch that there was an important concept missing from
the policy discussion. We could not confirm our intuition without building
and solving a model. Once we did, it was obvious that we should present our
results in a new research paper," he said in the interview.
Darrell Duffie is the Dean Witter Distinguished
Professor in Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Senior
Fellow, by courtesy, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
Bob Jensen's threads and the CDS mess are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout
"A New(?) Model for Teaching Ethical Behavior," by Robert J. Sternberg,
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 24, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i33/33b01401.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
What is frightening about ethical lapses is not that they happen to
the ethically outrageous but that they can sneak up on just about
all of us. An informal classroom "experiment" I performed recently
illustrates that slippery slope. "I
am very proud of myself," I told the 17 undergraduates in my
seminar, called "The Nature of Leadership." I had just returned from
a trip, I told them, and felt that the honorarium I was paid for my
consulting on ethical leadership was less than I deserved. I felt
badly that I had decided to accept an engagement for so little
compensation. I then told the class that I had been about to fill
out the reimbursement forms when I discovered that I could actually
get reimbursed twice. The first reimbursement would come from the
organization that had invited me, which required me merely to fill
out a form listing my expenses. The second reimbursement would come
from my university, which required me to submit the receipts from
the trip. I explained to the class that by getting reimbursed twice,
I could justify to myself the amount of work I had put into the
engagement. (Full disclosure: I did not really seek double
reimbursement.)
I waited for the firestorm. Would the
class — which had already studied leadership for several months —
rise up in a mass protest against what I proposed to do? Or would
only a few brave souls raise their hands and roundly criticize me
for what was patently unethical behavior? I waited, and waited, and
waited. Nothing happened. I then decided to move on to the main
topic of the day, which, I recall, was ... ethical leadership. The
whole time I was speaking about that main topic, I expected some of
the students to raise their hands and demand to return to the issue
of my double reimbursement. It didn't happen.
Finally, I stopped talking and flat-out
asked the class whether any of them thought anything was wrong with
my desire for double reimbursement. If so, I asked them, why had no
one challenged me? I figured that all of them would be embarrassed
for not having challenged me. Indeed, many of them were. Others
thought I must have been kidding. Still others thought that, since I
was the professor and a dean to boot, I must have had a good reason
for doing whatever I wanted to do. What I did not expect, though,
was that some of the students would commend me for my clever idea
and argue that, if I could get away with it, I was entitled to
receive the money — more power to me!
That experience reminded me how hard it is
to translate theories of ethics, and even case studies, into
practice. The students had read about ethics in leadership, heard
about ethics in leadership from a variety of real-world leaders,
discussed ethics in leadership, and then apparently totally failed
to recognize or at least speak out against unethical behavior when
it stared them in the face. Moreover, these were students who by
conventional definitions would be classified as gifted. Why is it so
hard to translate theory into practice, even after one has studied
ethical leadership for several months?
In 1970, Bibb Latané and John Darley opened
up a new field of research on bystander intervention. They showed
that, contrary to expectations, bystanders intervene when someone is
in trouble only in very limited circumstances. For example, if they
think that someone else might intervene, bystanders tend to stay out
of the situation. Latané and Darley even showed that divinity
students who were about to lecture on the parable of the good
Samaritan were no more likely than other bystanders to help a person
in distress.
Drawing in part on Latané and Darley's
model of bystander intervention, I've constructed a model of ethical
behavior that applies to a variety of ethical problems. The model's
basic premise is that ethical behavior is far harder to display than
one would expect simply on the basis of what we learn from parents,
school, and religious training. To intervene, to do good,
individuals must go through a series of steps, and unless all of the
steps are completed, people are not likely to behave ethically,
regardless of the ethics training or moral education they have
received and the level of other types of relevant skills they might
possess, such as critical or creative thinking.
Consider these eight steps of behaving
ethically and how my students responded, or didn't respond, to the
ethical challenge I presented:
1. Recognize that there is an event to
react to. The students were sitting in a class on leadership,
expecting to be educated about leadership by an expert on
leadership. In this case, I did not present the problem as one to
which I expected them to react. I was simply telling them about
something I was planning to do. They had no a priori reason to
expect that something an authority figure did, or was thinking of
doing, would require any particular reaction, except perhaps taking
notes. So for some students, the whole narrative may have been a
nonevent.
