Tidbits on June 23, 2009
My Pictorial Walk Down Lovers Lane
Bob Jensen
For a description of lupine fields
along our road, go to
http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0027pL
There is a fantastic spot in northern New
Hampshire for wildflowers with mountains on the horizon (though not
usually covered in snow at that time of the year). Go to Sugar Hill, NH
in mid-June for the lupine festival. From about June 10th to 17th there
are fields of lupines that bloom beneath the White Mountains. In Sugar
Hill on Sunset Road there is a 12 acre field completely filled lupines
that has Cannon Mountain and Mt. Washington in the background. These
lupines come in shades of blue, purple, white and pink. The attached
image was taken at sunrise in the lupine field on Sunset Road in Sugar
Hill. The back roads around Sugar Hill contain a number of spots where
there are large concentrations of lupines, some strategically located
near red barns and white churches. This spot is not only great for grand
landscape shots, but is also macro photography heaven, the dew drops and
little insects on the lupines also make great subjects. But be careful,
one morning at sunrise I was intently photographing the sunrise and moved
towards a tree to include it in my shot. I startled a mother moose and
calf who I did not realize were on the other side of the tree and they
ran right in front of me. Of course having a 17-35mm lens on my camera
with an ND grad and polarizing filter made it a little tough to get a
good shot of the moose.
About 5 miles away is Franconia Notch state
park where there are lots of nice waterfall opportunities, my favorites
include The Basin, the Falling Waters Trail (Stair Falls and Cloudland
Falls are both wonderful) and the Flume.
This area in early to mid-June can't be beat.
To do grand landscape photography in New England requires a little more
work than in the national parks out west, but Sugar Hill is one of the
better locations in New England for the kind of photography you are
interested in.
--
Ed McGuirk , April 06, 2002; 06:15 A.M. Eastern
Bob Jensen's Walk Down Lovers Lane
On June 16, 2009 I took a walk down a country road called Lovers Lane that
begins at our Sugar Hill Community Church heading north. First I had to walk
down Sunset Hill Road where I passed the The Sampler (gift barn and museum)
owned by
Barbara Zarafini ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090303.htm
Barbara and her husband Joe live across the
road in "The Cabin" that is surrounded by lupine fields. Joe mows walking paths
through one of the fields so tourists can see the lupine up close.
About a half mile down from the Sampler is our
Sugar Hill Community Church. The Cape Cod house next to the Church was once a
guest house owned by the famous sportscaster Curt Gowdy ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curt_Gowdy
After Gowdy died, the house was bought by Bud and Mary Weiler---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits081111.htm
In front of the Gowdy-Weiler house is a rail fence covered with roses in bloom
this time of year.
South from our Church is Sugar Hill's Main
Street that contains some houses and only one store called Harmon's General
Store and Cheese House ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090115.htm
Heading north from our church is the beginning of one of Sugar Hill's country roads
called Lovers Lane. This "lane" passes through woods so dense that the trees
form a canopy over the road. About a quarter mile down from the road is a huge
red barn that most likely was a dairy barn at one time. Surrounding the barn are
lush pastures now grazed upon by three Percheron draft horses --- two blacks and
a gray that is so light-colored it looks white from a distance.
Across from these horses is a farm known as
Hilltop Farm that has the traditional New Hampshire stone fences. Robert Frost,
who once lived in a house down from where I live, once wrote "good fences make
good neighbors." His house up here is now a museum and center for poetry
readings ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070905.htm
The pictures below show the stone fences of
the beautiful Hill Top Farm on Lovers Lane. At this point I encountered two of
our pastor's ten children also taking a morning stroll on the Lane. Seven of the
children moved here last year with their parents. They live beside the
Gowdy-Weiler house in the former Foxglove Inn ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080916.htm
About a quarter mile up from the Hill Top Farm
is what I call the Peckett Farm. In the early 1900s
there were four luxury resorts in the Sugar Hill vicinity. My cottage now sits
where the Sunset Hill House Hotel and Resort thrived in the early part of the
20th Century ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070326.htm
Up from our cottage about a half mile was the smaller Lookoff Hotel and Resort.
All of Sugar Hill's four luxury hotels were demolished in the latter part of the
20th Century as summer living/playing cultures evolved and the passenger
railroads ceased to operate in remote parts of America.
About two miles
from our cottage was the
Peckett's-On-Sugar Hill Resort. Although a sign on Lovers Lane says the
first ski school in the United states was at the Peckett's resort, I'm told it
was really the second but better-known ski school. It was run by a well-known
ski instructor from Austria ---
http://www.nesm.org/page.php?cid=doc30
Near where the
Peckett's hotel once stood is the following Lovers Lane barn with its sweeping
views of fields and the mountains in the background. Both the Hill Top and
Peckett farms are quiet as cemeteries these days except when tractors move in on
occasion to cut hay. There are no longer crops or animals on these or most other
Sugar Hill farms. There are woods and fields of lupines and other wild flowers.
Not far from the Peckett Farm is the Butternut
Farm on Blake Road. Butternut at one time was owned by film star Bette Davis ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070801.htm
She and her mother Ruthie
moved into the farm house. Soon afterward Bette bought a huge dairy barn in
Vermont and had it carted in pieces across the mountains to her farm. She then
reconstructed the barn into a magnificent home called Butternut Lodge. Butternut
Lodge looks like a big old dairy barn. It's now a private residence and is not
visible from a public road or walking trail.
Bette Davis
married her Sugar Hill neighbor and Pecketts' Resort manager Arthur Farnsworth
in 1940. In 1943 she was investigated and suspected but never charged with his
mysterious death. After he died, she purportedly placed a bronze memorial plaque
on the rock at the bottom of a mountain brook where Farnsworth "rescued her" in
1939 before they were married. This plaque still exists in the stream and can be
viewed at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070801.htm
At the
intersection of Lovers Lane and Coffin Road is a house with a panoramic view of
the Iris Farm down below (with silos). Unlike most farms around Sugar Hill, the
Iris Farm is still a working farm with horses, sheep, chickens, and a herd of
Scottish Cows. A portion of Lovers Lane borders on an Iris Farm field. Alongside
the field are wild iris blooms shown below.
Lovers Lane begins at the Sugar Hill Community
Church and ends at Highway 117. To the east about a half mile is the village of
Franconia chartered in 1764 ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franconia,_New_Hampshire
About a half mile to the west is Hildex Farm where you will find the legendary
Polly's Pancake Parlor ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090105.htm
Having come to the end of Lovers Lane,
however, I did not return home via the Hildex Farm or stop for pancakes. Instead
I crossed over to Birches Road where I took more pictures along the two miles
remaining before I returned to our cottage. The pictures from Birches Road will
be shared with you in subsequent editions of Tidbits.
In this edition of
Tidbits I wanted to share only some pictures that I took on June 16, 2009 on
my walk down Lovers Lane.
It's been an exceptionally cold summer
thus far in the White Mountains. It's been even worse suffering through global
warming in the Arctic. Here's something you won't hear about on MSNBC or in
The New York Times or from Al Gore's lips --- the "record late" summer in
the Arctic.
It is the winter that refuses to go away in northern
Manitoba and most of the eastern Arctic. Prolonged cold snowy conditions in the
Hudson Bay area are expected to obliterate the breeding season for migratory
birds and most other species of wildlife this year. . According to Environment
Canada, the spring of 2009 is record-late in the eastern Arctic with virtually
100 per cent snow cover from James Bay north as of June 11
Robert Alison, "Big chill in Churchill Winter," Winnipeg Free Press,
June 13, 2009 ---
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/westview/big-chill-in-churchill-47992231.html
Tidbits on June 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
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/.
Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Bob Jensen's Home Page is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
CPA
Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
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
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
The Master List of Free
Online College Courses ---
http://universitiesandcolleges.org/
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
When a soldier comes home ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKdTUcZLSXw
Put $100 Million Budget Cut Into
Perspective ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt8hTayupE
Good Teaching
Video (must watch to the end when the coin cutter is illustrated)
Terrible Ladder Accident (humor) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By8VJqhqy_0
Big Horn Sheep Attacks a Car ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPdLtRexwqw
Milk: From Grass to Glass (not
humor) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJRy82i8e5Q&feature=email
One operation near Chicago provides enough milk for eight million people ---
much more than is needed in the entire city of Chicago.
The methane gas from the manure provides all electric power needed in each barn.
How to peel hard boiled eggs (surprise
ending) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2gYHJNT3Y
Jensen
Comment:
Don’t boil cold eggs. Let them sit in the pan for an hour before turning on the
stove burner.
It's All Bull With
Toyota (Humor) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u70DwS2FMw
Kleptomania (old time humor) ---
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/42943/johnny_carson_copper_clappers/
Apparently women are born this way ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z3aADRWX1U
Suryia and Roscoe ( Friends at First Sight) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3SbjjMChqw
Just proves the beauty is in the eyes of the lonely
Video: Success Is A Continuous Journey (three minutes) ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-success-is-a-continuous-journey/
Creative Commons Videos ---
http://creativecommons.org/
Creative Commons Directory ---
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators
I have posted some videos of the Iranian
uprising on my website and I would strongly urge you to watch them.
(Item 3 here:
www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001038.html )
They show the reality of Iran’s dictatorship, a reality
that many international TV networks are refusing to show. Some of these videos
are disturbing but I feel they need to be watched to understand the true nature
of Iran’s regime and why it should never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.
I have not included those which are too bloody to watch. To state the obvious,
this is not some video game or Hollywood movie. These events really happened,
and they happened last week, and the leader of the free world, Barack Obama, has
been extraordinarily slow to criticize them.
Tom Gross as quoted in a
recent email message from Naomi Ragen
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Video: Ti lascio una canzone - 'O sole mio: Trio
Ginoble-Boschetto-Barone (what talent) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqUkUjeF4-c
12-Year Old Sings Ave Maria ---
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/2176087/ave_maria_for_x_mas/
Cliburn Competition (Piano) Awards Two Gold
Medals (listen to the two gold medal winners) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104883567
A Sampling of Stormy Classical Music ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4776354
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
Pamukkale Slide Show (interesting) ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Pamukkale.pps
Art and Art History ---
http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/arthist.html
Victoria Falls Slide Show ---
Click Here
Those wonderful '50s (great photographs)---
http://www.billsretroworld.com/RETROLIFE.HTM
Exciting Cruise Slide Show ---
Click Here
Cute White House Dog ---
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/06/19/white_house_dog_photographed_r.html?wprss=44
"The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The
Past 40 Years: Mr. Luce's mag does satanism, porn, crack, Pokemon, and
more!" by Jeff Winkler and Radley Balko, Reason Magazine, June 10, 2009
---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/134038.html
Bob Jensen's threads on history, literature and art ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
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
Karl Marx was a vehement racist and
anti-Semite (yes, even though both his grandfathers were rabbis!) This
particular quote is not an aberration but very typical of both his and Engel's
thoughts.
Free Republic, June 14, 2009 ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/news-forum/index?more=2271681
Marx-Engels Correspondence, 1862
---
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1862/letters/62_07_30a.htm
Free Book
Ten Great Economists: From Marx to Keynes ---
http://mises.org/books/tengreateconomists_schumpeter.pdf
Free Book (very creative)
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual ---
http://www.cluetrain.com/book/introduction.html
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
A Moslem Leader Appeals for Respect and Opportunity for All Women
He has embarrassed his hosts by likening America to
terrorism and suggesting that Italy abolish all its political parties, but
yesterday Colonel Muammar Gaddafi won praise from hundreds of leading Italian
women by condemning the Arab and Muslim world for treating their sex “like
pieces of furniture”. Addressing women drawn from politics, culture and the
economy at the Auditorium concert hall, Colonel Gaddafi called for a “world
female revolution”. Too often, he said, Muslim men treated women as “piece of
furniture which you can change when you want, and no one will ask you why you
have done it”. Colonel Gaddafi — who travels with a squad of female bodyguards
dubbed The Amazons by the Italian press — is making his first visit to Libya’s
former colonial power for 40 years. The formal gathering, at which the Libyan
leader addressed the women audience from the stage, was organised by Mara
Carfagna, the former topless model and TV host who was appointed Equal
Opportunities Minister by Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, last year.
Richard Owen, The London Times,
June 13, 2009 ---
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6489604.ece
There are times, I must confess,
when I consider our current culture and conclude that the Muslims are right
about us. We are, as they insist, hedonistic, and far too many of us do have the
morals of goats. We do rely on sex and violence for our entertainment. Our
popular music is swinish. We are, by a wide margin, the world’s largest market
for drugs, both of the legal and illegal variety. Our politicians are selfish,
ignorant and, more often than not, at odds with the American ideals of the
Founding Fathers.
Burt Prelutsky, "Obama, Mothers and
Muslims, Townhall, June 15, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/BurtPrelutsky/2009/06/15/obama,_mothers_and_muslims
The putrid comments by David
Letterman about Sarah Palin and her daughter, and the dethronement of Carrie
Prejean for the vice of honesty, bring home just have savagely civil life has
been murdered by the Left. We no longer have a civil public life. It has been
crushed between pinchers of enraged nihilism and fantasy causes.
Bruce Walker, "The Murder of Civil
Life," American Thinker, June 15, 2009 ---
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/the_murder_of_civil_life.html
Jensen Comment
The murder of civil life has grown worse in the media, but at the same time it
has become even more atrocious in Internet blogs. Fortunately, the most uncivil
blogs still have a small readership relative to the network media (that is
losing eyeballs in part because of degradation of broadcasting taste. bias,
hurtful humor that is not funny and foul language). If a movie wins an Academy
Award it's a signal to me to avoid the movie.
If truth does not matter, then the
accumulation of truth which we call learning cannot matter either. Public
education and academia is simply re-education. Children and college students
are taught "facts" that round out political indoctrination. There was a time
when education meant exposing growing minds to a universe of facts which
supported conflicting opinions and grasping the thinking behind those
opinions. The myth of the intolerant medieval university or old public
school systems of America is evidence of just how little our modern
totalitarians actually know: debate, controversy, cognition, and schools of
thought were the norm, not the exception. The very term "schools of
thought," no longer exists. In our murdered civil life, there is "the school
of thought," surrounded by barbed wire.
Amusement too has died. In its place are
spite, angst, degradation, imbecility, and madness dressed up as
entertainment. Channel surfing, even when the surf is as long as the Pacific
Coast, shows just how empty the once bright stage of entertainment has
become. We loved Lucy, but not the untalented and unfunny women who came
fifty years after her. Singers like Perry Como have been replaced by
puerile, forgettable nebbishes. Once films like It's a Wonderful Life joined
us into a common, happy heart, but now the vacuum we call "Hollywood" cannot
produce anything better than bad remakes of old movies.
A Leading American on CBS and His MSNBC Friends Make an
Exception for Activist Conservative Women
Surprise: Feminists Take Sarah Palin's Side in Letterman Feud
If there was any question that a stubborn strain of
old-school sexism persists in Obama's America, one has only to look at certain
leaders of what the right wing loves to call the "liberal media" but which is
sounding and acting, recently, more like the frat-house media. There, like a
virus hiding in the body before, perhaps, staging a comeback, misogyny has found
a place to lurk almost undetected, at least by the usually sharp eyes of
progressive feminists. Examine the symptoms of this infection, beginning with
David Letterman's comments....
Jill Stanek, "Feminists Take Sarah Palin's Side in
Letterman Feud," Opposing Views, June 14, 2009 ---
http://www.opposingviews.com/articles/opinion-feminists-take-sarah-palin-s-side-in-letterman-feud-r-1245015220
National Organization for Women (NOW) places David
Letterman in NOW's Hall of Shame
The sexualization of girls and women in the media is reaching new lows these
days -- it is exploitative and has a negative effect on how all women and girls
are perceived and how they view themselves. Letterman also joked about what he
called Palin's "slutty flight attendant look" -- yet another example of how the
media love to focus on a woman politician's appearance, especially as it relates
to her sexual appeal to men. Someone of Letterman's stature, who appears on what
used to be known as "the Tiffany Network" (CBS), should be above wallowing in
the juvenile, sexist mud that other comedians and broadcasters seem to prefer.
On that point, it's important to note that when Chelsea Clinton was 13 years old
she was the target of numerous insults based on her appearance. Rush Limbaugh
even referred to her as the "White House dog." NOW hopes that all the
conservatives who are fired up about sexism in the media lately will join us in
calling out sexism when it is directed at women who aren't professed
conservatives.
National Organization for Women (NOW) places David
Letterman on NOW's Hall of Shame, June 8, 2009 ---
http://www.now.org/issues/media/hall-of-shame/
Jensen Comment
On Page 20 of the June 22, 2009 edition of Newsweek Magazine, Newsweek
editors contend that "winners don't take on comics." The logical conclusion is
that Newsweek Magazine is calling the National Organization of Women
losers along with the other feminists who've "took on" David Letterman.
NBC's Democratic Party subsidiaries MSNBC proclaimed that
Letterman's sexist attack on Palin was in good fun and proceeded to attack Palin
for making an issue out of all this. Both MSNBC and Newsweek have a major
mission of forever preventing the GOP from ever again rising up from the ashes.
CBS News anchor Katie Couric also belittled Governor Palin in an earlier
commencement address at Princeton University.
Although I'm not a fan of Sarah Palin (she's history), the
relentless and pathetic attacks on Governor Palin by Keith Olbermann, Chris
Matthews, and David Letterman do nothing but turn viewers off to the bias of
repeated old jokes and innuendos.
David Letterman's 2008 campaign video calling Palin a slut ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MvaXBlGg0o
David Letterman's 2009 mean video calling Palin a slut ---
Click Here
Good work David. Don't stop until you call the Governor the whore that she is
according to MSNBC.
I can see her legs from my house in New Hampshire.
This is why I stopped watching David Letterman even
before Jon Stewart came along: He was forever either drooling on women or
treating them like they were perfect idiots, in a way he never behaved with male
guests. (I did, however, enjoy the appearances of his mom Dorothy, a church
secretary who was occasionally able to summon Good Dave, live from her kitchen
in Indiana.) At age 62, he shouldn't need Dorothy to tell him that referring to
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as having updated her "slutty flight attendant look'' is
outrageous – and his "joke'' about Palin's daughter was even worse. During his
Tuesday monologue, Letterman mentioned that last year's GOP vice presidential
nominee was in New York, and had attended a Yankees game with her daughter.
"During the seventh inning,'' he said, "her daughter was knocked up by Alex
Rodriguez." Palin had taken her 14-year-old daughter Willow to the game. On
Wednesday night, a semi-apologetic Letterman told viewers that Willow's older
sister, 18-year-old Bristol Palin, had been the intended target of the remark:
"We were, as we often do, making jokes about people in the news and we made some
jokes about Sarah Palin and her daughter, the 18-year-old girl, who is -- her
name is Bristol, that's right -- and so, then, now they're upset with me. These
are not jokes made about her 14-year-old daughter. I would never, never make
jokes about raping or having sex of any description with a 14-year-old girl. I
mean, look at my record. It has never happened. I don't think it's funny. I
would never think it was funny. I wouldn't put it in a joke."
Which means he thinks rape jokes about an 18-year-old
are funny?
Melinda Henneberger,
"Letterman Owes Palin, Flight Attendants, Women in General an Apology,"
Politics Daily, June 11, 2009 ---
Click Here
Will you teach your son to talk about women and
girls the way you talk about Sarah Palin and her daughters? You called the
married 45-year-old mother, grandmother and Alaska governor a "slutty flight
attendant" on your national TV talk show because she happens to be a tall,
beautiful and dynamic public figure who doesn't look, walk or talk the way you
think she should. You joked on national television about Palin's teenage
daughter "getting knocked up" by professional baseball player Alex Rodriguez or
solicited by the prostitute-addicted former New York Attorney General Eliot
Spitzer because it's acceptable in your social and professional circles to sneer
at the children of politicians you despise. You admitted that your attacks on
Palin's family were in "poor taste," but cackled while acknowledging your
sophomoric judgment.
Michelle Malkin, "Dear David
Letterman," Townhall, June 12, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/MichelleMalkin/2009/06/12/dear_david_letterman
June 10, 2009 show half-hearted apology ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbCzTNJgoxQ
June 11 barf ---
http://lateshow.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/video_player/index/php/988845.phtml
"Why did the press ignore the firebombing of Sarah Palin’s church?" ---
Click Here
Fear of Rat Renewal: Alaska Governor Bans Letterman from Island
Alaska's Rat Island is finally rat-free, 229 years
after a Japanese shipwreck spilled rampaging rodents onto the remote Aleutian
island, decimating the local bird
population.