That is a problem that extends beyond this
mere college-classroom situation. When people hear their political,
educational, or especially religious leaders talk, they may not
believe there is any reason to question what they hear. After all,
they are listening to authority figures. In this way, cynical and
corrupt leaders can lead their followers to accept and even commit
unethical acts such as suicide bombings and murder of those with
divergent beliefs.
2. Define the event as having an ethical
dimension. Not all students in the class defined the problem as
an ethical one. It became clear in our discussion that some students
saw the problem as utilitarian: I had worked hard, had been
underpaid, and was trying to figure out a way to attain adequate
compensation for my hard work. In that definition of the problem, I
had come up with a clever way to make the compensation better fit
the work I had done.
Thus cynical leaders may flaunt their
unethical behavior simply by defining it in other,
plausible-sounding ways. For example, when Robert Mugabe and his
henchmen seized the land of white farmers in Zimbabwe, the seizure
was presented as a way of compensating alleged war heroes for their
accomplishments. What could be unethical about compensating war
heroes?
3. Decide that the ethical dimension is
significant. In the case of my plan to seek double
reimbursement, some of the students may have felt it was sketchy or
dubious but not sufficiently so to make an issue of it. Perhaps they
themselves had "double-dipped." Or perhaps they had sometimes taken
what was not theirs — say, something small like a newspaper or even
money they found on the ground — and saw what I was doing as no more
serious than what they had done. So they may recognize an ethical
dimension, but not see it as sufficiently significant to create a
fuss.
Politicians seem to specialize in trying to
downplay the ethical dimension of their behavior. The shenanigans
and subsequent lies of Bill Clinton regarding his behavior with
Monica Lewinsky are an example. Eliot Spitzer, former governor of
New York, misbehaved for years until his misdeeds were exposed.
4. Take responsibility for generating an
ethical solution to the problem. My students may have felt that
they were, after all, merely students. Is it their responsibility,
or even their right, to tell a professor of a course on leadership
how to act, especially if the professor is a dean? Perhaps from
their point of view, it was my responsibility to determine the
ethical dimensions, if any, of the situation.
Similarly, people may allow leaders to
commit wretched acts because they figure it is the leaders'
responsibility to determine the ethical dimensions of their actions.
Or people may assume that the leaders, especially if they are
religious leaders, are in the best position to determine what is
ethical. If a religious leader encourages someone to become a
suicide bomber, for example, that person might conclude that being a
bomber must be ethical; why else would a religious leader suggest
it?
5. Figure out what abstract ethical
rule(s) might apply to the problem. Perhaps some of the students
recognized the problem I created for them as an ethical one. But if
they had never had to figure out reimbursements, it might not have
been obvious to them what rule, or rules, apply. Or even if they had
dealt with reimbursements, might there be some circumstances in
which it is ethical to be reimbursed twice? Maybe the university
supplements outside reimbursements, as they sometimes do with
fellowships? Or maybe the university does not care who else pays, as
long as they get original receipts. Or maybe I had misspoken; maybe
what I meant to say was that I would get some expenses paid by the
university and others by the sponsoring organization. Especially in
unfamiliar situations, it may not be clear what constitutes ethical
behavior.
6. Decide how abstract ethical rules
actually apply to the problem, in order to suggest a concrete
solution. Perhaps the students did know of relevant ethical
rules but did not see how to apply them. Suppose they thought of the
rule that one should expect from others only what one deserves.
Well, what did I deserve? Maybe they saw me as deserving more than I
did simply because I said I did. Or suppose they reflected on the
maxim that one should not expect something for nothing. Well, I did
something — I was only trying to get something back that
adequately reflected my work. In the end, the students may have had
trouble translating abstract principles into concrete behavior.
When U.S. forces kill suspected terrorists
in other countries, some residents of the United States may be happy
that the evildoers got what they deserved. But what if foreign
forces entered the United States and started killing people a
foreign government suspected of being terrorists? Does the ethical
principle of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"
mean, concretely, that if we do not want foreign forces in our
country, we should not have our own forces elsewhere? Or does it
mean that if we in the United States have forces elsewhere, those
forces should not kill anyone, regardless of who that person is
killing and what terrorist acts he or she may be planning?
In many instances, understanding exactly
how to apply an ethical principle forces us to grapple with deeply
held values.
7. Formulate an ethical solution, at the
same time possibly preparing to counteract contextual forces that
might lead you to act unethically. Suppose you sit in a
classroom and hear your teacher brag about what you consider to be
unethical behavior. You look around: No one else is saying anything.
As far as you can tell, no one else is even fazed. Perhaps what you
think is the right course of action isn't. Maybe you're the one
who's out of line, and speaking up will only embarrass you in front
of your peers.
In Latané and Darley's work, the more
bystanders there were, the less likely it was for one to intervene.
The investigators saw that people tend to think that if something is
really wrong, someone else witnessing the event will take
responsibility. You are actually better off having a breakdown on a
somewhat lonely country road than on a busy highway because a driver
passing by on the country road may feel that he or she is your only
hope.
Sometimes the problem is not that other
people seem oblivious to the ethical implications of a situation,
but that they actively encourage you to behave in ways you define as
unethical. In the Rwandan genocides, Hutus were encouraged to hate
and kill Tutsis, even if they were family members. Those who were
not willing to participate in the massacres risked becoming victims
themselves. In Hitler's Germany, those who tried to save Jews from
concentration camps risked being sent to the camps themselves, or
having family members sent.
Obviously an individual has to decide what
he or she is willing to risk for the sake of doing what he or she
believes is right.
8. Act. In the end, you could be a
wonderful ethical thinker, figure out all you need to do, be
prepared to do the right thing, and then do nothing. One has to make
the leap from thought to action. For example, most people know they
should have only safe sex, but not all of them do, even if they know
they have an illness that they could spread through sexual contact.
In Rwanda and most recently in West Darfur, there were countless
discussions about what needed to be done to behave ethically.In the
end, the most difficult thing was not getting people to talk about
action, but to engage in it.
We would like to think that peer pressure
to behave ethically leads people to resist internal temptations to
misbehave. But often exactly the opposite is the case. In the Enron
scandal, when Sherron Watkins blew the whistle on unethical
behavior, she was punished and made to feel like an outcast. In
general, whistle-blowers are treated poorly, despite the protections
they are supposed to receive.
I have argued that ethical behavior
typically requires eight steps, and that if you miss any one of
them, you are not likely to behave fully ethically. College can
produce students who are smart and knowledgeable but ethically
challenged. By alerting students to the steps in ethical behavior
and the potential difficulty of going through them all, students may
come to understand why it is so easy to slip into unethical behavior
and be more likely to think and behave ethically. Given the problems
we face in today's world, that seems like an urgent priority.
Robert J. Sternberg is dean of the School of Arts and
Sciences, a professor of psychology, and an adjunct professor of
education at Tufts University. His books include Wisdom,
Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized (Cambridge University
Press, 2003). |
Jensen Comment One of my favorite illustrations of ethical lapses is where a
number of large auditing firms were billing clients for expense reimbursements
well in excess of amounts paid by the auditing firms for airline tickets and
hotels ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#BigFirms
(You must scroll down to find media modules on these billing scandals.)
Bob Jensen's threads on auditor professionalism
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Professionalism
"American U. in Cairo Presents a Documentary About Second-Life Journalism,"
by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 13, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3710&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Those who attended the Virtual Journalism
Conference at Washington State University this week may have glimpsed the
future of global journalism in a brief documentary about an avatar-to-avatar
news conference. The news conference, which took place in February in the
virtual platform Second Life, gave eight Egyptian political bloggers a
chance to directly question James K. Glassman, the public-diplomacy czar
under form President George W. Bush.
“This is the ultimate situation of breaking down
barriers of time and space,” said Lawrence Pintak, director of the Kamal
Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University
in Cairo—or, rather, his slightly-less-gray-haired avatar said that in the
documentary. “We’re putting together people who are on opposite sides of the
world for a real-time conversation.”
The Second-Life news conference was the final stage
of a project, overseen by American University in Cairo and paid for by the
U.S. Agency for International Development, that brought the Egyptian
bloggers to the United States to cover last fall’s presidential election.