"Alaska's Rat Island rat-free after 229 years," Reuters,
June 12, 2009 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090612/lf_nm_life/us_alaska_rat
Flight Attendants Are Also Offended by Letterman
But also not amused are flight attendents. Were they offended by Letterman's
slur? "Yes – and I'm speaking as a MALE flight attendant here," said Ken Kyle,
president of the 1,200-member Denver chapter of the Association of Flight
Attendants-CWA United Airlines. "We've fought the TV stereotype for so many
years, and quite honestly, it's objectionable when you put it in light of
(flight attendants' heroic actions during) 9/11 and more recently, the
professionalism of the US Airways attendants during the emergency landing on the
Hudson River." Jokes and sexual innuendos take a long-term toll, said Kyle."They
desensitize the public to the very important safety role we fill. Sure, we are
sensitive to any comment we believe demeans a job we feel is important,
especially the safety aspect of it." They also hit attendants in the pocket
book, he said. "We face a lot of pressures – from the public and from the
corporate level -- and to minimize and devalue (our) job classification makes it
much more difficult for us to fight for a pay raise." People don't think about
that, in part because attendants do their jobs so well. "But I bet if you asked
the passengers on the Hudson River flight, they would have voted to give
attendants a raise."
Janet Battaile, "Also Not Amused by
Letterman: Flight Attendants," Politics Daily, June 12, 2009 ---
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/06/12/also-not-amused-in-the-palin-dustup-flight-attendants/
Don Imus apologized. Mel Gibson apologized. So did
Michael Richards and the Greaseman (didn't do much good). Politicians do it all
the time. Shock jocks, actors and athletes do. Even Bill O'Reilly has done it.
So why can't David Letterman bring himself to apologize? . . . "He doesn't have
to apologize to me," she told host Matt Lauer on the "Today" show yesterday
morning. "I would like to see him apologize to young women across the country
for contributing to that kind of . . . that thread that is throughout our
culture that makes it sound like it's okay to talk about young girls in that
way, where it's kind of okay, accepted and funny to talk to about statutory
rape. It's not cool, it's not funny." For good measure,
Palin also got off a blast at the media for their "double
standard" in shielding the children of President Obama ("the candidate who must
be obeyed") from attention, but not her own.
Paul Farhi, "Letterman Sends No
Regrets Should Host Apologize to Palin? Sorry, No Consensus," The Washington
Post, June 13, 2009 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/12/AR2009061203849.html
In December 2005 Oprah and Letterman officially, with great fanfare, buried
the hatchet after feuding for16 years so don't expect Oprah to take on
Letterman's sexist jokes ---
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10288393/
Her recently suffered a huge ratings slump ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2270900/posts
David Letterman called Governor Palin a "slut." Be reasonable here. It
could've been much worse. He might've called her ... er (can I put it in
print?) ... "Ma'am." ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pziILAi_Un8
Update on June 15, 2009: A more sincere apology in the midst of the
heat
"I understand, of course, why people are upset; I would
be upset myself," Letterman said. "I’m sorry about it and I’ll try to do better
in the future."
Watch the Video ---
http://www.thrfeed.com/2009/06/letterman-readdresses-palin.html
"Sarah Palin Accepts David Letterman's Apology for 'Coarse' Jokes," Fox News,
June 16, 2009 ---
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,526525,00.html
Letterman Was Not Alone During the 2008 Presidential Campaign
ABC News cataloged a history, during the 2008 presidential campaign, of leading
comedians' bad taste jokes about Palin's pregnant daughter ---
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=5719503&page=1
Jensen Question
The liberals won the presidency and buried Sarah Palin. Why do they keep beating
up on Letterman's dead "slut?"
What always irritates me about Keith Olbermann on MSNBC is that his guests
are virtually always from his own choir. Keith's scholarship is in baseball.
He's very good at reading from scripts prepared by himself and MSNBC staff, but
he's not scholarly enough to debate issues with scholars who take different
sides on political and economic issues ---
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#31333379
Keith Olbermann (MSNBC while interviewing
a Palin-hating CNN liberal commentator) called Governor
Palin "Sanctimonious, holier than thou, exploitative, undignified, pedantic,
childish, self-inflicting, insipid, backwards, embarrassing, over-reactive,
overreaching" as well as a "delusional lunatic."
Noel Sheppard, "Olbermann: Palin's a
'Delusional Lunatic', Letterman's 'The Victim'," Newsbusters, June 13,
2009 ---
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/06/13/olbermann-calls-palin-delusional-lunatic-letterman-victim
You just know it has to be killing
the folks at CNN and MSNBC that Fox News has completely overwhelmed them in the
ratings. In fact, the combined number of viewers of both of those networks still
doesn't match that of Fox News. Could it be that the public is sick of the
fawning coverage given to the Obama administration by most of the mainstream
media and look to Fox News for providing more balanced stories? That is
something that the MSM people just can't confess.
P.J. Gladnic, "CNN Co-founder: High
Fox News Ratings Caused by Anger," June 7, 2009 ---
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladnick/2009/06/07/cnn-co-founder-high-fox-news-ratings-caused-anger
Jensen Comment
How would MSNBC explode if Fox News mentioned Michelle Obama's slutty (gasp
sleeveless) dresses or
innuendos about the sex life of her two daughters? Do you think MSNBC has double
standards? MSNBC did not seem to object when jokes were made on NBC's Saturday
Night Live about Presidential Candidate Palin's "incestuous" husband. But SNL
never dared joking about Obama's family.
"NBC jokes: Todd Palin has sex with daughters 'Saturday Night Live' skit
suggests Sarah's husband guilty of incest," WorldNetDaily, September 21, 2008
---
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=75852
Of course the liberal media (e.g., Keith Olbermann) rushed to
the defense of David Letterman ---
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#31275917
Olbermann never mentions the bad taste of calling Sarah Palin herself a slut. I
guess that's good media reporting!
No doubt
noticing the publicity Letterman got for his
vulgar comments about Sarah Palin’s teenage
daughter, Keith Olbermann apparently decided to
outdo the Late Show house when it comes to making
vile comments about a woman. From this evening’s
Countdown, addressing himself to Ann Coulter in the
course of naming her his “Worser Person.”
KEITH OLBERMANN: Ann, to use the vulgarities of the
gutter, you are a worthless
(contemplating
a C-word) .
. . Coulter.
"Olbermann Comes Close To Calling Coulter The
C-word" ---
http://finkelblog.com/index.php/2009/06/11/olberman-toys-with-calling-coulter-the-c-word/
Barack Obama's controversial former pastor, the Rev.
Jeremiah Wright, blamed "them Jews" in an interview this week for keeping him
from speaking to the president, but later apologized for the comments. Wright,
the former pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, said he hasn't
spoken to Obama since he became president. "Them Jews ain't going to let him
talk to me.
"Wright says 'Jews' keeping him from Obama" ---
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D98OO9D80&show_article=1
Katie Couric should offer her older audience a free
colonoscopy with every three news stories.
Jon Stewart ---
http://www.thedailyshow.com/
Hypocrisy from one sentence to the next
Katie Couric’s speech to Class Day at Princeton was posted Monday on The
Huffington Post. In her flailing attempts at humor, she mocked Rush Limbaugh,
Donald Rumsfeld, Miss California, and Sarah Palin. And after all that, she
counseled the students "don’t be a hater...you must really guard against the
cynicism and nastiness that are so pervasive today, especially on the Internet."
That’s certainly true when you count anchor snarkiness on The Huffington Post.
Tim Graham, "Couric
Advises Against 'Nastiness' -- In Speech That Mocked Rush, Palin, Rumsfeld, and
Miss California," Newsbusters, June 1, 2009 ---
Click Here
Also read about her snarkiness and hypocrisy at
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=49244
Question: What happens to snarky news anchors?
Answer: They sink like anchors!
CBS EVENING NEWS FALLS TO ALL-TIME LOW; 5,180,000 VIEWERS FOR COURIC ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2268028/posts
Letterman and his staff of writers misunderstand the
phrase – “Women and children first.”
"Top 10 Reasons to Snub David Letterman vanity." by Jack Engelhard ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2270589/posts
10: He’s not funny.
9: His jokes are written by 20 frat boys
who have an IQ of 180 – combined.
8. His audience gets in for free – and
even that’s paying too much.
7. On his best day he’s no Johnny Carson.
Carson would never stoop for a laugh.
6. Letterman’s reference to Sarah Palin as
“slutty” was an insult to all women.
5. Letterman’s routine on Monday took up
the Palin family’s visit to New York, which included a trip to the ball
park. Here’s Letterman in his own words: “During the seventh inning, her [Palin’s]
daughter was knocked-up by Alex Rodriguez.” Todd Palin, the father,
responded like this: “Any jokes about raping my 14-year-old daughter are
despicable.”
4. A perverted crack like that, by
Letterman, got on national TV. (Try that on Obama’s daughters, Dave, and see
how quickly you get booted.)
3. But a quip like that against a
14-year-old girl would most likely require registration as a sex offender in
my neighborhood.
2. Letterman
and his staff of writers misunderstand the phrase – “Women and children
first.”
1. On the pretense of contrition,
Letterman denied that he was a “celebrity.” Now we know what he isn’t – and
we know what he is.
Dear NEWSWEEK (actual letter),
I never thought this kind of thing would happen to me. I was at the library
making last-minute edits to The Dartmouth Review when Miss Shimock, the young
librarian, walked up to my table wearing nothing but a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
She made a strong case that it was in my rational self-interest to take off my
pants...Wait, I think I'm writing this letter to the wrong magazine.
Stephen Colbert, Hanover, N.H. Sept.
18, 1984
You can read about Stephen Colbert at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert
Some of his old and unpublished Letters to the Editor of Newsweek are published
in the on Page 7 of the June 15, 2009 edition of Newsweek (where he also appears
on the cover).
Stephen Colbert Lands in Iraq, Shares Big Laughs with Troops ---
Click Here
He tones down his bury Bush partison routines.
"The big sweat: Banking catastrophes and recession have led to vast
increases in rich countries’ public debts. Getting their finances back into
shape will be painful," The Economist, June 11, 2009 ---
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13825211
The 2008-2009 Economic Downfall
Great Graphic:
Infographic: Anatomy of the Crash
http://www.simoleonsense.com/infographic-anatomy-of-the-crash/
Bob Jensen's threads on the downfall ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
Those macroeconomists, who study the broad economy—don't
have a blessed clue
If the
economy improves and unemployment drops, Obama can take credit. If it fails to
improve and unemployment rises, though, he can say he averted an even worse
showing. Republicans will take the opposite tack—attributing any improvement to
the natural resilience of the economy and blaming the administration if things
get worse. And neither side will really know who's right. I have long been a
believer in the value of economics in understanding the world. But the chief
effect of the current crisis is to raise the possibility that economists—at
least those macroeconomists, who study the broad economy—don't have a blessed
clue.
Steve Chapman, "Baffled by
the Economy: Why being a macroeconomist means never having to say you're
sorry," Reason Magazine, June 11, 2009 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/134059.html
Bob Jensen's threads on the bailout are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
A growing concern for Fed policy makers is a
weakening in the US dollar against major currencies. The price of the euro in
US-dollar terms climbed from a low of $1.27 in November last year to around
$1.41 in May and $1.43 in early June — an increase of 12.6% from November. The
major currencies dollar index fell to 78.89 in May from 82.3 in April — a fall
of 4.1%. If the declining trend in the US dollar were to consolidate, this could
cause foreign holders of US-dollar assets to divest into non-dollar-denominated
assets and precious metals.
Frank Shostak, "The Fed Might Have
Painted Itself into a Corner," Mises Institute, June 12, 2009 ---
http://mises.org/story/3518
Brazil, Russia, India and China, (the
BRICs) sometimes lumped together as BRIC to represent
fast-growing developing economies, are selling off their U.S. Treasury Bond
holdings. Russia announced earlier this month it will sell U.S. Treasury Bonds,
while China and Brazil have announced plans to cut the amount of U.S. Treasury
Bonds in their foreign currency reserves and buy bonds issued by the
International Monetary Fund instead. The BRICs are also soliciting public
support for a "super currency" capable of replacing what they see as the ailing
U.S. dollar. The four countries account for 22 percent of the global economy,
and their defection could deal a severe blow to the greenback. If the BRICs sell
their U.S. Treasury Bond holdings, the price will drop and yields rise, and that
could prompt the central banks of other countries to start selling their
holdings to avoid losses too. A sell-off on a grand scale could trigger a
collapse in the value of the dollar, ending the appeal of both dollars and bonds
as safe-haven assets. The moves are a challenge to the power of the dollar in
international financial markets. Goldman Sachs economist Alberto Ramos in an
interview with Bloomberg News on Thursday said the decision by the BRICs to buy
IMF bonds should not be seen simply as a desire to diversify their foreign
currency portfolios but as a show of muscle.
"BRICs Launch Assault on Dollar's Global Status," The Chosun
IIbo, June 14, 2009 ---
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2009/06/12/2009061200855.html
Their report, "Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050," predicted
that within 40 years, the economies of Brazil, Russia, India and
China - the BRICs - would be larger than the US, Germany, Japan,
Britain, France and Italy combined. China would overtake the US as
the world's largest economy and India would be third, outpacing all
other industrialised nations.
"Out of the shadows," Sydney Morning Herald, February 5, 2005
---
http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2005/02/04/1107476799248.html
The first economist, an early Nobel
Prize Winning economist, to raise the alarm of entitlements in my
head was Milton Friedman. He has written extensively about the
lurking dangers of entitlements. I highly recommend his fantastic
"Free to Choose" series of PBS videos where his "Welfare of
Entitlements" warning becomes his principle concern for the future
of the Untied States 25 years ago ---
http://www.ideachannel.com/FreeToChoose.htm
Our legislators
did not heed his early warnings, and now we are no longer "free to
choose."
IOUSA (the most frightening movie in American history) ---
(see a 30-minute version of the documentary at
www.iousathemovie.com
). |
Stocks are still the best investment for the long
run. But maybe not for your long run.
Justin Fox, "Are Stocks Still Good for the Long Run?" Time Magazine,
June 15, 2009 ---
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1902843-2,00.html
Also see Jim Mahar's June 10, 2009 summary at
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
In particular this references a study by Arnott that asserts that over the past
40 years the stock market underperformed the bond market. In my opinion, if you
into bonds for the next 40 years they'd better be inflation-indexed bonds such
as Treasury TIPs.
Bob Jensen's threads on the Efficient Markets Hypothesis ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#EMH
In his quest to have all the U.S. media in his choir, President Obama has
taken on Fox Network
The Fox Network is not his problem
The Biggest Obama Hurdle is Silencing the Congressional Budget Office
The most potent threat to the Obama administration’s fledgling health may come
not from the insurance industry or skeptical doctors but from the Congressional
Budget Office. Earlier this week, CBO released preliminary estimates suggesting
that the health care proposals — the most ambitious currently under discussion —
from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee would cost $1
trillion (actually $1.6 trillion) and trim the number of uninsured by only 16 million.
Julian E. Zelizer (professor of
history and public affairs at Princeton University) as quoted by P.J. Gladnick,
Newsbusters, June 19, 2009 ---
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladnick/2009/06/19/politico-writer-health-care-advice-obama-ignore-cbo
Jensen Comment
The Congressional Budget Office refuses to accept hyped and phony political
promises of cost savings resulting from spending $1.6 trillion dollars on the
pending legislation. The non-partisan CBO just is not buying phony promises of
cost savings.
Voting for universal health care is one thing, but voting for
it based upon trillions more in debt and false promises is quite another.
President Obama should build a supportive base based upon truthful estimates of
bringing health insurance to 47 million uninsured Americans. What he’s
advocating is a gobbled up mess of private and public health insurance that will
be inefficient and little more than extended Medicaid for 47 million uninsured
while private insurance companies still requiring mountains of paperwork for
working Americans.
The best approach, in my viewpoint, at a critical juncture
when it only takes 51 votes in the Senate, is to pass legislation for National
Health Care somewhat similar to that in Canada and also pass the Canadian way of
paying for it (about 50% of the income tax for average taxpayers). This business
of borrowing trillions upon trillions to be dumped on future generations is
insane and will lead to economic disaster.
We may have to double taxes paid by average workers and even
charge slightly more taxes from poor workers now paying zero income taxes, but
at least the U.S. economy might survive the shock.
EGADs! Pending Collapse of the Overspending U.S. Economy to Be Financed
With Hot Air
President Barack Obama on Tuesday proposed budget rules that would allow
Congress to borrow tens of billions of dollars and put the nation deeper in debt
to jump-start the administration's emerging health care overhaul. The
"pay-as-you-go" budget formula plan is significantly weaker than a proposal
Obama issued with little fanfare last month. It would carve out about $2.5
trillion worth of exemptions for Obama's priorities over the next decade. His
health care reform plan also would get a green light to run big deficits in its
early years. But over a decade, Congress would have to come up with money to
cover those early year deficits. Obama's latest proposal for addressing deficits
urges Congress to pass a law requiring lawmakers to pay for new spending
programs and tax cuts without further adding to exploding deficits projected to
total about $10 trillion over the next decade.
Andrew Taylor, "Obama: It's OK to
borrow to pay for health care: Obama-proposed budget rules allow deficits to
swell to pay for health care plan," Yahoo News, June 8, 2009 ---
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Obama-Its-OK-to-borrow-to-pay-apf-15483626.html?.v=13
Jensen Comment
The frightening part of this is that the added $10 trillion to National Debt does not include the
entitlements obligations of Obama's Universal Health Plan. That will add up to
another $100 trillion to the current $100 trillion in entitlements obligations.
America, what is happening to you?
“One thing seems probable to me,” said Peer Steinbrück,
the German finance minister, in September 2008....“the United States will lose
its status as the superpower of the global financial system.” You don’t have to
strain too hard to see the financial crisis as the death knell for a
debt-ridden, overconsuming, and underproducing American empire.
Richard Florida, "How the Crash Will
Reshape America," The Atlantic, March 2009 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography
President Obama's deficit spending playbook is straight out of
Alice in Wonderland. The King says"
"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the
end: then stop."
Put $100 Million Budget Cut Into Perspective ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt8hTayupE
America, what is happening to you?
“One thing seems probable to me,” said Peer Steinbrück,
the German finance minister, in September 2008....“the United States will lose
its status as the superpower of the global financial system.” You don’t have to
strain too hard to see the financial crisis as the death knell for a
debt-ridden, overconsuming, and underproducing American empire . . .
Richard Florida, "How the Crash Will
Reshape America," The Atlantic, March 2009 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography
Bernanke is insanely printing hundreds of millions of dollars that do not
arise from taxes or borrowing
We remember that 2003 debate because it turns out
we played a part in it. The Fed recently released the transcripts of its 2003
FOMC meetings, and what a surprise to find a
Journal
editorial the subject of an insider rebuttal from
none other than Ben Bernanke, then a Fed Governor and now Chairman. We had run
an editorial on monetary policy on the same day as the Dec. 9, 2003 FOMC
meeting, and Mr. Bernanke clearly didn't take well to our warning about "Speed
Demons at the Fed."We reprint nearby both Mr.
Bernanke's comments and
our
editorial from that day. Readers can judge who got
the better of the argument, but far more important is what Mr. Bernanke's
reasoning tells us about the Fed today. Our guess is that it won't reassure
holders of dollar assets
"Bernanke at the Creation: What the Fed Chairman said at the
onset of the credit bubble, and the lesson for today," The Wall Street
Journal, June 23, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124572415681540109.html
Failed Banks List as of June 22, 2009 (including 2008 failures) ---
http://www.cnbc.com/id/31049457
The Moneyball Movie Gets Scrapped (sorry Brad Pitt) ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-moneyball-movie-gets-scrapped-2009-6
It's really sad that the script suddenly veered from the excellent book by
Michael Lewis.
Why not build those new GM factories in Flint and Detroit?
Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods
bulldozed as part of drastic "shrink to survive" proposals being considered by
the Obama administration to tackle economic decline. The government looking at
expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which
involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature. Local
politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent,
concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable
area.
Tom Leonard, "US cities may have to
be bulldozed in order to survive," U.K. Telegraph, June 12, 2009 ---
Click Here
Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Susan Collins quickly
trade a bad idea for a worse one, while trading auto lobbyists for environmental
ones ("Handouts for Hummers," op-ed, June 11). Bribing consumers to buy more
fuel-efficient cars only encourages more driving, undermining consumption
savings, and leaving taxpayers to foot the bill. If anything, consumption in
Texas and California has relentlessly increased, driven by cheap gas and
commuters rationally choosing to live farther and drive farther and more
frequently.
Felix Yu,"'Cash for Clunkers' Bill
Deserves Road Kill Status," The Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2009 ---
Click Here
Oh Sheeet!
A GERMAN town will become the first in the world to
be powered by animal waste when it launches a biogas network this year. Lunen,
north of Dortmund, will use cow and horse manure and other organic material from
farms to provide cheap and sustainable electricity for its 90,000 residents.