Technology that allows journalists anywhere in the
world to connect with each other and with newsmakers could make reporting
less costly at a time when many newspapers are cutting back on travel. And
while some might dismiss a Second-Life meet-up as little more than a
glorified conference call, Rita J. King, a former journalist, said the
difference is tremendous. Ms. King is CEO and creative director of Dancing
Ink Productions, which designed the virtual space where the news conference
was held and also helped create the documentary.
First of all, “teleconferences put people to
sleep,” she told The Chronicle. They’re also expensive. But most
importantly, the experience of interacting in a three-dimensional space is
much richer, sensationally and psychologically.
“Neurologically, people feel they are sharing an
experience if the brain perceives that they are sharing space,” she said. “I
have found that people are very likely to be candid in interviews that are
conducted virtually, much more so than over the phone or even in person.… It
is safe physically, first of all, but it also eliminates elements of
discomfort that are part of the physical world, related to socioeconomic
status, age, gender, race.… There are all sorts of limiting factors that
prevent people from being candid with one another in person.”
Bob Jensen's threads about Second Life virtual worlds are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
From The Wall Street Journal Weekly Accounting Review on April 16,
2009
More States Look to Raise Taxes
The Wall Street Journal
by Leslie
Eaton
Apr 09, 2009
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123923448796803135.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC
TOPICS: Governmental
Accounting, Income Tax, Revenue Forecast, sales tax, State
Income Tax, State Taxation, Tax Laws, Taxation
SUMMARY: Since
most states must by law balance their budgets every year,
dwindling sales and income tax revenues during this economic
downturn have led to discussions about increasing income and
sales tax rates. "At least 10 states are considering some kind
of major increase in sales or income taxes: Arizona,
Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New
Jersey, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. California and New
York already have agreed on multibillion-dollar tax increases
that went into effect earlier this year. Fiscal experts say more
states are likely to try to raise tax revenue in coming months,
especially once they tally the latest shortfalls from April 15
income-tax filings, often the biggest single source of funds for
the 43 states that levy them....[However,] many states remain
determined to balance their budgets by relying solely on
spending cuts. That is the case in Indiana, where raising
revenue 'is really not on the table,' said Pat Bauer, the
speaker of the state House." The article finishes with a
discussion of year over year comparisons and state revenue
forecasts used to assess what actions states must take in these
difficult times.
CLASSROOM
APPLICATION: The article can be used both to discuss state
tax levies in a tax class and to discuss governmental budgeting
in a governmental accounting class.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory) As described in this article, what
are the major sources of revenue to state governments?
2. (Advanced) Why are states raising income and sales
tax rates when current economic times make it difficult for many
households even under current tax levies?
3. (Advanced) When can states best project their tax
revenues for the fiscal year? Why must they make these
projections?
4. (Introductory) For how long a period does Indiana
usually prepare its budget? What has changed in this year?
5. (Advanced) What Financial analysis techniques do
states undertake to forecast their revenues in order to decide
on their course of action? Cite all that you can find in the
article.
6. (Advanced) How do governmental entities include bad
debts assessment as part of the analysis described in answer to
question 5?
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
|
From the Scout Report on April 17, 2009
Picard Tagger ---
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardTagger
Those individuals with sizable (or not so-sizable)
music collections may wish to take a look at the Picard Tagger application.
The application allows users to create album-oriented tags that will work
across different platforms, and it will also help them to create a more
sophisticated way of accessing and organizing their music files. The site
for this application also contains complete documentation and some video
demonstrations of how the application can be used. This version is
compatible with computers running Linux, Mac OS X 10.3 and newer, and
Windows 98 and newer.
Restoration 3.2.13 ---
http://www3.telus.net/mikebike/RESTORATION.html
If you've ever found yourself in a pickle after
accidentally placing some needed files in the recycle bin, you'll appreciate
this helpful application. Created by Brian Kato, the Restoration application
effectively restores files which have been deleted from the recycle bin by
mistake. Conversely, the program has another function that makes it almost
impossible to restore all deleted files. This version is compatible with
computers running Windows 98 and newer.
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Intelligent YouTube: Smart Video Collections ---
http://www.openculture.com/2008/03/youtubesmartvideos.html
Exploratorium: Teacher Institute: Podcasts [iTunes, five-minute podcast tips]
http://www.exploratorium.edu/ti/podcasts/index.php
"Do Parents Matter?" by Jonah Lehrer, Science Blogs, April 9, 2009 ---
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/04/do_parents_matter.php
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
United Nations World Digital Library ---
http://www.wdl.org/en/
April 18, 2009 message from Barry Rice
[brice@LOYOLA.EDU]
Many of you may be familiar with
www.imdb.com, the Internet Movie Database, which
was launched in 1990 according to Wikipedia. It is the 41st most popular Web
site on the Internet today according to
http://mostpopularwebsites.net. However, did you
know that they have added the ability to
legally
view free feature-length movies and TV shows in the past few
months? Most of my friends and Loyola College colleagues as well as students
with whom I discuss this don't know about this feature. Go to
http://www.imdb.com/features/video/ and look at
the "Browse All Videos By Type" heading on the left for links to
"Full-Length Movies" and "Full-Length TV Episodes" to see the lists of
dozens of movies and
hundreds
of TV episodes that you can view in their entirety at no
cost. Yes, many of them are rather old, but they are free.
Just hook your computer or other Internet device to
your flat screen TV and become a couch potato again. Some information about
such devices is available at
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how_to/4213002.html in
a one-year-old article. I'm sure other AECMers have more current ways to
connect the Internet to TVs.
Finally, yes, I am aware that YouTube announced plans
for something similar earlier this week. See
http://www.pcworld.com/article/163320/youtube_adds_movies_and_shows_goes_after_hulu.html for
more information.
Barry Rice
AECM Founder
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Evolution of Life ---
http://www.evolution-of-life.com/en/home.html
Darwin’s evolving thoughts and private communications on the boundaries of
science and religion ---
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/index.php
The Organic Center ---
http://www.organic-center.org/
World Food: International Year of Natural Fibres ---
http://www.naturalfibres2009.org/en/index.html
Transforming Agricultural Education ---
http://dels.nas.edu/ag_education/
World Health Organization: Global Malaria Programme ---
http://www.who.int/malaria/
National Center for Electronics Recycling ---
http://www.electronicsrecycling.org
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
PBS Video on Multinational Illegal Payments
FRONTLINE: Black Money ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/blackmoney/
"Do Parents Matter?" by Jonah Lehrer, Science Blogs, April 9, 2009 ---
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/04/do_parents_matter.php
World Health Organization: Global Malaria Programme ---
http://www.who.int/malaria/
Public Policy Institute of California: Map Room
http://www.ppic.org/main/mapindex.asp
United Nations World Digital Library ---
http://www.wdl.org/en/
Internet and Information Systems --- http://idrinfo.idrc.ca/
Public Records and by State --- http://www.pac-info.com/
Government Information and Maps --- http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/govdoc/
Integrating U.S. Climate, Energy, and Transportation Policies ---
http://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/2009/RAND_CF256.pdf
Oxfam International Climate ChangeVideo ---
http://www.oxfam.org/en/video
With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition ---
http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/lincoln/Pages/default.aspx
Deena Stryker Photographs, 1963-1964 and undated
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/stryker/
The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 [Flash Player]
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view-now/third-mind
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
PBS Video on Multinational Illegal Payments
FRONTLINE: Black Money ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/blackmoney/
Public Policy Institute of California: Map Room
http://www.ppic.org/main/mapindex.asp
United Nations World Digital Library ---
http://www.wdl.org/en/
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
United Nations World Digital Library ---
http://www.wdl.org/en/
National Endowment for the Arts: Audio & Video ---
http://www.nea.gov/av/index_v.htm
Deena Stryker Photographs, 1963-1964 and undated
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/stryker/
Public Policy Institute of California: Map Room
http://www.ppic.org/main/mapindex.asp
The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 ---
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view-now/third-mind
With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition ---
http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/lincoln/Pages/default.aspx
One Life: The Mask of Lincoln (picture history focus) ---
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/lincoln/
The Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana ---
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/stern-lincoln/