Biogas is already used around the world - it will power buses in Oslo from
September - but Lunen claims to be the only town to build a dedicated biogas
network. Materials will be fed into heated tanks, where natural fermentation
will break them down into methane and carbon dioxide. This biogas can then be
burned to generate electricity and heat in a combined heat and power plant (CHP)
before the heat is distributed through a new biogas pipeline, which is being
built underground. The plant can produce 6.8 megawatts, enough to power and heat
26,000 houses. Peter Kindt, the director of Alfagy, which distributes CHP
plants, said the Lunen network was capable of providing 30 per cent to 40 per
cent of the town's heat and electricity needs. The benefits of biogas are clear,
said Mr Kindt "This sustainable technology allows local production of local
power, reducing reliance on fossil fuels and fuel imports."
"Waste not, want not - town first to use poo power," Sydney
Morning Herald, May 30, 2009 ---
Click Here
Jensen Question
Why can't we turn the tons of Washington DC bull crap into something useful?
Generating electricity out of farm animal manure is
controversial. The tradition of spreading manure back to the soil adds many
vital nutrients to that soil. Depriving the soil of manure requires that these
nutrients be replaced with petrochemicals which, in turn, are generated from oil
that German's are trying to cut back on by using manure to generate electricity.
Senators Protect Their ASSets
Senators who oversee the $700 billion Wall Street
rescue package held stocks in many of the banks bailed out towards the end of
last year, according to financial disclosure reports released Friday. According
to the reports detailing senators’ finances in 2008, nearly half of the members
of the Senate Banking Committee had holdings in financial institutions that have
taken funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
Reid Wilson and Kevin Bogardus, "Senators held stock in bailed-out
banks," The Hill, June 12, 2009 ---
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/senators-held-stock-in-bailed-out-banks-2009-06-12.html
As California teeters on the brink of a financial
meltdown, big interest groups led by public employee unions are complicating the
picture, with chances slim of near-term reform. Little gets done in state and
local politics across California without the involvement of unions for teachers,
nurses, firefighters and state employees. "The Democratic state party is really
just an extension of the unions," said Tony Quinn, co-editor of the California
Target Book, a non-partisan analysis of the state legislature and Congressional
elections. "The unions now control the legislature and they helped bring about
the situation in which we simply spend more money than we take in because of the
union pensions, the welfare programs they support and because the teachers union
wants more money spent on teachers' salaries and education," he said.
Dan Whitcomb, "Loosening unions'
grip may be key for California," Reuters, June 12, 2009 ---
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE55B5U120090612
"The 'Paygo' Coverup: The Obama pattern: Spend, repent, spend again,
repent," The Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124467627264104053.html
Some things in politics you can't make up,
such as President Obama's re-re-endorsement Tuesday of "pay-as-you-go"
budgeting. Coming after $787 billion in nonstimulating stimulus, a $410
billion omnibus to wrap up fiscal 2009, a $3.5 trillion 2010 budget
proposal, sundry bailouts and a 13-figure health-care spending expansion
still to come, this latest vow of fiscal chastity is like Donald Trump
denouncing self-promotion.
Check that. Even The Donald would find
this one too much to sell.
But Mr. Obama must think the press and
public are dumb enough to buy it, because there he was Tuesday re-selling
the same "paygo" promises that Democrats roll out every election. Paygo is
"very simple," the President claimed. "Congress can only spend a dollar if
it saves a dollar elsewhere."
That's what Democrats also promised in
2006, with Nancy Pelosi vowing that "the first thing" House Democrats would
do if they took Congress was reimpose paygo rules that "Republicans had let
lapse." By 2008, Speaker Pelosi had let those rules lapse no fewer than 12
times, to make way for $400 billion in deficit spending. Mr. Obama repeated
the paygo pledge during his 2008 campaign, and instead we have witnessed the
greatest peacetime spending binge in U.S. history. As a share of GDP,
spending will hit an astonishing 28.5% in fiscal 2009, with the deficit
hitting 13% and projected to stay at 4% to 5% for years to come.
The truth is that paygo is the kind of
budget gimmick that gives gimmickry a bad name. As Mr. Obama knows but won't
tell voters, paygo only applies to new or expanded entitlement programs, not
to existing programs such as Medicare, this year growing at a 9.2% annual
rate. Nor does paygo apply to discretionary spending, set to hit $1.4
trillion in fiscal 2010, or 40% of the budget.
This loophole matters, because on the very
day Mr. Obama was hailing paygo the House Appropriations Committee was
gleefully approving a 12% increase in 2010 nondefense discretionary
spending, the third year running that Democrats have proposed double-digit
increases. Or consider that the 2010 budget resolution included a $2 billion
increase for low-income heating assistance as an entitlement change that
should be subject to paygo. But Congressional Democrats simply classified it
as discretionary spending, thereby avoiding the need for $2 billion in cuts
elsewhere. C'est-la-paygo.
Mr. Obama's new proposal includes even
more loopholes. There's an exception for Congress's annual
alternative-minimum tax "patch," which is worth at least $576 billion over
10 years; for any of the Bush tax cuts that Mr. Obama decides he wants to
extend past 2010; and to protect against planned cuts in Medicare doctor
payments. These carve-outs alone spare Democrats from having to come up with
some $2.5 trillion in spending cuts or new taxes. To add insult to
profligacy, the rules also allow the Administration to run huge early
deficits for its looming health-care bonanza, and only pay for it later --
say, after 2012.
The President also revived the myth that
paygo was somehow responsible for eliminating budget deficits during the
Clinton years. In fact, that brief era of balanced budgets was due to:
mid-decade spending reductions by a GOP Congress elected on a
balanced-budget pledge; an excessive cut in defense spending to 3% from 5%
of GOP across the decade; and an unsustainable revenue boom due to the
dot-com bubble. But harking back to the 1990s lets Mr. Obama avoid having to
defend his own spending record.
The real game here is that the President
is trying to give Democrats in Congress political cover for the health-care
blowout and tax-increase votes that he knows are coming. The polls are
showing that Mr. Obama's spending plans are far less popular than the
President himself, and Democrats in swing districts are getting nervous. The
paygo ruse gives Blue Dog Democrats cover to say they voted for "fiscal
discipline," even as they vote to pass the greatest entitlement expansion in
modern history. The Blue Dogs always play this double game.
The other goal of this new paygo campaign
is to make it easier to raise taxes in 2011, and impossible to cut taxes for
years after that. In the near term, paygo gives Mr. Obama another excuse to
let the Bush tax cuts he dislikes expire after 2010, while exempting those
(for lower-income voters) that he likes. In the longer term, if a GOP
Congress or President ever want to cut taxes, paygo applies a straitjacket
that pits those tax cuts against, say, spending cuts in Medicare. The Reagan
tax reductions would never have happened under paygo.
The main political question now is when
Americans will start to figure out Mr. Obama's pattern of spend, repent and
repeat. The President is still sailing along on his charm and the fact that
Americans are cheering for an economic recovery. But eventually they'll see
that he isn't telling them the truth, and when they do, the very Blue Dogs
he's trying to protect will pay the price. And they'll deserve what they
get.
Is the U.S. Dollar About to Plunge in a Crash?
"Face-Off: The Dollar’s Doldrums." Newsweek Magazine, June 22, 2009 ---
http://www.newsweek.com/id/201975
Last fall, the dollar surged as the world
turned to U.S. Treasuries as a safe haven. But its recent decline has some
wondering: is the dollar headed for a crash?
Peter Schiff : Absolutely!
"At some point, the world will want out of the U.S. economy, and the
dollar will rapidly lose value. The bailouts and stimulus have only worsened
our problems. We can't afford our huge government because we don't produce
enough, so we spend borrowed money. We're sealing the fate of our currency
by printing it into oblivion."
Brad Setser: Not so fast.!
"Whenever a country runs a large trade deficit for a long period of time,
there's some risk for a disorderly correction. But there are two things
mitigating that risk: the trade deficit has come down signif- icantly, and
our savings rate has gone up. If sustained, together they reduce the risk of
a crash and the needed adjustment is smaller."
Our (Newweek's) Verdict
The potential for a crash depends on what happens abroad, as the dollar's
value is relative to that of other currencies. As long as the U.S. doesn't
get left behind in a global recovery, the dollar will be fine.
Schiff is president of Euro Pacific Capital and author
of Crash Proof.
Setser is a fellow for Geoeconomics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Jensen Comment
Since Newsweek Magazine is owned by NBC, Newsweek would never take
a position that made President Obama's policies look bad. To do otherwise might
not keep the GOP buried beneath its 2008 ashes. No other nation is entering into
trillion-dollar deficits for the next 10 years. I side with Peter Schiff 100%,
although the timing of the dollar's crash is very unpredictable. Peter Schiff
correctly predicted (and publically warned the public) well in advance that
there would be a subprime mortgage crisis and an economic collapse. But the
funds he manages did not make excess profits on these correct predictions due
largely to the fact that he predicted treasury yields would soar and the dollar
would crash long before major events transpired (if they do indeed transpire).
It's one thing to correctly predict economic happenings and quite another to
predict their timings.
One of the Most Enlightening Debates I've Ever Watched
Video of Peter Schiff Making Accurate Predictions in 2007 ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw
He makes Art Laffer and Ben Stein look like they should’ve instead been limited
to making commercials with Shaq. Keep in mind that at the time Bush was still
President of the United States, although the Democrats had the majorities in the
House and Senate.
I find the above video to be incredible in making
us lose your faith in “financial experts.”
Is this global warming?
Our politicians haven't noticed that the problem
may be that the world is not warming but cooling, observes Christopher Booker.
In Manitoba last week, it was -4ºC. North Dakota had its first June snow for 60
years. a veteran US grain expert said last week: "In 43 years I've never seen
anything like the decline (crop yield) we're looking at in South America."
Christopher Booker, "Crops under stress
as temperatures fall ," London Telegraph, June 13, 2009 ---
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5525933/Crops-under-stress-as-temperatures-fall.html
Jensen Comment
It has been a markedly cool spring and summer here in the White Mountains of New
Hampshire.
We hang the petty thieves and
appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop
Congress is our only native criminal class.
Mark Twain ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
"Dodd's Irish Luck: The Senator Sure Knows How to Pick an Investment,"
The Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124545642440632999.html
Irish property prices have plummeted since
2002. But a "cottage" in County Galway owned by Conn, ecticut Senator Chris
Dodd has tripled in value during the same period, according to a financial
disclosure form filed by the Senator this month.
There are two possible explanations for
this remarkable turn of fortune. Maybe Mr. Dodd is luckier than a
leprechaun. Or could it be that he paid well below the market price when he
bought out a co-owner in 2002 and had undervalued the property accordingly?
If it's the latter, then Mr. Dodd received a "gift," in IRS parlance, and
should have declared it on his financial disclosure form that year. He did
not. Oh, and by the way, the seller at that low, low price has been the
business partner of a man for whom Mr. Dodd lobbied to receive a
Presidential pardon.
It's also been nearly a year since a
former loan officer at Countrywide Financial charged that the mortgage
lender had classified Mr. Dodd as a "very important person" (a.k.a., a
"friend of Angelo" Mozilo, Countrywide's then-CEO). As such, Robert Feinberg
said, Mr. Dodd received -- and knew he'd received -- preferential rates and
fees on two mortgages he and his wife refinanced in 2003. As a power on the
Senate Banking Committee, he also knew this was a conflict of interest. This
was the era when Countrywide originated and then sold to Fannie Mae high
volumes of subprime loans.
The SEC charged Mr. Mozilo with fraud and
insider trading earlier this month, and the Los Angeles Times reported in
May that there is an FBI investigation which "includes a probe of
[Countrywide's] role in an influence-peddling scandal involving" Mr. Dodd.
The Senate Ethics Committee won't comment on its own investigation of almost
a year.
Mr. Dodd denies receiving any special
treatment, and nearly a year ago he promised to release the Countrywide
mortgage documents and clear up the matter. We are still waiting, though he
did attempt to placate the Connecticut press with a peek-a-boo release of a
few select documents and a review by his own lawyers in February.
Now the Irish cottage on 10 scenic acres
is bringing more trouble. At the start of the Irish real estate boom in
1994, Mr. Dodd bought the property with William Kessinger for $160,000. Mr.
Kessinger has been a business partner of Edward Downe, who is a longtime
friend of Mr. Dodd's. In 1986 Messrs. Dodd and Downe owned a condominium
together in Washington. In 1993 Mr. Downe pleaded guilty to insider trading
and securities fraud and in 2001, as Bill Clinton was preparing to leave the
White House, Mr. Dodd successfully lobbied to get his friend a pardon.
The following year, 2002, Mr. Dodd bought
out Mr. Kessinger's two-thirds share in the house and became the full owner.
Mr. Dodd reported to the Irish government that he paid Mr. Kessinger
$122,351, and Mr. Dodd says that a bank appraisal that same year valued the
property at $190,000. From 2002 to 2007 Mr. Dodd reported its worth at
between $100,001 and $250,000 on his annual Senate financial disclosure
form.
But Hartford Courant columnist Kevin
Rennie began digging this year into the mismatch between what Mr. Dodd paid
to Mr. Downe's business partner to become a full owner and what the property
in Ireland was likely worth in 2002 amid the Irish land boom. Last week,
when Mr. Dodd filed his annual financial disclosure form, it included a new
appraisal from the same appraiser putting the current value of the house at
$658,000.
In an effort to explain the gain despite
the fact that the Irish housing market has since gone south, a spokesman for
the Senator said that "The value of the cottage, or of Irish real estate
generally, isn't something that the Dodds have thought much about." However,
according to Galway County records, Mr. Dodd was so uninterested in the
value of those 10 acres that he tried to subdivide the property in 1998 and
put up another house. No doubt because he had no idea what it was, or would
be, worth.
The Senate's financial disclosure
forms are supposed to be a tool of honest government, and former Senator Ted
Stevens was indicted for allegedly false disclosures. Mr. Dodd's miraculous
property reappraisal is further grist for Senate and Justice investigators
-- and especially for voters in 2010.
Sen. Chris Dodd, the dubious Democrat from the
Nutmeg State, told a recent interviewer that it was "offensive" that the media
would suggest that his wife, Jackie Clegg Dodd, has potential conflicts of
interest because she sits on the boards of four pharmaceutical firms. With Sen.
Ted Kennedy ailing, Dodd is the Democratic point man for upcoming health-care
legislation. Of course, this is the 21st century. Spouses of powerful pols have
their own -- often quite successful -- careers. Of course, everybody knows that
Mrs. Dodd received no special consideration because of her powerful spouse --
because Sen. Dodd says so.
"Chris Dodd's Other Problem," The Washington Post, June 22, 2009 ---
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06222009/postopinion/editorials/chris_dodds_other_problem_175421.htm
Bob Jensen's on how the most criminal class writes the laws are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#Lawmakers
Leave your heart in San Francisco, but not your illegal immigrant
But over the last year, buffeted by several
high-profile crimes by illegal immigrants and revelations of mismanagement of
the city’s sanctuary policy, San Francisco has become less like its self-image
and more like many other cities in the United States: deeply conflicted over how
to cope with the fallout of illegal immigration. At the center of the turnaround
is a new law enforcement policy focused on under-age offenders who are in this
country illegally. Under the policy, minors brought to juvenile hall on felony
charges are questioned about their immigration status. And if they are suspected
of being here illegally, they are reported to the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agency for deportation, regardless of whether they are eventually
convicted of a crime. “We went from being one of the more progressive counties
in the country to probably one of the least, and the most draconian,” said
Abigail Trillin, the managing attorney with Legal Services for Children, a
nonprofit legal group. “It’s been a total turnaround.”
Jesse McKinley, "San Francisco at
Crossroads Over Immigration," The New York Times, June 12, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/us/13sanctuary.html?_r=1&hp
The UK has about 50,000 family doctors, but nearly
280,000 professionally qualified accountants (pdf), often earning exorbitant
salaries. That is almost the highest number per capita in the world and more
than the rest of the European Union put together. Unsurprisingly, nearly 165,000
students are registered with the UK accountancy trade associations to become
professional accountants. In addition, probably more than 100,000 are studying
for accounting and business degrees at UK universities and colleges, dwarfing
the numbers studying engineering, mathematics and sciences. A record number of
graduates are making a career in accounting.
Prem Sikka, "A nation of accountants: The growing industry
has aided corruption, fraud and unethical governance. Why does the state help it
audit society at a profit?" The Guardian, June 13, 2009 ---
Click Here
"Sixty Years After 1984: Does Orwell's dystopian classic still
matter?" Cathy Young, Reason Magazine, June 11, 2009 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/134074.html
This week marks the 60th anniversary of
perhaps the most famous book of the 20th Century: George Orwell's 1984.
It is a book that changed our language, giving us such words and phrases as
"thought police," "newspeak," "doublethink," and "Big Brother"—not to
mention "Orwellian." But what is the relevancy of Orwell's disturbing novel
today? Is it a warning about future horrors that may come if we fail to
guard our freedom? Does it talk about things that are already present in our
lives?
Orwell, the British journalist and writer,
penned his book in 1948 as a commentary on Soviet totalitarianism, a very
present danger at the time. His dystopia was in many ways an even darker
version of Stalin's Soviet Union, with a godlike leader, a ruling party that
enforces the state's ideology, and an omnipresent secret police. Yet Orwell
was a socialist, a man of the left whose polemic was directed in large part
at the pro-Soviet delusions of his fellow leftists. Since then, both left
and right have tried to appropriate Orwell's vision and claim it as their
own.
The most recent such appropriation comes
from the right. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which opposes
increased regulation, used the anniversary to put out a
press release arguing that "the crusade for global
governance led by environmental activist groups in the name of combating
global warming" represents a 1984-style threat to personal freedom
today. The CEI has released a
video clip based on
the famous 1984-themed
Apple Computer ad in which Al Gore
appears as Big Brother lecturing a zombie-like captive audience in gray
uniforms on the perils of global warming.
Whatever one may think of climate change,
such imagery and rhetoric runs the risk of trivializing the evil of true
totalitarianism—and discrediting one's own argument, except in the eyes of
those who need no convincing. Al Gore is not planning to establish secret
dungeons where people will be horribly tortured until they see the error of
their ways, any more than George W. Bush—a frequent target of accusations of
Orwellian malfeasance—was planning to brainwash the unpatriotic into
submission.
Orwell's concern was not with a democratic
government's excessive regulatory powers, or excessive national security
powers (in the Cold War years, he himself shared a list of communist
sympathizers and possible Soviet spies with an intelligence agency in the
British Foreign Office). It certainly wasn't with the ability of
corporations to track customers' buying habits, which some privacy advocates
have likened to Big Brother's watchful eye.
Continued in article
Candidate Obama Promised No New Taxes on the Middle Class: The
Joke's on Yew in the Form of Higher Prices
An annual report issued by the Competitive
Enterprise Institute (CEI) shows that the U.S. government imposed $1.17 trillion
in new regulatory costs in 2008. That almost equals the $1.2 trillion generated
by individual income taxes, and amounts to $3,849 for every American citizen.
According the 2009 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of
the Federal Regulatory State, the government issued 3,830 new rules last year,
and The Federal Register, where such rules are listed, ballooned to a record
79,435 pages. “The costs of federal regulations too often exceed the benefits,
yet these regulations receive little official scrutiny from Congress,” said CEI
Vice President Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr., who wrote the report. “The U.S. economy
lost value in 2008 for the first time since 1990,” Crews said. “Meanwhile, our
federal government imposed a $1.17 trillion ‘hidden tax’ on Americans beyond the
$3 trillion officially budgeted” through the regulations.
Adam Brickley, "Government
Implemented Thousands of New Regulations Costing $1.17 Trillion in 2008," CNS
News, June 12, 2009 ---
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=49487
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on June 18, 2009
Historic Overhaul of Finance Rules
by Damian
Paletta
The Wall Street Journal
Jun 18, 2009
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
TOPICS: Banking,
Bankruptcy, Collateralized Debt Obligations, Disclosure, Disclosure
Requirements, Financial Reporting, Hedge Funds, Investment Banking,
Regulation, SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, Securitization,
Treasury Department
SUMMARY: "Obama
urged policy makers to rewrite the rules governing U.S. finance, unveiling
proposals that would affect nearly every aspect of banking and markets." The
Wall Street Journal's "Condensed Version" (see related article) makes clear
that the Federal Reserve Board will see an increase in power in expanding
its regulatory oversight to "all U.S. financial firms that meet 'certain
minimum size thresholds'....[covering both] parent companies and all
subsidiaries, including unregulated units and those based overseas." The
intent is for at least one governmental unit to have a perspective on the
safety of the overall financial system, including international
implications, as opposed to a focus on individual banks and other entities.
The SEC's role is retained, though it no longer has supervisory authority
over Wall Street investment banks, and its registration and data collection
authority is expanded to cover hedge funds, private-equity funds and
venture-capital funds. The online version of this article contains links to
documents associated with the reforms after the stock market crash of 1929,
including articles discussing the formation of the Securities and Exchange
Commission in 1934.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The
articles introduce the new financial regulatory regime and help condense
complex points for students. Questions focus on the section of the white
paper, "Financial Regulatory Reform: A New Foundation" that covers
establishment of comprehensive regulation of financial markets.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory)
Who has proposed this "sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory
system"? How will change stemming from this proposal move forward?
2. (Introductory)
Access the links to documents associated with the reforms after the stock
market crash of 1929 available through the online version of this article.
What are some parallels to the momentous change that occurred then? What are
some differences in today's situation?
3. (Advanced)
WSJ articles published when the SEC was established in 1934 expressed
concerns about stymied economic growth from "meddling" by government
regulators. How do those concerns compare to some expressed today? Be
specific in describing at least two individual opinions and naming the
holders of those positions.
4. (Introductory)
Access the reform proposal document, Financial Regulatory Reform: A New
Foundation, issued by the Treasury Dept. and available at
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/finregfinal06172009.pdf
Focus on the introduction and the component related to establishing
"comprehensive regulation of financial markets." What is "securitization"?
What roles do credit rating agencies have in that process?
5. (Advanced)
What problems arose in the financial crisis with the work of credit rating
agencies and financial firms' reliance on credit ratings?
6. (Advanced)
Summarize the accounting requirements for securitization transactions.
7. (Advanced)
The regulatory proposal recommends requiring loan originators to retain a
significant economic interest in the credit risk associated with securitized
items. Do you think that will change the accounting for these transactions?
Explain.
8. (Introductory)
Another recommendation is that "the SEC should continue its efforts to
increase the transparency and standardization of securitization markets and
be given clear authority to require robust reporting by issuers of asset
backed securities (ABS)." What disclosures are recommended under this
section 3 heading? Given what you know about the current process, how will
these new disclosure requirements be established?
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
RELATED ARTICLES:
Obama's Financial Reform Plan: The Condensed Version
by Susan Davis and Reporters of the WSJ Washington Bureau
Jun 18, 2009
Online Exclusive
The West fooled itself Iran would allow reform
Officially put at 85%, voter turnout was the highest in
Iran’s history. Ahmadinejad won with 63%, collecting more votes than any of his
predecessors. The results were arranged to give him a two-thirds majority among
all categories of voters – men, women, young and old, poor and middle class, and
in all of Iran’s 30 provinces. Whoever wrote the script also made sure that his
three rivals, all veterans of the Khomeinist revolution, were roundly defeated
even in their respective home towns.
Amir Taheri , "The West fooled
itself Iran would allow reform," The London Times, June 14, 2009 ---
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6493541.ece
Wafa Sultan's Reaction to President Obama's Speech to the Moslem World
While in Egypt
Before reading this you should read about the courageous Dr. Wafa Sultan at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wafa_Sultan
This speech was forwarded by Naomi Ragen on June 13, 2009
Who Should We Believe?
After President Obama's Cairo speech, many
of my Middle Eastern Arab readers reacted with bewilderment. As one of them
expressed; "Who should we believe, Obama or you?" in particular his
statement that "America and Islam overlap and share common principles, the
principles of justice, tolerance and dignity for human beings".
True, reading the Arab press's reaction to
his speech it is clear that many Muslims now love Obama. After all, he
introduced to them a narrative that affirms their conspiracy theories and
their identity as victims of the West. Hence, the Arab media expressed their
confidence that the speech will provide a "new stance towards Islam and the
Muslims, after centuries of aggression and hostility." (Al Ahram - Egypt-
MEMRI) More than anything, I am reminded of a story by Nizar Qubbani, the
famous Syrian poet. His young son was a physician and suffered from an acute
heart problem. When Nizar asked his son about his heart condition, the son
drew a red heart. Being a poet, the father interpreted the drawing as a sign
of a vibrant and healthy heart and took great comfort in believing this to
be a sign of recovery. After his son's passing, Nizar wrote a poem
describing his feelings as a heartbroken father. He felt unbearably saddened
as he realized he had misinterpreted the drawing. Obviously, the son's
sketch of a red heart was meant to convey no hope for his profusely bleeding
heart, while the father's understanding of the symbol as a hopeful one was
wrong.
The poet and the physician perceived
reality in totally different ways; similar to the dichotomy between
President Obama's view of the Islamic world and mine. The truth is, however,
that only one reality exists.
Mr. Obama is a politician, and a very
astute one. However, his speech revealed that his view is unduly influenced
by naïve desire. His perception of Islam and the reality of Islam need to be
synchronized. I am a physician and a realist who has lived and experienced
the effect of my Arab culture and Islamic religion since childhood. The
president pandered to Muslims: praised their accomplishments, commiserated
with their grievances, and apologized for injustices done to them by
centuries of colonialism -- without once mentioning the history of rampant
and violent Arab colonialism. He avoided any mention of Jihadi tenets, or of
the Islamic political ideology of supremacy over non Muslims -- principles
embedded in Sharia law. These are taught and sanctioned openly by Al-Azhar,
the university that hosted him, the foremost center of Sharia studies. Obama
underscored the supposed American mistreatment of terrorists and apologized
for torture in Guantanamo, forgetting that Islamic regimes are brutal to
their own people. The president also repudiated significant U.S.
contributions in both the lives of its soldiers and humanitarian aid to
Muslims across the globe made throughout history -- despite Muslim attacks
against America and Americans. In short, parts of his speech sounded like a
new Pan-Arab messiah come to usher the Arab world back into its rightful
world dominion. Most disturbing was the president's call to defend Muslims
against negative stereotypes. A dangerous precedent is set when freedom of
speech is silenced and ideological criticism forbidden. This, again, is the
stuff of nightmarish totalitarian regimes. The beauty of the US Constitution
is its balance, and the wisdom it embraces by distinguishing between that
which should be protected and defended and that which should be prosecuted
and decried. Encouraging laws to make criticism of Islam an offense
punishable by law is troubling.
Since arriving in the US, I have enjoyed
the freedom to educate my Arab brothers and sisters in the Middle East, who
yearn for real freedom - and I have seen successes. Mr. Obama calls these
very successes into question rather than championing freedom.
As the president embarks on his new task
to defend Muslims "against negative stereotypes," does this mean he will
somehow interfere and undermine that message? Or, perhaps it means he may
join with the Organization of Islamic Conference, the 57 Muslim countries
that work relentlessly to promote a United Nations resolution to suppress
voices of dissent against Islam? I am confident we would all come to regret
this.
Obama sidesteps the acute state of affairs
in the Islamic world with flattery, failing to encourage accountability for
rhetoric, practices and the behavior that feed stereotypes. I did not hear
an exhortation to the Islamic world to open itself to diversity, to accept
women as equal citizens with the same rights and protection under law as
men. I did not hear a challenge to the Muslim world to accept other
religions and their ability to practice openly within the Islamic world --
where the practice of Christianity, Judaism and other religions could cost
an individual his or her life. I did not hear a call to erase for all time,
Dhimmi racism -- the Sharia law-based dictate that Christians and Jews are
inferior and should be suppressed. Are these "…the principles of justice,
tolerance and dignity for human beings"?
In contrast, I see my people's heart
bleeding and know the pressing need for self-correction and honest
examination for the sake of urgent repair. Obama dangles the carrot but
shies away from the imperative issues boiling beneath the surface. Obama's
reality makes my work and that of others who speak up against intolerant
Islamic doctrines more challenging. He undermines this mission by placating
abusive, xenophobic policies and enabling those within the Islamic world to
subjugate others, to coerce others to its beliefs, and to continue these
pursuits with his blessing.
The president failed to join
freedom-loving individuals, liberated Arabs like myself. He failed to lead
the Muslim world into modernization and vital reform. Rather than calling
out, "The house is on fire." Obama smiles and tells us how beautiful the
house is as it burns out of control and threatens to destroy us. To the
question I received on my e-mail; "Who should we believe, Obama or you?" I
elaborated to my Moroccan reader that Obama is a politician who wishes to
use sweet talk and to whitewash reality to make amends with Muslims.
I, on the other hand am a pragmatic Arab
woman who escaped the prison of Islam to the free world and now devotes her
life to expressing views freely and pressing for a genuine difference in
Islam. We cannot have it both ways. Intolerance never tolerates freedom.
Wafa Sultan
Jensen Comment
Be all that as it may in the reactions to Obama's outreach to the Moslem world,
it appears that Israel's latest and unrealistic conditions for peace essentially
doom the possibilities for peace in the Middle East.
"Palestinians: Netanyahu is 'sabotaging' peace efforts," Haartz,
June 14, 2009 ---
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1092713.html
"PA: Netanyahu has buried peace process," Jerusalem Post, June 14,
2009 ---
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1244371096340&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
President Obama affirmed before the American Medical Association on May 15,
2005 that he adamantly refuses to save money in his Universal Health Plan by
curtailing medical malpractice lawsuits and multi-million awards to tort
lawyers. Remember that he's a lawyer whose election to office depended heavily
on financial support from the plaintiff's bar.
President Obama's team would like to copy a lot of things out of Canada's
National Health Plan, but curtailment of malpractice claims won't be one of
them. Nor will capping the awards given to the lawyers who chase ambulances.
"Why 98% Of Canadian Medical Malpractice Victims Never Receive A Penny In
Compensation," by John McKiggan, Ezine Articles, ---
Click Here
Are Canadian Medical Malpractice Claims Different
Than in the U. S.?
In a word; yes.
Lot's of people have read about large jury awards
for personal injury claims in the United States. Sometimes the American jury
awards seem to be out of proportion to the injury.
In Canada, court awards are much lower than awards
for similar injuries from courts in the United States. Cases that might be
successful in the U.S. are simply not economically feasible to pursue in
Canada.
For example, the province of Nova Scotia also has
some of the most conservative (lowest) awards in Canada for compensation for
personal injury claims.
Role of the C.M.P.A.:
In Canada, most doctors are defended by a single
organization, the Canadian Medical Protection Association (the C.M.P.A.).
According to a recent annual report, the C.M.P.A.
has two point nine (2.9) BILLION DOLLARS in assets (money in the bank). The
C.M.P.A. is able to use this money to hire the best experts and lawyers
money can buy.
Many victims of serious medical errors cannot work,
or have huge expenses for ongoing rehabilitation or medical care.
Against such overwhelming financial odds, Canadian
victims of medical malpractice face an almost insurmountable challenge to
obtain justice and fair compensation for their injuries.
Remember the Canadian Medical Association Journal
study that determined that over 87,000 patients in Canada suffer an adverse
event and as many as 24,000 people die each year due to medical errors?
That's more than 100,000 potential malpractice claims in Canada every year!
But between 2002 and 2006 the C.M.P.A. reports only
5246 lawsuits were filed against doctors in Canada: only about a 1000 claims
per year.
In other words, out of 100,000 potential claims 99%
of potential medical malpractice victims never even filed a claim!
The C.M.P.A. reports it's success rate in defending
claims brought against doctors. More than 3800 of the 5000 claims were
dismissed or abandoned because the victim or his or her family quit or ran
out of money, or died before trial.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The liberal media keeps running modules on how wonderful Canada's National
Health Plan is in terms efficiency and care. What has not been mentioned once,
however, is that half of the average Canadian's tax dollar is spent on health
care. If Americans had to carve out half of every tax dollar for health
insurance there would be riots in the streets.
In fairness, Canadians can better afford taxes for health care. One reason is
that Canadians live under the umbrella of the U.S. military and have no need to
devote as much tax revenue to pay for national defense. A second reason is that
Canada is rich in export resources, particularly oil and gas. Canada does not
have to support the trade deficits that are killing the United States. Also
Canada's long border is with the U.S. and, accordingly, Canada has much less
problem supporting millions of illegal border-crossing immigrants with
health care, law enforcement, housing, education, etc. There are benefits in the
U.S. from the illegal immigrant labor force, but the the total costs far exceed
the benefits of having millions of these poor people straining social services,
including medical care.
Gulp! Retired Canadians are not drinking to this loss in pension benefits
"Molson retirees losing their free beer to cry in Pensioners protest as their
allotment of 864 brews a year will be cut to nothing," by Andrew Chung, The
Star, June 9, 2009 ---
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/647664
If you sang that well-worn campfire song about the
beer bottles on the wall, you'd have to start at 864.
That's the annual complimentary beer allotment for
retirees from the Molson brewery in St. John's, Nfld., the same amount of
free suds they received while still working.
But, without consulting them, Molson has decided to
shut the tap.
Come Jan. 1, the allotment will be a dozen bottles
a month, down from six dozen a month (or 72 dozen a year), and in five
years, it will be zero. For current workers, who also get 72 dozen bottles a
year, the allotment will drop to 52 dozen. No five-year cut-off is planned.
Retirees held a protest outside the brewery last
Friday. They've demanded a meeting with top company officials and will get
one within the next two weeks.
In Vancouver and Montreal, where the allotment is
less than in St. John's, the unions have launched grievances. Vancouver's
case goes to arbitration June 16.
"There was no consultation, we just received a
letter that this is a done deal, which is totally unfair," said Bill Bavis,
who retired six years ago after 32 years at Molson's in St. John's. "I think
with the economic downturn they're trying to take advantage of us, as a way
to cut retirees' benefits and justify it."
Molson says it is "standardizing" its complimentary
beer policy, which was originally intended not only as a perk but also to
allow workers to share their beer, thereby helping to market it.
"This was a decision made by management after
reviewing a number of cost-cutting measures," said Molson vice-president
Ferg Devins. "We strongly feel the benefits package for our employees and
retirees is still very generous."
Continued in article
"How Safeway Is Cutting Health-Care Costs," by Steven A. Burd, The
Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124476804026308603.html
Forwarded by Team Carper
A Japanese company (Toyota) and an American company (Ford Motors) decided to
have a canoe race on the Missouri River. Both teams practiced long and hard to
reach their peak performance before the race.
On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile.
The Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to investigate the
reason for the crushing defeat. A management team made up of senior management
was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action.
Their conclusion was the Japanese had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering,
while the American team had 7 people steering and 2 people rowing.
Feeling a deeper study was in order, American management hired a consulting
company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion.
They advised, of course, that too many people were steering the boat, while
not enough people were rowing.
Not sure of how to utilize that information, but wanting to prevent another
loss to the Japanese, the rowing team's management structure was totally
reorganized to 4 steering supervisors, 2 area steering superintendents and 1
assistant superintendent steering manager.
They also implemented a new performance system that would give the 2 people
rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the 'Rowing Team
Quality First Program,' with meetings, dinners and free pens for the rowers.
There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes and other equipment, extra
vacation days for practices and bonuses. The pension program was trimmed to
'equal the competition' and some of the resultant savings were channeled into
morale-boosting programs and teamwork posters.
The next year the Japanese won by two miles.
Humiliated, the American management laid off one rower, halted development of
a new canoe, sold all the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new
equipment. The money saved was distributed to the Senior Executives as bonuses.
The next year, try as he might, the lone designated rower was unable to even
finish the race (having no paddles,) so he was laid off for unacceptable
performance, all canoe equipment was sold and the next year's racing team was
out-sourced to India.
Sadly, the End.
Here's something else to think about: Ford has spent the last thirty years
moving all its factories out of the US, claiming they can't make money paying
American wages.
TOYOTA has spent the last thirty years building more than a dozen plants
inside the US.
The last quarter's results: TOYOTA makes 4 billion in profits , while Ford
racked up 9 billion in losses.
Ford folks are still scratching their heads, and collecting bonuses... and
stand next in line for a 'bail-out'...
Airbus: Made In China
The first Chinese-assembled A320 is set for delivery,
symbolizing the importance of future demand in Asia. PARIS -- Will emerging
markets make or break the aerospace industry? Though the airline industry is
suffering across the world, executives from Boeing and Airbus talked up the
prospect of future demand from China as one bright spot at this month’s Paris
Air Show. And on Tuesday, Airbus will deliver its first China-assembled A320,
part of a joint venture that could help the plane-maker take more market share
from its American arch-rival.
Lionel Laurent, Forbes, June 22, 2009 ---
Click Here
Instead of adding more regulating agencies, I think
we should simply make the FBI tougher on crime and the IRS tougher on cheats
Our Main Financial Regulating Agency: The SEC Screw
Everybody Commission
One of the biggest regulation failures in history is the way the SEC failed to
seriously investigate Bernie Madoff's fund even after being warned by Wall
Street experts across six years before Bernie himself disclosed that he was
running a $65 billion Ponzi fund.
CBS Sixty Minutes on June 14, 2009 ran a rerun that is
devastatingly critical of the SEC. If you’ve not seen it, it may still be
available for free (for a short time only) at
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5088137n&tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel
The title of the video is “The Man Who Would Be King.”
Also see
http://www.fraud-magazine.com/FeatureArticle.aspx
Between 2002 and 2008 Harry Markopolos repeatedly told
(with indisputable proof) the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernie
Madoff's investment fund was a fraud. Markopolos was ignored and, as a result,
investors lost more and more billions of dollars. Steve Kroft reports.
Markoplos makes the SEC look truly incompetent or
outright conspiratorial in fraud.
I'm really surprised that the SEC survived after Chris
Cox messed it up so many things so badly.
As Far as Regulations Go
An annual report issued by
the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) shows that the U.S. government
imposed $1.17 trillion in new regulatory costs in 2008. That almost equals the
$1.2 trillion generated by individual income taxes, and amounts to $3,849 for
every American citizen. According the 2009 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments:
An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State, the government issued 3,830
new rules last year, and The Federal Register, where such rules are listed,
ballooned to a record 79,435 pages. “The costs of federal regulations too often
exceed the benefits, yet these regulations receive little official scrutiny from
Congress,” said CEI Vice President Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr., who wrote the report.
“The U.S. economy lost value in 2008 for the first time since 1990,” Crews said.
“Meanwhile, our federal government imposed a $1.17 trillion ‘hidden tax’ on
Americans beyond the $3 trillion officially budgeted” through the regulations.
Adam Brickley,
"Government Implemented Thousands of New Regulations Costing $1.17 Trillion in
2008," CNS News, June 12, 2009 ---
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=49487
Jensen Comment
I’m a long-time believer that industries being regulated end up controlling the
regulating agencies. The records of Alan Greenspan (FED) and the SEC from Arthur
Levitt to Chris Cox do absolutely nothing to change my belief ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
How do industries leverage the regulatory agencies?
The primary control mechanism is to have high paying jobs waiting in industry
for regulators who play ball while they are still employed by the government. It
happens time and time again in the FPC, EPA, FDA, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc. Because so
many people work for the FBI and IRS, it's a little harder for industry to
manage those bureaucrats. Also the FBI and the IRS tend to focus on the worst of
the worst offenders whereas other agencies often deal with top management of the
largest companies in America.
Goldman to make record bonus payout
Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the
biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history after a spectacular first
half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived
the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms. A lack of
competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and
fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to
insiders at the firm.
"Goldman to make record bonus payout: Surviving banks accused of
undermining stability," The Guardian, June 21, 2009 ---
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jun/21/goldman-sachs-bonus-payments
Bob Jensen's threads on outrageous executive
compensation schemes ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation
How to blow a whistle!
June 14, 2009 message from XXXXX
Mr. Jensen:
I know you are retired so I
hope this email is not an imposition.
I have been dealing with an
accounting fraud for years. Can’t get SEC or PCAOB to act. Do you have any
suggestions? I do have a Civil RICO filed but it like fighting city hall.
The defendants have all the money.
Regards,
XXXXX
June 18, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi XXXXX
This is a
tough question that comes to me quite often. Much depends upon the nature of
the crime or other fraud when you are trying to whistleblow a fraud.
A white collar crime blog edited by some law professors
---
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/whitecollarcrime_blog/
How to report cybercrime
(including Internet crime) ---
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/
One link is to a listing of where you can file
Internet complaints ---
http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/consumer-center.cfm
Organizations and government agencies featured in this
section are listed alphabetically.
Better Business Bureau Online
The Better Business Bureau Online, the electronic arm of the Better Business
Bureau, offers consumers the opportunity to file a complaint against
e-commerce sites as well as offline businesses. The Better Business Bureau
was founded in 1912 and seeks to create a more fair marketplace through
consumer education and voluntary self-regulation on the part of companies.
http://www.bbbonline.org/consumer/complaint.asp
Consumer Sentinel
Consumer Sentinel is a complaint database designed to provide law
enforcement agencies with information on Internet cons, telemarketing scams
and other consumer fraud-related complaints. The database, which is
maintained by the Federal Trade Commission, is available to 40 federal law
enforcement organizations, more than 200 state and local fraud-fighting
agencies, and every state attorney general in the United States. You may
register a complaint
here.
http://www.consumer.gov/sentinel/index.html
econsumer.gov
This international site, launched by a coalition of 13 nations, registers
cross-border e-commerce complaints and offers tips for safe shopping online.
It utilizes the Consumer Sentinel's network of Internet fraud complaint data
and shares it in several languages with consumer protection law enforcers in
countries that belong to the International Marketing Supervision Network.
http://www.econsumer.gov
Internet Fraud Complaint Center
The Internet Fraud Complaint Center enables consumers to log online fraud
complaints. The center is the result of a partnership between the FBI and
the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), a nationwide support network
for enforcement agencies involved in the prevention, investigation, and
prosecution of economic and high-tech crime. NW3C is funded through a grant
from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, and the
U.S. Department of Justice.
http://www1.ifccfbi.gov/index.asp
National Fraud Information Center
The National Fraud Information Center (NFIC) was established in 1992 by the
National Consumers League and continues to be funded by the organization.
NFIC offers an online form for consumers who are interested in registering
an Internet fraud complaint.
http://www.fraud.org/
State Attorneys General
Contact your state attorney general if you feel you have been a victim of
consumer fraud on the Web. Consult individual state sites for telephone or
electronic contact information for filing complaints. U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission offers tips
on avoiding Internet fraud when investing, and a mechanism to register
Internet fraud or spam complaints for investigation.
http://www.naag.org/ag/full_ag_table.php
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission offers tips on avoiding Internet
fraud when investing, and a mechanism to register Internet fraud or spam
complaints for investigation.
http://www.sec.gov/complaint.shtml
Corporate Fraud Reporting
§
Bob Jensen's Links
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm
§
FBI Corporate Fraud Hotline (Toll Free) 888-622-0177
FBI
http://www.fbi.gov/
§
Commodity Futures Trading Commission
http://www.sec.gov/answers/cftc.htm
§
Defense Criminal Investigative Service
http://www.dodig.osd.mil/INV/DCIS/
§
Department of Labor
http://www.dol.gov/
§
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
http://www.ferc.gov/
§
Internal Revenue Service
http://www.irs.gov/
§
National Association of Securities Dealers
http://www.nasd.com/
§
Postal Inspection Service
http://www.usps.com/postalinspectors/
§
Securities and Exchange Commission
http://www.sec.gov/
If the SEC
ignored the Bernie Madoff $65 billion Ponzi fraud for six years, you
probably cannot expect much from the SEC.
My threads on crime and fraud reporting are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ThingsToKnow
On a net basis, the total number of hedge funds declined by 1,471 in 2008,
leaving 9,284 funds that were still in business. In the last quarter of 2008, a
record number of 778 funds liquidated. Many of the remaining hedge funds imposed
new restrictions on how much money could be withdrawn over designated time
intervals such as a month or a year.
Hedge Fund Research Inc. ---
Click Here
http://www.bizjournals.com/gen/company.html?gcode=9E154A9ABD034B20BA640186F1E41F65&market=philadelphia
Question
What are hedge funds, especially after Bernie Madoff made them so famous?
When people ask me this question, my initial response is that a hedge fund no
longer necessarily has anything to do with financial risk hedging. Rather a
hedge fund is merely a "private" investment "club" that does not offer shares to
the general public largely because it would then subject itself to more SEC,
stock exchange, and other regulators. Having said this, it's pretty darn easy
for anybody with sufficient funds to get into such a "private" club. Minimum
investments range from $10,000 to $1,000,000 or higher.
Since Bernie Madoff made hedge funds so famous, the public tends to think
that a hedge fund is dangerous, fraudulent, and a back street operation that
does not play be the rules. Certainly hedge funds emerged in part to avoid being
regulated. Sometimes they are risky due to high leverage,
but some funds skillfully hedge to manage risk and are much safer than mutual
funds. For example, some hedge funds have shrewd hedging strategies to
control risk in interest rate and/or foreign currency trading.
Most hedge funds are not fraudulent. In general, however, it's "buyer beware"
for hedge fund investors.
I would never invest in a hedge fund that is not audited by a very reliable
CPA auditing firm. Not all CPA auditing firms are reliable (Bernie Madoff proved
you can engage a fraudulent auditor operating out of a one-room office). Hence,
the first step in evaluating a hedge fund is to investigate its auditor. The
first step in evaluating an auditor is to determine if the auditing firm is
wealthy enough to be a serious third party in law suits if the hedge fund goes
belly up.
But the recent multimillion losses of Carnegie Mellon, the University of
Pittsburgh, and other university endowment funds that invested in a verry
fraudulent hedge fund purportedly audited by Deloitte suggests that the size and
reputation of the auditing firm is not, by itself, sufficient protection against
a criminal hedge fund (that was supposedly given a clean opinion by Deloitte in
financial reports circulated to the victims of the fraud) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#Deloitte
When learning about hedge funds, you may want to begin at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_Fund
"What is a hedge fund and how is it different from a mutual fund?" by
Andy Samuels, Business and Finance 101 Examiner, June 10, 2009 ---
Click Here
Jim Mahar pointed out this link.
Having migrated away from their namesake, hedge
funds no longer focus primarily on “hedging” (attempting to reduce risk)
because hedge funds are now focused almost blindly on one thing: returns.
Having been referred to as “mutual funds for the
super rich” by
investopedia.com, hedge funds are very similar to
mutual funds in that they pool money together from many investors. Hedge
funds, like
mutual funds, are also managed by a financial
professionals, but differ because they are geared toward wealthier
individuals.
Hedge funds, unlike mutual funds, employ a wider
array of ivesting techniques, which are considered more aggresive. For
example, hedge funds often use
leverage to amplify their returns (or losses if
things go wrong).
The other key difference between hedge funds and
mutual funds is the amount of regulation involved. Hedge funds are
relatively unregulated because investors in hedge funds are assumed to be
more sophisticated investors, who can both afford and understand the
potential losses. In fact, U.S. laws require that the majority of investors
in the fund are
accredited.
Most hedge funds draw in investors because of the trustworthy reputations of
the executives of the fund. Word-of-mouth praise and affiliations are often the
key to success. Bernie Madoff succeed in luring customers based on two leading
factors: (1) His esteemed reputation on Wall Street and (2) His highly
regarded connections in the Jewish community where he drew in most of his
victims.
A Bit of History
German Chancellor's Call for Global Regulations to Curb Hedge Funds
Germany and the United States are parting company
again, this time over Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's call for international
regulations to govern hedge funds. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, speaking
here Thursday at the end of a five-country European tour, said the United
States opposed "heavy-handed" curbs on markets. He said that he was not
familiar with the German proposals, but left little doubt about how
Washington would react. "I think we ought to be very careful about
heavy-handed regulation of markets because it stymies financial innovation,"
Mr. Snow said after a news conference here to sum up his visit. Noting that
the Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed that hedge funds be
required to register themselves, he said he preferred the "light touch
rather than the heavy regulatory burden."
Mark Landler, "U.S. Balks at German Chancellor's Call for Global Regulations
to Curb Hedge Funds," The New York Times, June 17, 2005 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/business/worldbusiness/17hedge.html?
An investing balloon that will one day burst
The numbers are mind-boggling: 15 years ago,
hedge funds managed less than $40 billion. Today, the figure is
approaching $1 trillion. By contrast, assets in mutual funds grew at an
impressive but much slower rate, to $8.1 trillion from $1 trillion, during
the same period. The number of hedge fund firms has also grown - to 3,307
last year, up 74 percent from 1,903 in 1999. During the same period, the
number of funds created - a manager can start more than one fund at a time
- has surged 209 percent, with 1,406 funds introduced in 2004, according
to Hedge Fund Research, based in Chicago.
Jenny Anderson and Riva D. Atlas, "If I Only Had a Hedge Fund,"
The New York Times, The New York Times, March 27, 2005 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/business/yourmoney/27hedge.html
Jensen Comment: The name "hedge fund" seems to imply that
risk is hedged. Nothing could be further from the case. Hedge
funds do not have to hedge risks, Hedge funds should instead be
called private investment clubs. If structured in a certain way they
can avoid SEC oversight.
Remember how the Russian
space program worked in the 1960s? The only flights that got publicized
were the successful ones. Hedge funds are like that. The ones asking
for your money have terrific records. You don't hear about the ones that
blew up. That fact should strongly color your view of hedge funds with
terrific records.
Forbes, January 13, 2005 ---
http://snipurl.com/ForbesJan_13
US hedge funds prior to 2005 were exempted from
Securities and Exchange Commission reporting requirements, as well as from
regulatory restrictions concerning leverage or trading strategies. They
now must register with the SEC except under an enormous loophole for funds
that cannot liquidate in less than two years.
The Loophole: Locked-up
funds don't require oversight. That means more risk for investors.
"Hedge Funds Find an Escape Hatch," Business Week,
December 27, 2004, Page 51 ---
Securities
& Exchange Commission Chairman William H. Donaldson recently
accomplished a major feat when he got the agency to pass a controversial
rule forcing hedge fund advisers to register by 2006. Unfortunately,
just weeks after the SEC announced the new rule on Dec. 2, many hedge
fund managers have already figured out a simple way to bypass it.
The easy out is
right on page 23 of the new SEC rule: Any fund that requires investors
to commit their money for more than two years does not have to register
with the SEC. The SEC created that escape hatch to benefit
private-equity firms and venture capitalists, which typically make
long-term investments and have been involved in few SEC enforcement
actions. By contrast, hedge funds, some of which have recently been
charged with defrauding investors, typically have allowed investors to
remove their money at the end of every quarter. Now many are considering
taking advantage of the loophole by locking up customers' money for
years.
You should investigate the CPA
firm that audits the a hedge fund and ask about its size (number of licensed
auditors, etc.). Usually this information is available from the auditing firm’s
Website. It’s a very bad sign if the auditing firm does not have this
information at its Website.
Then you should verify with
the State Board of Accountancy (there’s one in each of the 50 states) and make
sure the auditing firm is licensed as an auditor where the audit is being
conducted. In Bernie Madoff’s case his hedge fund's auditor was a CPA but was
not licensed by the NYSCPA to conduct audits in the State of New York (or any
other state).
To additionally check out the
hedge fund's external CPA auditor, contact the PCAOB to see if the Federal
government has inspected the auditing work of the CPA auditing firm (keep in
mind that the PCAOB has not inspected all small auditing firms, but by now it
has gotten around to most large auditing firms more than once). Inspection
reports are archived at
http://www.pcaobus.org/inspections/public_reports/index.aspx
On a net basis, the total number of
hedge funds declined by 1,471 in 2008, leaving 9,284 funds that were still in
business. In the last quarter of 2008, a record number of 778 funds liquidated.
Many of the remaining hedge funds imposed new restrictions on how much money
could be withdrawn over designated time intervals such as a month or a year.
Hedge Fund Research Inc. ---
Click Here
http://www.bizjournals.com/gen/company.html?gcode=9E154A9ABD034B20BA640186F1E41F65&market=philadelphia
Keep in mind that many (most?) of those 9,284 hedge
funds do not pay for a CPA firm audit (especially a large CPA firm with deep
pockets in investor lawsuits). I would never invest in any fund that is not
audited by a large and licensed CPA firm.
Bob Jensen's threads on frauds are linked at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm
In particular see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm
And see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
The 2008-2009 Economic Downfall
Great Graphic:
Infographic: Anatomy of the Crash
http://www.simoleonsense.com/infographic-anatomy-of-the-crash/
Bob Jensen's threads on the downfall ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
50 Great Examples of Data Visualization ---
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/
Bob Jensen's threads on visualization of multivariate data ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm
Those macroeconomists, who study the broad economy—don't have
a blessed clue
If the
economy improves and unemployment drops, Obama can take credit. If it fails to
improve and unemployment rises, though, he can say he averted an even worse
showing. Republicans will take the opposite tack—attributing any improvement to
the natural resilience of the economy and blaming the administration if things
get worse. And neither side will really know who's right. I have long been a
believer in the value of economics in understanding the world. But the chief
effect of the current crisis is to raise the possibility that economists—at
least those macroeconomists, who study the broad economy—don't have a blessed
clue.
Steve Chapman, "Baffled by
the Economy: Why being a macroeconomist means never having to say you're
sorry," Reason Magazine, June 11, 2009 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/134059.html
Bob Jensen's threads on the bailout are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
What
makes this such a big scandal is that the savings of half the
households in the U.S. are at stake here. The tragedy is that now
that the scandal is surfacing in the media and in state courts, the
SEC is only wrist slapping mutual funds. This is along with the
continued wrist slapping of investment banking (e.g., why is Merrill
Lynch still in existence after frauds dating back to
Orange
County ?) is the real evidence of
industry power over regulators. Sarbanes-Oxley won’t do it! It’s
still Congress to the core in Washington
DC as long as industries have regulators in
their well-financed pockets ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#Cleland
|
Before FAS 133 and IAS 39 Swaps Did Not Even Have to Be
Booked
Booking does not necessarily put an end to speculation and fraud
1.93 Billion Euros: Derivatives Fraud Worse Than
Orange County
‘Impossible to Understand’ Swap Burns 290-Person Italian Hamlet Share," by
Alan Katz, Lorenzo Totaro and Elisa Myartinuzzi, Bloomberg News, June 19,
2009 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=a04MS8q.QQTM
Ortenzio Matteucci points to towns down the wooded
Nerina valley in Italy’s Umbria region and blames peer pressure for his
decision to let Polino, population 290, buy a U.S.-inspired financial swap
he didn’t understand.
A retired steelworker with wavy gray hair, Polino’s
Mayor Matteucci says he agreed to the interest-rate swap because Milan, with
more than 1 million residents, and local towns Arrone and Stroncone all
bought derivatives to try to save money. Polino’s contract has cost the
village 6,579.66 euros ($9,200) more than it has earned since the town made
the deal in 2005.
“At the time I thought: Can the Province of Terni,
the City of Terni and all the other municipalities bigger than us, such as
Milan, be all wrong?” said Matteucci, 59, dressed in a blue polo shirt and
jeans. “You can make a mistake if you don’t have an appropriate and deep
knowledge of this and just follow what other local governments do.”
Derivatives have burned towns from Polino to Milan
to Erie, Pennsylvania. Jefferson County, Alabama, said it might need to
declare bankruptcy because of costs associated with the contracts.
Responsibility for the expenses in Italy’s second- biggest city and in
Umbria’s smallest village sits with elected officials who agreed to
financial instruments they didn’t fully grasp, said Stefano Taurini, a
lawyer who specializes in corporate law in Milan.
1.93 Billion Euros
In Italy, some 600 local authorities had taken out
more than 1,000 derivative contracts on about 35.5 billion euros of debt by
the end of last year, according to national Treasury data provided to the
Italian Senate Finance Commission.
The governments had unrealized losses of 1.93
billion euros on over-the-counter derivative bets placed with Italian banks
and local units of foreign banks at the end of 2008, according to data from
the Rome-based Bank of Italy, the country’s central bank.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments frauds ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
Bob Jensen's free tutorials on accounting for derivative financial
instruments ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/000index.htm
This may be a bit of a stretch, but I think that instructors teaching
managerial/cost accounting may set students thinking about the economies of
scale in milk production.
When I grew up on a farm in Iowa, virtually every small town had its own
"creamery" where milk and cream separations from each farm were picked up
locally and bottled in each of the small towns. Virtually all the small town
creameries have been defunct for years.
Here is an attention-grabbing video that could be a great beginning for study
of the production cost function components of dairy farming.
Milk: From Grass to Glass (not humor) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJRy82i8e5Q&feature=email
One operation near Chicago provides enough milk for eight million people ---
much more than is needed in the entire city of Chicago.
The methane gas from the manure provides all electric power needed in each
barn.
On the down side, think of the down side of large-scale diaries and factories
in terms of monopoly pricing and the risk of supply disruption such as when a
disease like hoof-and-mouth or mad-cow wipes out the milk supply for the entire
city of Chicago. What is the cost and technology of preventing this type of
disaster from happening. Why are we more vulnerable to terrorism in our food
production and distribution systems?
What were the advantages of small town creameries? Why did they all fail?
Without Curbing Corruption, Developing Nations Cannot Develop
Nuhu Ribadu has a good sense of humor for a guy
whose job puts his life in jeopardy. As the founding chairman of Nigeria's
Economic & Financial Crimes Commission, he led efforts to combat corruption. In
that role he was threatened, shot at, and, finally, fired. Ribadu jokes that he
was let go for doing too good a job. But even in self-imposed exile, he remains
on an anti-corruption mission. "This is the key to economic development," Ribadu
told me during the opening cocktail party at the Aspen Institute's global
leadership conference in Aspen, Colo. "The money [from Western government aid]
that's supposed to go into building the infrastructure and combating AIDS
instead goes out of the country. If you attack corruption, it's the best way to
attack poverty."
Steve Hamm, "Africa's Anti-Corruption Hero," Business Week, June 12, 2009
---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2009/tc20090612_591279.htm?link_position=link8
Deceptions, Hoaxes, and Fakery
"Open-Access Publisher Appears to Have Accepted
Fake Paper From Bogus Center," by Paul Basken,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2009 ---
Click Here
The medical-research industry is
under
growing
pressure
to improve its ethical standards. Similar pressure has extended to
peer-reviewed medical journals, after Elsevier, a publishing leader,
admitted to
publishing at least nine fake journals from 2000
to 2005.
In other words, it’s an especially bad time for a
medical journal to be duped by an author who, say, submits a fake
computer-generated research paper from a fake institution he named the
Center for Research in Applied Phrenology — or CRAP.
And yet that’s exactly what appears to have
happened.
The deception was the work of Philip M. Davis, a
doctoral student in communication at Cornell University who serves as
executive editor of the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s
Scholarly Kitchen blog.
Mr. Davis said he had concocted the plan after
receiving numerous “aggressive” unsolicited e-mail messages from Bentham
Publishing, which finances its line of 200 open-access scientific journals
by charging authors a publication fee.
Mr. Davis and the blog’s editor in chief, Kent R.
Anderson, submitted two research papers that were created by a
computer program
at MIT called SCIgen
that describes itself as generating random text
intended to “maximize amusement, rather than coherence.”
One of the papers was rejected by Bentham, and the
other — a nonsensical five-page report with footnotes and graphical charts
that purported to describe an Internet process called the “Trifling Thamyn”
— was accepted after the publisher said it had been peer-reviewed. Mr. Davis
reported that an invoice for $800 had been issued by Bentham, without any
evidence that the article was actually peer-reviewed.
The publications director at Bentham, Mahmood Alam,
told The Chronicle by e-mail that, “to the best of our knowledge, we
have not published any article from the Center for Research in Applied
Phrenology in any of our journals.” Mr. Davis said he had written to Bentham
to withdraw the paper after its publication was approved.
Bentham’s subscription manager, Pradeep Menon,
reached by telephone at the company’s headquarters in the United Arab
Emirates, said he was aware of the accusation but had no further details and
could not offer any other company official to comment.
“It’s the first of its kind because we never had
such an insinuation charged against us,” Mr. Menon said. “All of our
journals are peer-reviewed — that is 100 percent sure.”
Similar scammers have
had success in
the past, most notably the
hoax published in the journal Social Text in
1996 by Alan D. Sokal, a physicist at New York
University.
The “popular conception” that open-access
publishers rely on publication fees, meanwhile, may not even be true,
according to Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard
University. Mr. Shieber, in his blog,
The Occasional Pamphlet, said he had devised a
program to pull data out of computerized medical-journal listings and
concluded that only about 23 percent of open-access journals charge
publication fees.
Jensen Comment
Various hoax papers have been discovered in leading magazines and journals. It
would seem that perpetrators of hoaxes are liable to the extent that damages can
be proved by the publisher or the readers. Hoaxes are especially dangerous in
medical journals.
Another problem is faked portions of articles, books, and documentary movies
where the author neglects to separate fact from fiction in the writing itself.
For example, Al Gore used fictional scenes in his movie "Inconvenient Truth" ---
http://www.zimbio.com/Global+Warming+Hoax/articles/22/Al+Gore+Used+Fictional+Scenes+Inconvenient
Whether or not a journal is open access is mostly irrelevant to this particular
issue of a faked publication. It is only slightly relevant in that open access
journals that are not printed in hard copy can be created more cheaply and,
accordingly, might have less oversight by people (such as dues-paying academic
association members) who put up the money for the journal.
I always remember, while still a doctoral student, when Les Livingstone came
into my office and pointed out that The Accounting Review had just
published an article that was entirely (meaning word-for-word) plagiarized from
Management Science. The article itself was not a
hoax, but this illustrates that reputable journals with reputable referees can
be deceived.
You can read about some hoaxes at
http://www.articlesbase.com/article-tags/hoax
Both Snopes and Wikipedia have search categories for "suspect items" that
have a higher likelihood of being hoax items but reviewers are not certain about
whether or not each item is a hoax ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Suspected_hoax_articles
Wikipedia depends heavily upon readers to detect hoaxes. This is why articles on
very obscure entries that have almost no readers are more likely to be
misleading than popular readership items. Some companies pay staff to search
Wikipedia for entries containing false or misleading items about their
companies. World governments also pay workers to check Wikipedia entries.
Note that according to Snopes "Urban Legends" may
differ from "pure fiction" ---
http://www.snopes.com/info/faq.asp
Also see the Glossary at
http://www.snopes.com/info/glossary.asp
I have repeatedly warned Internet searchers to beware of items published by
individuals and organizations that may not be reputable. This is a special
problem with blogs. I seldom pass along a module from unknown individuals and
organizations. It is a bit more of a problem when a generally trustworthy source
links to an unknown individual or organization. Here I must use judgment. If a
reporter for a major newspaper or magazine links to an article by an unknown
source, I tend to trust that the reporter checked out authenticity. I'm less
trusting of blog entries even if I know the blogger. There are of course
exceptions such as when I trust the WebMD blogs or the Chronicle of
Higher Education blogs.
Bob Jensen's threads on listservs, blogs and social networks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Awesome video (via Cal Tech)….If you like Taleb’s- Fooled By Randomness
you will enjoy this talk! The speaker Leonard Mlodinow was Stephen Hawkin’s
co-author for A Brief History Of Time.
Video: The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-the-drunkards-walk-how-randomness-rules-our-lives/
Video Introduction (Via Perimeter Institute)
In ‘The Drunkard’s Walk’, acclaimed writer and
scientist Leonard Mlodinow shows us how randomness, change, and probability
reveal a tremendous amount about our daily lives, and how we misunderstand
the significance of everything from a casual conversation to a major
financial setback. As a result, successes and failures in life are often
attributed to clear and obvious cases, when in actuality they are more
profoundly influenced by chance. By showing us the true nature of chance and
revealing the psychological illusions that cause us to misjudge the world
around us, Mlodinow gives us the tools we need to make more informed
decisions.
Speaker Background (Via Perimeter Institute)
Leonard Mlodinow received his doctorate in physics
from the University of California, Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt
fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and now teaches about randomness to
future scientists at Caltech. Along the way he also wrote for the television
series MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation. His previous books
include Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to
Hyperspace, Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life,
and, with Stephen Hawking, A Briefer History of Time. He lives in South
Pasadena, California.
Video Link (click the play button) ---
Click Here
Exercising Imagination with Professor Mike Kearl
Sociology Professor Mike Kearl at Trinity University was an early pioneer in
academic Website quality and content. Each year the site gets better and better.
It is one of the most popular academic sites in the world ---
http://www.trinity.edu/~mkearl/
Thirty years
ago columnist Lewis Lapham made the following observation:
There no longer
exists a theater of ideas in which artists or philosophers can perform
the acts of the intellectual or moral imagination. In nineteenth-century
England Charles Darwin could expect On The Origin of Species to
be read by Charles Dickens as well as by Disraeli and the vicar in the
shires who collected flies and water beetles. Dickens and Disraeli and
the vicar could assume that Mr. Darwin might chance to read their own
observations. But in the United States in 1979 what novelist can expect
his work to be read by a biochemist, a Presidential candidate, or a
director of corporations; what physicist can expect his work to be
noticed, much less understood, in the New York literary salons? ("A
Juggernaut of Words," Harper's Magazine, June 1979: pp. 12-13).
Conditions have
hardly improved three decades later. Now in the supposed "Information Age"
six out of ten American households do not purchase a single book and
one-half of American adults do not read one. Forty-three years ago in 1965
when the Gallup
Organization asked young people if they read a
daily newspaper, 67 percent said yes; in 2006, according to the
NORC
General Social Survey, only 11 percent of those
18-24 answered affirmatively. And yet "they" say we are saturated with
informational overload!
I am most
interested in the potential of this cyberspace medium to inform and to
generate discourse, to enhance
information literacy, and to truly be a "theater
of ideas." This site features commentary, data analyses (hey, we've become a
"factoid" culture), occasional essays, as well as the requisite links, put
together for courses taught by myself and my colleagues.
If you do give feedback on one of the message pads
scattered across these pages and wish a reply, please include your e-mail
address.
And now for some sites to stimulate the
sociological imagination
(or, at a minimum, prepare one for
Sociology Jeopardy).
-
General sociological resources
-
Sociological theory
-
Data
resources and some useful web tools
-
Methods and statistics
-
Guide to writing a research paper
-
Exercising
the imagination: Subject-based Inquiries
-
Op-Ed
-
Search
engine for site--improved for the new millennium
June 12, 2009 reply from David Albrecht
[albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]
Two years ago, my university ordered me to take
down my web site. In a coffee shop a little while ago, I showed it to some
Visual Communications with Technology students in a local coffee shop, and
they all went: ewwwwww, too Netscapey.
Mr. Kearl's is also Netscapey, I think. I wonder if
visual style impedes usage. Does visual design style affect web site
quality?
Just a thought. It is obvious that Kearl's quality
is driven by content. I heartily approve of content.
Dave Albrecht
June 13, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi David,
Content trumps everything else! People make return trips to Website for
content, and elements extraneous to content (pictures, jokes, music,
animation, color stripes, etc.) are distractions and often become
time-delaying irritations to users. Who wants to repeatedly encounter the
same jokes? Who wants to repeatedly sit through the same animations?
Multimedia also adds greatly to storage space needed on servers such as a
Blackboard server or your own personal hard drive.
When I first started out with HyperGraphics and Toolbook files for
lecture aids (PowerPoint had not yet been invented), I filled the pages with
multimedia designed to draw attention to items on a page and even to wake
students up. Instead I found that these extraneous bells and whistles and
Mickey Mouse animations irritated students and often delayed my
presentations such as when I had to stand and wait while a cutsey animation
ran its course. There may be age factors to consider here, but my college
students were not less than five years old.
After students became honest in their critiques, I went strictly for
readable content in most cases and used multimedia only when it truly
enhanced content such as when a graphic enhances a data table or an
animation truly enhances parts of a graphic. My own Website has been
repeatedly accused of being long on endless text and short on pictures and
animations and music. That's what I intend, because the text is readable and
more importantly easy to search. Java and JavaScript modules that I once
used to a fault made content less usable.
Of course my Web pages have many, many links to videos, pictures, slide
shows, and audio, but these hot links are designed to be optional
distractions that are not forced upon students in a hurry.
Mike Kearl pretty much used the same dark coloring and other display
features that he began with 25 years ago in his first Website. I often find
the pages somewhat gloomy looking. But you have to understand that his
scholarship and research specialty is the sociology of death and dying.
Perhaps this affected his design choices.
Most of the massive content of Mike’s Website is not concerned with the
sociology of death and dying such that it might’ve been less gloomy and
distracting sometimes to simply follow my style of plain text on white or
soft pastel backgrounds. Be that as it may, the extensive content of Mike’s
Website is what draws faculty and students from virtually all academic
disciplines repeatedly to his extremely popular Website.
Content is king! It's the words that are picked up
by Web crawlers like Google and Bing.
And always think of your readers as historians.
Content often improves with age as it becomes history that has disappeared
from other sites. Website content is thus like wine that improves with age
for students seeking an understanding of context and history.
Bob Jensen
June 13, 2009 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University
[fordhadr@JMU.EDU]
Content trumps everything else! People make return trips to Website for
content, and elements extraneous to content (pictures, jokes, music,
animation, color stripes, etc.) are distractions and often become
time-delaying irritations to users. ... I found that these extraneous bells
and whistles and Mickey Mouse animations irritated students and often
delayed my presentations. ... I went strictly for readable content in most
cases and used multimedia only when it truly enhanced content such as when a
graphic enhances a data table or an animation truly enhances parts of a
graphic. ... Content is king!
To which I respond:
Bob, I've excerpted your comments to highlight what
I consider to be the crux of the matter.
I agree wholeheartedly that content is king, and
that content trumps everything else. And I agree fully that peripheral
devices *often* become distractions. But I must emphasize the point you made
subtly that this is not always the case.
Those additional "devices" (color, background, font
choice, shadowing, animations, sound, cartoons, graphics, element size,
placement, etc.) can actually become part of the content when used
correctly.
Here's the principle: Content does not have to be
restricted to "knowledge transfer". Content especially does not have to be
restricted to "readable" stuff. Content can serve other educational purposes
as well. Content can include attention-directing devices;
attention-distracting devices; attention-stimulating devices; simulations
(and stimulations) of temporal progression, chronological order, and
sequencing; illustration of relationships; illustration of change and
dynamism; and by far the most often abused and misused: variety, aesthetic,
and decorative elements that contribute ease, pleasure and enjoyment to the
learning experience ... WHEN DONE RIGHT.
I believe that is what is so often misapplied by
professors who try to use technology. Kearl's site is a prime example of
someone adding the peripheral devices but without properly incorporating
them "as content".
I think it was McLuhan who said, "the medium is the
message". You mentioned Toolbook and HyperGraphics, and, I know you are old
enough (since I am) to remember Harvard Graphics... back then, computer
animation "hadn't been invented yet", and sound cards were still in the
future. All we had was "content" in the form of bullet points and narrative
text, and rudimentary motion of the text. In my mind, we were crippled
compared to today in what CONTENT we could deliver via computer learning.
I agree with the majority that Kearl's website does
a very poor job of applying those peripheral elements. They are not combined
in an appropriate manner to achieve a pedagogical objective. To start with,
the text is too wide for comfort on today's wide-screen monitors. The
margins do not properly separate the text from the reader's vision
background. The fonts were poorly chosen compared to the background elements
and reading style. It is not clear what, if any, contribution is made by the
peripheral elements beyond their mere presence. (As you mention, there might
be a subtle objective of matching color to the gloominess of the subject
matter, but that's about all I could find...)
(Shameless advertisement: I am giving a
presentation at the AIS Educators Conference 2 weeks from now on how to
"avoid student narcolepsy" by *proper* (proper, not overdone) usage of
peripheral content-enhancement devices. My presentation addresses primarily
classroom presentations using PowerPoint, but the concepts borrow heavily
from good website design, and in general, good educational and
psychophysiological theory.)
The whole idea of our effort is student learning.
Plain and simple knowledge delivery is good, but better student learning
requires student involvement. Proper application of the peripheral devices
(animations, sound, pictures, cartoons, etc.), **> when done properly <**
has been shown to increase mental involvement and enhance learning, not only
by better illustration of the concepts and principles, and highlighting
primary points in a variety of manners, but also by motivating the student
to come back for more because it was an enjoyable experience. They paid
attention to what they should have, their attention was directed to what was
important and they also picked up on the trivial details as such. In short,
they *learned* what I wanted them to learn.
There's a right way and wrong way (and more often,
many right ways and many wrong ways) to use the tools we have today.
David Fordham
JMU
June 13, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi David,
Thank you for your informative reply.
I guess that my main conclusion is that, in spite of Web page design
flaws, Mike Kearl's Website is extremely popular with thousands of faculty
and students. This suggests that content is the main draw in spite of design
flaws.
Bob Jensen
Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
When is a "fee" tuition?
Currently, undergraduate students at California
State University campuses pay more than $3,000 per year out of pocket for
something called the "State University Fee" and another $500 in various
incidental fees, while the state contributes a bit more than $8,000 per student
per year to campus operations. By calling the $3,000 payment a State University
Fee, the Legislature is able to maintain the fiction that higher education in
California remains tuition free. But in reality, the State University Fee is a
charge for instruction, so it meets the dictionary definition of a tuition
payment.
Mark Shapiro, The Irascible Professor, January 18, 2009 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-06-18-09.htm
Jensen Comment
My daughter Lisl graduated from the University of Texas. For four years I paid
fee after fee that amounted to the same thing as Mark describes above.
California is an extreme in fee-based education, but it is certainly not unique.
Will this university be allowed to study medication reactions?
Now there's a new Humane Society University
Since the degree programs are so few in number, couldn't it have been called
a college?
Or animals, at least. The
Humane
Society University, newly
licensed as a degree-granting institution by the
District of Columbia, will begin offering undergraduate degrees this fall in
animal studies, animal policy and advocacy, and humane leadership, as well
as graduate certificates in those three areas. The university, which is a
program of the Humane Society of the United States, will offer degree
programs online and on site in D.C.
The programs are oriented
toward working adults and those looking to complete their bachelor’s
degrees; to be admitted to the undergraduate programs, students would
essentially have to have junior status, and have already completed at least
60 college credits, including general education requirements, elsewhere.
(Another
such specialized college offering instruction only in the junior and senior
years, but this one with a single major in history,
is also getting started.)
“In the animal shelter
community, a great percentage of executive directors are career changers.
And the executive directors at the local animal shelter level, a great
majority of them do not have a college degree or only have an associate
degree. So this is really trying to help professionalize that position,”
says Robert Roop, the Humane Society University’s president. In addition to
professionals already working in animal shelters or related nonprofits, the
university hopes to attract students interested in animals and animal
advocacy more generally -- “someone who works in the day and volunteers in
the evening, or someone who works in public policy who has a keen interest
in animal advocacy,” Roop says.
"We really think there is a
niche out there."
The Humane Society
University already offers non-credit professional or work force development
courses in-person and online, and has since its founding about five years
ago, Roop explains. Now that it’s licensed to grant degrees, Roop says the
university has plans to seek accreditation from the Middle States Commission
on Higher Education.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Problems this university will encounter are housing and testing animals for
research purposes. Research for the good of all animals in a species may be hard
on the particular animals being housed and studied in research labs. There's a
huge difference between petting research and heart worm disease research and
medication reaction research. But animal activists that yell and scream when
President Obama swatted a fly are going to be breathing down the back of the
Humane Society University. Insecticide research is probably totally off limits.
Russian Credit Card Fraud: 800,000 Preauthorization Checks Per Month
"An Odyssey of Fraud," by Brian Krebs, The Washington Post, June 18,
2009 ---
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/06/an_odyssey_of_fraud.html?wprss=securityfix
Andy Kordopatis is the proprietor of Odyssey Bar, a
modest watering hole in Pocatello, Idaho, a few blocks away from Idaho State
University. Most of his customers pay for their drinks with cash, but about
three times a day he receives a phone call from someone he's never served --
in most cases someone who's never even been to Idaho -- asking why their
credit or debit card has been charged a small amount by his establishment.
Kordopatis says he can usually tell what's coming
next when the caller immediately asks to speak with the manager or owner.
"That's when I start telling them that I know why
they're calling, and about the Russian hackers who are using my business,"
Kordopatis said.
The Odyssey Bar is but one of dozens of small
establishments throughout the United States seemingly picked at random by
organized cyber criminals to serve as unwitting pawns in a high-stakes game
of chess against the U.S. financial system. This daily pattern of phone
calls and complaints has been going on for more than a year now. Kordopatis
said he has talked to the company that processes his bar's credit card
payments about fixing the problem, but says they can't do anything because
he hasn't actually lost any money from the scam.
The Odyssey Bar's merchant account is being abused
by online services that cyber thieves built to help other crooks check the
balances and limits on stolen credit and debit card account numbers. In
April, I wrote about a pet store in Buffalo, N.Y., whose merchant account
was being similarly abused by another card-checking service. In that story,
I cited research on this trend by Lawrence Baldwin, a security consultant in
Alpharetta, Ga., who has been working with several financial institutions to
help infiltrate illegal card-checking services:
The services are advertised on Internet forums
that facilitate identity theft, and cater to criminals who wish to buy
large numbers of stolen credit and debit cards. Using such services, the
would-be buyers can quickly verify whether a random sampling of the
cards is still active, and -- for an additional fee -- the available
balance on each card. In most cases, the only barrier to new customers
signing up at these services is the ability to speak and read Russian,
and the ability to pay with one of several virtual currencies, such as
Webmoney.
Baldwin estimates that at least 25,000 credit
and debit cards are checked each day at three separate illegal
card-checking Web sites he is monitoring. That translates to about
800,000 cards per month or nearly 10 million cards each year.
Baldwin said the checker sites take advantage
of authentication weaknesses in the card processing system that allow
merchants to conduct so-called "pre-authorization requests," which
merchants use to place a temporary charge on the account to make sure
that the cardholder has sufficient funds to pay for the promised goods
or services.
Pre-authorization requests are quite common.
When a waiter at a restaurant swipes a customer's card and brings the
receipt to the table so the customer can add a tip, for example, that
initial charge is essentially a pre-authorization.
With these card-checking services, however, in
most cases the charge initiated by the pre-authorization check is never
consummated. As a result, unless a consumer is monitoring their accounts
online in real-time, they may never notice a pre-authorization initiated
by a card-checking site against their card number, because that query
won't show up as a charge on the customer's monthly statement.
In fact, in most cases when banks are alerted
to the card-checking activity, it is because a credit card customer is
regularly checking their online statement or has signed up with their
bank to receive e-mail alerts each time a charge is initiated against
their account.
The crooks have designed their card-checking
sites so that each check is submitted into the card processing network
using a legitimate, hijacked merchant account number combined with a
completely unrelated merchant name, Baldwin discovered.
On June 11, Kordopatis heard from Keri Tetlow, a
mother of three from the suburbs of Houston. Tetlow, who watches her
family's debit account balance like a hawk from their home computer, said
she called Odyssey Bar because she noticed a $2.77 charge from the
establishment. Tetlow said that after checking with her husband to make sure
he hadn't made the charge, she decided to wait and see if the pending charge
would clear. It never did.
But a few days later, Tetlow spotted $300 missing
from her checking account, which she noticed was due to two unauthorized
charges at a Office Depot on Broadway in New York City. So she called her
bank. After confirming neither she nor her husband had lost their debit
card, she told the bank to cancel the card.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on identity theft are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#IdentityTheft
"Survey Identifies Trends at U.S. Colleges That Appear to Undermine
Productivity of Scholars," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher
Education, June 14, 2009 ---
Click Here
A paper summarizing the researchers’ findings says
they defined scholarly productivity in terms of the number of articles
faculty members had published in refereed journals, and determined that “the
factors most associated with productivity are an inclination to research,
time devoted to research, full-professor status, and a pattern of
international collaboration in research activities.” Other factors that have
been thought to be tied to research productivity, such as the demographic
makeup of the academic work force, did not play a significant role.
In comparing the 1992 and 2007 international-survey
data, the researchers found that U.S. scholars in the latest survey were
less likely to be interested in research, relative to teaching; were
receiving less financial support for research and were less satisfied with
the quality of equipment and laboratories; were less likely to be tenured or
on the tenure track; and were slightly less likely to be involved in
international collaborations.
For all fields, the average number of refereed
journal articles produced by each researcher stood at 3.9 in 2007, down from
4.2 in 1992, the researchers’ paper says. It acknowledges, however, that
merely counting scientists’ publication of refereed journal articles might
underestimate their true productivity, in that they might be writing fewer
articles of higher quality, or turning to electronic publications or
conference presentations as their means of sharing findings with others.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in higher education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Former top executive of American International Group Inc. plundered an AIG
retirement program of billions of dollars
"AIG lawyer tells jury that Greenberg plundered retirement program after
being forced out," by Madlen Read, Newser, June 15, 2009 ---
Click Here
Also see The Washington Post's account ---
Click Here
The former top executive of American International
Group Inc. plundered an AIG retirement program of billions of dollars
because he was angry at being forced out of the company, a lawyer for AIG
told jurors Monday at the start of a civil trial.
Attorney Theodore Wells told the jury in Manhattan
that former AIG Chief Executive Officer Maurice "Hank" Greenberg improperly
took $4.3 billion in stock from the company in 2005, after he was ousted by
the company amid investigations of accounting irregularities.
"Hank Greenberg was mad. He was angry," Wells said
in U.S. District Court of the emotional state of the man who, over a
35-year-career, built AIG from a small company into the world's largest
insurance company.
Wells said that Greenberg, within weeks of being
forced out in mid-2005, gave the go-ahead for tens of millions of shares to
be sold from a trust fund. The fund was set up to provide incentive bonuses
to a select group of AIG management and highly compensated employees that
they would receive upon their retirement.
Greenberg, 84, has contended through his lawyers
that he had the right to sell the shares because they were owned by Starr
International, a privately held company he controlled.
Starr International was named after Cornelius
Vander Starr, who created a worldwide network of insurance companies in the
early 1900s.
AIG maintains that Starr and Greenberg, his protege
and successor, decided in the late 1960s to organize the various companies
under one holding company, AIG.
Starr International remained a private company and
its shareholders decided in 1970 that the amount that its shares of AIG were
worth above book value of about $110 million should be used to compensate
AIG employees, AIG has said.
The embattled insurer is trying to reclaim the
money from Starr it says was wrongly pocketed through stock sales by
Greenberg.
Bob Jensen's threads on the history of AIG fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#MutualFunds
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had the
most instances of digital piracy and other copyright infringements among
American colleges and universities in 2008 for the second year in a row,
according to a report released by Bay-TSP, a
California company that offers tracking applications for copyrighted works.
According to the company’s
annual report, MIT had
2,593 infringements of media owned by Bay-TSP’s clients. The University of
Washington and Boston University ranked second and third, with 1,888 and
1,408 infringements, respectively.
Clients of the company, whose name means “Bay-Area
Track, Security, Protect,” include motion-picture studios; software,
video-game and publishing companies; and sports and pay-per-view television
networks.
The annual report provides an analysis of data
collected using piracy-network crawling software. The company does not track
all instances of Internet-based piracy, said Jim E. Graham, a Bay-TSP
spokesman. It only monitors violations of movies, videos, TV shows, or
software that clients ask the company to follow.
Mr. Graham also said not all violations result in a
take-down notice. Clients give the company varying instructions for their
data, ranging from sending take-down notices to simply tracking how often
and by whom the material is infringed.
Although MIT ranks first
among domestic colleges and universities, it is not in the top 10 worldwide.
The University of Botswana had 9,027 infringements, followed by Sweden’s
Uppsala University, which had 8,032 infringements, according to the report.
Jeffrey I. Schiller, the information-services and
technology-network manager at MIT, said he has not
seen a copy of Bay-TSP’s report, but the
institution does not tolerate copyright infringement, nor does it receive an
unusual number of take-down notices.
“I haven’t formally counted the number of take-down
notices we’ve received, but if we get more than a few, it’s a big day,” he
said. “If we represented truly the worst-case scenario, then copyright
infringement can’t be a really big problem, because we don’t have that
much.”
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Working for Nothing Does Not Pay the Mortgage
Struggling British Airways asks 40,000 staff to work for nothing in
desperate fight for survival
British Airways boss Willie Walsh is asking his 40,000
staff to work for nothing to save the airline. The astonishing plea comes as BA
faces what Mr Walsh says is a 'fight for survival'. The company has written
directly to its 40,000 employees asking them to volunteer for up to four weeks
of unpaid work.
Ray Massey, London Telegraph, June 16, 2009 --- Click
Here
Chaos Theory ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Theory
Wow! Talk About Crossing Disciplines
"Business-School Dean Advanced From Chaos Theory to Global Marketing," by
Ruth Hammond, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 15, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i39/39peersingh.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
St. Mary's University's new business dean might
have had a career as a physicist, had her temperament been different. Her
bachelor's and master's degrees, from Allahabad University, in India, are in
physics.
"I was a pretty good physicist," said Tanuja Singh,
who has been chair of the marketing department at Northern Illinois
University's College of Business for three years. "But I'm inherently a
people person." And physics, she concluded, "is a fairly lonely field."
So "just for the heck of it," she took India's
national examination to be a bank officer and then found work with the State
Bank of India, where she became an officer of international banking in 1985.
She found herself enthralled with the import-export side of trade, and a new
pursuit was born.
Ms. Singh's international background is one of the
assets — along with being "terrifically energetic," innovative, and
change-oriented — that she will bring to San Antonio, where she will lead
St. Mary's Bill Greehey School of Business, says Charles L. Cotrell, the
university's president.
She will be the first female dean of the
86-year-old business school, which in 2005 was named for Bill Greehey, an
oil executive and alumnus who endowed it with $25-million. Part of the money
was to be used to attract top professors and students.
Ms. Singh, who turns 46 this month, says she has
been fascinated since childhood by how countries develop. So it seemed only
natural that, once she got involved in international trade, she would pursue
an M.B.A. and do so in the United States, following a path similar to those
her brother and an uncle had taken.
She ended up at Millsaps College, a small, private
institution in Jackson, Miss., where she earned her M.B.A. in 1990. A
professor there remarked on how well she worked with students and encouraged
her to get a Ph.D. That advice reinforced her own ideas about what to do
next.
"You have to know what you love," she says. "For
me, it was a big risk to jump from physics, where I was pretty good, into a
new field. So some of it is personality also — how comfortable you are with
risky situations."
In 1994 she earned a doctorate in business
administration at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Concepts she
had learned in physics made their way into her dissertation on "advertising
wearout," particularly entropy, with a little bit of chaos theory thrown in.
"I used the foundation of how entropy works in the thermodynamic world," Ms.
Singh says, "and translated it to how it should work in a cognitive world,
where we were dealing with information processing."
She analyzed "how information wears out, why people
get bored with it, overloaded with it, and how soon this information
dissipates."
The year before she finished her dissertation, she
became an assistant professor of marketing at the Florida Institute of
Technology. She returned to Illinois after a few years, to Northern Illinois
University's College of Business, where she became a tenured professor of
marketing. The business school's balance between theory and practice is what
drew her there, she says.
At Northern Illinois, Ms. Singh has brought
real-world experience into the classroom by having students work with
businesses in nearby Chicago on global-marketing strategies and learn from
Chinese business leaders who visited the campus for an international
executive-education program.
She was not looking to leave right away but was
approached by a search firm about the job at St. Mary's after being
nominated by a dean who met her at a conference for aspiring business-school
deans.
The more she learned about St. Mary's, the more
excited she grew about the prospect of working there. "It was almost as if
the position was designed with me in mind," she says. The university's
emphasis on ethics, social justice, service, and a concept known as "peace
through commerce" all appealed to her.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Brigham Young University (BYU) launched its Open CourseWare (OCW) pilot
with
six Creative Commons licensed courses
Before reading this module you may want to read about the Creative Commons
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
Creative Commons Home Page ---
http://creativecommons.org/
Creative Commons Directory of Resources ---
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators
From Canada's Creative Commons ---
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15108
It appears that David Wiley’s move to Brigham Young
University has already resulted in progress towards opening the university’s
content. Long-time pioneer and academic of open education, Wiley
reports that
BYU’s Independent Study has launched its Open
CourseWare (OCW) pilot with six Creative Commons licensed courses under
CC BY NC-SA.
“The pilot includes three university-level
courses and three high school-level courses (BYU IS offers 250
university-level courses online for credit and another 250 high
school-level courses online for credit). The courses in BYU IS OCW are
content-complete - that is, they are the full courses as delivered
online without the need of additional textbooks or other materials (only
graded assessments have been removed).”
The most interesting thing about this pilot is that
it “is part of a dissertation study to measure the impact of OCW courses on
paying enrollments.” So far, “the results are very positive - 85 of the 3500
people who visited the OCW site last month registered for for-credit
courses… if this pattern remains stable, then BYU IS OCW will be financially
self-sustainable with the ability to add and update a number of new courses
to the collection each year, indefinitely, should they so choose.” Echoing
Wiley, that is an exciting prospect. We look forward to seeing these results
develop, in addition to other inquiries into the sustainability of general
OER initiatives in the future…
BYU Independent Study ---
http://ce.byu.edu/is/site/courses/ocw/
Also see
http://ce.byu.edu/is/site/aboutus/index.cfm
University Courses
High School Courses
You may view, use, and reuse all materials in the Open CourseWare
courses. Please note that Open CourseWare courses do not provide the
opportunity to submit assessments for credit, interact with faculty, or
receive credit or a certificate upon completion. BYU Independent Study
provides these courses as a community service under a Creative Commons
license. The course materials are freely available for you to use, download,
modify and share as long as you do not sell the products you derive from
them. If you alter, transform, or build upon the courses, you may distribute
your work only using licensing terms the same as or similar to the
Creative Commons Atribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.
University Courses (includes art, accounting, chemistry, etc.)
High School Courses
Middle School Courses
Personal Enrichment Courses
Free Courses (includes such things as dating and romance)
Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing (learning materials, videos,
lectures, and entire courses) are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education
alternatives are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
Karl Marx was a vehement racist and anti-Semite
(yes, even though both his grandfathers were rabbis!) This particular quote is
not an aberration but very typical of both his and Engel's thoughts.
Free Republic, June 14, 2009 ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/news-forum/index?more=2271681
Marx-Engels Correspondence, 1862 ---
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1862/letters/62_07_30a.htm
Free Book
Ten Great Economists: From Marx to Keynes ---
http://mises.org/books/tengreateconomists_schumpeter.pdf
Daily Humor (mostly humor but not always)
Snopes also has an interesting page called Odd News that I intend to examine
daily since the items on this page are transient ---
http://www.snopes.com/daily/
George Wright says the same articles show up on fark.com, along with much
snarky commentary.
Also note What's New ---
http://www.snopes.com/info/whatsnew.asp
The Now-Dubious Hawthorne Effect and the Need for Research Replication
(something that's virtually non-existent in accounting research)
Since empirical accounting research studies are almost never replicated, I've
long contended that "accountics" farmers are more interested in their tractors
than their harvests. Accounting research is almost all form rather than
substance.
Sometimes experimental outcomes impounded for years in textbooks become
viewed as "laws" by students, professors, and consultants. One example, is the
Hawthorne Effect impounded into psychology and management textbooks for the for
more than 50 years ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_Effect
But Steven Levitt and John List, two economists at
the University of Chicago, discovered that the data had survived the decades in
two archives in Milwaukee and Boston, and decided to subject them to econometric
analysis. The Hawthorne experiments had another surprise in store for them.
Contrary to the descriptions in the literature, they found no systematic
evidence that levels of productivity in the factory rose whenever changes in
lighting were implemented.
"Light work," The Economist, June 4, 2009, Page 74 ---
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13788427
One problem is that if old experiments are not periodically verified in terms
of new analysis of old data or replications using new data, they become urban
legends in the literature.
A scientist in any serious scientific discipline,
such as genetics, would be in serious trouble if his fellow scientists were
unable to confirm or replicate his claim to have found the gene for fatness. He
would gain a reputation as being 'unreliable' and universities would be
reluctant to employ him. This self-imposed insistence on rigorous methodology is
however missing from contemporary epidemiology; indeed the most striking feature
is the insouciance with which epidemiologists announce their findings, as if
they do not expect anybody to take them seriously. It would, after all, be a
very serious matter if drinking alcohol really did cause breast cancer.
James Le Fanu ---
http://www.open2.net/truthwillout/human_genome/article/genome_fanu.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on replication are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm#Replication
If you're going to attack empirical accounting research, hit it where it
has no defenses!
- One type of accounting research is "Spade Research" and our leading
Sam Spade in recent decades was Abe Briloff when he was at Baruch College in
NYC. Abe and his students diligently poured over accounting reports and
dug up where companies and/or their auditors violated accounting standards,
rules, and professional ethics. He was not at all popular in the accounting
profession because he was so good at his work. Zeff and Granof wrote as
follows:
Floyd Norris, the chief financial
correspondent of The New York Times, titled a 2006 speech to the
American Accounting Association "Where Is the Next Abe Briloff?" Abe
Briloff is a rare academic accountant. He has devoted his career to
examining the financial statements of publicly traded companies and
censuring firms that he believes have engaged in abusive accounting
practices. Most of his work has been published in Barron's and in
several books — almost none in academic journals. An accounting gadfly
in the mold of Ralph Nader, he has criticized existing accounting
practices in a way that has not only embarrassed the miscreants but has
caused the rule-making authorities to issue new and more-rigorous
standards. As Norris correctly suggested in his talk, if the academic
community had produced more Abe Briloffs, there would have been fewer
corporate accounting meltdowns.
"Research on Accounting Should Learn From the
Past," by Michael H. Granof and Stephen A. Zeff, Chronicle of Higher
Education, March 21, 2008
- In the 1960s and 1970s leading academic accounting researchers
abandoned "Spade" work and loosely organized what might be termed an
Accounting Center for Disease Control where spading was replaced with mining
of databases using increasingly-sophisticated accountics (mathematical)
models. Leading academic accounting research journals virtually stopped
publishing anything but accountics research ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm
- In the past five decades readers of leading academic accounting
research journals had to accept on faith that there were no math errors in
the analysis. The reason is that no empirical accounting research is
ever exactly replicated and verified. In fact the leading academic
accounting research journals adopted policies against publishing
replications or even commentaries. The Accounting Review (TAR) does
technically allow commentaries, but in reality only about one appears each
decade.
- Many of the empirical research studies are rooted in privately
collected databases that are never verified for accuracy and freedom from
bias.
- On occasion empirical studies are partly verified with anecdotal
evidence. For example the excellent empirical study of Eric Lie in
Management Science on backdating of options was partly verified by court
decisions, fines, and prison sentences of some backdating executives.
However, anecdotal evidence has severe limitations since it can be cherry
picked to either validate or repudiate empirical findings at the same time.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Options_backdating
- Replication is part and parcel to the scientific method. All
important findings in the natural sciences are replicated our verified by
some rigorous approach that convinces scientists about accuracy and freedom
from bias.
- One of my most popular quotations is that "empirical
accounting farmers are more interested in their tractors than in their
harvests." When papers are presented at meetings most of the
focus is on the horsepower and driving capabilities of the tractors
(mathematical models). If the harvests were of importance to the accounting
profession, the profession would insist on replication and verification. But
the accounting profession mostly shrugs off academic accounting research as
sophisticated efforts to prove the obvious. There are few surprises in
empirical accounting research.
- Another sad part about our leading academic accounting research
journals is that they have such a poor citation record relative to our
academic brethren in finance, marketing, and management. American
Accounting Association President Judy Rayburn made citation outdomes the
centerpiece of her emotional (and failed) attempt to get leading academic
accounting research journals to accept research paradigms other than
accountics paradigms ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR.htm
- But the saddest part of all is that the Accounting Center for Disease
Control literally took over every doctoral program in the United States
(slightly excepting Central Florida University) by requiring that all
accounting doctoral graduates be econometricians or psychometricians. As
a result doctoral programs realistically require five years beyond the
masters degree. Accountants who enter these programs must spend years
learning mathematics, statistics, econometrics, and psychometrics.
Mathematicians who enter these programs must spend years learning
accounting. The bottom line is that practicing accountants who would like to
become accounting professors are turned off by having to study five years of
accountics. Each year the shortage of graduates from accounting doctoral
programs in North America becomes increasingly critical/
The American Accounting Association (AAA) has a new research report on
the future supply and demand for accounting faculty. There's a whole lot
of depressing colored graphics and white-knuckle handwringing about
anticipated shortages of new doctoral graduates and faculty aging, but
there's no solution offered ---
http://aaahq.org/temp/phd/AccountingFacultyUSCollegesUniv.pdf
Since empirical accounting research studies are almost never replicated, I've
long contended that "accountics" farmers are more interested in their tractors
than their harvests. Accounting research is almost all form rather than
substance.
June 11, 2009 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University
[fordhadr@JMU.EDU]
Bob (et al):
As my generation would have said: "right on".
One of my many vices is an interest in several
fields besides accounting. About a quarter of a century ago, I remember two
physicists at UofU (Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, if memory serves)
who published a report about cold fusion (which technically, if you read
their paper, wasn't real fusion to start with, but alas the popular press
took their usual liberty with the facts to sell stories).
F&P's experiments were replicated out the wazoo,
and interestingly enough, their results were reproduced on an intermittent
basis: sometimes the results came up, and sometimes they didn't, using the
same experimental design over and over. To this day, those who duplicated
the results believe in their findings, while those who didn't pooh-pooh the
idea.
Because the majority of attempts didn't reproduce
the results, interest in the experiment seems to have waned, lending
credence to the idea that science is something of a democracy (complete with
lobbying, wasteful spending, campaigning, shameless lying to drum up votes,
and massive corruption) after all. If too many people vote against you,
you're toast.
But back to replications: The disappointing thing
about F&P is, no one seems to be pursuing the question of WHY the
replications produced varying results. To my mind, the question of why
replications sometimes worked and sometimes didn't was an important question
worth pursuing, but (sigh) the vagaries of the "marketplace for research",
influenced so unseemly by the vitriolic criticism of the self-proclaimed
pundits of the day on the quiet majority, seem to have let the
really-important question just fade away into the abyss of oblivion.
And I believe this is one of the maladies affecting
accounting research (assuming one buys into the position that accounting
research is beset by maladies): We seem to have lost interest in pursuing
the really important questions -- ones that might end up making a difference
-- by listening to the pundits who seem to hold undue influence over the
silent majority.
David Fordham (who never really left the abyss to
start with...)
JMU
Bob Jensen's rant on the lack of replication in "accountics (pseudo
science) research" can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#Replication
Video: Something Down The Drain? Retrieve it Without a Wrench (not humor)
---
http://www.familyhack.com/2007/08/29/drain-tip/
Link forwarded by Gene and Joan
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
From Mike Kearl
Need to find out what a dollar in 1917 is worth in 2007?
Examine postwar inflation rates in transportation rates in the South? Take
advantage of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Consumer Price Indices
or EH.NET's "How Much Is That"
websites. (For British conversions from 1264 to 2002,
click here.) Speaking of
conversions, there are 8,100 conversions and calculators at
Online Conversion.com--"Convert
just about Anything to Anything else."
More data links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/data.html
"Why are young people leaving the church?" WorldNetDaily, June
14, 2009 ---
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=100324
What does the age of the Earth have to do with the
exodus of young people from American churches?
Ken Ham, known for his Answers in Genesis
creation-science ministry, says a major study he commissioned by a respected
researcher unveils for the first time in a scientific fashion the startling
reasons behind statistics that show two-thirds of young people in
evangelical churches will leave when they move into their 20s.
The study, highlighted in Ham's new book with
researcher Britt Beemer, "Already Gone: Why your kids will quit church and
what you can do to stop it," finds church youth already are "lost" in their
hearts and minds in elementary, middle and high school – not in college as
many assume.
"A lot of the research already done has been to
find out how many believe, how many support abortion, believe in the
resurrection, say they're born again," Ham told WND. "But nobody has really
ever delved into why two-thirds of young people will walk away from the
church."
Get "Already Gone: Why your kids will quit church
and what you can do to stop it"
The first-of-its-kind study by Beemer – a former
senior research analyst for the Heritage Foundation and founder in 1979 of
the American Research Group – included 20,000 phone calls and detailed
surveys of 1,000 20 to 29 year olds who used to attend evangelical churches
on a regular basis.
The survey found, much to Ham's surprise, a "Sunday
School syndrome," indicating children who faithfully attend Bible classes in
their church over the years actually are more likely to question the
authority of Scripture.
"This is a brutal wake-up call for the church,
showing how our programs and our approaches to Christian education are
failing dismally," Ham writes in the book.
Among the survey findings, regular participants in
Sunday School are more likely to:
- Leave the church
- Believe that the Bible is less true
- Defend the legality of abortion and
same-sex marriage
- Defend premarital sex The book explores a
number of reasons for the findings, but Ham sees one overarching
problem that is related to how churches and parents have taught
youth to understand the Genesis account of creation.
Ham – who believes in a literal six-day creation
that happened 6,000 to 10,000 years ago – says the church opened a door for
the exodus of youth, beginning in the 19th Century, when it began teaching
that "the age of the Earth is not an issue as long as you trust in Jesus and
believe in the resurrection and the Gospel accounts."
Ken Ham: "What you see in the Bible is that
when there is compromise in one generation, and it's not dealt with, you
usually notice it to a greater extent in the next generation," Ham told WND.
In previous generations, young people could live
with this inconsistency, he said, but with an increasingly secular and
atheistic public education system – where some 90 percent of church-going
youth are trained – today's youth find it hard to see a connection between
what they are taught in church and what they learn at school.
"Because of the way in which they've been
educated," Ham said, teens come to believe "that what they are taught in
school is reality, but the church teaches stories and morality and
relationship. Bible teaching is not real in the sense of real history."
Now, as parents or leaders tell youth they can
"continue to believe in evolution, millions of years," Ham said, young
people are starting to see, 'Well, I can then believe what I'm taught at
school – but school has nothing to do with God.'"
The key issue is that this doubt about the Bible's
account of origins causes youth to doubt the authority of Scripture, he
said.
"Salvation is not conditioned on what you believe
about the age of the Earth and the six days of creation," Ham said. "There
are many who believe in millions of years and are Christians."
But the Genesis issue does matter, he contends,
"because salvation does rise or fall on the authority of Scripture. The
message of the Gospel comes from these words of Scripture."
When that Bible is undermined, he explained,
everything it teaches is in doubt.
Ham's new book shows how young people can be given
"answers to help them understand you can really believe God's word, that it
"connects to reality and it's really a book of history."
Helping young people makes sense of reports such as
the claim last month of the discovery of a "missing link" proving Darwin's
theory of evolution is Ham's specialty.
In a May 19 interview with WND, he pointed to a
line in the scientific report about the discovery that countered the
researchers' bold claims to media.
The fossil's species "could represent a stem group
from which later anthropoid primates evolved [the line leading to humans],"
states the report, published in the online journal Public Library of
Science, "but we are not advocating this here."
The London Guardian newspaper also reported that
scientific reviewers of the research asked that others "tone down" claims
that the fossil was on the human evolutionary line.
"The reviewers said we don't know this is a missing
link, and they asked the people who wrote [the newspaper reports] to tone it
down," Ham told WND, "and yet we have this media hype claiming this is it,
this is the missing link."
We hang the petty thieves and
appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop
Congress is our only native criminal class.
Mark Twain ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
"Dodd's Irish Luck: The Senator Sure Knows How to Pick an Investment,"
The Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124545642440632999.html
Irish property prices have plummeted since
2002. But a "cottage" in County Galway owned by Conn, ecticut Senator Chris
Dodd has tripled in value during the same period, according to a financial
disclosure form filed by the Senator this month.
There are two possible explanations for
this remarkable turn of fortune. Maybe Mr. Dodd is luckier than a
leprechaun. Or could it be that he paid well below the market price when he
bought out a co-owner in 2002 and had undervalued the property accordingly?
If it's the latter, then Mr. Dodd received a "gift," in IRS parlance, and
should have declared it on his financial disclosure form that year. He did
not. Oh, and by the way, the seller at that low, low price has been the
business partner of a man for whom Mr. Dodd lobbied to receive a
Presidential pardon.
It's also been nearly a year since a
former loan officer at Countrywide Financial charged that the mortgage
lender had classified Mr. Dodd as a "very important person" (a.k.a., a
"friend of Angelo" Mozilo, Countrywide's then-CEO). As such, Robert Feinberg
said, Mr. Dodd received -- and knew he'd received -- preferential rates and
fees on two mortgages he and his wife refinanced in 2003. As a power on the
Senate Banking Committee, he also knew this was a conflict of interest. This
was the era when Countrywide originated and then sold to Fannie Mae high
volumes of subprime loans.
The SEC charged Mr. Mozilo with fraud and
insider trading earlier this month, and the Los Angeles Times reported in
May that there is an FBI investigation which "includes a probe of
[Countrywide's] role in an influence-peddling scandal involving" Mr. Dodd.
The Senate Ethics Committee won't comment on its own investigation of almost
a year.
Mr. Dodd denies receiving any special
treatment, and nearly a year ago he promised to release the Countrywide
mortgage documents and clear up the matter. We are still waiting, though he
did attempt to placate the Connecticut press with a peek-a-boo release of a
few select documents and a review by his own lawyers in February.
Now the Irish cottage on 10 scenic acres
is bringing more trouble. At the start of the Irish real estate boom in
1994, Mr. Dodd bought the property with William Kessinger for $160,000. Mr.
Kessinger has been a business partner of Edward Downe, who is a longtime
friend of Mr. Dodd's. In 1986 Messrs. Dodd and Downe owned a condominium
together in Washington. In 1993 Mr. Downe pleaded guilty to insider trading
and securities fraud and in 2001, as Bill Clinton was preparing to leave the
White House, Mr. Dodd successfully lobbied to get his friend a pardon.
The following year, 2002, Mr. Dodd bought
out Mr. Kessinger's two-thirds share in the house and became the full owner.
Mr. Dodd reported to the Irish government that he paid Mr. Kessinger
$122,351, and Mr. Dodd says that a bank appraisal that same year valued the
property at $190,000. From 2002 to 2007 Mr. Dodd reported its worth at
between $100,001 and $250,000 on his annual Senate financial disclosure
form.
But Hartford Courant columnist Kevin
Rennie began digging this year into the mismatch between what Mr. Dodd paid
to Mr. Downe's business partner to become a full owner and what the property
in Ireland was likely worth in 2002 amid the Irish land boom. Last week,
when Mr. Dodd filed his annual financial disclosure form, it included a new
appraisal from the same appraiser putting the current value of the house at
$658,000.
In an effort to explain the gain despite
the fact that the Irish housing market has since gone south, a spokesman for
the Senator said that "The value of the cottage, or of Irish real estate
generally, isn't something that the Dodds have thought much about." However,
according to Galway County records, Mr. Dodd was so uninterested in the
value of those 10 acres that he tried to subdivide the property in 1998 and
put up another house. No doubt because he had no idea what it was, or would
be, worth.
The Senate's financial disclosure
forms are supposed to be a tool of honest government, and former Senator Ted
Stevens was indicted for allegedly false disclosures. Mr. Dodd's miraculous
property reappraisal is further grist for Senate and Justice investigators
-- and especially for voters in 2010.
Bob Jensen's on how the most criminal class writes the laws are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#Lawmakers
Education Tutorials
Creative Commons
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
Creative Commons Home Page ---
http://creativecommons.org/
Creative Commons Directory of Resources ---
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators
Creative Commons Free Video ---
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
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
Why Researchers Should Always Check for Outliers, and What To Do About Them
---
http://gearybehaviourcenter.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-researchers-should-always-check-for.html
Mike Kearl's Website ---
http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/
Great Minds in Sociology ---
http://www.sociosite.net/topics/sociologists.php
From Mike Kearl
Need to find out what a dollar in 1917 is worth in 2007?
Examine postwar inflation rates in transportation rates in the South? Take
advantage of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Consumer Price Indices
or EH.NET's "How Much Is That"
websites. (For British conversions from 1264 to 2002,
click here.) Speaking of
conversions, there are 8,100 conversions and calculators at
Online Conversion.com--"Convert
just about Anything to Anything else."
More data links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/data.html
"The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years: Mr. Luce's
mag does satanism, porn, crack, Pokemon, and more!" by Jeff Winkler and Radley
Balko, Reason Magazine, June 10, 2009 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/134038.html
Karl Marx was a vehement racist and anti-Semite
(yes, even though both his grandfathers were rabbis!) This particular quote is
not an aberration but very typical of both his and Engel's thoughts.
Free Republic, June 14, 2009 ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/news-forum/index?more=2271681
Marx-Engels Correspondence, 1862 ---
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1862/letters/62_07_30a.htm
Free Book
Ten Great Economists: From Marx to Keynes ---
http://mises.org/books/tengreateconomists_schumpeter.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Law and Legal Studies
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Why Researchers Should Always Check for Outliers, and What To Do About Them
---
http://gearybehaviourcenter.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-researchers-should-always-check-for.html
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
Art and Art History ---
http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/arthist.html
Mike Kearl's Website ---
http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/
Great Minds in Sociology ---
http://www.sociosite.net/topics/sociologists.php
"The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years: Mr. Luce's
mag does satanism, porn, crack, Pokemon, and more!" by Jeff Winkler and Radley
Balko, Reason Magazine, June 10, 2009 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/134038.html
Karl Marx was a vehement racist and anti-Semite
(yes, even though both his grandfathers were rabbis!) This particular quote is
not an aberration but very typical of both his and Engel's thoughts.
Free Republic, June 14, 2009 ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/news-forum/index?more=2271681
Marx-Engels Correspondence, 1862 ---
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1862/letters/62_07_30a.htm
Free Book
Ten Great Economists: From Marx to Keynes ---
http://mises.org/books/tengreateconomists_schumpeter.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
Naxos Classical
Music and Music Education Site ---
http://naxos.com/education/links_other.asp
Cliburn Competition (Piano) Awards Two Gold Medals (listen to
the two gold medal winners) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104883567
Mozart's 'Don
Giovanni' (Houston Grand Opera's terrific full performance) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15828636
Tchaikovsky's 'The
Queen of Spades' From the Vienna State Opera (Act 1) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17818105
A
Sampling of Stormy Classical Music ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4776354
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/
June 12,
2009
June
14, 2009
June 15,
2009
June 17,
2009
June 18,
2009 ---
June 22,
2009
"How Safeway Is Cutting Health-Care Costs," by Steven A. Burd, The
Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124476804026308603.html
Oprah Winfrey's Dangerous Cosmetic and Medical Advice
Newsweek Magazine claims that Oprah has intentionally or
unknowingly peddled over the years. She refused to cooperated with the
authors of the article below.
"Crazy Talk: Wish Away Cancer, Eradicate Autism, Turn Back the Clock,
Cure Menopause, Harness Positive Energy, Erase Wrinkles, Banish Obesity,
etc." by Weston Kosova and Pat Wingert, Newsweek Magazine Cover Story, June
8, 2009, pp. 55-61 ---
http://www.newsweek.com/id/200025
Note that the title in the printed copies of Newsweek differs
slightly in the electronic version.
Before reading the article below, you may want to read about Asperger's
Syndrome at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger%27s_Syndrome
"Higher Education and Asperger's Syndrome," by Jennifer Lynn Hughes,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 26, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i40/40a02701.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
Two years ago, one of my students came to my office
and told me that she wanted to major in psychology. It was her second try at
Agnes Scott College, having dropped out a decade earlier. During that time
she was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, and she was back to try again,
armed with knowledge about her diagnosis.
This time she's making it because she's getting the
help she needs.
Asperger's syndrome, first listed in the American
Psychiatric Association's manual of mental disorders in 1994, affects two to
six of every 1,000 Americans, according to the National Institutes of
Health. People who have the disorder often have social difficulties, verbal
and nonverbal communication problems, and repetitive and restricted
activities. Students with Asperger's are often seen as eccentric or odd, but
many have a normal or higher-than-average IQ, as well as an exceptional
talent in one specific area — traits that make them likely to want to attend
college. For such students, however, college presents significant challenges
related to adjustment, organization, and social interaction. They often
experience sensory overload and misunderstandings because of their overly
literal thinking.
The Americans With Disabilities Act is clear that
colleges must make reasonable accommodations for students with Asperger's if
those students request them. But the law doesn't define "reasonable
accommodations," and campus disability offices vary in what they offer. They
are having to learn as they go, because unfortunately there is little
published literature about how to help, and what information does exist is
not presented in a comprehensive list. The most common accommodations that
disability offices use include additional time on exams, alternative exam
locations, tutoring, or mentors. But much more can and should be done.
To start with, several weeks before orientation,
residence-life staff members should give students with Asperger's a schedule
of activities for the first week of college and an overview of what to
expect. While such schedules are of course helpful for all students, they
are especially so for those with Asperger's, as they can have difficulty
adjusting to change.
Some experts argue that students with Asperger's
should live at home during the first year of college, but if that is not
possible or the student chooses not to, a single room might be advisable. A
quiet dormitory room can provide a safe space. Also, dining halls can be a
challenge because of sensory overload, so students with Asperger's often
skip meals if not given alternatives, such as residence halls with kitchens.
During orientation, it is especially helpful for
students to get a tour of the campus that includes the bookstore, the
tutoring center, and the public-safety, disability, and counseling offices.
Again, while such tours are helpful for most students, those with Asperger's
may need them even more because they often are not skilled at finding or
taking advantage of resources. They often don't know where to go for help,
so the disability office should have information on the college Web site,
with a contact person specified.
Students with Asperger's should be encouraged by
their families to register with the disability office. Disability staff
members can be valuable sources of academic advice and support. They can
help students set up time-management systems, which are especially
beneficial because students with Asperger's often have problems knowing how
much time it takes to accomplish tasks (many students can benefit, for
example, from programming their cellphones with timers and reminder
messages). Staff members should encourage students with Asperger's to take
breaks between classes and to assume a lighter course load in the first
year. Finally, staff members should continue to keep in contact throughout
the school year, all the while watching for depression, anxiety, or eating
disorders — and recommend counseling if needed.
Professors, if they know of a student's diagnosis,
can also be a tremendous help. They should be aware, for example, that
students with Asperger's usually have strong rote memory skills but can get
fixated on details and be unable to see the big picture. Students with
Asperger's also often display classroom behaviors that may seem
disrespectful. However, if a professor knows that a student is, for example,
showing poor eye contact because he or she finds it distracting to look at
people and listen or think at the same time, the professor might not
misinterpret such behavior as rudeness or inattention.
Students with Asperger's also can have problems
interacting with others because of their inability to pick up on social and
emotional cues. For example, they may interrupt others to change the topic
of conversation to one that they prefer to talk about. Professors can help
monitor classroom interactions and smooth over such interruptions (while
making sure not to reveal a student's diagnosis, of course).
Faculty members can help students with Asperger's
succeed in many other ways if they:
Give clear instructions on assignments, including
deadlines.
Provide organization and structure to lectures by
summarizing important points from the prior class, stating the key
information to be covered that day at the beginning of each lecture, and
summarizing main ideas at the end of class.
Ensure that some visual learning is included in
their courses.
Share PowerPoint slides with students with
Asperger's before class.
Ensure that student work groups include students
with Asperger's, even if that means assigning the groups.
Allow students with Asperger's to send assignments
by e-mail so they do not lose or forget them.
Help them break down assignments into manageable
parts.
Encourage them to use computers to type assignments
and even to take exams, as they usually have poor handwriting.
Assign peer tutors to clarify assignments and
supplement notes.
Encourage students with Asperger's to seek help at
the writing center, use note-takers assigned by the disability office, work
on study questions, attend review sessions, and write papers without
original sources at hand to avoid inadvertent plagiarism.
Even if only a few staff and faculty members put
some of these strategies in place, students with Asperger's can greatly
benefit. By being proactive, we can help prevent them from getting too
frustrated, which can increase their retention and graduation rates. The
more educated and aware a campus is about the needs of students with
Asperger's, the better their chances are of succeeding in college.
Jennifer Lynn Hughes is an associate professor of psychology and vice
chair of the psychology department at Agnes Scott College.
June 23, 2009 reply from Linda A Kidwell, University of Wyoming
[lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]
I have a girl in my scout troop with Asperger's,
and much of this article is spot-on. Her mother tells me that many people we
used to perceive as nerdy computer-geek types were likely people with this
syndrome. Many are drawn to computer science because of its high level of
technical detail and the lack of a high level of social interaction. Many
with Asperger's, according to the mom, are fascinated with the minute
details and will talk endlessly about them but demonstrate complete lack of
interest in topics of interest to others -- I have certainly observed this
in her case. Accounting is unlikely to be as appealing in its modern form
because of the high level of social engagement required, as opposed to the
stereotypical green eyeshades days.
This thread has also reminded me of my experience
with a hearing-impaired student a few years back. I made relatively minor
modifications for her, such as making sure I faced the class when I spoke
and assigning her to a group with her friends. I usually break up cliques,
but I knew that her friends understood how to work effectively and
inclusively with her whereas others might get impatient with repeating
themselves, etc. What I didn't expect was that this made me an exceptional
professor for her. I got invited to speak to faculty groups about working
with the deaf and hearing impaired, honored for my efforts, etc. I just
thought I was doing my job! But apparently, sadly, many faculty are not so
reasonable about making adjustments. Students with Asperger's are likely to
be much more high-need, in some courses especially, so they must have a
pretty tough go of it.
Linda K.
June 24, 2009 reply from Rowena Rayner
[r.rayner@QUT.EDU.AU]
Hi Linda,
Thank you for sharing your story. You are right,
people with a hearing loss do not want to be treated any differently from
other people though just understanding and considering their circumstances
and their requirements to adapt to their environment is important. (A
hearing loss has nothing to do with a person's intelligence.) Giving this
consideration, you will always be an exceptional professor.
Rowena R (A student with a hearing loss.)
Bob Jensen's threads on education technologies for special needs students ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped
You can read some of Linda Kidwell's earlier messages about teaching
hearing-impaired students at the above link.
Hide and Sing
"Hidden genitalia in female water striders makes males 'sing',"
PhysOrg, June 11, 2009 ---
http://www.physorg.com/news163938148.html
10 Ways You Know You're Married to a Geek Dad ---
Click Here
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/06/top-10-ways-you-know-you%E2%80%99re-married-to-a-geekdad/
1. You spend your honeymoon at a theme park.
(Sadly, Legoland wasn’t built then…)
2. You never know when you’ll walk into the dining
room to find the table covered with a computer broken down into all its
component parts.
3. He installs stilts under the legs of your bed so
his comic book boxes can fit underneath.
4. He keeps his spare change in a Miss Piggy bank (with
a coin slot where her cleavage would be).
5. The ornaments on your Christmas tree consist of
Romulan Warbirds, shuttlecraft, and Borg cubes.
6. He asks you to dress up as Catwoman for
Halloween. (Sorry, no photo of that one!)
7. He’ll patiently spend an hour building a tower
for your four-year-old Superman to break down – and then comfort him when it
collapses prematurely.
8. He spent more for his bicycles (and each of the
kids’ bicycles) than for some of the cars you’ve owned.
9. Your kids’ college fund consists of a trunkful
of first issues of his favorite comic books.
10. He’ll sit down with the kids and read through
the trunkful of first issues, college fund be damned. (Well, maybe not
Watchmen #1.)
"Fox steals more than 100 shoes," Reuters, June 12, 2009 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090612/od_nm/us_germany_fox
Jensen Comment
What this article fails to mention is that the fox was under contract from
Fergie who says her 500 pairs of shoes just are not enough ---
Click Here
Forwarded by Paula
These were posted on an
Australian Tourism Website and the answers are the actual responses by the
website officials, who obviously have a great sense of humour.
__________________________________________________
Q: Does it ever get windy in
Australia ? I have
never seen it rain on TV, how do the plants grow? (UK ).
A: We import all plants fully grown and then just sit around watching them die.
__________________________________________________
Q: Will I be able to see kangaroos in the street? ( USA )
A: Depends how much you've been drinking.
__________________________________________________
Q: I want to walk from Perth to Sydney - can I follow the railroad tracks? (Sweden)
A: Sure, it's only three thousand miles, take lots of water.
__________________________________________________
Q: Are there any ATMs (cash machines) in Australia ? Can you send me a list of
them in
Brisbane, Cairns,
Townsville and HerveyBay? ( UK )
A: What did your last slave die of?
__________________________________________________
Q: Can you give me some information about hippo racing in Australia ? ( USA)
A: A-fri-ca is the big triangle shaped continent south of
Europe. Aus-tra-lia
is that big island in the middle of the Pacific which does not.... oh forget it.
Sure, the hippo racing is every Tuesday night in Kings Cross. Come naked.
__________________________________________________
Q: Which direction is North in Australia? ( USA )
A: Face south and then turn 180 degrees. Contact us when you get here and we'll
send the rest of the directions.
_________________________________________________
Q: Can I bring cutlery into Australia ? ( UK )
A: Why? Just use your fingers like we do.
__________________________________________________
Q: Can you send me the Vienna Boys' Choir schedule? ( USA )
A: Aus-tri-a is that quaint little country bordering Ger-man-y, which is…oh
forget it. Sure, the
Vienna Boys Choir
plays every Tuesday night in Kings Cross, straight after the hippo races. Come
naked.
__________________________________________________
Q: Can I wear high heels in Australia? ( UK )
A: You are a British politician, right?
____________________________ ______________________
Q: Are there supermarkets in Sydney and is milk available all year round?
(Germany)
A: No, we are a peaceful civilization of
vegan hunter/gatherers. Milk is
illegal.
__________________________________________________
Q: Please send a list of all
doctors in Australia who can Dispense
rattlesnake serum. (USA)
A: Rattlesnakes live in A-meri-ca which is where YOU come from. All Australian
snakes are perfectly harmless, can be safely handled and make good pets.
__________________________________________________
Q: I have a question about a famous animal in Australia, but I forget its name.
It's a kind of bear and lives in trees. (USA )
A: It's called a Drop Bear. They are so called because they drop out of Gum
trees and eat the brains of anyone walking underneath them. You can scare them
off by spraying yourself with human urine before you go out walking.
__________________________________________________
Q: I have developed a new product that is the fountain of youth. Can you tell
me where I can sell it in Australia? (USA )
A: Anywhere significant numbers of Americans gather.
__________________________________________________
Q: Can you tell me the regions in
Tasmania where the
female population is smaller than the male population? (Italy )
A: Yes, gay night clubs.
__________________________________________________
Q: Do you celebrate
Christmas in Australia? (France )
A: Only at Christmas.
__________________________________________________
Q: I was in Australia in 1969 on R+R, and I want to contact the Girl I dated
while I was staying in
Kings Cross. Can
you help? (USA )
A: Yes, and you will still have to pay her by the hour.
__________________________________________________
Q: Will I be able to speak English most places I go? ( USA )
A: Yes, but you'll have to learn it first.
The 10 Dumbest Tech Products So Far ---
http://www.pcworld.com/article/165546/the_10_dumbest_tech_products_so_far.html
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
The Master List of Free
Online College Courses ---
http://universitiesandcolleges.org/
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