University of Rochester shares its Abraham Lincoln letters online ---
http://www.library.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=379
Also see
http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/20364/?nlid=912
C-Span: Lincoln 200 Years (Video)
http://www.c-span.org/lincoln200years/
Delaware Postcard Collection ---
http://fletcher.lib.udel.edu/collections/dpc/indexm
Hampton Dunn Postcards Collection ---
http://www.lib.usf.edu/public/index.cfm?Pg=HamptonDunnPostcardsCollection
Edinburgh World Heritage --- http://www.ewht.org.uk/Home.aspx
goSmithsonian: Lincoln ---
http://www.gosmithsonian.com/lincoln
Cambridge University: Digital Image
Collections ---
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/digital_image_collections/
Stage Costumes ---
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/theatre_performance/features/Costume/index.html
All Sewn Up: Millinery, Dressmaking, Clothing, and Costume
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/HumanEcol/subcollections/MillineryBooksAbout.html
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
From the Scout Report on April 17, 2009
Egyptian archaeologists hope to discover the tomb of Cleopatra and Marc
Antony Egypt to search 3 sites for Cleopatra's tomb
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/15/AR2009041501087.html
Cleopatra bust among treasures found in Egypt temple
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/05/080530-antony-cleopatra_2.html
Coin shows Cleopatra's ugly truth
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tyne/6357311.stm
Found: the sister Cleopatra killed
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5908494.ece
Dr. Zahi Hawass's blog
http://drhawass.com/blogs/zahi-hawass
Supreme Council of the Antiquities
http://www.museumsector.gov.eg/
Pyramid Challenge
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/launch_gms_pyramid_builder.shtml
Antony and Cleopatra – Fact or Fiction http://www.biography.com/video.do?name=weboriginals&bcpid=1811456834&bclid=1407950740&bctid=1453535908
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
Rare Footage (Dancing 60 years ago) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOoNOs8Ql28
Picard Tagger ---
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardTagger
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Music
Writing Tutorials
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
Small Patients, Big Consequences in Medical Errors ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/health/healthspecial2/15mistakes.html?_r=1
Link forwarded by Amy Haas
"Five Ages of the Brain," New Scientist ---
http://www.newscientist.com/special/five-ages-of-the-brain
"Immune Overhaul for Diabetes: Some diabetics who received a
stem-cell transplant do not need insulin injections even years later," by
Courtney Humphries, MIT's Technology Review, April 14, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22465/?nlid=1950
Patients who underwent a procedure to wipe out the
immune system and reconstitute it with their own stem cells remained insulin
injection-free for up to three to four years after the procedure, according
to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical
Association. The research provides further evidence that a stem-cell
transplant can reverse type 1 diabetes in some patients. Although a
stem-cell transplant is a drastic procedure with a risk of serious side
effects, this represents the most successful treatment to reverse the
disease in humans without the need for ongoing medication.
The report extends research published in 2007
showing that the majority of 15 patients who underwent a blood stem-cell
transplant were able to remain insulin-free for more than 18 months. Richard
Burt, a coauthor of the study and a specialist in autoimmune disease at
Northwestern University, says that "the criticism of the prior study was
that maybe this was some kind of extended honeymoon"; he's referring to a
phenomenon in which patients newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes will see
their symptoms improve temporarily as they make health changes. This latest
study extends the treatment to an additional five patients and shows that
most patients have been able to remain off insulin for a longer period of
time. In addition, it shows that patients have increased levels of a
biological indicator of insulin secretion--evidence that they are indeed
producing insulin on their own.
Type 1 diabetes is a chronic disease in which the
immune system attacks the insulin-secreting beta cells in the pancreas; the
body eventually fails to produce enough insulin to control blood-sugar
levels. Because this form of diabetes is an autoimmune disease, scientists
have been looking for ways to stop the immune system's destructive actions.
One idea is to "reset" the patient's immune system by wiping it out with
drugs and then rebuild it with the patient's own stem cells. Blood or
hematopoietic stem cells reside in the bone marrow and are responsible for
replenishing blood and immune-system cells. Hematopoietic stem-cell
transplant is most often used to treat patients with cancers like leukemia
and other diseases of the blood, but it has recently been investigated as a
way to treat several autoimmune diseases, including diabetes and lupus.
In this study, which was based at the University of
Sao Paulo, in Brazil, patients first underwent drug treatments to boost
their blood stem-cell production, making it possible to harvest stem cells
from the blood rather than from the bone marrow. The patients were then
hospitalized and given chemotherapy that severely impaired their immune
systems; they simultaneously received drugs to prevent infections. The stem
cells were purified from the blood and then injected back into the patients,
where they could travel to the bone marrow and rebuild the immune system.
Forwarded by an old timer
TWO GUYS IN LOWE'S
Two guys, one old timer and one young, are pushing their carts around Lowe's
Building Supply when they collide.
The old timer says to the young guy, 'Sorry about that. I'm looking for my
wife, and I guess I wasn't paying attention to where I was going'.
The young guy says, 'That's OK. It's a coincidence. I'm looking for my wife,
too. I can't find her and I'm getting a little desperate.'
The old guy says, 'Well, maybe we can help each other. What does your wife
look like?'
The young guy says, 'Well, she is 24 yrs old, tall, with blonde hair, big
blue eyes, long legs, big boobs, and she's wearing tight white shorts, a halter
top and no bra..What does your wife look like?'
The old timer says... 'Doesn't matter --- let's look for yours.'
Most of the old timers are helpful like that.
INNOCENCE IS PRICELESS
One Sunday morning, the pastor noticed little Alex standing in the foyer of
the church staring up at a large plaque. It was covered with names and small
American flags mounted on either side of it. The six-year old had been staring
at the plaque for some time, so the pastor walked up, stood beside the little
boy, and said quietly, 'Good morning Alex.' Good morning Pastor, he replied,
still focused on the plaque. Pastor, what is this? The pastor said, Well son,
it's a memorial to all the young men and women who died in the service. Soberly,
they just stood together, staring at the large plaque. Finally, little Alex's
voice, barely audible and trembling with fear asked,
"Which service...the 8:30 or the 10:30?"
Tidbits Archives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Three Finance Blogs
Jim Mahar's FinanceProfessor Blog ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
FinancialRounds Blog ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Karen Alpert's FinancialMusings (Australia) ---
http://financemusings.blogspot.com/
Some Accounting Blogs
Paul Pacter's IAS Plus (International
Accounting) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/index.htm
International Association of Accountants News ---
http://www.aia.org.uk/
AccountingEducation.com and Double Entries ---
http://www.accountingeducation.com/
Gerald Trites'eBusiness and
XBRL Blogs ---
http://www.zorba.ca/
AccountingWeb ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/
SmartPros ---
http://www.smartpros.com/
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Shared Open Courseware
(OCW) from Around the World: OKI, MIT, Rice, Berkeley, Yale, and Other Sharing
Universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Free Textbooks and Cases ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Mathematics and Statistics Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
Free Science and Medicine Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science
Free Social Science and Philosophy Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Free Education Discipline Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm
Teaching Materials (especially
video) from PBS
Teacher Source: Arts and
Literature ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/arts_lit.htm
Teacher Source: Health & Fitness
---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/health.htm
Teacher Source: Math ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/math.htm
Teacher Source: Science ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/sci_tech.htm
Teacher Source: PreK2 ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/prek2.htm
Teacher Source: Library Media ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/library.htm
Free Education and
Research Videos from Harvard University ---
http://athome.harvard.edu/archive/archive.asp
VYOM eBooks Directory ---
http://www.vyomebooks.com/
From Princeton Online
The Incredible Art Department ---
http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/
Online Mathematics Textbooks ---
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html
National Library of Virtual Manipulatives ---
http://enlvm.usu.edu/ma/nav/doc/intro.jsp
Moodle ---
http://moodle.org/
The word moodle is an acronym for "modular
object-oriented dynamic learning environment", which is quite a mouthful.
The Scout Report stated the following about Moodle 1.7. It is a
tremendously helpful opens-source e-learning platform. With Moodle,
educators can create a wide range of online courses with features that
include forums, quizzes, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and surveys. On the
Moodle website, visitors can also learn about other features and read about
recent updates to the program. This application is compatible with computers
running Windows 98 and newer or Mac OS X and newer.
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accountancy Discussion ListServs:
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a
ListServ (usually for free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM (Educators)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc
Roles of a ListServ ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
|
CPAS-L (Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo
(Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation
Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu