Tidbits on July 14, 2009
Bob Jensen

Another sunrise in the White Mountains
Honestly, I did not touch up any of the pictures shown below in any way
except for the final picture below where I added "Thanks Dad"

This summer we've had more rain and less sun than usual.
We keep waiting for summer, but a temperature range of 45-65 doesn't much feel like summer.
On some afternoons our beautiful mornings can change to something like this.

Quite often our cottage is above the clouds and the rain

Although I really don't take the time to golf, I do live on a mountain golf course.

Here are some of the ducks that live on the water hazard in front of the first green.

The rains bring on lovely flowers.

Five years ago I bought an air conditioner when we bought the cottage.
I think we've turned it on less than three days each summer and one time this summer.
I may make a planter out of the compressor you can see below.

 

The Stories Behind Names of Flowers --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124657689923189159.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
For pictures to go with the names see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower

After getting $4,500 for my 21-year old "clunker" (maybe and maybe not) and plus annual $1,200 economicstimulus payments, I'm ready to be stimulated, economically speaking, yet another time. Keep taxpayer dough showering over me up here in the White Mountains ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/MonaCharen/2009/07/10/help_they_are_talking_about_a_new_stimulus!

Aw Shucks!
Few Economists Favor More Stimulus --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124708099206913393.html#mod=todays_us_page_one
Jensen Comment
The good news is that economic sense never gets in the way of the spendthrift U.S. Congress.

Seriously I have a 21-year old Cadillac Deville that I inherited from my father about ten years ago. It's a great car --- nothing ever goes wrong as long as I buy good tires and a new battery now and then. But it is, after all, 21 years old and has an EPA fuel mileage rating of 18 that's the number given to the car for both town and highway mileage combined. Now if I want the $4,500 in Obama's "Cash-for Clunker" deal I have to trade the Cad for a new car with a rating of 28, which means I'm limited to tiny cars that I can lift off the ground with one arm. Buying a heavier hybrid makes little sense since we put on less than 5,000 miles per year on both cars. But with the blizzards up in these mountains we really need an all-wheel drive vehicle.

If I want the $3,500 Cash-for-Clunker deal the new car must have a rating of 23-27 which gets me a new car that I can only lift off the ground with two arms. Actually the Subaru Forrester or Outback cars I might be happy with have ratings of 22, but that means $0 for my "clunker" (which in no way is a clunker). So I may just keep the heavy Cad for a lifetime of comfortable driving in the summer (it sits in my barn in the winter and is replaced by my 1999 Jeep Grand Cherokee for snow driving).

Great Video of an 89-Year Old Woman
My 21-year old Cad barely has 80,000 miles to date. The woman in this video drove the same Mercury for over 540,000 trouble-free miles over 45 years of her life provides evidence that it is possible to drive an American-made car with the original drive train for a lifetime --- http://growingbolder.com/media/technology/vehicles/romancing-the-road-259598.html

Sadly, President Obama has committed taxpayer dollars to guarantee the lifetime (up to 120 years) drive train (engine, transmission, etc.) of all new Chrysler cars and zero dollars to guarantee a single part of any Ford Motor Company vehicle. I waiting to see if he extends this 120-year warranty to Italian cars that will now carry a Chrysler boilerplate.

If Maxwell had a lifetime powertrain warranty on the car that Jack Benny purchased, he undoubtedly would have driven that Maxwell right up to the day he died --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-z7t5Fkg3o

A picture of a Maxwell automobile like Jack owned is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_automobile

Mel Blanc's classic routine --- Click Here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9s8U0O0XPE&feature=PlayList&p=3C493293CF8D2819&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=36

In the 1970s, K-Mart offered an insane warranty that would replace a battery with no replacement cost for as long as you owned the car. Little did K-Mart realize that people like me drive cars for 20 or 30 years. I think I had eight totally free battery replacements. Once I even wore a Jack Benny nametag into the K-mart service center. They did seem to appreciate my humor.

If Plymouth had a given me a lifetime powertrain warranty on by 1970 stationwagon, I would still be driving a 1970 Plymouth stationwagon with new fenders, doors, seats, radiator, muffler, exhaust pipes, and of course a new battery from K-Mart (those lifetime battery warranties are still good).

Alas, in 1998 my Plymouth stationwagon transmission failed (the car would only go in reverse). At that time I decided that replacing this component of the powertrain did not meet the benefit-cost test without having a lifetime powertrain warranty from Plymouth. The saddest part was having to give up the lifetime battery replacement from K-Mart.

Bob Jensen

Cash for Clunkers Fuel Economy Guidelines --http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/cars.shtml 

Magnificent
The Farmers by Artist Robert Duncan (Slide Show) --- Click Here 
After it loads hit the arrow buttons!

Life is Beautiful --- http://www.greatdanepromilitary.com/Life/index.htm

 

 

Tidbits on July 14, 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

Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google --- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines

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

Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google --- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines
Bob Jensen's search helpers --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
Education Technology Search --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Distance Education Search --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm
Search for Listservs, Blogs, and Social Networks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.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/

"Microsoft Office to Go Online for Free," Fortune, July 13, 2009 --- Click Here
Also see http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/23838/?nlid=2174
This will not be the full-featured version of Office that you can purchase, but it will compete head on with Google Office.
Free Alternatives to/for MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#MSofficeAlternatives
Also see http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/productivity/0,1000001108,39674807,00.htm

Unfortunately none of the free alternatives to MS Office will have all the new and supposedly wonderful features of the 2010 Version of MS Office
Richard Campbell forwarded this link describing the new features to look forward to with the MS Office 2010 --- http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10284013-12.html?tag=smallC

 


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/ )

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

Inspiration:  Games Versus Teachers
"Creator of 'The Sims' Talks Educational Gaming," Chronicle of Higher Education, July 14, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/media/video/v55/i41.5/wright/?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Introduction to (video) Game Design 2009 --- http://pod.gscept.com/intro2gd2009.xml
Bob Jensen's threads on networked learning simulations --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Simulation
Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment and learning games --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Bob Jensen's threads on virtual worlds in education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife

Video:  We Are the World --- Click Here

Video:  Investing for Inflation --- http://www.simoleonsense.com/janet-tavakoli-author-of-dear-mr-buffett-on-investing-for-inflation/

Historical Thinking Matters --- http://historicalthinkingmatters.org/

The Simpsons' cartoon version of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead --- http://tinyurl.com/pu89ca

Video: 3 Ways The Brain Creates Meaning --- http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-3-ways-the-brain-creates-meaning/

PBS creates a library of digital resources for free use in schools ---
http://thejournal.com/articles/2009/07/08/pbs-creates-library-of-digital-resources-targeted-to-classroom-use.aspx

Evian Roller Babies (fun and fancy free) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PHnRIn74Ag&feature=yva-video-display
In some ways this video makes you not trust much of what your eyes see in moving pictures.

Comedy Video: Warren Buffett & The Nervous Nellie ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/comedy-video-warren-buffett-the-nervous-nellie/

P.J. O'Rourke is a 21st-century H.L. Mencken-a libertarian satirist and quote-machine who's deeply suspicious of most any office-holder ("Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit") ---
http://reason.com/blog/show/134561.html

CNN Video: Former Secretary of State Colin Powell tells CNN's John King that he's concerned about President Obama's spending.--- http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/07/03/colin_powell_concerned_with_obamas_spending.html
Also see http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/07/03/state-of-the-union-im-concerned-about-obamas-agenda-says-powell/

Western Soundscape Archive --- http://westernsoundscape.org/


Free music downloads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Video:  We Are the World --- Click Here

Mountain Stage --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92133820

Tanya Tucker: Living In A Country Song --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106474479

Yolanda Kondonassis: Impressions Of The Harp --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105927495

Konstantin Preobrezhensky - Author, describes his life as a former Lt. Colonel in the KGB who worked before, during, and after the fall of the Soviet Union. In his book, he describes Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), Russia and the Press, and his personal experiences. This is the first in a series of extraordinary video interviews with former KGB officer Konstantin Preobrezhensky ---
http://nocompromisemedia.com/2009/07/01/no-compromise-with-putins-russia/

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

Magnificent
The Farmers by Artist Robert Duncan (Slide Show) --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Farmers.pps

John Jacob Omenhausser Civil War Sketchbook --- http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/record.jsp?pid=umd:50498 

Lianhuanhua: Picture Storybook --- http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/storybook/index.php?c=1

The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960
http://repository.library.northwestern.edu/winterton/

Aluka (art history in Africa) --- http://www.aluka.org/

SFMOMA: Kerry James Marshall [African-American Art]  --- http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/interactive_features/79 

Boeing unveils first Australian Super Hornet --- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2289494/posts

The Day President Obama Bottomed Out --- Click Here
But wait! The video puts it all in a different context --- Click Here
It's all right since we forgave President Carter for lusting in his heart (but not his burka) --- Click Here

From a Special Edition of the Scout Report via Email on July 2, 2009

Best of 2008-2009
- Smithsonian's History Explorer
- Academic Earth
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
- National Science Foundation: Discoveries
- The Mannahatta Project
- The Great Issues Forum [iTunes, RealPlayer]
- Philadelphia Architects and Buildings
- Reclaiming the Everglades: South Florida's Natural History, 1884-1934
- LabCAST: The MIT Media Lab Video Podcast
- Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice

 

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

About 800 pages of the world's oldest surviving Christian Bible have been pieced together and published on the Internet for the first time, experts in Britain said Monday --- http://www.physorg.com/news166106367.html

Poets House --- http://www.poetshouse.org/ 

From Harvard University
Open Collections Programs: Expeditions and Discoveries --- http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/expeditions/

The State University of New York Digital Repository --- http://dspace.sunyconnect.suny.edu/

Libraries to the Rescue --- http://www.imls.gov/resources/podcasts_Jun09.shtm

Institute of Museum and Library Services: Primary Source http://www.imls.gov/news/source.shtm

Random House Modern Library's 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century --- http://www.listsofbests.com/list/17

Searchable Bible Online --- http://www.biblegateway.com/ 

Quran online --- http://www.quranexplorer.com/

Complete Multimedia Bible w/ James Earl Jones --- Click Here

MP3 Quaran --- http://www.quranonline.net/

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




"Microsoft Office to Go Online for Free," Fortune, July 13, 2009 --- Click Here
Also see http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/23838/?nlid=2174
This will not be the full-featured version of Office that you can purchase, but it will compete head on with Google Office.
Free Alternatives to/for MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#MSofficeAlternatives
Also see http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/productivity/0,1000001108,39674807,00.htm

Unfortunately none of the free alternatives to MS Office will have all the new and supposedly wonderful features of the 2010 Version of MS Office
Richard Campbell forwarded this link describing the new features to look forward to with the MS Office 2010 --- http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10284013-12.html?tag=smallC
Also see http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/productivity/0,1000001108,39674807,00.htm

Perspectives of the U.S. Congress
The U.S. Congress held a moment of silence for the tragedy of Michael Jackson,
something it has never done for a single recipient of the Medal of Honor

False Promises
If the Senate doesn't pass a bill to cut global warming, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer says, there will be dire results: droughts, floods, fires, loss of species, damage to agriculture, worsening air pollution and more. She says there's a huge upside, however, if the Senate does act: millions of clean-energy
(union) jobs, reduced reliance on foreign oil and less pollution for the nation's children. Boxer is engaged in her biggest sales job ever. The stakes couldn't be higher as she faces one of the toughest high-profile acts of her lengthy career: getting Congress to sign off on historic legislation to lower greenhouse-gas emissions.
Yahoo News, July 11, 2009
Jensen Comment
Senator Boxer covers up the fact that the Cap and Trade Bill has virtually nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with corporate welfare where billions of dollars will be showered upon large corporations and their labor unions while doubling the cost of electricity to rural America and forcing millions of jobs to leave America for more polluting parts of the world --- like India and China.

Dear Premier Jiabao --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Jiabao
We are imposing a 50% tariff on all imported goods from China because you've failed to impose carbon emission limits to levels that the United States is imposing in on all manufacturing plants. I'm sorry about this, but a clause in the Cap and Trade legislation to help our labor unions and create more jobs in the U.S. gives me no choice in the matter.
Senator Boxer

Dear Madam Boxer
We are not turning over 50% of our investment in the $12 trillion U.S. National Debt and will no longer support the  spendthrift U.S. Congress that is building up the annual Federal government spending
deficit by over $2 trillion per year. We will cease bidding on new issues of Treasury Bonds used to finance your overspending. Please take your import tariffs plus your spending deficits and shove them where the "sun don't shine Barbie Doll."
Wen
Jensen Comment
Since President Obama wisely opposes the pro-labor union clause in the Cap and Trade Bill that imposes tariffs on nations that pollute at hire carbon rates than the U.S., this clause will probably be deleted or not enforced. But he's playing a dangerous game when trying to appease the unions that helped get him elected.

China’s new lending more than doubled in June from a month earlier, increasing concerns bad loans and asset bubbles will emerge amid a credit boom. New lending was 1.53 trillion yuan ($224 billion), the central bank said on its Web site today, bringing total lending this year to 7.4 trillion yuan. The calculation for new loans is preliminary, the central bank added. The government is countering an export collapse by flooding the economy with money to fuel domestic demand. Rapid credit growth poses a risk to the nation’s lenders and a concentration of credit in some industries and businesses may damage the stability of the financial system, the banking regulator said yesterday. “Excess liquidity is fueling speculation and that means asset bubbles and wasteful investment,” said Isaac Meng, a senior economist at BNP Paribas SA in Beijing. “Expect credit to slow dramatically in the second half.”
"China’s New Lending Surges, Fueling Bad-Loan Concerns (Update1)," Bloomberg News, July 8, 2009 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601089&sid=asIkAKte9CbY

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw says that we should keep an eye on what the Obama Administration decides to do about Chinese tire imports because last week, the U.S. International Trade Commission advised the president to slap taxes on imports of low-cost Chinese tires. Supposedly, they’re harming American tire companies. Mankiw comments: “President Obama's views about international trade are still something of a mystery. As a senator and presidential candidate he seemed like a protectionist, but once elected he hired a bunch of free traders as economic advisers.” Fortunately, so far, President Obama has sounded more like a free trader than...
John Stossel, "Free Trade Watch," ABC News, July 7, 2009 --- http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/07/free-trade-watch.html

I’ve reported on the government’s boneheaded farm subsidy programs that cost taxpayers $25 billion per year, and import taxes that cost consumers another $12 billion in higher supermarket costs. The average American household pays $320 per year for these policies, but voters rarely complain, because the costs are well hidden. Also, it’s another case of concentrated benefits winning in politics over diffuse costs. Even if you do know that you will be unfairly penalized $320/year, you are less likely to go to your Congressman about that than the business that will win millions.
John Stossel, "Your Handout to Agri-Business," ABC News, July 9, 2009 --- http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/07/your-handout-to-agribusiness.html

From MIT
Energy experts generally agree that the electrical grid in the United States needs to be upgraded if the country is to increase its use of renewable-energy sources like wind power and significantly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. But plans to string new high-voltage lines to bring wind power from the midsection of the country to the coasts, where most of the demand is, could be expensive and unnecessary, and a distraction from more urgent needs, some experts say.
Kevin Bullis, "A Costly and Unnecessary New Electricity Grid:  A national interstate system for distributing power may prove an expensive boondoggle," MIT's Technology Review, July 14, 2009 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22997/?nlid=2174

From MIT
The European cap-and-trade system, known as the Emission Trading System (ETS), is the world's largest pollution market, and it offers important lessons for U.S. policymakers
(see "Carbon Trading on the Cheap"). One lesson rings louder than all the others: cap-and-trade, by itself, won't make much of a dent.
David Victor, "The Problem with Cap and Trade David Victor explains why emissions trading alone won't be adequate to address global warming," MIT's Technology Review, July/August 2009 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22846/?nlid=2156 

EU: Climate Deal Pointless Without China, India
The chances of concluding a new global climate change pact remain dim unless China, India and Brazil make significant cuts in carbon dioxide emissions as well a senior Swedish climate change official said Thursday. Lars-Erik Liljelund, special climate change adviser to the Swedish government, said cuts from richer countries in the 27-nation bloc or planned cuts in the United States will not be enough to meet aims to cut at least 25 percent of emission from 1990 levels. "The problem at the moment is that if you take the contributions made so far by the United States, the European Union and Japan then we don't come up to that minus 25 percent," he told reporters. He said cuts from those richer countries and regions would only reach two-thirds of that minimum target.
Newsmax, July 2, 2009 --- http://moneynews.newsmax.com/investing/china_india_climate/2009/07/02/231487.html

CNN Video: Former Secretary of State Colin Powell tells CNN's John King that he's concerned about President Obama's spending.--- http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/07/03/colin_powell_concerned_with_obamas_spending.html
Also see http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/07/03/state-of-the-union-im-concerned-about-obamas-agenda-says-powell/

"Parsing the Health Reform Arguments Some of the shibboleths we've heard in recent weeks don't make much sense," by George Newman, The Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124640626749276595.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
Also see http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/2009/07/01/better_health_care

There's No Such Thing as Free Health Care
"The costly truth about Canada's health care system," by John Strossel, Reason Magazine, July 2, 2009 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/134553.html

"Medicare Administrative Costs Are Higher, Not Lower, Than for Private Insurance," by Robert Book, The Heritage Foundation, June 25, 2009 --- http://www.heritage.org/Research/HealthCare/wm2505.cfm 
To say nothing of the ease with which vendors defraud Medicare.

U.S. Senate Hearings (where nobody listens unless the melody is from the choir)
Princeton University Physics Professor Gores Gore On Global Warming and Climate Change --- Click Here

"Obamanomics' War On Business Will Strangle Economic Recovery," by Carol Platt Liebau ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/CarolPlattLiebau/2009/07/13/obamanomics_war_on_business_will_strangle_economic_recovery 

By contrast, private (health) insurers try to manage care, and that takes money. Not only does administrative spending go toward screening for waste and fraud -- logical, given the return-on-investment incentives -- they also go toward building networks of (honest) doctors and other providers. Medicare doesn't pay for this legwork, so it simply counts fraud losses as more spending. Generally private insurers also attempt to pay for other things that consumers find valuable, such as high quality, while Medicare and Medicaid are forbidden by law from excluding substandard providers, unless they're criminals. Dead doctors, fake patients, high-school dropouts, fly-by-night businesses and the rest will continue to swindle our sclerotic entitlement system, no matter how far the government turns up the after-the-fact heat. The arrests in Detroit and Miami are another argument against importing to the rest of the health economy the model that enabled these scams.
"Why It's Easy to Steal From Medicare:  Arrests in Detroit and Miami are another argument against importing to the rest of the health economy the model that enabled these scams," The Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124649425934283347.html#mod=todays_us_opinion

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
John Kenneth Galbraith --- Click Here

The total return of the S&P 500 index fell by nearly 40% last year, the second-worst performance by America’s stock market since 1825 --- http://www.simoleonsense.com/us-stockmarket-returns-since-1825/
But Wall Street's pay packages in 2009 are shooting for all time highs --- Click Here
Bob Jensen's threads on outrageous compensation --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation

We are living, after all, in a sort of conflict-of-interest golden age. Professionalism is for sale almost wherever you choose to look. Among the forces that most conspicuously drove the late real-estate bubble, for example, were appraisers and bond rating agencies that apparently decided to put themselves on the market. The city of Washington is an extreme case of this marketized world. The capital swarms with hired guns, payola pundits, and think tanks on a mission. Every bad idea that has ever appealed to the funding class is well-represented here. And with the coming of the health-care debate, as the Post itself has noted, the entire apparatus has swung into well-compensated action.
"When Newspapers Peddle Influence:  A revealing scandal at the Washington Post," The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124701195025708919.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

Blame Proposition 13 and the $200 billion platinum pension spending mentality of California's state workers and their unions
Right now California's economy is moribund, and the prospects for a quick turnaround are not good. Unable to pay its bills, the state is issuing IOUs; its once strong credit rating has collapsed. The state that once boasted the seventh-largest gross domestic product in the world is looking less like a celebrated global innovator and more like a fiscal basket case along the lines of Argentina or Latvia.

Joel Kotkin, "Who Killed California's Economy?" Forbes, July 7, 2009 ---
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/06/economy-pension-environment-business-opinions-columnists-california.html

This may go down as one of the greatest construction projects of all time
American engineers who serve as consultants for the Egyptian military have recently informed Israel that Hamas has succeeded in digging 60-meter deep smuggling tunnels to avoid detection and destruction by the IDF, defense officials said on Thursday. The American engineers, deployed as consultants along the Philadelphi Corridor in Egyptian Rafah, have been using technology that can detect seismic movements to uncover tunnels. But it is more difficult to detect them once they have reached the 60-meter depth, the engineers told their Israeli counterparts. According to IDF assessments, Hamas now has several hundred active tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor, even though close to 300 were reportedly bombed by the Israel Air Force during Operation Cast Lead in December and January. Digging to the new depths required special techniques, one official said. "The Palestinians are experts at digging tunnels," the official said. "They reach 60 meters, pump out the groundwater, and pump in air so they can continue digging."
Yaakov Katz, "US engineers: 'Gaza tunnels now 60m deep'," Jerusalem Post, July 3, 2009 --- http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1246443709998&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull


The U.S. Congress is just grateful that water board torture was not used instead
Somali Islamist fighters on Friday beheaded seven prisoners accused of abandoning the Muslim faith and spying for the government in the largest mass execution since the Islamists were pushed from power two and a half years ago. The public killings in the southwestern town of Baidoa followed weeks of fierce fighting as the Islamists try to seize Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, amid mounting concerns about the influx of hundreds of foreign fighters to the failed state. The beheadings may be linked to the Islamists' failure to take Mogadishu after a 2-month-old offensive, said a senior analyst at global intelligence company Stratfor....
Katherine Houreld, Yahoo News, July 10, 2009 --- http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090710/ap_on_re_af/af_somalia_beheadings_4


President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, announced today she may sue her potential future colleagues for racial bias over yesterday's 5-4 ruling that overturned her own decision in the New Haven fire fighters discrimination lawsuit.

The Supreme Court ruled in Ricci v. DeStefano Monday that an employer could not throw out the results of a promotion exam simply for fear of a lawsuit from racial minorities who fared poorly on the test.

Sotomayor accused the high court's "Constitutional literalists" of bias and an "abject lack of wisdom" in tossing out the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' prior ruling in the case which she joined. "In their majority ruling in Ricci, Justices Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas failed to take into account the cultural forces exerted on a Latina appeals court judge," said Sotomayor. "Historical, entrenched institutional prejudice can cause a person, even a wise Latina, to make emotional decisions which, while consistent with the cultural norms of the aggrieved ethnic group, might not comport entirely with the specific language of the Constitution -- a document of questionable practical value due to the Anglo-Saxon cultural bias of its authors." Sotomayor said she hopes the threat of a lawsuit will be enough to persuade the Supreme Court to reverse its ruling.ing Suing the U.S. Supreme Court
Scott Ott, Washington Examiner, June 30, 2009 --- Click Here 

While the recent Supreme Court decision in the New Haven firefighters' case will be welcome news to those who don't think that a gross injustice is O.K. when those on the receiving end are white, the reasoning behind the 5 to 4 decision is a painful reminder that the law is still tangled in a web of assumptions, evasions and contradictions when it comes to racial issues. Nor have these problems been clarified with the passage of time. On the contrary, the growing complexity and murkiness of civil rights law over the years recalls the painful saying: "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."
Thomas Sowell, "A Tangled Web," Townhall, July 7, 2009 --- http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/07/07/a_tangled_web

For my TV show on the effect of a government monopoly on K-12 education, we gave kids in Belgium the same international test we gave to kids at a top New Jersey high school. The Belgian kids cleaned the NJ kids’ clocks. Pockets of charter competition have begun to compete with the monopoly, but we clearly have a long way to go. Immigrants seeking to become U.S. citizens have to pass a test. It’s not that hard a test. 92.4% of new immigrants pass on first try. The test includes simple questions like “Who was the first President?”
John Stossel, "Still Stupid in America," ABC News, July 8, 2009 --- 
http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/07/still-stupid-in-america.html

I’ve often reported on how licensing laws kill opportunity. Typically, politically connected businesses band together with regulators in the name of creating “standards” for “safety”, “fairness”, etc., but the regulations quickly become a mechanism for protecting the establishment from cheaper or more innovative competition. In DC, a “cosmetology board” was putting innovative hair braiders out of business. With the help of the Institute for Justice the hairdressers took that case to court and won. But politicians, urged on by special interests, are always busy passing business-killing licensing laws.
John Stossel, "Opportunity Killing Laws," ABC News, July 8, 2009 ---
http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/07/opportunitykilling-laws.html

Payback Time
A report in USA Today says that "billions of dollars in federal aid delivered directly to the local level to help revive the economy have gone overwhelmingly to places that supported President Obama in last year's presidential election." Got that? Money that's supposed to "stimulate" our economy is in fact lining the pockets of Democratic Party supporters.

"Blue State Stimulus," IBD Editorials, July 9, 2009 --- http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=332032012323719

"The Feminists Demand and Receive," by Phyllis Schlafly, Townhall, July 7, 2009 --- http://townhall.com/columnists/PhyllisSchlafly/2009/07/07/the_feminists_demand_and_receive

Nevertheless, the feminists demanded that half the stimulus jobs be given to women. The feminists worked to achieve this result by directing the stimulus funds into the types of jobs where women predominate and by allocating at least a third of the spending in manufacturing and construction industries to training women for those men's jobs.

All the feminist organizations joined in the political clatter. They called for a meeting so they could lecture Obama's economic advisers and hurl their demands that the stimulus package create jobs that women like, such as workplace-comfortable inside jobs with air-conditioned offices and carpeted floors.

As one tactic to intimidate Obama administration officials, the feminists successfully insisted that participants in the meeting be seated in a circle without a table between them -- a format that enabled the feminists to be confrontational. The feminists created their own vocabulary to shout at the men, demanding jobs for "human infrastructure" and "human bridges," which were euphemisms for social service, health-care, childcare and librarian jobs.

. . .

Obama gave two of his economists the task of calculating the gender ratio of jobs to be created by the stimulus legislation. They reported that women had only 20 percent of jobs lost in the recession but would get 42 percent of stimulus-created jobs.

In Georgia, for example, two-thirds of the $3.9 billion stimulus money will go to existing social programs.

Despite the recent welcome Ricci decision by the Supreme Court against egregious reverse discrimination on the basis of race, the feminists can look forward to Sonia Sotomayor joining the high court and ruling that "empathy" requires reverse discrimination for women. After all, when she was on the Second Circuit, she upheld affirmative action in the Ricci case, and her own words (repeated many times) reveal that she believes a woman's view of the law can be better than a man's.

When are the American people going to wake up to the fact that the feminists are not for equal opportunity or fairness? The feminist movement is for reverse discrimination to give jobs to women and make men, husbands and fathers irrelevant as family providers.

Continued in article


Something the liberal press will never mention about Bush successes
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 23 terrorist plots against the United States have been foiled. This report updates a November 2007 report from the Heritage Foundation that described 19 plots that had been foiled to date since 9/11. Less than two years later, the U.S. has foiled four more plots aimed at Americans. While some trials have ended in mistrial and charges against some suspects were dropped, significantly more individuals have been convicted and sentenced for their crimes. These victories make the case for continued U.S. vigilance against terrorism around the globe. While these particular attacks have been disrupted, the threat remains. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Congress should not construe the successes over the past eight years as a signal to reduce U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
Jena Baker McNeill and James Jay Carafano, "Terrorist Watch: 23 Plots Foiled Since 9/11," Heritage Foundation, July 2, 2009 --- http://www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandSecurity/bg2294.cfm

Giving in to terrorism demands
About two weeks ago, the Obama administration released Laith Qazali after extensive negotiations with the Asaib al-Haq terror network. That network has long been in negotiations with the fledgling Iraqi government, dangling the possibility of laying down its arms, renouncing violence, and integrating into Iraqi society, provided that its top members — particularly Qais and Laith Qazali, as well as Ali Mussa Daqduq — be released. Realizing, however, that these terrorists were responsible for kidnapping and killing American soldiers in gross violation of the laws of war, the Bush administration had declined to release them. The Obama administration has not only released Laith Qazali, it has been in negotiations to release his brother, Qais Qazali, as well. The negotiations and release were carried out in flagrant disregard of the longstanding policy against exchanging prisoners for the release of hostages. Undermining that policy endangers all American troops and civilian personnel — as well as the troops and civilian personnel of our allies — by encouraging terrorists to kidnap them to use as bargaining chips.
Andrew C. McCarthy, "Negotiating with Terrorists:  The Obama administration ignores a longstanding — and life-saving — policy," National Review, June 24, 2009 --- Click Here

In Troy, New York, where a quarter of the children live below the poverty level and the average household makes less than $30,000 a year, the 29th richest man in the world is being given more than 300,000 taxpayer dollars to open a restaurant. They call it economic development. What it is is a sin. What it is is welfare for the wealthy, proof positive that raping the taxpayer is what the government does best. Meet George Soros. He owns Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. Specifically, his company – Soros Strategic Partners – owns 70 percent of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.
Bob Ionsberry, July 2, 2009 --- http://www.boblonsberry.com/writings.cfm?go=4

Konstantin Preobrezhensky - Author, describes his life as a former Lt. Colonel in the KGB who worked before, during, and after the fall of the Soviet Union. In his book, he describes Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), Russia and the Press, and his personal experiences. This is the first in a series of extraordinary video interviews with former KGB officer Konstantin Preobrezhensky ---
http://nocompromisemedia.com/2009/07/01/no-compromise-with-putins-russia/

The Huffington Post issued an apology Friday evening for an article about the resignation of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin posted at their website entitled, Palin Will Run In '12 On More Retardation Platform, written by HuffPo writer Erik Sean Nelson.The Daily Dose published an e-mail apology from Mario Ruiz of HuffPo: Due to an editorial lapse, Erik Sean Nelson’s post on Sarah Palin bypassed the normal vetting process and appeared on HuffPost — but was never featured anywhere on the site. Even though satiric works are generally given greater latitude, Nelson’s post falls outside of HuffPost’s editorial guidelines.
See http://dailydose.us/2009/07/03/huffpo-statement-on-the-deleted-huffington-post-story/
Jensen Comment
HuffPost should've been content to calling her a bimbo "slut" like CBS and NBC. Actually the HuffPost author apologized to special needs families for implying retarded people might be as stupid as Sarah Palin. I'm serious! He apologized to special needs people, but not to Sarah Palin. His apology was even less sincere than the smirking first apology of David Letterman (who subsequently sobered up when advertisers commenced to withdraw financial support from CBS).

Liberals like David Letterman and Keith Olbermann just cannot let Sarah Palin alone after she resigned
David Letterman says she was waving goodbye to Russia from her front porch
Sarah Palin has deeply disappointed her enemies. People who hate her guts feel she's really let them down by resigning. She's like the ex-girlfriend they're SO over, never want to see again, have already forgotten about -- really, it's O-ver -- but they just can't stop talking about her. Liberal: Ha, ha ... Sarah who? She's over, she's toast, a future Trivial Pursuit answer, nothing more. 
Ann Coulter, "Forgetting Sarah Palin," Townhall, July 8, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/AnnCoulter/2009/07/08/forgetting_sarah_palin

This situation developed because Alaska's transparency laws allow anyone to file Freedom of Information Act requests. While normally useful, in the hands of political opponents FOIA requests can become a means to bog down a target in a bureaucratic quagmire, thanks to the need to comb through records and respond by a strict timetable. Similarly, ethics investigations are easily triggered and can drag on for months even if the initial complaint is flimsy. Since Ms. Palin returned to Alaska after the 2008 campaign, some 150 FOIA requests have been filed and her office has been targeted for investigation by everyone from the FBI to the Alaska legislature. Most have centered on Ms. Palin's use of government resources, and to date have turned up little save for a few state trips that she agreed to reimburse the state for because her children had accompanied her. In the process, though, she accumulated $500,000 in legal fees in just the last nine months, and knew the bill would grow ever larger in the future. "The Alaska ethics elves had painted such a target on Sarah's forehead that she had begun turning down pretty much every invitation she got -- even though they were pouring in every day by the dozens," a confidant of the governor's told me. "It is not throwing in the towel. It is deciding that she was ineffective in fighting for her principles and could do more in another role."
John Fund, "Why Palin Quit Death by a Thousand FOIAs," The Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124700261179807839.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

Obama and Snopes and Wikipedia Playing Loose With Facts
Below is a letter Obama sent to Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii at a Centennial Dinner on 01/24/2009 which was read by Rep. Neil Abercrombie. Obama clearly references this hospital as his hospital of birth. Below is screen shot of Snopes.com 90 minutes before this article was published at WND.COM showing his hospital of birth in Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii . . . For more on that see Snopes and FactCheck caught misrepresenting the position of those after Obama's birth certificate.... and Video of reporter asking the White House Briefing Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about Obama's "LONG FORM" birth certificate.
"Snopes.com changes hospital of Obama's birth 90 minutes after WND.COM article," Value Voters News, July 8, 2009 --- http://www.valuesvoternews.com/2009/07/snopescom-changes-hospital-of-obamas.html
Jensen Comment
It is too late to worry about Obama's credentials to be President, and it's not uncommon for Wikipedia to play loose with facts. But Snopes stakes its reputation on being accurate.

Andrew Breitbart takes on the elitist media, specifically the three female "feminists" who have been on the trash Sarah bandwagon from the beginning, and he does it with gusto: What a shock that Maureen Dowd devoted her New York Times column Sunday to attack Sarah Palin. It did not so much criticize Alaska's governor for prematurely stepping down from her official duties as to finish off what sister snipers Katie Couric and Tina Fey began last fall. The assassination of Sarah Palin - by media.
"The Elite “Feminist” Attack Machine," Flopping Aces, July 5, 2009 ---
http://www.floppingaces.net/2009/07/05/the-elite-feminist-attack-machine/
Jensen Comment
Liberals should lay off Sarah Palin. She's the best thing that can happen for Democratic Party success in future elections.

The main stream media is finally discussing the sexual preferences of Frank Lombard - the Duke University administrator accused of molesting and offering his five-year-old adopted son for sex, via the internet. Naturally, the newspapers are focusing on threats to the gay adoption movement not threats to those who are adopted by gay parents. I’d like to bring the conversation back to Frank Lombard for a moment. His potential as a child molester should have been detected by social workers and friends alike. Just one look at Frank Lombard’s Amazon Wish List should have convinced anyone that he should not be adopting a young boy. 
Mike Adams, "Frank Lombard’s Wish List," Townhall, July 6, 2009 --- http://townhall.com/Columnists/MikeAdams/2009/07/06/frank_lombard%E2%80%99s_wish_list

American soldiers in Afghanistan will be under orders to back down when they're chasing Taliban fighters whenever they think that civilians might be at risk.
McClatchey, Yahoo News, July 1, 2009 ---  http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20090701/wl_mcclatchy/3264079
Jensen Comment
What an incentive for the Taliban to drag along a civilian little kid or two for each terror engagement. Why not handcuff each child to a Taliban machine gun? GIs could thereby be under orders to let the Taliban roam at will

Yes we still have an ally
Around 800 British troops have pushed deep into Taliban-held territory in Helmand province after a ten-day battle to secure river crossings. The latest wave of two-week-old Operation Panther's Claw involved one of the most strategically significant operations the British have carried out in Helmand, a British Army statement said. Hundreds of soldiers from the Light Dragoons began moving to secure a large area north of Lashkar Gah after 750 Welsh Guards seized 13 canal crossings. "Hundreds of soldiers from the Welsh Guards Battlegroup have successfully seized 13 key canal crossings in one of the most strategically significant British operations ever...
Ben Farmer, "UK forces push deep into Taliban territory in Afghanistan," The London Telegraph, July 3, 2009 --- Click Here
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/5735038/UK-forces-push-deep-into-Taliban-territory-in-Afghanistan.html

The Catch and Release Policy:  How it works for terrorists
As Marine Corps forces roll into southern Afghanistan, they face an enemy familiar to US officials -- Mullah Zakir, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who now leads a reconstituted Taliban. Abdul Qayum Zakir, also known as Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, is from Helmand Province and has taken a circuitous route to become head of the radical Islamic group.
Seth G. Jones, The New York Post, July 5, 2009 --- Click Here
http://www.nypost.com/seven/07052009/news/worldnews/mullah_sprung_from_gitmo_jail_now_leads__177719.htm

Taxpayers: Beware GM's Decision to Build Compact in Michigan
Now, there is one factor that probably tipped things in favor of Michigan — money. The state offered $779 million in tax credits over 20 years, $130 million in federal funds for worker training and another $102 million came from local political districts. Reportedly, that dwarfed anything the other two states came up with. So why doesn’t GM just come out and say it was all about the money? It seems like that would be a whole lot better than clamming up and encouraging rumor mongers (like me) and conspiracy theories. One is also inclined to ask how a state as flat broke as Michigan can come up with that kind of dough. I suppose the answer is that they have a friend on the Potomac.
Seeking Alpha, July 6, 2009 --- Click Here

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg seems to have made a stunning admission in favor of cleansing America of unwanted populations by aborting them.
Kathleen Gilbert, "Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg: I Thought Roe Would Help Eradicate Unwanted Populations Through Abortion," Lite Site News, July 9, 2009 --- http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/jul/09070901.html
Jensen Comment
An empirical evidence clearly bears out Judge Ginsburg's hypothesis as crime rates plunged dramatically in inner cities according the University of Chicago Professor Steven Levitt --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freakonomics

"New Evidence on the Foreclosure Crisis:  Zero money down, not subprime loans, led to the mortgage meltdown," by Stan Liebowitz, The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124657539489189043.html

What is really behind the mushrooming rate of mortgage foreclosures since 2007? The evidence from a huge national database containing millions of individual loans strongly suggests that the single most important factor is whether the homeowner has negative equity in a house -- that is, the balance of the mortgage is greater than the value of the house. This means that most government policies being discussed to remedy woes in the housing market are misdirected.

Many policy makers and ordinary people blame the rise of foreclosures squarely on subprime mortgage lenders who presumably misled borrowers into taking out complex loans at low initial interest rates. Those hapless individuals were then supposedly unable to make the higher monthly payments when their mortgage rates reset upwards.

But the focus on subprimes ignores the widely available industry facts (reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association) that 51% of all foreclosed homes had prime loans, not subprime, and that the foreclosure rate for prime loans grew by 488% compared to a growth rate of 200% for subprime foreclosures. (These percentages are based on the period since the steep ascent in foreclosures began -- the third quarter of 2006 -- during which more than 4.3 million homes went into foreclosure.)

Sharing the blame in the popular imagination are other loans where lenders were largely at fault -- such as "liar loans," where lenders never attempted to validate a borrower's income or assets.

This common narrative also appears to be wrong, a conclusion that is based on my analysis of loan-level data from McDash Analytics, a component of Lender Processing Services Inc. It is the largest loan-level data source available, covering more than 30 million mortgages.

Minimum-Wage Increase Comes at a Bad Time for Weakened Job Market
The federal minimum wage goes up this month just as job losses are sending new alarms about the economy, giving traction to perennial fears that higher wages will hurt job creation. In the past, minimum-wage increases have done little to dent job creation. And pouring more money into people's pockets -- especially low-wage workers who are likely to spend the increase to meet living costs -- would normally boost the economy. But these aren't normal times. "It's tough timing," said John Silva, chief economist at Wells Fargo, who expects low-skilled workers and teenagers will be hit hardest. "You're going to have a very negative response. In a recession like this, companies don't have the pricing power to pass on those costs." History, in this case, isn't a reliable predictor, he says, because the current economic slump is much deeper than during previous times.
Chris Mahar, The Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124684183990798403.html

Barney's Rubble:  The problem was that the system let people borrow more than they could afford
The focus on subprimes ignores the widely available industry facts (reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association) that 51% of all foreclosed homes had prime loans, not subprime, and that the foreclosure rate for prime loans grew by 488% compared to a growth rate of 200% for subprime foreclosures . . . The analysis indicates that, by far, the most important factor related to foreclosures is the extent to which the homeowner now has or ever had positive equity in a home. The accompanying figure shows how important negative equity or a low Loan-To-Value ratio is in explaining foreclosures (homes in foreclosure during December of 2008 generally entered foreclosure in the second half of 2008). A simple statistic can help make the point: although only 12% of homes had negative equity, they comprised 47% of all foreclosures. Further, because it is difficult to account for second mortgages in this data, my measurement of negative equity and its impact on foreclosures is probably too low, making my estimates conservative.
Stan Liebowitz
, The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124657539489189043.html


"Here's The Real Reason The Dollar Is Screwed," by Joe Weisenthal, Clusterstock, July 7, 2009 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-real-reason-the-dollar-is-screwed-2009-7

So, then, what's the real reason to fear a dollar decline? It's that governments around the world are more stable and transparent than they used to be, meaning more currencies are worth "holding in the mattress." It still is, for the most part, that no matter where you are, it makes sense to hold some US Dollars as a reliable store of value. But maybe now you'll carry some Brazilian Real or Singapore Dollars. Basically, the real issue is current and growing Dollar competition, a trend that doesn't look likely to abate.

Granted, this doesn't absolve US policymakers in the slightest, as they've given investors all kinds of reasons to look for alternatives. A failure to control the fiscal situation, as well as the politicization of debt and lending come to mind.

Further thoughts: This idea that we've become addicted to our status of having the reserve currency has been discussed a lot. What's not frequently discussed is the extent to which is this case. How much profit do we derive from the each year in the form of cheaper funding costs, and whatnot. Are we more like AIG, which was wholly dependant on its AAA status, or more like Berkshire Hathaway, which can take a ratings hit and still keep chugging?

Also see "Russia to raise new currency issue with China at G8," Reuters, July 8, 2009 ---  http://www.reuters.com/article/usDollarRpt/idUSL715783520090707

. . .  the Obama-supporting/George W. Bush-hating/billionaire benefactor of hyper-liberal MoveOn.org, George Soros, predicted that the administration's spending and borrowing will trigger inflation and higher interests rates. "As markets revive," he said, "fear of inflation will drive up interest rates, which will choke off recovery."
Larry Elder, "Obamanomics Supporters - Cracks in the Dike," Townhall, July 9, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/LarryElder/2009/07/09/obamanomics_supporters_-_cracks_in_the_dike 

Possible Investing Inflation Hedge
George Washington University is planning to increase, to 10 percent from 6 percent, the share of its $1 billion endowment invested in farms, Bloomberg reported. The news service quoted one of the university's analysts as saying that the fund already has farm investments in Latin America and Eastern Europe and is now looking to Australia. The endowment data collected each year by the National Association of College and University Business Officers is not granular enough to determine whether GW's strategy is unusual.
Inside Higher Ed, July 7, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/07/qt#202778


Forwarded by my good neighbors

It is the month of August, on the shores of the Black Sea . It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town.

He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 Euro note on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one.

The hotel proprietor takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher.

The Butcher takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the rancher.

The rancher takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel.

The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the town's prostitute that in these hard times, gave her "services" on credit.

The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the 100 Euro note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.

The hotel proprietor then lays the 100 Euro note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything.

At that moment, the rich tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 100 Euro note, after saying that he did not like any of the rooms, and leaves town.

No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States Government is trying to do business today. Let's hope they succeed!




Hot Academic Jobs of the Future

Note that due to shortage of supply of PhD accountants, newly-hired accounting PhDs are generally among the highest paid faculty in their ranks such as newly hired assistant professors of accounting now being paid well over $120,000 for nine-month contracts in major universities. In most instances accounting assistant professors get significantly higher offers than their counterparts in science, humanities, and engineering. They may not do much better than new hires in law schools. Medical schools have such complicated ways of paying faculty, that comparisons of salaries of medical schools with all other disciplines in a university are virtually impossible. For example, medical faculty sometimes get bonuses for clinical services in university hospitals.

A June/July 2009 report says the shortage of accounting PhDs is getting worse instead of better, particularly as the supply of new PhD graduates in accounting declines while demand for accounting faculty explodes (accounting is probably the only business discipline where demand for graduates has either held steady in corporations or increased in public accounting):
"Doctoral-Level Faculty Numbers Continue to Decline," AACSB, June/July 2009 --- http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/enewsline/datadirect.asp

And yet opportunities for graduates of accounting doctoral programs is totally ignored in the latest article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the hottest academic jobs of the future. If I were advising a confused undergraduate student who is contemplating a career in academe, I would say look more closely at accounting, including the warts of virtually all accounting doctoral programs --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

"Hot Academic Jobs of the Future: Try These Fields," by Lee Roberts, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 10, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i41/41b02201.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Green chemistry

Green chemistry focuses on eliminating the use of toxic chemicals in chemistry without stifling scientific progress. Paul T. Anastas, a Yale University chemist, founded the field in 1991. As it grows in importance, more institutions are expected to offer master's degrees and doctorates. Among the universities with green-chemistry programs are Carnegie Mellon and Yale Universities and the Universities of Oregon, Scranton, and Massachusetts at Lowell.

Terry Collins, a chemistry professor at Carnegie Mellon who heads the university's Institute for Green Science, thinks the intellectual rationale for the field is strong. "It hasn't gotten a lot of federal support, but I think that's going to change," he says. One reason: Mr. Anastas has been nominated by President Obama to head the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Research and Development.

Energy

Threats to human society by the consumption of limited resources have sparked a race to find alternative energy sources that are sustainable, efficient, and safe for the environment. Among the leaders in this research mission is the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California at Berkeley. The interdisciplinary group has been devising technical and policy alternatives to unsustainable energy and resource use for the past 30 years.

The Energy Efficiency Center at the University of California at Davis identifies promising energy-efficient technologies and develops viable business ventures around them. Established in 2006 with a challenge grant from the state, the center focuses on transferring technology from academe to the marketplace.

Boston University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, meanwhile, specializes in the fields of energy and environmental analysis.

Gerontology

Not only are professors aging — everybody else is, too. The aging process will take on a more prominent role in society as the baby-boom generation ages, making studies like gerontology a growth area, says Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

The oldest and largest school of gerontology in the world is the Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California. It has conducted research in molecular biology, neuroscience, dem-ography, psychology, sociology, and public policy on aging since 1975.

The Universities of Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland at Baltimore, and Massachusetts at Boston are among those offering doctoral programs in the field.

Education

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the number of postsecondary educational administrators will increase by 14 percent from 2006 to 2016.

"The leadership turnover in education is going to be tremendous in the coming years," said Mark David Milliron, president and chief executive of Catalyze Learning International, an education-consulting group in Newland, N.C. "Folks are scrambling to fill the C-level pipeline; as a result, Ph.D.'s and Ed.D.'s are in high demand, and will be for some time."

Nanotechnology

A nanometer, one billionth of a meter, is about 10,000 times narrower than a human hair. Nanotechnology is the study of the control of matter on an atomic and molecular scale. It has the potential to create materials and devices in fields as diverse as electronics, energy production, and medicine.

Among institutions that offer programs in the growing field are the Universities of Washington and North Carolina at Charlotte; the State University of New York at Albany; and Arizona State, Louisiana Tech, Pennsylvania State, and Rice Universities.

Health policy

Just as gerontology will become more important as the population ages, health-related fields and health-care policy will remain vital in coming years. Some of the influential universities for health policy and management are Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and New York Universities.

Information technology

Harry Lewis, a Harvard professor of computer science and one of the authors of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty and Happiness After the Digital Explosion (Addison-Wesley, 2008), believes information technology will remain a growth area in the coming years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics agrees, projecting that among selected occupations requiring a doctoral degree, computer and information science will have one of the largest growth rates — 22 percent — from 2006 to 2016.

Some of the better-known programs in information technology are those offered by the University of California at Berkeley, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University.

Engineering

There always seems to be a high demand for engineers of one kind or another, and the next decade should be no exception. Engineering comprises such a broad array of studies and competencies that it can lead to vastly different careers. In especially promising fields, the Bureau of Labor Statistics sees environmental engineering experiencing 25-percent growth between 2006 and 2016, and industrial and biomedical engineering each experiencing about 20-percent growth in that time.

Jensen Comment
I think that for many years to come, new accounting PhDs will have many more choices about where to accept job offers and what they will earn in their new jobs at colleges and universities.

July 10, 2009 reply from Patricia Walters [patricia@DISCLOSUREANALYTICS.COM]

Full disclosure: I'm clinical faculty and had an 12 year gap between my two academic lives. I have a 3-year contract (which I was glad didn't come up for renewal this year).

In my view, this salary inversion (I believe your ratio is typical) is one of the costs of having tenure. I personally don't think of it as a "penalty" although I do understand why tenured faculty feel that way.

Rather, I view this differential between tenured faculty salaries and other market-based salaries (whether in or outisde of academia) as the market price for bearing the risk of losing one's job (which tenure track faculty is still subject to).

I don't know but wonder if there is any data on the percentage of tenure track faculty who actually are ABLE to stay at their first school.

Pat

July 10, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Pat,

Remember that in major universities, publications in leading academic journals are the major things counted (not necessarily read) for performance raises. Teaching has a minimum threshold but is secondary to publication records.

Salary compression arises from many suspected causes, not the least of which is that tenure protects the jobs but not the performance raises of faculty with declining research productivity. In accounting, the very few tenured faculty with increasing research productivity generally do move on to endowed chairs or at least named professorships in other universities.

It’s surprising how many accounting faculty who are highly productive (relative to other accounting researchers and not chemists) in their non-tenure years actually burn out in terms of research. Some actually move into administrative positions because, in my viewpoint, they want out of both teaching and research and still obtain high performance raises.

If you extract from the TAR publishing records of hot non-tenured accounting faculty, you get the picture that accounting researcher productivity generally declines as the tenure years pile on --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm

Universities also take advantage of the fact that salary is only one of the factors leading to family decisions to not move to new towns. There is a stickiness due to spouse employment, children in good schools that they really like, transactions costs of home selling, unwillingness to give up friends and other neighbors, unwillingness to depart colleagues at work, and just plain fear of the unknown.

Another factor that I tended to ignore (except for one time) was the risk of giving up tenure in the old job for having to go through the tenure process once again in a new job. Although the University of Maine gave me the Nicolas Salgo endowed chair and tenure when I moved from Michigan State, I became the KPMG Professor at Florida State without being given tenure in advance. Trinity University gave me the Jesse Jones endowed chair without giving me tenure up front.

In hindsight, things worked out for me, but I can name at least one instance (at Notre Dame) where a well known accounting professor given a chair and then denied tenure afterwards.

Bob Jensen

Second June 10, 2009 replay from Patricia Walters [patricia@DISCLOSUREANALYTICS.COM]

Bob:

You are of course right on all counts above. I would add that perhaps the primary reason I left academic in 1994 was because I did not believe that I would have the fortitude to do the necessary research to get tenure. I knew myself well enough then to realize that I would put most of my efforts into my teaching and so be constantly on the move. I also have no regrets about my years at the CFA Institute. I believe my current teaching is better because of the work and experience I had there. There are huge personal costs to these moves, let alone the need to be thinking about a job search. This is not to say that I don't also have to write to maintain my academic qualification for AASCB purposes. It just doesn't have to be the 'accountics' research that is what's wanted in most of the top-tier journals.

There are also trade-offs between cash and quality of life that academics must make which are not much different that those other professionals make. There is money to be made in consulting and continuing ed training by academics even though the former may be more dependent on research than the latter. One of the aspects of academia that I like, beside teaching and interacting with students at the university, surprisingly is that, if an opportunity comes along to do consulting or training work, I can say 'no'. Something one cannot do (normally) without consequences in a full-time job outside of academia. In that respect, I can create my own balance between money and quality of life.

The current trade-off I'm personally struggling with is living in NJ when I really want to be living on my farm in VA and this struggle is despite the fact I very, very much like Fordham, its students, and my colleagues. It is a great place to work.

Your comments about performance raises are interesting. Clinicals at Fordham are not eligible for such raises....all we can do is negotiate at contract renewal times. I have the impression that these raises are not all that terrific regardless of the amount of research one does, but I admit to not having first hand experience.

Pat

Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#careers


If GM says its shares are "destined to be worthless," why does the SEC still allow trading in those shares?

"A Stock With Bounce: Investors Stick to G.M.," Michael J. de la Merced and Zachery Kouwe, The New York Times, July 10, 2009 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/business/11shares.html?ref=business

The stock, which trades under the ticker symbol GMGMQ, gained as much as 43 percent on Friday, after G.M. announced that it had completed the sale of its assets to an entirely new company. Nearly 75 million shares traded hands until the securities industry’s self-regulator, Finra, halted trading at 2:09 p.m., citing “extraordinary events.”

The stock closed at $1.15 a share, up 31.3 cents, or 37 percent, for the day, giving the bankrupt company a market value of $702 million, up from $512 million on Thursday.

“This certainly has all the hallmarks of market manipulation, but it’s very hard for the S.E.C. to prove,” said Peter J. Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. “Someone made a lot of money here.”

G.M. has issued statements telling investors not to buy the shares because they are destined to become worthless.

Continued in article

A Primer on the New General Motors --- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/business/11primer.html?ref=business


Turkey Times Time for Overstuffed Law Schools
Lean Times for MBA Programs
Accounting Profession Holds Steady Despite Turbulent Economy
Doctoral-Level Accounting Faculty Numbers Continue to Decline (while demand increases)
Credentials of Accounting Instructors Are Changing Dramatically

"Law Schools Mull Whether They Are Churning Out Too Many Lawyers," by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/07/21755n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

At a time when law-school graduates are facing greater debt and fewer job opportunities, the University of Miami School of Law has offered to pay accepted students to stay away—at least for a year. The school's unusual offer, which followed an unexpectedly high number of acceptances for this fall's entering class, comes during a period of soul searching in legal education about just how many lawyers the nation needs and whether educators have an obligation to paint a realistic picture of students' prospects for landing jobs that would justify taking out loans of $70,000 or more.

At least 10 new law schools are on the drawing board around the country, in addition to the 200 already accredited by the American Bar Association. At the same time, the demand for legal services has dropped during the economic recession, prompting hundreds of firms to lay off lawyers, cut salaries, and delay the start dates of new associates. As law schools continue to churn out graduates, the resulting bottleneck could make the competition for jobs even more fierce. And some legal experts predict that even when they do resume hiring, many big firms won't be able to continue paying new associates the salaries of $120,000 or more that students had counted on to whittle down their debt.

But that sobering news hasn't stopped students from flocking to law schools, which saw the number of applicants rise 4.3 percent for this fall, according to the ABA. At the University of Miami, a higher-than-expected yield prompted Dean Patricia D. White to send accepted students an e-mail message last month offering $5,000 scholarships if they deferred their admission for a year and completed at least 120 hours of public service by next June. Doing so would also improve their chances of winning the school's three-year, $75,000 public-interest scholarship, she said.

"While I would like to believe that this year’s elevated acceptance rate reflects the great sense of excitement about the law school and its future that led me to become its new dean, I fear that some of it may be related to the shortage of jobs in the current economy,” she wrote. “Perhaps many of you are looking to law school as a safe harbor in which you can wait out the current economic storm. If this describes your motivation for going to law school, I urge you to think hard about your plans and to consider deferring enrollment."

In addition to being difficult and expensive, "in these uncertain and challenging times the nature of the legal profession is in great flux. It is very difficult to predict what the employment landscape for young lawyers will be in May 2012 and thereafter.”

The average debt faced by graduates of public law schools now tops $71,000, while private-school graduates must pay back, on average, more than $92,000, according to the bar association. Over the past year, shrinking endowments and state appropriations have prompted many law schools to enact double-digit tuition increases at a time when the credit crisis has made low-interest student loans harder to come by.

The recession has raised new challenges for law schools now in the pipeline and renewed questions about whether they are needed. Three new schools have been proposed in New York State, which already has 15. Pennsylvania, which has eight law schools, has one more in the works.

Law schools are proliferating, in part, because they add to a college’s prestige. And because they don’t require expensive laboratories and can offer a number of large lecture classes, they can either break even or make money for their institutions.

The State University of New York system, which has a law school at its Buffalo campus, is considering adding two more, at Stony Brook and Binghamton. State lawmakers set aside $2.25-million to explore the possibility of starting a third new law school at St. John Fisher College, in Rochester.

Other colleges with aspirations of opening law schools include Husson College, in Bangor, Me.; Louisiana College, in Pineville; Lincoln Memorial University, in Harrowgate, Tenn.; the University of North Texas, in Denton; and Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. In addition, a new law school will open next month at the University of California at Irvine.

Concordia University, based in Portland, Ore., hopes to open a law school in Boise, Idaho, where it could end up competing with a law school the University of Idaho hopes to open there. The University of New Haven put its plans for a law school on hold because of the economic downturn.

Loren D. Prescott Jr. is in charge of the law-school planning effort at Wilkes University, which hopes to open the school in 2011. The university’s trustees have approved the new school, contingent upon whether the university can raise the necessary money without hurting its other schools or programs.

Mr. Prescott acknowledges that the recession raises questions both about the employment prospects of graduates and the school’s ability to raise money. But he says that when the economy eventually recovers, more jobs will open up, especially for graduates who apply their legal skills to business, philanthropy, and other careers outside law firms.

And, while he says law schools should be honest with students about their career prospects, he disagrees with those who argue that opening new schools will doom more students to lifetimes of underemployment and crushing debt.

“Should we deny someone the opportunity to go to law school, or to go to a school in their region, simply because we feel we know better about their chances of getting a job?” he says. The state’s existing schools are relatively difficult to gain admittance to, he says, and Wilkes’s would focus on students with slightly lower Law School Admission Test scores who would otherwise have to leave the region to attend a law school. It would also emphasize badly needed practical skills, he says.

Not surprisingly, administrators at many existing law schools aren't eager to welcome potential new competitors. James R. Newton, vice dean for administration at the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School, says the state’s 15 law schools are plenty.

“The school’s position is that there is no market justification for another law school,” he says. “New York already has more law schools per capita than any other state, and legal employment in New York is saturated, not expanding.”

William D. Henderson, an associate professor at Indiana University at Bloomington's Maurer School of Law who has done extensive research on the legal job market, says he would like to see a Web site in which law schools published accurate details about bar-passage rates and employment statistics. That, he says, would give students a more realistic idea of how readily they would be able to pay off their debts. Instead of just reporting that a certain percentage of graduates went into "business," the site would detail the kinds of jobs and salaries they earned.

“The reality hasn’t filtered down to students that this isn’t like Boston Legal where you get a law degree and walk into a great, high-paying job,” Mr. Henderson says. “We’re taking their money and putting people $100,000 in debt,” he says, while their job prospects are at best uncertain.

Continued in article

Times grew lean for MBA programs before the economic crash
With MBA enrollments down, B-schools are striving to become more relevant to prospective students. To remain leading suppliers of management talent to corporations, consulting firms, investment banks, and other business, B-schools are being forced to adapt to a changing world. "More and more, companies find themselves involved in exploration," says Margaret A. Neale, a professor of organizational behavior and leader of the MTIS program at Stanford. "To be competitive, you have to be more creative."
"Tomorrow's B-School? It Might Be A D-School ," Business Week, August 1, 2005 --- http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_31/b3945418.htm

Now it's getting to be bare bones
At the same time, students themselves are confronting a stark new economic reality of their own. Burdened with debt and entering a market for MBA talent that's getting grimmer by the day, many are questioning their reasons for getting an MBA. "There's no way the economic crisis doesn't make every single person rethink what he or she wants to do and whether it's a good time to do it," says Guy Turner, a first-year student at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Francesca Di Medlio, "Amid Economic Carnage, Business Schools Mull Fixes," Business Week, March 9, 2009 ---
Click Here

Accounting Profession Holds Steady Despite Turbulent Economy
As many white-collar professions lose stability amid the economic crisis, one profession is actually weathering the storm.
"Accounting Profession Holds Steady Despite Turbulent Economy," SmartPros, June 29, 2009

Doctoral-Level Accounting Faculty Numbers Continue to Decline (while demand increases)
Over the last 4-5 years, the percentage of academically qualified (AQ) faculty who are engaged in the life of the school has declined. At the same, the percentage of professionally qualified faculty members who are actively engaged has increased.
"Doctoral-Level Faculty Numbers Continue to Decline," AACSB, June/July 2009 --- http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/enewsline/datadirect.asp

The proportion of academically qualified faculty at both the participative and supportive level has experienced an overall decline, according to data collected annually from AACSB member schools. At the same time, faculty who are considered professionally qualified (or those that do not hold a doctoral-level degree) have increased.

AACSB categorizes faculty into two basic areas: 1) those who hold a doctoral-level degree and 2) those who do not have a doctorate but have a master's degree in a business-related field and who are considered as highly experienced professionals. Within these two categories, individuals are additionally classified as either participating or supporting faculty. Participating faculty members are defined as individuals (full-time or part-time) who teach, serve on committees, work with student groups, take part in planning, or otherwise participate more fully in the life of the school. Supporting faculty are considered as individuals (full-time or part-time) who teach but do not otherwise participate in the life of the school.

2007–08 data found that nearly 64% of all faculty reported were listed as academically qualified (or those who hold a doctoral-level degree). Among faculty listed as participating, the percentage was even higher at 82.7%. The largest proportion of faculty listed as professionally qualified (or those who do not hold a doctoral-level degree) was 78.7% among those faculty listed as supporting. These numbers show a fairly significant shift in some areas since 2002–03. During 2002–03, slightly more than 76% of all faculty were listed as academically qualified with the proportion among participating faculty equating to 91.2%. The proportion of faculty who are professionally qualified has risen in both the participating and supporting categories.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#careers

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm


More on the Greatest Swindles of the World

If the left-of-left Obama worshipper Rep. Dennis Kucinich voted against an Obama, Pelosi, Waxman, Gore-promoted bill there must be a catch --- http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/10478
 

There is a catch --- this is a record-breaking corporate welfare package that more then doubles our electricity bills

"The Carbonated Congress Orszag nails it: The 'largest corporate welfare program' ever," The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124657758880989227.html

President Obama is calling the climate bill that the House passed last week an "extraordinary" achievement, and so it is. The 1,200-page wonder manages the supreme feat of being both hugely expensive while doing almost nothing to reduce carbon emissions.

The Washington press corps is playing the bill's 219-212 passage as a political triumph, even though one of five Democrats voted against it. The real story is what Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House baron Henry Waxman and the President himself had to concede to secure even that eyelash margin among the House's liberal majority. Not even Tom DeLay would have imagined the extravaganza of log-rolling, vote-buying, outright corporate bribes, side deals, subsidies and policy loopholes. Every green goal, even taken on its own terms, was watered down or given up for the sake of political rents.

Begin with the supposed point of the exercise -- i.e., creating an artificial scarcity of carbon in the name of climate change. The House trimmed Mr. Obama's favored 25% reduction by 2020 to 17% in order to win over Democrats leery of imposing a huge upfront tax on their constituents; then they raised the reduction to 83% in the out-years to placate the greens. Even that 17% is not binding, since it would be largely reached with so-called,  offsets, through which some businesses subsidize others to make emissions reductions that probably would have happened anyway.

Even if the law works as intended, over the next decade or two real U.S. greenhouse emissions might be reduced by 2% compared to business as usual. However, consumers would still face higher prices for electric power, transportation and most goods and services as this inefficient and indirect tax flowed down the energy chain.

The sound bite is that this policy would only cost households "a postage stamp a day." But that's true only as long as the program doesn't really cut emissions. The goal here is to tell voters they'll pay nothing in order to get the cap-and-tax bureaucracy in place -- even though the whole idea is to raise prices to change American behavior. At the same time -- wink, wink -- Democrats tell the greens they can tighten the emissions vise gradually over time.

Meanwhile, Congress had to bribe every business or interest that could afford a competent lobbyist. Carbon permits are valuable, yet the House says only 28% of the allowances would be auctioned off; the rest would be given away. In March, White House budget director Peter Orszag told Congress that "If you didn't auction the permit, it would represent the largest corporate welfare program that has ever been enacted in the history of the United States."

Naturally, Democrats did exactly that. To avoid windfall profits, they then chose to control prices, asking state regulators to require utilities to use the free permits to insulate ratepayers from price increases. (This also obviates the anticarbon incentives, but never mind.) Auctions would reduce political favoritism and interference, as well as provide revenue to cut taxes to offset higher energy costs. But auctions don't buy votes.

Then there was the peace treaty signed with Agriculture Chairman Colin Peterson, which banned the EPA from studying the carbon produced by corn ethanol and transferred farm emissions to the Ag Department, which mainly exists to defend farm subsidies. Not to mention the 310-page trade amendment that was introduced at 3:09 a.m. When Congress voted on the bill later that day, the House clerk didn't even have an official copy.

The revisions were demanded by coal-dependent Rust Belt Democrats to require tariffs on goods from countries that don't also reduce their emissions. Democrats were thus admitting that the critics are right that this new energy tax would send U.S. jobs overseas. But instead of voting no, their price for voting yes is to impose another tax on imports from China and India, among others. So a Smoot-Hawley green tariff is now official Democratic policy.

Mr. Obama's lobbyists first acquiesced to this tariff change to get the bill passed. Afterwards the President said he disliked "sending any protectionist signals" amid a world recession, but he refused to say whether this protectionism was enough to veto the bill. Then in a Saturday victory lap, he talked about green jobs and a new clean energy economy, but he made no reference to cap and trade -- no doubt because he knows that energy taxes are unpopular and that the bill faces an even tougher slog in the Senate.

Mr. Obama wants something tangible to take to the U.N. climate confab in Denmark in December, but the more important issue is what this exercise says about his approach to governance. The President seems to believe that the Carter and Clinton Presidencies failed by fighting too much with Democrats in Congress. So his solution is to abdicate his agenda to Congress -- first the stimulus, now cap and trade, and soon health care. We wish he had told us he was running to be Prime Minister.

Of all the proposals in President Barack Obama's breathtakingly ambitious agenda to foster long-term economic decline, by far the biggest is the Waxman-Markey energy-rationing bill, which the House of Representatives passed with the narrowest of majorities late Friday evening. This bill by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is more damaging than the $787 billion stimulus, the proposed huge increases in federal spending and corresponding increases in the national debt, the takeover of GM and Chrysler, and the proposed tax hikes on the wealthy - combined. Enacting Waxman-Markey (H. R. 2454 . . .
Myron Ebell, "Waxman-Markey is Hilarious, but the Joke is on Us," Townhall, June 29, 2009 --- http://townhall.com/columnists/MyronEbell/2009/06/29/waxman-markey_is_hilarious,_but_the_joke_is_on_us

EU: Climate Deal Pointless Without China, India
The chances of concluding a new global climate change pact remain dim unless China, India and Brazil make significant cuts in carbon dioxide emissions as well a senior Swedish climate change official said Thursday. Lars-Erik Liljelund, special climate change adviser to the Swedish government, said cuts from richer countries in the 27-nation bloc or planned cuts in the United States will not be enough to meet aims to cut at least 25 percent of emission from 1990 levels. "The problem at the moment is that if you take the contributions made so far by the United States, the European Union and Japan then we don't come up to that minus 25 percent," he told reporters. He said cuts from those richer countries and regions would only reach two-thirds of that minimum target.
Newsmax, July 2, 2009 --- http://moneynews.newsmax.com/investing/china_india_climate/2009/07/02/231487.html

CNN Video: Former Secretary of State Colin Powell tells CNN's John King that he's concerned about President Obama's spending.--- http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/07/03/colin_powell_concerned_with_obamas_spending.html




"A Timeline of the Madoff Fraud," The New York Times, June 29, 2009 --- http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/06/29/business/madoff-timeline.html?ref=business

Nome:  A Good Deal for Ruth Madoff
The Chamber of Commerce in Nome says it "cordially invites" Ruth Madoff to move there, "where you can live off the land, far away from the prying news media.
"Nome offers shelter to Ruth Madoff," Anchorage Daily News, July 3, 2009 ---
http://www.adn.com/3437/story/852272.html
Jensen Comment
In addition she can be frozen for centuries and wake up at a time when the world has forgotten all about the $65 billion Madoff fraud. By then $65 billion Obama dollars won't buy a cup of coffee.

Sadly, Mrs. Madoff will probably decline this generous offer from Nome. Since she still has millions of current dollars, she will probably make out well in senior singles events, especially in Florida and further south in the Carribean. If all she wants is to get away from civilization, she might consider marrying an Emperor penguin in the Antarctic. That would be more exciting to being married to a tuxedo-clad Bernie.

New Hints at Why the SEC Failed to Seriously Investigate Madoff's Hedge Fund
After being repeatedly warned for six years that this was a criminal scam
It's beginning to look like a family "affair"

(The SEC's) Swanson later married Madoff's niece, and their relationship is now under review by the SEC inspector general, who is examining the agency's handling of the Madoff case, the Post reported. Swanson, no longer with the agency, declined to comment, the Post said.
"SEC lawyer raised alarm about Madoff: report," Reuters, July 2, 2009 --- http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090702/bs_nm/us_madoff_sec
The Washington Post account is at --- Click Here

A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer warned about irregularities at Bernard Madoff's financial management firm as far back as 2004, The Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing agency documents and sources familiar with the investigation.

Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, a lawyer in the SEC's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, sent emails to a supervisor saying information provided by Madoff during her review didn't add up and suggesting a set of questions to ask his firm, the report said.

Several of the questions directly challenged Madoff activities that turned out to be elements of his massive fraud, the newspaper said.

Madoff, 71, was sentenced to a prison term of 150 years on Monday after he pleaded guilty in March to a decades-long fraud that U.S. prosecutors said drew in as much as $65 billion.

The Washington Post reported that when Walker-Lightfoot reviewed the paper documents and electronic data supplied to the SEC by Madoff, she found it full of inconsistencies, according to documents, a former SEC official and another person knowledgeable about the 2004 investigation.

The newspaper said the SEC staffer raised concerns about Madoff but, at the time, the SEC was under pressure to look for wrongdoing in the mutual fund industry. Walker-Lightfoot was told to focus on a separate probe into mutual funds, the report said.

One of Walker-Lightfoot's supervisors on the case was Eric Swanson, an assistant director of her department, the Post reported, citing two people familiar with the investigation.

Swanson later married Madoff's niece, and their relationship is now under review by the SEC inspector general, who is examining the agency's handling of the Madoff case, the Post reported.

Swanson, no longer with the agency, declined to comment, the Post said.

SEC spokesman John Nester also declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation by the agency's inspector general, the newspaper said.

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.

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm


Quotation of the Week
What the models failed to capture was that humans don’t behave in simple, predictable and uncorrelated ways. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the way these models cope with correlation of peoples’ psychology. To sum it up: they don’t. Let me know if that’s too complex an analysis for the mathematical masters of the universe.
"Quibbles With Quants: Models are not Reality," Psy-Fi Blog:  A Sideways Look and Psychology and Finance, July 6, 2009 --- http://www.psyfitec.com/2009/07/quibbles-with-quants.html
Link forwarded by the Financial Rounds Blog

Can the 2008 investment banking failure be traced to a math error?
Recipe for Disaster:  The Formula That Killed Wall Street ---
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all
Link forwarded by Jim Mahar ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/recipe-for-disaster-formula-that-killed.html 


Highest Grossing Films of All Time (Top 20) --- http://www.listsofbests.com/list/1881
But these rankings change if they're inflation adjusted --- Click Here
http://www.simoleonsense.com/why-journalists-dont-account-for-inflation-when-they-report-box-office-records/

Random House Modern Library's 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century --- http://www.listsofbests.com/list/17

Ten Most Read Articles in the Harvard Business Review  --- http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/web/collections/10mustreads
Jensen Comment
I wouldn't call them all "must reads" unless you want to drop titles of what you read at cocktail parties. The problem with the HBR is they often publish "fad articles" weak on research and scholarship. I was turned off by the HBR when it refused to publish error corrections of an article published by a Harvard Business School alum. The HBR is not a journal that I track intensively like many other academic journals --- unless I'm invited to certain cocktail parties.


The Wisdom and the Ignorance of George Bernard Shaw

This is the whole contention of The Quintessence of Ibsenism, put better than the book puts it; it is a really sharp exposition of the dangers of "idealism," the sacrifice of people to principles, and Shaw is even wiser in his suggestion that this excessive idealism exists nowhere so strongly as in the world of [Pg 128] physical science. He shows that the scientist tends to be more concerned about the sickness than about the sick man; but it was certainly in his mind to suggest here also that the idealist is more concerned about the sin than about the sinner.
Gilbert K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, 1909, Project Guttenberg EBook #19535 ---
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/9/5/3/19535/19535-h/19535-h.htm

Jensen Comment
This reminded me of a critical comment about the unhealthy dominance of positivism in accounting research for three decades commencing around 1975. His comment was to the effect that positivist anthropology is the study of anthropologists rather than anthropology per se. This would seem to be the antithesis of Shaw's scientist.

This blindness to paradox everywhere perplexes Shaw's outlook. He cannot understand marriage because he will not understand the paradox of marriage; that the woman is all the more the house for not being the head of it. He cannot understand patriotism, because he will not understand the paradox of patriotism; that one is all the more human for not merely loving humanity. He does not understand Christianity because he will not understand the paradox of Christianity; that we can only really understand all myths when we know that one of them is true. I do not under-rate him for this anti-paradoxical temper; I concede that much of his finest and keenest work in the way of intellectual purification would have been difficult or impossible without it. But I say that here lies the limitation of that lucid and compelling mind; he cannot quite understand life, because he will not accept its contradictions.
Gilbert K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, 1909, Project Guttenberg EBook #19535 ---
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/9/5/3/19535/19535-h/19535-h.htm 

The ultimate epigram of Major Barbara can be put thus. People say that poverty is no crime; Shaw says that poverty is a crime; that it is a crime to endure it, a crime to be content with it, that it is the mother of all crimes of brutality, corruption, and fear. If a man says to Shaw that he is born of poor but honest parents, Shaw tells him that the very word "but" shows that his parents were probably dishonest. In short, he maintains here what he had maintained elsewhere: that what the people at this moment require is not more patriotism or more art or more religion or more morality or more sociology, but simply more money. The evil is not ignorance or decadence or sin or pessimism; the evil is poverty.
Gilbert K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, 1909, Project Guttenberg EBook #19535 ---
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/9/5/3/19535/19535-h/19535-h.htm 

There is something unexpected and fascinating about this reversal of the usual argument touching enterprise and the business man; this theory that success is created not by intelligence, but by a certain half-witted and yet magical instinct. For Bernard Shaw, apparently, the forests of factories and the mountains of money are not the creations of human wisdom or even of human cunning; they are rather manifestations of the sacred maxim which declares that God has chosen the foolish things of the earth to confound the wise. It is simplicity and even innocence that has made Manchester.
Gilbert K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, 1909, Project Guttenberg EBook #19535 ---
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/9/5/3/19535/19535-h/19535-h.htm 

Lastly, he has obliterated the mere cynic. He has been so much more cynical than anyone else for the public good that no one has dared since to be really cynical for anything smaller. The Chinese crackers of the frivolous cynics fail to excite us after the dynamite of the serious and aspiring cynic. Bernard Shaw and I (who are growing grey together) can remember an epoch which many of his followers do not know: an epoch of real pessimism. The years from 1885 to 1898 were like the hours of afternoon in a rich house with large rooms; the hours before tea-time. They believed in nothing except good manners; and the essence of good manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may be defined as a silent yell. The power which the young pessimist of that time showed in this direction would have astonished anyone but him. He yawned so wide as to swallow the world. He swallowed the world like an unpleasant pill before retiring to an eternal rest.
Gilbert K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, 1909, Project Guttenberg EBook #19535 ---
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/9/5/3/19535/19535-h/19535-h.htm 

We call the twelfth century ascetic. We call our own time hedonist and full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic age the love of life was evident and enormous, so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist age pleasure has always sunk low, so that it has to be encouraged. How high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds. How low human happiness sank in the twentieth century our children will only know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people that it is a duty to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity never produces optimists till it has ceased to produce[Pg 249] happy men. It is strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men to a banquet with spears. But this shall be written of our time: that when the spirit who denies besieged the last citadel, blaspheming life itself, there were some, there was one especially, whose voice was heard and whose spear was never broken.
Gilbert K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, 1909, Project Guttenberg EBook #19535 ---
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/9/5/3/19535/19535-h/19535-h.htm 


"We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?," by Miguel Helft, The New York Times, July 4, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/business/05ping.html?hpw

Jensen Test:
Rent Textbooks from Chegg --- http://www.chegg.com/
Rental prices are about half the so-called purchase price of a new book.
Buying a used book is probably a better idea since it, in turn, can be sold back into the used market.

Intermediate Accounting ISBN 0470374942 by Kieso et al.
New (Chegg claims the new price is $209 but the price of hardcover is $177 at Barnes & Noble )
            The Amazon Price of a new hardcover is $168 --- Click Here
Bigwords.com (international edition that differs somewhat in chapter orderings) lists a price of $53.98
Used prices start at Amazon for about $159 (but watch carefully for the edition number)
Rent from Chegg ($96.53) ---
http://www.chegg.com/details/intermediate-accounting/0470374942/

Jensen Comment
To get value for my money, I prefer used houses, cars, and books.
Of course, both Amazon and Google are now selling electronic versions of textbooks. For Amazon you must have a Kindle reader. For Google, all you have to have is a computer, although to date Amazon has a wider selection of textbooks available.

American Council of the Blind filed a lawsuit last month against Arizona State University, saying that its plan to use the Kindle to distribute books to students is illegal because blind people cannot use the device as currently configured ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/06/kindle 

March 25, 2009 message from Ramsey, Donald [dramsey@UDC.EDU]

The cost accounting book I'm using retails for $190.30. I see on a textbook search website called Bigwords.com that no less than 9 large dealers are offering it at under $50 for a new copy, including shipping. How can this be possible?

My concern would be how to get the word to students early enough so they could (1) not buy books at retail, and (2) get delivery in time for the first assignment.

Cheers,

Don

March 25, reply from Zane Swanson [ZSwanson@UCO.EDU]

Convince your university/college/department to go completely electronic (like Kindle) and the pricing problem would be gone. This recession may well drive some cost-sensitive programs to go to electronic books looking for a comparative advantage or a means of covering a budgetary shortfall. The tipping point will center around the trade-off costs of the campus book store versus outsourcing the textbooks electronically.

Zane Swanson

Jensen Added Comment
Universities that are promoting Kindle are running into some resistance from sight-impaired students. Although Kindle benefits some sight-impaired students by being able to enlarge fonts, the issue is one of access to Kindle readers and access to audio versions of the text. Many publishers have audio versions restricted to sight-impaired students. To avoid conflicts with sight impaired students, universities might have to offer audio versions to sight-impaired students at deals as good as Kindle deals to other students.

The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind filed a lawsuit last month against Arizona State University, saying that its plan to use the Kindle to distribute books to students is illegal because blind people cannot use the device as currently configured --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/06/kindle

PS
I noticed that Bigwords.com is also selling solutions manuals --- Click Here
http://www5.bigwords.com/search/?z=easysearch&searchtype=ISBN&searchstring=Kieso&Go.x=36&Go.y=28

Free online textbooks, cases, and videos ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

Teaching Without Textbooks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#NoTextbooks

Bob Jensen's threads on technologies for aiding handicapped learners --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm


July 6, 2009 message on the AAA Commons from julie.smith.david@asu.edu

  • title:
    Is anyone using a Kindle reader yet?
    summary:

    ASU has started to offer Kindles in some of the freshman classes, but we haven't adopted them at the higher levels... but we're considering it for our masters program.  Bob Jensen has posted a couple of items about textbook issues (most recently:  http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/c76be17f37), and I wondered if anyone had first hand experience... the good, the bad, the ugyl?
     

    amazon:
    my notes:
    I love my kindle, even though it's a first generation. I would imagine with the new DX version so PDF is native and figures are more clear, I would toss text books in a heart beat... but I've been wrong many times before!

July 6, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

The Kindle pickings for accounting textbooks are still pretty sparse. None of the high volume accounting textbooks have Kindle editions as of yet. A sample of the best selections, in my opinion, is shown below:

Wiley GAAP Codification Enhanced by Barry J. Epstein (Kindle Edition - April 22, 2009) - Kindle Book Buy: $46.10

Intermediate Financial Theory (Academic Press Advanced Finance) (Kindle Edition) by John B. Donaldson Jean-Pierre Danthine (Author) $54.66 & includes wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet

Financial Engineering Principles: A Unified Theory for Financial Product Analysis and Valuation by Perry H. Beaumont (Kindle Edition - Oct 3, 2003) 63.96

I don't think accountants will be using Kindle books for accounting textbooks for some time to come. They might, however, recommend some of the popular press editions in finance (such as some Warren Buffett writings), but I don't see much that is exciting here. Some of the blogs like (Knowledge@wharton) are available, but there's a fee for Kindle downloading of the blogs that are free when downloading into a PC. Bummer.

Bob Jensen

Bob Jensen's threads about electronic books are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm


"A sad day for fair use," Creative Commons, July 6, 2009 --- http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15664

Last week a U.S. district court judge issued a preliminary injunction against the publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, a book based on the idea of J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caufield character as a 76 year old man. Strong reactions to the ruling have come from many across the legal, literary and technology fields, for example Mike Madison, Jim Brown, and Mike Masnick.

My Media Musings delivers the bottom line, easily understood by all:

Seeing judges ban books is never a good thing. Seeing a judge ban a book for such flimsy reasons as this is downright frightening. If her ruling stands, expect to see a long line of similar suits in the near future.

"Copyright laws threaten our online freedom, by Christian Engström, Financial Times, July 7, 2009 --- http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/87c523a4-6b18-11de-861d-00144feabdc0.html 

"Colleges Offer Online Help on Copyright Law for Instructors," by Marc Beja, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3846&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en 

A Fair(y) Tale:  Animated cartoon about copyright law --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo
Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University created this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms.  Also see http://snipurl.com/fairu1
Bob Jensen's threads on the DMCA are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

Harvard Study:  Copyright restrictions limit the spread of digital learning tools
Copyright restrictions limit the spread of digital learning tools in schools and colleges, according to a new report from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University.
Inside Higher Ed, July 19, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/19/qt

From the AAUP (with higher education in mind)
Campus Copyright Rights and Responsibilities: A Basic Guide to Policy Considerations --- http://www.aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/Campus_Copyright.pdf

New Guidelines for Copyright Policies in Universities
Four associations have released a guide for colleges to use in reviewing whether their copyright policies reflect recent legal and technological developments. The guide notes that colleges and their faculty members are major producers of copyrighted material, and that professors and students also are big users of such material — sometimes in ways that create legal difficulties. The groups that prepared the guide are the Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American University Presses, and the Association of American Publishers.
Inside Higher Ed, December 7, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/07/qt

A report released yesterday by a pair of free-expression advocates at New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice claims Web site owners and remix artists alike are finding free-expression rights squelched because of ambiguities in copyright law. The study argues that so-called "fair use" rights are under attack. It suggests six major steps for change, including reducing penalties for infringement and making a greater number of pro-bono lawyers available to defend alleged fair users. BNA's Internet Law News (ILN) - 12/6/2005
Coverage at http://news.com.com/2100-1030_3-5983072.html"> 
Report at http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/WillFairUseSurvive.pdf">a>
From the University of Illinois Scholarly Communication Blog on December 7, 2005 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/ 

Bob Jensen's threads on the frightening DMCA are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright


A Good Day (Maybe?) for Open Sharing

From the Issues in Scholarly Communications Blog from the University of Illinois on June 26, 2009 --- http://www.library.illinois.edu/blog/scholcomm/ 

Yesterday, Senators Lieberman (I-CT) and Cornyn (R-TX) (re-)introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (S.1373), a bill that would ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies. S.1373 would require those agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from such funding no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The bill gives individual agencies flexibility in choosing the location of the digital repository to house this content, as long as the repositories meet conditions for interoperability and public accessibility, and have provisions for long-term archiving.

The bill specifically covers unclassified research funded by agencies including:
Department of Agriculture
Department of Commerce
Department of Defense
Department of Education
Department of Energy
Department of Health and Human Services
Department of Homeland Security
Department of Transportation
Environmental Protection Agency
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
National Science Foundation

Continued in article

 


Long URL condensers
Tinyurl.com --- http://tinyurl.com/

Are you sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Then you've come to the right place. By entering in a URL in the text field below, we will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires.

The older and better-known service is SnipIt --- http://snipurl.com/


Problems with big checks drawn on JP Morgan (Chase) Bank:  Branches may refuse to cash them
Sondra Matthews from JP Morgan has responded to this article with the following information. JP Morgan (Chase) follows an internal policy which is based on preventing fraud and is specifically geared to protecting their account holders and the bank itself. Ms. Matthews explains that there is an upwards dollar limit on the checks it will cash for non-customers in its branches and this amount is completely risk based, and designed to protect its account holders.
Dianna Cotter, "CHASE bank refuses to honor checks written on its bank (update 2)," Examiner.com, July 9, 2009 --- Click Here
Jensen Comment
You can probably deposit the check in your own bank account in another bank and wait for clearance. This is a suspected ploy of JP Morgan to motivate small business firms to change banks to JP Morgan.

What gets to me is that banks that won't cash their own checks are protecting their customers. Since banks must make good on checks that do not have valid signatures, these banks are not protecting their customers by refusing to cash demand deposit checks signed by their customers. The banks are protecting themselves by requiring that they be deposited in some bank account rather than be turned in for cash. Also the banks like to get interest free money while over the days that it takes for one bank to cash a check drawn on another bank --- its called living it up on the "float."


5 Things You Never Knew Your Cell Phone Can Do versus Cannot Do --- http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/household/cellphones.asp

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

 

Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google --- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines
Bob Jensen's search helpers --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
Education Technology Search --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Distance Education Search --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm
Search for Listservs, Blogs, and Social Networks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm


Big Companies Leaving the U.K. Because of Tax Concerns
McDonald's, the fast food giant, will join the ranks of companies quitting the UK when it moves its European headquarters to Geneva later this year. Senior executives, including Denis Hennequin, president of McDonald's operations in Europe, will be based there. The US company, which opened its first restaurant in London in 1974, joins other large US corporations that have based their European operations in Switzerland, including Kraft, Procter & Gamble, Colgate Palmolive and Yahoo. Google also chose Zurich for its European headquarters, despite having a large office in the UK capital . . . Changes to the taxation of foreign profits linked to intellectual property rights such as patents and trademarks, announced in this year's Budget, led publishing company Informa to move its tax residency to Switzerland earlier this year. The company has said it would end up paying twice, because of a UK tax on dividends from intellectual property rights abroad. Home-grown UK companies have also upped sticks in recent years, in search of more favourable tax regimes. The list includes Regus, the temporary office supplier, which has moved to Luxembourg, advertising giant WPP and pharmaceuticals company Shire which are both relocating their headquarters to Ireland, and Brit Insurance, which plans to move to the Netherlands. Investment company Henderson set up a new parent company in Ireland to pay less tax.
Amy Wilson, London Telegraph, July 11, 2009 --- Click Here
Jensen Comment
Since California now has the highest taxes and the highest environmental restrictions among all 50 states, lawmakers in Sacramento should take heed in terms of how high tax rates can backfire. As we speak, corporations are leaving California after looking at 49 other alternatives.


Good Luck Jack (and Suzi):  You're Going to Need All the Luck You Can Get

"Jack Welch Launches Online MBA:  The legendary former GE CEO says he knows a thing or two about management, and for $20,000 you can, too," by Geoff Gloeckler, Business Week, June 22, 2009 --- http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2009/bs20090622_962094.htm?link_position=link1

A corporate icon is diving into the MBA world, and he's bringing his well-documented management and leadership principles with him. Jack Welch, former CEO at General Electric (GE) (and Business Week columnist), has announced plans to start an MBA program based on the business principles he made famous teaching managers and executives in GE's Crotonville classroom.

The Jack Welch Management Institute (JWMI) will officially launch this week, with the first classes starting in the fall. The MBA will be offered almost entirely online. Compared to the $100,000-plus price tag for most brick-and-mortar MBA programs, the $600 per credit hour tuition means students can get an MBA for just over $20,000. "We think it will make the MBA more accessible to those who are hungry to play," Welch says. "And they can keep their job while doing it."

To make the Jack Welch Management Institute a reality, a group led by educational entrepreneur Michael Clifford purchased financially troubled Myers University in Cleveland in 2008, Welch says. Welch got involved with Clifford and his group of investors and made the agreement to launch the Welch Management Institute.

Popularized Six Sigma For Welch, the new educational endeavor is the latest chapter in a long and storied career. As GE's longtime chief, he developed a management philosophy based on relentless efficiency, productivity, and talent development. He popularized Six Sigma, wasn't shy about firing his worst-performing managers, and advocated exiting any business where GE wasn't the No. 1 or No. 2 player. Under Welch, GE became a factory for producing managerial talent, spawning CEOs that included James McNerney at Boeing (BA), Robert Nardelli at Chrysler, and Jeff Immelt, his successor at GE.

Welch's decision to jump into online education shows impeccable timing. Business schools in general are experiencing a rise in applications as mid-level managers look to expand their business acumen while waiting out the current job slump. The new program's flexible schedule—paired with the low tuition cost—could be doubly attractive to those looking to move up the corporate ladder as the market begins to rebound.

Ted Snyder, dean of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, agrees. "I think it's a good time for someone to launch a high-profile online degree," Snyder says. "If you make the investment in contentthat allows for a lot of interaction between faculty and students and also among students, you can get good quality at a much more reasonable tuition level."

Welch's Secret Weapon That being said, there are challenges that an online MBA program like Welch's will have a difficult time overcoming, even if the technology and faculty are there. "The integrity and quality of engagement between faculty and students is the most precious thing we have," Snyder says. "Assuming it's there, it dominates. These things are hard to replicate online."

But Welch does have one thing that differentiates his MBA from others: himself. "We'll have all of the things the other schools have, only we'll have what Jack Welch believes are things that work in business, in a real-time way," he says. "Every week I will have an online streaming video of business today. For example, if I was teaching this week, I would be putting up the health-care plan. I'd be putting up the financial restructuring plan, talking about it, laying out the literature, what others are saying, and I'd be talking about it. I'll be doing that every week."

Welch and his wife Suzy are also heavily involved in curriculum design, leaning heavily on the principles he used training managers at GE.

Continued in Article

Jensen Comment
There are enormous obstacles standing in the way of the super-confident Jack Welch on this one. I should mention that I've never been a Jack Welch fan and am especially disturbed that he is the world's leader in platinum retirement perks that, in my opinion, go way beyond his value in the past and future to GE. But I will try to not let my prejudices bias my remarks below.

In any case it will be interesting to track the progress of the Jack Welch Management Institute. I would applaud if it becomes one of the best online degree programs in the world, because I highly support the development of more and better online training and education programs in the world --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

The Official Website of the Jack (and Suzi) Welch Management Institute is at http://www.welchway.com/

The competition is listed at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

More on the greatest swindles of the world
General Electric, the world's largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government's key rescue programs for banks. At the same time, GE has avoided many of the restrictions facing other financial giants getting help from the government. The company did not initially qualify for the program, under which the government sought to unfreeze credit markets by guaranteeing debt sold by banking firms. But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE. As a result, GE has joined major banks collectively saving billions of dollars by raising money for...

Jeff Gerth and Brady Dennis, "How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue Industrial Giant Becomes Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program," The Washington Post, June 29, 2009 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/28/AR2009062802955.html?hpid=topnews
Jensen Comment
GE thus becomes the biggest winner under both the TARP and the Cap-and-Trade give away legislation. It is a major producer of wind turbines and other machinery for generating electricity under alternative forms of energy. The government will pay GE billions for this equipment. GE Capital is also "Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program." Sort of makes you wonder why GE's NBC network never criticizes liberal spending in Congress.
Jensen's threads on the bank rescue swindle are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm z
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Question
How would you advise Jack and Suzi to modify the program for greater assurance as to success?

Answer
My advice would be to make this a GE Executive MBA Program. The business model would be to gear it to GE professionals, especially newly hired engineers that are strong on technical ability and weak on managerial skills, financial management, marketing, and accounting.

The key to success would be to have GE pay the tuition as a fringe benefit to the winning employees selected to get an MBA from Jack and Suzi. This may not be too difficult since there are shrines throughout the world in GE facilities where Jack Welch is worshipped as a God.

Some of the advantages of this business model are as follows:

There are successful business models of this nature already in existence, although in most instances the corporation or other organization selected an AACSB-accredited institution to devise a special curriculum for employees seeking degrees in that institution. A few examples are summarized below.

"Stanford, Duke, Rice, ... and Gates?," by Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 10, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i41/41a02201.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Dear Bill Gates,

Hi! You don't know me, but I have an idea about how you should spend your hard-earned money. I'll bet you get a lot of that these days.

It's an old idea, a 19th-century idea. But I think its time has come again. Two words: Gates University.

What does that mean? Just what it sounds like! You should build a brand-new university, a great 21st-century institution of higher learning. A university unlike anything the world has ever seen.

The time is right — your foundation, the world's largest, recently announced a big push to improve postsecondary education. It's a terrific move. High-quality college credentials are the key to opportunity in the modern economy. If our higher-education system doesn't get much better at helping more students earn them, your good work in improving elementary and secondary education will be for naught.

But you've also learned from your decade of pushing schools to improve. It's really hard! As you said in your annual letter in 2009, "We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school."

Well, high schools are a breeze compared with colleges, which are both more apt to resist change and more skilled at doing so successfully.

You need to prove that newer, better ways are possible. Fortunately, that part is easier in higher education. The problem with high schools is that there are tens of thousands of them, all serving local regions, and they don't pay attention to one another. Higher education is a national market, with only a few hundred elite colleges, in close competition. You won't have to work to get people to watch Gates University. It'll get all the notice it needs — and then some.

What would Gates University look like? To start, it would look like something. It wouldn't be wholly virtual. A university needs a physical center, a beating heart, a place where students and teachers come together and learn.

Admission to Gates U., the place, would be selective — but without the bribery and latent classism that still stain our so-called best colleges. No legacy admissions, once you start having legacies. No buying one's way in, no gentleman's agreements with wealthy private high schools that admit the "right" kind of students. No bias against striving ethnic groups, no special considerations for senators' sons.

And no preferences for athletes, because Gates University won't be running a pro football team on the side. (Seattle already has one, last I checked.)

Who would work at Gates University? Anyone who could do a great job. Maybe professors will have Ph.D.'s, maybe they won't. If a really smart person drops out of college, founds a phenomenally successful business, and decides to turn toward education as a way of giving back, he or she would be welcome to apply for a job. You, for example, would be qualified to teach at Gates U.

There would be no tenure, obviously. I assume you never thought it was a good idea at Microsoft — why have it here? Nor would you sequester faculty members into departments organized around academic disciplines. The world can get by without one more English department or college of business. Gates's programs would cross traditional disciplines, organized around goals for what students need to learn. Faculty time, pay, and status would center on the primary teaching mission.

How would you grant credits at Gates University? You wouldn't. At least not the way colleges normally do, based on time in contact with professors. No credit hours at Gates U., no degrees based on the number of years enrolled. Instead you'd describe in great, public detail all of the knowledge, skills, and attributes that students pursuing a given course of studies would need to acquire. You'd be very open about how you teach those things and how you assess what students have learned. Then you'd grant credentials when students met those academic standards — regardless of how long it takes.

How many students would you serve at Gates University? As many as you can. That, more than anything, would truly distinguish the university from all others.

Many public and nonprofit universities are trying to expand distance education over the Internet. But they're often constrained by their brands, their culture, their fealty to tradition. While the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and others are pioneering "open courseware" — well-developed materials available free of charge to individual learners and instructors — many colleges' online divisions are mere appendages, ways to make money and survive. Traditional colleges tend to look at the Internet and say, "How can we use this to keep being what we've always been?" Gates University would use the Internet to be what no university has ever been.

For-profit universities, meanwhile, are surging into the online market. Some provide valuable services, while others are ripping off students and taxpayers. But on some level they all want to provide as good an education as necessary for as much tuition as possible. Gates University would provide as good an education as possible for as much tuition as necessary, to as many students as it can reach.

How many students is that? You made a vast fortune with information technology and economies of scale. More people weren't an obstacle for you — they were an opportunity. How does Microsoft think about the number of people it could sell software to? That's how you should think about the number of people Gates University could serve.

Gates University, the place, would be the center of a global, Web-based institution of higher learning. In the same way that your foundation works to provide low-cost pharmaceuticals and vaccines to developing nations, your faculty members would work hand-in-hand with colleagues around the world to develop curricula, enforce academic standards, and experiment with novel new ways to use technology to help as many students as possible earn high-quality, low-cost degrees.

Because Gates University's standards would be open, the job market would have no trouble accepting its degrees. And I don't think you'll have any problems attracting students. Your name is global currency. People of every nation and culture need higher education, and they would jump at the chance to earn credentials with your imprimatur. Because Gates U. would be nonprofit, you'll price those degrees at cost. Since you'll have no money-losing sports teams, huge libraries full of books, bloated administrative structures, or unproductive professors, I'm guessing that will be far less than what other elite institutions now charge.

And for low-income students learning online, the charge will be even less. Technology and economies of scale are creating huge, largely untapped opportunities to lower the marginal cost of higher education. People all over the world have the talent, motivation, and will to earn degrees from world-class universities. But many of them are poor and isolated and far away. Gates University's mission would be to find those people, wherever they are, and give them the chance to learn.

These are big changes. Some might put you in conflict with accreditors, which are still too focused on fitting universities into a precast mold. But that's OK — it's a fight worth having, and one I think you would win. Indeed, the whole process of building Gates University would generate a conversation about postsecondary education that is sorely needed.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Given Bill Gate's pattern of giving away billions of dollars, my guess is that the money would go toward schools, probably K-12 schools, in Africa. His philanthropy seems to be more focused on global needs. Thus far he's focused more on health needs, but eventually he perhaps will be equally focused on learning needs of young minds.

"THE COLLEGE OF 2020: STUDENTS," The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2009 ---
http://research.chronicle.com/asset/TheCollegeof2020ExecutiveSummary.pdf?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

This is the first Chronicle Research Services report in a three-part series on what higher education will look like in the year 2020. It is based on reviews of research and data on trends in higher education, interviews with experts who are shaping the future of colleges, and the results of a poll of members of a Chronicle Research Services panel of admissions officials.

To buy the full, data-rich 50-page report, see the links at the end of this Executive Summary. Later reports in this series will look at college technology and facilities in 2020, and the faculty of the future

"The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age," by  Jane Park, Creative Commons, June 26th, 2009 --- http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15522

Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in higher education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on available online training and education programs are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm


Business Technology from Business Week Magazine --- http://bx.businessweek.com/business-technology/

The Journal of Accountancy has a great monthly technology section (with particular focus on things you never, ever thought you could do with MS Office, particularly Excel) --- http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/
The Q&A modules are particularly informative and should be centralized in one place in addition to monthly editions.

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting software --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#AccountingSoftware

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on July 10, 2009

Public Pensions Cook the Books
by Andrew G. Biggs
The Wall Street Journal

Jul 06, 2009
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com

TOPICS: Advanced Financial Accounting, Financial Accounting Standards Board, Governmental Accounting, Market-Value Approach, Pension Accounting

SUMMARY: As Mr. Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, puts it, "public employee pension plans are plagued by overgenerous benefits, chronic underfunding, and now trillion dollar stock-market losses. Based on their preferred accounting methods...these plans are underfunded nationally by around $310 billion. [But] the numbers are worse using market valuation methods...which discount benefit liabilities at lower interest rates...."

CLASSROOM APPLICATION: Introducing the importance of interest rate assumptions, and the accounting itself, for pension plans can be accomplished with this article.

QUESTIONS: 
1. (Introductory) Summarize the accounting for pension plans, including the process for determining pension liabilities, the funded status of a pension plan, pension expense, the use of a discount rate, the use of an expected rate of return. You may base your answer on the process used by corporations rather than governmental entities.

2. (Advanced) Based on the discussion in the article, what is the difference between accounting for pension plans by U.S. corporations following FASB requirements and governmental entities following GASB guidance?

3. (Introductory) What did the administrators of the Montana Public Employees' Retirement Board and the Montana Teachers' Retirement System include in their advertisements to hire new actuaries?

4. (Advanced) What is the concern with using the "expected return" on plan assets as the rate to discount future benefits rather than using a low, risk free rate of return for this calculation? In your answer, comment on the author's statement that "future benefits are considered to be riskless" and the impact that assessment should have on the choice of a discount rate.

5. (Advanced) What is the response by public pension officers regarding differences between their plans and those of corporate entities? How do they argue this leads to differences in required accounting? Do you agree or disagree with this position? Support your assessment.

Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island

 

"Public Pensions Cook the Books:  Some plans want to hide the truth from taxpayers," by Andrew Biggs, The Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124683573382697889.html

Here's a dilemma: You manage a public employee pension plan and your actuary tells you it is significantly underfunded. You don't want to raise contributions. Cutting benefits is out of the question. To be honest, you'd really rather not even admit there's a problem, lest taxpayers get upset.

What to do? For the administrators of two Montana pension plans, the answer is obvious: Get a new actuary. Or at least that's the essence of the managers' recent solicitations for actuarial services, which warn that actuaries who favor reporting the full market value of pension liabilities probably shouldn't bother applying.

Public employee pension plans are plagued by overgenerous benefits, chronic underfunding, and now trillion dollar stock-market losses. Based on their preferred accounting methods -- which discount future liabilities based on high but uncertain returns projected for investments -- these plans are underfunded nationally by around $310 billion.

The numbers are worse using market valuation methods (the methods private-sector plans must use), which discount benefit liabilities at lower interest rates to reflect the chance that the expected returns won't be realized. Using that method, University of Chicago economists Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh calculate that, even prior to the market collapse, public pensions were actually short by nearly $2 trillion. That's nearly $87,000 per plan participant. With employee benefits guaranteed by law and sometimes even by state constitutions, it's likely these gargantuan shortfalls will have to be borne by unsuspecting taxpayers.

Some public pension administrators have a strategy, though: Keep taxpayers unsuspecting. The Montana Public Employees' Retirement Board and the Montana Teachers' Retirement System declare in a recent solicitation for actuarial services that "If the Primary Actuary or the Actuarial Firm supports [market valuation] for public pension plans, their proposal may be disqualified from further consideration."

Scott Miller, legal counsel of the Montana Public Employees Board, was more straightforward: "The point is we aren't interested in bringing in an actuary to pressure the board to adopt market value of liabilities theory."

While corporate pension funds are required by law to use low, risk-adjusted discount rates to calculate the market value of their liabilities, public employee pensions are not. However, financial economists are united in believing that market-based techniques for valuing private sector investments should also be applied to public pensions.

Because the power of compound interest is so strong, discounting future benefit costs using a pension plan's high expected return rather than a low riskless return can significantly reduce the plan's measured funding shortfall. But it does so only by ignoring risk. The expected return implies only the "expectation" -- meaning, at least a 50% chance, not a guarantee -- that the plan's assets will be sufficient to meet its liabilities. But when future benefits are considered to be riskless by plan participants and have been ruled to be so by state courts, a 51% chance that the returns will actually be there when they are needed hardly constitutes full funding.

Public pension administrators argue that government plans fundamentally differ from private sector pensions, since the government cannot go out of business. Even so, the only true advantage public pensions have over private plans is the ability to raise taxes. But as the Congressional Budget Office has pointed out in 2004, "The government does not have a capacity to bear risk on its own" -- rather, government merely redistributes risk between taxpayers and beneficiaries, present and future.

Market valuation makes the costs of these potential tax increases explicit, while the public pension administrators' approach, which obscures the possibility that the investment returns won't achieve their goals, leaves taxpayers in the dark.

For these reasons, the Public Interest Committee of the American Academy of Actuaries recently stated, "it is in the public interest for retirement plans to disclose consistent measures of the economic value of plan assets and liabilities in order to provide the benefits promised by plan sponsors."

Nevertheless, the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, an umbrella group representing government employee pension funds, effectively wants other public plans to take the same low road that the two Montana plans want to take. It argues against reporting the market valuation of pension shortfalls. But the association's objections seem less against market valuation itself than against the fact that higher reported underfunding "could encourage public sector plan sponsors to abandon their traditional pension plans in lieu of defined contribution plans."

The Government Accounting Standards Board, which sets guidelines for public pension reporting, does not currently call for reporting the market value of public pension liabilities. The board announced last year a review of its position regarding market valuation but says the review may not be completed until 2013.

This is too long for state taxpayers to wait to find out how many trillions they owe.

Bob Jensen's threads on Off-Balance-Sheet Financing (OBSF) are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#OBSF2

Bob Jensen's threads about fraud in government are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#Lawmakers


A Fabulous, Albeit Controversial, History Story
History of the University of Phoenix and Its Founder (a really interesting long article)

"Phoenix Risen:  How a history professor became the pioneer of the for-profit revolution," by Thomas Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 10, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i41/41a00101.htm
Unfortunately this fabulous article is not free, but professors and students will find it in their campus library.

(Introductory paragraphs not quoted)

It is hard to square that with the actual John Sperling, who may just be the least flashy billionaire out there. He tools around Phoenix in a decade-old car (albeit a Jaguar), carries his IBM ThinkPad tucked under one arm, and dons the same outfit almost every day: a blue, button-down shirt and khaki slacks. He loves theater, classical music, and especially poetry. He is easily bored by chitchat but lights up when the conversation turns to politics or the environment. He sees the University of Phoenix not as a giant ATM to support his causes, but as a force for social good, an enterprise consistent with his left-of-center worldview. These days he is spending millions on solar technology and sustainable agriculture, which he hopes can reel humankind back from the edge of calamity.

What's more, following a brief retirement of sorts, he has returned to the helm of the company he founded and is attempting to steer it through one of the country's choppiest economic periods. So how did a middling history professor become the billionaire leader of the for-profit revolution? And, as he nears his 90th year, is he still up to the challenge?

John Sperling grew up poor and sickly in the middle of America — Missouri — during the Great Depression, the youngest son of a doting mother he loved and an abusive father he loathed. In his autobiography, Rebel With a Cause (2000), the account of his boyhood is filled with startling scenes of suffering and cruelty. Mr. Sperling is a fan of Charles Dickens, and it's no wonder.

His father beat him regularly, and, at age 10, after one humiliating episode too many, the boy threatened to kill the old man in his sleep if he ever hit him again. The threat did the trick, and the beatings stopped. When he was 15 his father died and John couldn't have been more pleased. His mother told him to at least try to look mournful, but he couldn't help himself: "I raced outside, rolled in the grass squealing with delight," he writes in his book. "There I lay looking up into a clear blue sky, and I realized this was the happiest day of my life. It still is."

After high school, he took a job as a stocker at a department store but was fired for being too slow. With no prospects, no skills that he knew of, and zero self-confidence, Mr. Sperling did what lots of young men have done before and since: He went to sea, snagging a spot on a freighter bound for the Far East.

It was on board that his education began. Fellow sailors introduced him to novelists, like Henry Miller, and philosophers, like Oswald Spengler. He also read Marx and embraced socialism (a position he has modified in the years since). Back in the United States in 1941, he got a night job at a filling station and enrolled at the City College of San Francisco.

During World War II, Mr. Sperling kicked around the military but never saw overseas action. He trained with the Navy, transferred to the Army, was discharged, and was called up again. Along the way, he got married and struggled with anxiety. He learned to sew to make his wife clothes, and to box to improve his self-confidence.

He left San Francisco for Reed College, a significant step up for a young man who had been a below-average high-school student. The competition from his classmates was stiff, and he began to despise those who had grown up with everything he had not, like educated parents, good schools, and money. Still, he excelled and was accepted into graduate school in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. When he learned that he would be forced to take a slew of prerequisites, though, he switched to history.

He shone at Berkeley, too, winning an endowed studentship at King's College Cambridge. Those days at Berkeley, he recalls now, were the most blissful of his life. "In the cafes, we honed our academic skills by expounding and arguing theory, fact, and fiction," he writes. "It was a movable intellectual feast."

. . .

With two former students as co-founders, Sperling worked out of his house and used $26,000 in savings as seed money for the fledgling program, which was originally called the Institute for Community Research and Development. By the second year, revenues were just under $3-million. Locked inside the middle-aged professor, it turns out, was a CEO waiting to burst forth.

In the mid-70s, Mr. Sperling's company was entirely different from what the University of Phoenix would become. Instead of competing with nonprofit institutions, it formed partnerships, acting as a subcontractor to teach working adults. Mr. Sperling traveled the country drumming up business and often running into skepticism and even scorn from those in traditional higher education. He saw his mission as bringing higher education to underserved communities. But naysayers said his company was lowering the standards of its accredited partners. Why would a college bring in outsiders to teach? And why cater specifically to working adults?

Not that the venture was a failure. Some colleges did sign on, but the arrangements ultimately proved problematic. Mr. Sperling remembers sitting in his office in San Jose — a proper office building rather than his living room — thinking that if he didn't come up with a new plan there would no longer be a company to run. The money was coming in, but he sensed trouble ahead.

That's when the University of Phoenix was born, at least in his mind. Problems with California regulators, whom Mr. Sperling believed were determined to shut his company down, prompted a move to Arizona. In those first few years, Phoenix was dismissed as a diploma mill and struggled to gain accreditation.

As profitable and ubiquitous as Phoenix is now, it is hard to imagine the company as a small, vulnerable upstart. But that's what it was, even after it was accredited. Other institutions in Arizona were hoping for its demise, and reports in the local news media about the California interlopers were almost uniformly negative. There was an FBI investigation into allegations that Mr. Sperling had bribed officials at the University of San Francisco to get them to support a contract with his pre-Phoenix company. The probe went nowhere but was a genuine distraction.

Meanwhile, Mr. Sperling, now twice divorced, struggled in his personal life. At 57, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Following surgery, he discovered that smoking marijuana helped him manage his pain better than prescription drugs. He has been an advocate of legalization ever since.

There were internal company struggles, too. One of them involved Mr. Sperling and another founder, Peter Ellis. Mr. Ellis had been one of Mr. Sperling's students at San Jose State and considered him a father figure. In his autobiography, Mr. Sperling portrays his former student as a hard worker but an inadequate leader who wasn't up to the challenge of building a university. The two men tangled over a host of issues, and Mr. Ellis, after some deft maneuvering by Mr. Sperling, was pushed out with a payment of $125,000, a tiny amount considering that he had an ownership stake in the company. They haven't spoken to each other since.

Nearly three decades later, Mr. Ellis, who now runs a company called Community Crime Prevention Associates, says he was ready to leave. In his view, the University of Phoenix had strayed from its original mission and become too focused on the bottom line. And Mr. Ellis, a self-described do-gooder, thought the university was no longer interested in doing good.

That said, he has watched in awe as the company he helped start has grown exponentially. As for his former professor, he sees Mr. Sperling as an ambitious businessman who hates to lose. "He's a brilliant guy, but he loves power," says Mr. Ellis.

Others also point to Mr. Sperling's fierce drive, his confidence in his own abilities, his desire to be in charge. Suzanne W. Helburn, a longtime collaborator on some of Mr. Sperling's writing projects, has had her disagreements with him over the years, but the two have remained friends. She describes him as cocky, ambitious, and very sure of his own judgment. "He's an archetype entrepreneur," she says. "He loves starting things. He's totally enthusiastic about the new thing."

Continued in a very long and interesting article

Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on free online video courses and course materials from leading universities --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

 

What's Online Learning Really Like in a Government and Not-for-Profit Accounting Class at the University of Phoenix?

The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered distance education for more than a decade, and during that time she's written stories about the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions market themselves, and the demise of the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn't done, it seemed, was to take a course from an online university. But this spring she finally took the plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and nonprofit accounting through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales from the cyber-classroom -- and her final grade -- in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter.
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) --- http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/

Jensen Added Comment
It wasn't mentioned, but I think Goldie took the ACC 460 course --- Click Here

ACC 460 Government and Non-Profit Accounting

Course Description

This course covers fund accounting, budget and control issues, revenue and expense recognition, and issues of reporting for both government and non-profit entities.

Topics and Objectives

Environment of Government/Non-Profit Accounting

Fund Accounting Part I

Fund Accounting Part II

Overview of Not-for-Profit Accounting

Current Issues in Government and Not-for-Profit Accounting

Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on free online video courses and course materials from leading universities --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education (although the University of Phoenix also has onsite campuses) alternatives are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm


For-Profit Colleges Deserve Some Respect
Finally, because the for-profit institutions are in competition with public universities and community colleges that charge lower tuition, they must offer students something more. Outstanding service, flexible schedules that fit the students' lifestyles, strong faculty members who combine theory with practical experience and who know how to teach, as well as quality, market-driven programs, are what lure students to the for-profit university — even if the tuition is more expensive. In reality, all institutions strive to have their revenues exceed their expenses. Sound institutions use the money to enhance the educational experience of the students. Regardless of the nature of a higher-education institution — private or public, research or career-oriented, for-profit or not-for-profit — its quality will be determined by its management. There have unquestionably been abuses in some for-profit education institutions, but the same can be said about private and public traditional institutions as well. Perhaps it's time to evaluate institutions on their own merits, rather than classify them by stereotypical categories.
Michael J. Seiden, "For-Profit Colleges Deserve Some Respect," Chronicle of Higher Education, July 10, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i41/41a08001.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en


Please send Amy (and me) your best "learning nudgers"

July 2, 2009 message from Amy Dunbar [Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]

Dale Flesher, the President of the Teaching and Learning Section of the AAA, asked me to be a breakfast speaker on Monday, Aug. 3, at the AAA meeting.  The breakfast is a 6:45 AM, so I need a good topic to keep folks awake, and I think I found one: Learning Nudges. I read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education this morning that mentioned Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein's book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

http://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/014311526X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246545491&sr=8-1

After reading the AECM emails on “cheat sheets,” I realized that the AECM would be a great source of nudges!  Certainly a “cheat sheet” is one that helps students study for exams, but I was disheartened by Linda Marquis’s statement that the scores didn’t change when she instituted the practice.  Nevertheless, I think it’s a great suggestion for easing student tension prior to exams.

I would appreciate your suggestions for what you use for nudges in your classes.  My goal is to create a handout that would give the nudge and the name and school of the person who uses the nudge. I would love to know if/how you use humor as a nudge.  Perhaps it is stretching the concept of a “nudge,” but  I think humor eases tension and creates bonds among students.  Just my two cents.

My email is amy.dunbar@uconn.edu

Thank you!

Amy Dunbar
Department of Accounting #431
School of Business
University of Connecticut
2100 Hillside Road, Unit 1041
Storrs, CT 06269-104
amy.dunbar@uconn.edu

 

July 2, 2009 reply by Bob Jensen

Hi Amy,

I think "learning nudges" can be helped by interesting history pieces. For example, when beginning an accounting class you might show how Incan khipus people kept accounting records with knots on strings --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
You can even bring your own knitting for this one.

I think great ethics videos fit into most any accounting course as "learning nudges." One of the greatest is at http://www.baylortv.com/streaming/001496/300kbps_str.asx 

Accounting professors all too often neglect possible learning nudges in the history of accountancy.
When introducing derivative financial instruments accounting I delve into the early history (back to Roman times) of derivatives speculation and the timeline of frauds --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

For AIS and auditing topics there's a wealth of sadness and humor in the history of these topics --- think of all the stupid technology disasters in the history of computing.

I hate to say it, but in your specialty (tax) there must be a wealth of humorous material on absurd tax shelters. For example, the Frontline (PBS Television) expose on the KPMG German trolleys grabs student attention --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#KPMG

I often did "learning nudges" with clips from news shows such as Sixty Minutes, 20/20, and especially the absurd and funny exposes of John Stossel --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stossel
John is extremely clever and funny and informative. His writings are fantastic serve as a major source on learning nudges.

Remember that your university's media center probably has video cartridges on these popular Network shows in their archives.

My all time favorite is a Sixty Minutes piece on derivative financial instruments --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000overview/mp3/SIXTY01.wmv

In spite of poor quality, Enron's infamous home video is near the top in terms of humor and sadness --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/windowsmedia/enron3.wmv

One of my favorite and humorous writers is P.J. O'Rourke. Talk about attention grabbers --- O'Rourke supplies a lifetime worth of attention grabbers and learning nudgers --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._J._O%27Rourke

There may be some humorous (also sad) learning nudges to attract attention by pointing out some really dumb decisions made in business (or possibly accounting or the tax code). For example there are some really dumb decisions made by fund managers to invest in absurdly (intentionally absurd derivatives engineered by salesmen at Merrill Lynch and elsewhere). Some of the derivatives fraud books are really a laugh a page, including such examples as shown below.

Also track some of the other "dumbest moments" in business such as Merrill Lynch CEO's "Commode on Legs."

"Dumbest Moments in Business 2009...Midyear Edition," Fortune via Yahoo, July 2, 2009 --- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2284224/posts

Some of these "dumbest moments" are very good attention grabbers.

 

 

***********************

Some of the older derivatives fraud exposes and humor include the following:

  • Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Playing the Money Markets (Coronet, 1999, ISBN 0340767006)

    Lewis writes in Partnoy’s earlier whistleblower style with somewhat more intense and comic portrayals of the major players in describing the double dealing and break down of integrity on the trading floor of Salomon Brothers.

    John Rolfe and Peter Troob, Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle (Warner Books, Incorporated, 2002, ISBN: 0446676950, 288 Pages)

    This is a hilarious tongue-in-cheek account by Wharton and Harvard MBAs who thought they were starting out as stock brokers for $200,000 a year until they realized that they were on the phones in a bucket shop selling sleazy IPOs to unsuspecting institutional investors who in turn passed them along to widows and orphans.  They write. "It took us another six months after that to realize that we were, in fact, selling crappy public offerings to investors."

    There are other books along a similar vein that may be more revealing and entertaining than the early books of Frank Partnoy, but he was one of the first, if not the first, in the roaring 1990s to reveal the high crime taking place behind the concrete and glass of Wall Street.  He was the first to anticipate many of the scandals that soon followed.  And his testimony before the U.S. Senate is the best concise account of the crime that transpired at Enron.  He lays the blame clearly at the feet of government officials (read that Wendy Gramm) who sold the farm when they deregulated the energy markets and opened the doors to unregulated OTC derivatives trading in energy.  That is when Enron really began bilking the public.

  • 3.  What are some of Frank Partnoy’s best-known works?

    Frank Partnoy, FIASCO: Blood in the Water on Wall Street (W. W. Norton & Company, 1997, ISBN 0393046222, 252 pages). 

    This is the first of a somewhat repetitive succession of Partnoy’s “FIASCO” books that influenced my life.  The most important revelation from his insider’s perspective is that the most trusted firms on Wall Street and financial centers in other major cities in the U.S., that were once highly professional and trustworthy, excoriated the guts of integrity leaving a façade behind which crooks less violent than the Mafia but far more greedy took control in the roaring 1990s. 

    After selling a succession of phony derivatives deals while at Morgan Stanley, Partnoy blew the whistle in this book about a number of his employer’s shady and outright fraudulent deals sold in rigged markets using bait and switch tactics.  Customers, many of them pension fund investors for schools and municipal employees, were duped into complex and enormously risky deals that were billed as safe as the U.S. Treasury.

    His books have received mixed reviews, but I question some of the integrity of the reviewers from the investment banking industry who in some instances tried to whitewash some of the deals described by Partnoy.  His books have received a bit less praise than the book Liars Poker by Michael Lewis, but critics of Partnoy fail to give credit that Partnoy’s exposes preceded those of Lewis. 

    Frank Partnoy, FIASCO: Guns, Booze and Bloodlust: the Truth About High Finance (Profile Books, 1998, 305 Pages)

    Like his earlier books, some investment bankers and literary dilettantes who reviewed this book were critical of Partnoy and claimed that he misrepresented some legitimate structured financings.  However, my reading of the reviewers is that they were trying to lend credence to highly questionable offshore deals documented by Partnoy.  Be that as it may, it would have helped if Partnoy had been a bit more explicit in some of his illustrations.

    Frank Partnoy, FIASCO: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader (Penguin, 1999, ISBN 0140278796, 283 pages). 

    This is a blistering indictment of the unregulated OTC market for derivative financial instruments and the million and billion dollar deals conceived in investment banking.  Among other things, Partnoy describes Morgan Stanley’s annual drunken skeet-shooting competition organized by a “gun-toting strip-joint connoisseur” former combat officer (fanatic) who loved the motto:  “When derivatives are outlawed only outlaws will have derivatives.”  At that event, derivatives salesmen were forced to shoot entrapped bunnies between the eyes on the pretense that the bunnies were just like “defenseless animals” that were Morgan Stanley’s customers to be shot down even if they might eventually “lose a billion dollars on derivatives.”
     
    This book has one of the best accounts of the “fiasco” caused almost entirely by the duping of Orange County ’s Treasurer (Robert Citron) by the unscrupulous Merrill Lynch derivatives salesman named Michael Stamenson. Orange County eventually lost over a billion dollars and was forced into bankruptcy.  Much of this was later recovered in court from Merrill Lynch.  Partnoy calls Citron and Stamenson “The Odd Couple,” which is also the title of Chapter 8 in the book.Frank Partnoy, Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets (Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated, 2003, ISBN: 080507510-0, 477 pages)Frank Partnoy, Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets (Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated, 2003, ISBN: 080507510-0, 477 pages)

    Partnoy shows how corporations gradually increased financial risk and lost control over overly complex structured financing deals that obscured the losses and disguised frauds  pushed corporate officers and their boards into successive and ingenious deceptions." Major corporations such as Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom entered into enormous illegal corporate finance and accounting.  Partnoy documents the spread of this epidemic stage and provides some suggestions for restraining the disease.

    "The Siskel and Ebert of Financial Matters: Two Thumbs Down for the Credit Reporting Agencies" by Frank Partnoy, Washington University Law Quarterly, Volume 77, No. 3, 1999 --- http://ls.wustl.edu/WULQ/ 
    (Not Humor)
     

  •  

    Liars Poker II is called "The End"
    The Not-Funny Punch Line is Not Until Page 9 of This Tongue in Cheek Explanation of the Meltdown on Wall Street!

    Now I asked Gutfreund about his biggest decision. “Yes,” he said. “They—the heads of the other Wall Street firms—all said what an awful thing it was to go public (beg for a government bailout) and how could you do such a thing. But when the temptation arose, they all gave in to it.” He agreed that the main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders. “When things go wrong, it’s their problem,” he said—and obviously not theirs alone. When a Wall Street investment bank screwed up badly enough, its risks became the problem of the U.S. government. “It’s laissez-faire until you get in deep shit,” he said, with a half chuckle. He was out of the game.

    This is a must read to understand what went wrong on Wall Street --- especially the punch line!
    "The End," by Michael Lewis December 2008 Issue The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
    http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true

     

    It should be a heck of a lot of fun, Amy, to catalog some of the great learning nudges that you discover in your searches. Please share the best ones with us (including both the humorous and not-so-funny nudgers).


    "Are Independent Audit-Committee Members Objective?" The Harvard Law School, July 6, 2009 --- http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/2009/07/06/are-independent-audit-committee-members-objective/
    Based upon a forthcoming Accounting Review article by Matthew Magilke of the University of Utah, Brian W. Mayhew of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Joel Pike of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.)
    The working paper can be downloaded from SSRN at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1097714

    Abstract:
    We use experimental markets to examine stock-based compensation's impact on the objectivity of participants serving as audit committee members. We compare audit committee member reporting objectivity under three regimes: no stock-based compensation, stock-based compensation linked to current shareholders, and stock-based compensation linked to future shareholders. Our experiments show that student participants serving as audit committee members prefer biased reporting when compensated with stock-based compensation. Audit committee members compensated with current stock-based compensation prefer aggressive reporting, and audit committee members compensated with future stock-based compensation prefer overly conservative reporting. We find that audit committee members who do not receive stock-based compensation are the most objective. Our study suggests that stock-based compensation impacts audit committee member preferences for biased reporting, suggesting the need for additional research in this area.

    Keywords: Audit Committee, Stock Compensation, Independence

    Jensen Comment
    I hate to keep repeating myself, but this will probably go down as one of those student experiments that have dubious extrapolations to the real world. The student compensation is nowhere near the possible compensations of real board members of real corporations. My traditional example here is my banker friend who gambles for relatively large stakes with his poker-playing friends, but never gambles even small time with his local Bangor bank.

    Even more discouraging is that following decades of publications of empirical academic research, the findings will simply be accepted as truth without ever replicating the outcomes as would be required in real science. In science, its the replications that are more eagerly anticipated than the original studies. But this is not the case in accounting research --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#Replication

    Probably the most fascinating study of an audit committee is the history of the infamous Audit Committee of Enron. Evidence in retrospect seems to point to the fact that the Audit Committee and the Board of Directors (Bob Jaedicke was on both Boards) were truly deceived by clever and unscrupulous Enron executives. Probably the most penetrating study of what happened was the after-the-fact Powers' Study conducted by the Board itself --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm
    There are times when I'm more impressed by a sample of one than a sample of students in an artificial experiment that is never replicated.

    Also see Question  7 at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnronQuiz.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on professionalism and independence are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Professionalism


    Speaking of Dumb Business Decisions
    Watch the video --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bOug1d20c

    "What The Pickens Fiasco Means To Green," by Andy Stone, Forbes, July 8, 2009 ---
    http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/08/boone-pickens-wind-power-business-energy-pickens.html

    The White House would be wise to learn the lessons of T. Boone Pickens' wind-power failure.

    On Tuesday, Texas oilman and energy security proselyte T. Boone Pickens announced that he will delay, and likely permanently scuttle, plans for a 687 turbine wind project in the Texas panhandle.

    The demise of the project, which was supposed to be the largest in the world at a rated generating capacity of 1,000 megawatts, came when Pickens discovered he couldn't raise money to build transmission lines to carry wind energy from his remote 200,000 acres to big cities that would consume the power.

    Pickens had obviously hoped to become the poster child for wind. Instead, his Texas experiment is now a cautionary tale on the critical role of transmission to wind development. He's stuck with $2 billion worth of General Electric ( GE - news - people ) turbines, which he hopes to move to smaller projects throughout the Midwest and Canada. He's also decided to wait for the government to build transmission to carry wind power in Texas.

    Transmission is a critical and often overlooked component to making green energy work, particularly because wind and solar resources are often located in rural areas far from major transmission backbones.

    A year ago the Department of Energy released a roadmap by which the U.S. would generate 20% of its electricity from wind by the year 2030. The critical bottleneck in the plan would be transmission. DOE said a nationwide network of high-voltage power lines would suffice to get all that wind energy to market, but the plan would cost at least $60 billion.

    In the drive to stimulate green energy, President Obama will need to keep the need for transmission front and center.

    "Dumbest Moments in Business 2009...Midyear Edition," Fortune via Yahoo, July 2, 2009 --- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2284224/posts

    Some of these "dumbest moments" are very good attention grabbers in class.

     


    Deloitte to Pay $1M in Beazer Suit
    Deloitte & Touche has agreed to pay investors of Beazer Homes USA nearly $1 million to settle claims the firm should have noticed the homebuilder was issuing inaccurate financial statements as the housing market began to decline earlier this decade. The audit firm, Beazer, and former Beazer executives have settled the class-action lawsuit for a total of $30.5 million, pending approval by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. Deloitte is scheduled to pay $950,000.
    Sarah Johnson, "Deloitte to Pay $1M in Beazer Suit," CFO.com, May 7, 2009 --- http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/13612963/c_13610376?f=TodayInFinance_Inside

    Bob Jensen's threads on Deloitte & Touche are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#Deloitte

    "Beazer to Pay Up to $53 Million in Fraud Case," by Brett Kendall and Sarah H. Lynch, The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124648101952382381.html#mod=todays_us_marketplace

    Beazer Homes USA Inc. will pay up to $53 million to settle mortgage fraud charges related to federally insured mortgage loans the company made to buyers of its homes.

    The U.S. Department of Justice said Wednesday that Beazer will pay $5 million to the federal government and up to $48 million to victimized homeowners.

    The settlement is tied to an agreement with federal prosecutors in North Carolina that will allow the Atlanta-based company to avoid criminal prosecution on the mortgage-fraud charges, and on other accounting-fraud charges related to the manipulation of company earnings.

    In a separate action, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil charges Wednesday against Beazer's former chief accounting officer, accusing him of conducting a fraudulent earnings scheme and hiding his wrongdoing from outside auditors and other company accountants.

    In the mortgage fraud case, prosecutors said Beazer ignored income requirements in making loans to unqualified buyers, and sought to hide from the Federal Housing Administration that some company branches had excessive default rates on their loans.

    Prosecutors also said Beazer charged home buyers interest "discount points" at closing but kept the money and didn't reduce interest rates on the loans. They added that the home builder provided buyers with cash gifts so they could come up with minimum down payments, only to add the gift price onto the purchase price of the house.

    Beazer said in a statement that it has fully cooperated with governmental authorities since irregularities in its mortgage origination business and its financial reporting came to light.

    "We deeply regret these matters and have used what we have learned to strengthen our control and compliance culture," said Beazer Chief Executive Ian J. McCarthy.

    In the SEC's accounting fraud case, the agency said Beazer's former chief accountant, Michael T. Rand, wrongfully understated the company's income between 2000 and 2005 by setting aside a reserve or rainy-day fund for land development and house construction costs.

    Mr. Rand's lawyer didn't return a call for comment.

    When home sales slowed in 2006, Beazer tapped into a reserve for land development and house construction and improperly boosted its slumping earnings, the agency said.

    In the end, the SEC said, Beazer understated the company's income in SEC filings by $63 million between fiscal years 2000 through 2005. In addition, the company overstated its income and understated losses by a total of $47 million in fiscal year 2006 and the first two quarters of fiscal year 2007.

     

    Corrections & Amplifications The Securities and Exchange Commission accused the former chief accounting officer of Beazer Homes USA Inc. of engaging in an accounting scheme that caused the company to understate its income between 2000 and 2005. A previous version of this article incorrectly said the company had overstated its income during those years.

    History of Litigation of Beazer Homes ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beazer_Homes_USA

    SEC Sues Ex-CAO of Beazer Homes in Earnings Scheme ---
    http://www.complianceweek.com/blog/scuttlebutt/2009/07/01/sec-sues-ex-cao-of-beazer-homes-in-earnings-scheme/

    Beazer Accountant Fired in Document Destruction Try ---
    http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a6fOumplBPfM

    Outside auditors informed Beazer the appreciation interest in the homes violated accounting principles, and would not allow the company to record the revenue and profit from the home sales to the outside investors. In order to deceive its auditor, the SEC states, Beazer circumvented the accounting rules by entering into new agreements in 2006 that omitted the appreciation interest, but then entered oral side agreements with the investors for the company to receive a portion of that appreciation. Beazer is one of the country's 10 largest single-family home builders with operations in Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
    "Beazer Homes settles SEC investigation," Entrepreneur, September 24, 2008 --- http://www.entrepreneur.com/localnews/1705617.html

     

    Deloitte & Touche has agreed to pay investors of Beazer Homes USA nearly $1 million to settle claims the firm should have noticed the homebuilder was issuing inaccurate financial statements as the housing market began to decline earlier this decade. The audit firm, Beazer, and former Beazer executives have settled the class-action lawsuit for a total of $30.5 million, pending approval by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. Deloitte is scheduled to pay $950,000.
    Sarah Johnson, "Deloitte to Pay $1M in Beazer Suit," CFO.com, May 7, 2009 --- http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/13612963/c_13610376?f=TodayInFinance_Inside

    Bob Jensen's threads on Deloitte & Touche are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#Deloitte


    Judge Hands Ward Churchill an All-Out Defeat
    "Judge Rejects Ward Churchill's Plea for Reinstatement, Vacates Verdict in His Favor," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 8, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/07/21690n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    A state court judge on Tuesday not only denied Ward Churchill everything he sought in his long-running battle with the University of Colorado system, but also negated the one victory the controversial scholar had won so far: a jury verdict holding that system officials had violated his First Amendment rights by firing him from a job as a tenured ethnic-studies professor in response to statements he had made.

    Having presided over the four-week trial that led to the jury's April 2 decision that the university had illegally fired Mr. Churchill for academic misconduct, Judge Larry J. Naves decided to vacate the jury verdict on the grounds that the university officials named in his lawsuit were immune from such litigation.

    Moreover, Judge Naves held, he could not appropriately order Mr. Churchill's reinstatement on the flagship campus, in Boulder, because the jury had found the professor undeserving of any significant compensation for damages—as reflected by its awarding him just $1 for economic losses—and because the university system's lawyers had successfully made the case that returning Mr. Churchill to his old job would damage the university, its faculty members, and its students.

    "I conclude that reinstating Professor Churchill would entangle the judiciary excessively in matters that are more appropriate for academic professionals," Judge Naves wrote.

    In briefs and hearings leading up to his decision, Judge Naves said, he received credible evidence that Mr. Churchill's reinstatement would "create the perception in the broader academic community that the Department of Ethnic Studies tolerates research misconduct." Such a perception, the judge said, will very likely make it harder for the department to attract and retain new faculty members. "In addition," he wrote, "this negative perception has great potential to hinder students graduating from the Department of Ethnic Studies in their efforts to obtain placement in graduate programs."

    On the question of whether the university would have owed Mr. Churchill pay in lieu of reinstatement if the jury's verdict had been upheld, Judge Naves refused to grant the professor even that much, saying that Mr. Churchill had not made a serious effort to find another job since his dismissal, in 2007.

    The judge's ruling was a major setback for Mr. Churchill, who had been investigated for academic misconduct, found guilty of it by a series of faculty panels, and fired by the Colorado Board of Regents at a time when the university system was under tremendous pressure to fire him as a result of the uproar over an essay in which he had argued that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were provoked by the United States' actions abroad.

    Mr. Churchill's lawyer, David A. Lane, responded to Judge Naves's ruling by announcing plans to appeal. In a statement e-mailed to The Chronicle, the lawyer said, "The message in this ruling is that if your First Amendment rights are violated by the University of Colorado, don’t look to Denver District Court for justice, because justice did not prevail in this instance."

    Several university officials issued statements heralding the judge's decision. Bruce D. Benson, president of the University of Colorado system, said, "This ruling recognizes that the regents have to make important and difficult decisions" that should not be influenced by "the threat of litigation." The regents' chairman, Steve Bosley, said the ruling "affirms that in dismissing Professor Churchill, the Board of Regents did the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons."

    Philip P. DiStefano, chancellor of the Boulder campus, called the decision "a victory for faculty governance" in that it "reinforces the idea that faculty set the standard for academic integrity on our campus and all campuses across the country."

    'Fruit of the Poisoned Tree'

    Some prominent advocates of academic freedom said they were troubled by the judge's decision. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, issued a statement saying the "chilling effect of the judge's views could be substantial."

    Continued in article

    Also see http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/08/churchill

    One of the least diverse (politically) academic associations is the highly liberal Modern Language Association. However, even the MLA could not muster up a vote critical of the firing of Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado.
    While material distributed by those seeking to condemn Churchill’s firing portrayed him favorably, and as a victim of the right wing, some of those who criticized the pro-Churchill effort at the meeting are long-time experts in Native American studies and decidedly not conservative.
    Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, December 31, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/31/mla
    Bob Jensen's threads on Ward Churchill are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm

    Jensen Comment
    Aside from probably faking his claim to faking Native American heritage in order to avoid having to earn a PhD in academe, his big black eye as far as I'm concerned are the allegations by Native American scholars that he faked major findings in his research for political reasons. The proven plagiarism is less important in the grand scheme of his scholarship but became crucial in overturning his tenure status.

    Sadly this fiery speaker will now become even more of a hero among liberal professors and students who place politics ahead of honest scholarship

    For accounting instructors seeking examples of uncollectable accounts:
    The University of Colorado will bill Churchill for legal expenses --- http://www.pirateballerina.com/blog/entry.php?id=973
    Also see the Chronicle of Higher Education version --- Click Here

    Bob Jensen's threads on the Ward Churchill saga are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm


    That Dubious Lifetime Powertrain Warranty from Chrysler and President Obama

    Great Video of an 89-Year Old Woman
    My 21-year old Cad barely has 80,000 miles to date. The woman in this video who drove the same car for over 540,000 trouble free miles over 45 years of her life provides evidence that it is possible to drive an American-made car with the original drive train for a lifetime --- http://growingbolder.com/media/technology/vehicles/romancing-the-road-259598.html

    Sadly, President Obama has committed taxpayer dollars to guarantee the lifetime (up to 120 years) drive train (engine, transmission, etc.) of all new Chrysler cars and zero dollars to guarantee a single part of any Ford Motor Company vehicle. I waiting to see if he extends this 120-year warranty to Italian cars that will now carry a Chrysler boilerplate.

    If Maxwell had a lifetime powertrain warranty on the car that Jack Benny purchased, he undoubtedly would have driven that Maxwell right up to the day he died --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-z7t5Fkg3o

    A picture of a Maxwell automobile like Jack owned is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_automobile

    Mel Blanc's classic routine --- Click Here
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9s8U0O0XPE&feature=PlayList&p=3C493293CF8D2819&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=36

    In the 1970s, K-Mart offered an insane warranty that would replace a battery with no replacement cost for as long as you owned the car. Little did K-Mart realize that people like me drive cars for 20 or 30 years. I think I had eight totally free battery replacements. Once I even wore a Jack Benny nametag into the K-mart service center. They did seem to appreciate my humor.

    If Plymouth had a given me a lifetime powertrain warranty on by 1970 stationwagon, I would still be driving a 1970 Plymouth stationwagon with new fenders, doors, seats, radiator, muffler, exhaust pipes, and of course a new battery from K-Mart (those lifetime battery warranties are still good).

    Alas, in 1998 my Plymouth stationwagon transmission failed (the car would only go in reverse). At that time I decided that replacing this component of the powertrain did not meet the benefit-cost test without having a lifetime powertrain warranty from Plymouth. The saddest part was having to give up the lifetime battery replacement from K-Mart.

     Bob Jensen

     

    July 9, 2009 message from XXXXX

    Bob,

    One issue that was brought up earlier was the risk of not being able to collect on a warranty for a new car purchased from GM or Chrysler. I'm looking at new cars. Do you have any idea whether GM will deliver on warranty repairs for a car purchased now?

    July 9, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

    Hi XXXXX,

    The thing to do is read the fine print in the Federal government's so-called guarantee to make good on Chrysler and GM warranties if the companies default.

    First take a look at http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/understanding-obamas-auto-warranty-plan/

    Then you should read the fine print of the warranty on any GM or Chrysler car you purchase.

    One risk is that if GM or Chrysler should fail, parts will become harder and harder to find for cars, especially models that may only have been available for a short time so that there are very few used cars to cannibalize for parts. If both your Chrysler company and your Chrysler transmission (with that dubious "life-time" Chrysler power train warranty) should fail, what happens if there are no longer any needed transmission parts? Ask the dealer to explain this scenario before you buy a Chrysler or a GM car!

    It's also not clear whether the Government's warranty backup plan will cover Fiats when Chrysler begins to sell Fiats. Wouldn't that be a kick in the butt when our Federal government backs up Italian car warranties but not Ford Motor Company warranties?

     Bob Jensen

    A15. Lifetime means lifetime
    This is put in writing by Chrysler at http://www.chrysler.com/en/lifetime_powertrain_warranty/faq.html
    Jensen Comment
    I'm not certain President Obama really understands that he is now backing up each new Chrylser's powertrain for a "lifetime" which attorneys can claim provides coverage until the buyer dies. Do you want to buy each of your newborns a new Chrysler? What a bummer if this also includes Fiats.

    How anxiously are you awaiting a FIAT with a Chrysler boilerplate?
    When FIAT entered the U.S. market and failed in the 1970s it was called "Fix It Again, Tony"
    Why does the Second Italian Navy use glass bottom boats? To look for the first Italian Navy.
    Who put the seven bullets into Benito Mussolini? Three hundred Italian marksmen.

    Among the 38 automobile models tested for reliability in 2008 ---
    http://www.which.co.uk/reviews/cars-and-motoring/index.jsp
    Honda and Toyota at the top of the 2008 reliability list, followed closely by Daihatsu, Lexus, Mazda, and Subaru. This largely mirrors the latest Consumer Reports predicted reliability ranking, though there Scion was at the top and Mazda placed 12th with Consumer Reports due to a different model line-up. Fiat ranked 35th (out of 38), followed by Renault, Land Rover, and Chrysler/Dodge. Jeep is the highest-rated brand from Chrysler, with its 29th place just barely keeping it in the “Poor” category. Fiat, Chrysler, and Dodge are categorized as “Very poor.” In total, Fiat, Chrysler, and Dodge provide similar reliability, and it isn’t good.
    Consumer Reports, May 5, 2009 ---
    http://blogs.consumerreports.org/cars/2009/05/chrysler-and-fiat-reliability-merger-of-equals.html
    Consumer Reports online subscribers can see how brands compare.--- Click Here
    Jensen Comment
    My 1989 Cadillac is ten times more reliable than my 1999 Jeep Cherokee. I don't plan to shift gears into a FIAT. My next car up in these mountains will probably be a Subaru station wagon (with all-wheel drive).

    Tips on Personal Finance --- http://twitter.com/EverydayFinance

    Bob Jensen's threads on personal finance --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers

    Oops! I forgot to ask the main accounting questions.

    How do we account for “lifetime warranties” that are not backed by the Federal government?

    How do we account for “lifetime warranties” that are backed by the Federal government?

    Actually if we assume “going concern” accounting, the accountants and auditors can probably ignore the government backing of warranties as defined at
    http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/understanding-obamas-auto-warranty-plan/

    But there’s still a question of how to estimate warranty reserves for “lifetime warranties?”
    Do auditors now have to factor in actuarial life expectancies of buyers of new Chrysler vehicles?

    I’m curious if cars die for reasons other than powertrain failures or being totaled in collisions?

    It would seem that most anything on a car that declines due to wear and tear can be replaced. It’s the powertrain replacements that usually make it not worthwhile to make repairs (due to the cost of making powertrain repairs).

    There’s also a Catch 22 in Chrysler’s lifetime powertrain warranty. The car has to be taken regularly to a Chrysler dealer for powertrain inspection and maintenance. What if Chrysler fails and there are no more Chrysler dealers to do the powertrain inspections and maintenance? Does this get Obama’s powertrain backup off the hook?

    This thread commenced with a question about how to account for the lifetime warranty of the powertrain of a Chrysler.

    I might note that even though President Obama committed taxpayers to fully backing up GM and Chrysler new car sales warranties but not new Ford Motor Company automobiles, thereby putting Ford at somewhat of a competitive disadvantage, or so it would appear until you watch the video below.

    I enjoyed the video below at
    http://growingbolder.com/media/technology/vehicles/romancing-the-road-259598.html


    "Gadgets Show How Much Power Your House Eats," Geoffrey F. Fowler, The Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204261704574276022585190910.html

    Curtailing your home electricity use is a bit like losing weight: You already understand the basics of how to do it, but it’s hard to accomplish without help and motivation. An array of gadgets are vying to serve as electricity personal trainers, monitoring home power use minute by minute, and making you feel guilty about indulgences like blasting the air conditioner.

    I have been testing three of these devices, the Power Monitor from Black & Decker Corp., the very similar PowerCost Monitor from Blue Line Innovations Inc., and the more-sophisticated The Energy Detective 5000 from Energy Inc. In my tests, the Black & Decker model provided the most effortless electricity-tracking service. At $99.99, it is also the least expensive.

    The devices provide real-time data about how much power you’re using across the house in terms that are easy to comprehend: cost per hour and cost per month. Turn on the microwave and watch the cost jump from 10 cents to 25 cents an hour. Turn off some lights and see the cost drop a few cents.

    The firms say their customers have, over time, seen drops of as much as 20% in power bills by being more mindful of electricity use and making informed purchases, such as installing efficient light bulbs. The largest drops are often recorded in households that have (power-hogging) electric water heaters, and where the whole family gets involved in monitoring use. An independent Oxford University study in 2006 found that people getting direct feedback on their power consumption reduced use 5% to 15%.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    These gadgets don't much interest me personally since I'm an economical old dog to a point who, at this stage of life, will be frugal with power but not to a point where I will sacrifice quality of life. But I see an immense opportunity here for business firms and other organizations to identify and correct power wastage.

    These gadgets might be of interest in managerial/cost accounting courses. Students might be assigned to think creatively about how to use these gadgets in particular business firms such as fast food restaurants or law offices.

    Bob Jensen's threads on gadgets ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#Technology


    "13 Indicted In $100 Million Mortgage Fraud Case,"  by Lisa Chow, NPR (audio), July 9, 2009 --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106415891 

    Prosecutors in New York have charged 13 people with running a massive mortgage fraud scheme. They say everyone was in on the alleged scheme: lawyers, appraisers and mortgage brokers.

    According to the indictment, mortgage company AFG Financial Group, based on Long Island, targeted properties whose owners were starting to default on their mortgages.

    The company recruited "straw buyers" — people with good credit scores — to apply for a loan to buy the target property, while promising the distressed owners that they'd get to stay in the home.

    The indictment says they paid appraisers to inflate the value of the property. Then they allegedly paid off lawyers to represent all parties: the seller, the buyer and the bank at the closing.

    Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau says the group fraudulently obtained $100 million in mortgage loans.

    "One of the morals of this case is there is no free lunch," Morgenthau says. "People with distressed properties thought they were being bailed out. They didn't look carefully at all at what the transaction was."

    Morgenthau says 25 people were involved in the scheme, and 12 already have pleaded guilty.

    Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on mortgage lending Greed, Sleaze, Bribery, and Lies --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze


    Your Friends and Enemies Aren't Always What They Seem to Be
    Under the pristine skirts of Wal-Mart's support for minimum wage increases and universal health care
    is some pretty dirty underwear

    "Everyday Low Politics:  Wal-Mart buys protection by selling out its competitors," The Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2009 ---
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124649408574683287.html

    Corporate America's cheerleading for more government involvement in health care now includes Wal-Mart, that liberal paragon of social irresponsibility. The discount giant's ex-critics probably ought to be more skeptical, given that this seems to be anticompetitive special pleading in progressive drag.

    This week the nation's largest employer blessed an employer mandate, aka "pay or play." This would require businesses that do not offer "meaningful coverage" -- i.e., government-approved -- to pay some percentage of their payroll to a federal insurance plan. This mandate is one of the more controversial policies in the Democratic health package, and Wal-Mart's endorsement will help it along, or at least give liberals political cover against business criticism.

    Another way of putting it is that Andy Stern finally got his man. Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke was joined in his show of support by Mr. Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union and probably the most influential U.S. labor leader, as well as by John Podesta, President Clinton's former chief of staff now running the leftward Center for American Progress. Both organizations regularly assail Wal-Mart. The SEIU, having failed in its drive to organize Wal-Mart stores, went on to help fund a harassment group called Wal-Mart Watch. The Podesta outfit provides ammunition for critics about the retailer's supposedly skimpy benefits -- especially health coverage -- and other corporate-greed outrages.

    Then the fog of politics set in. Wal-Mart hired Leslie Dach, another former Clinton operative, to give its public image an extreme makeover. It has since rolled out green programs (most of which save it money in any case), and in 2007 the company joined with organized labor to call for universal health care by 2012. Two years before, it plumped for a higher minimum wage.

    The employer-mandate endorsement falls into the same self-interest department. A boost in the minimum wage helps Wal-Mart because most of its workers already earn well over the wage floor, and it hurts smaller, less-profitable competitors that can't afford to pay more. On health care, an employer mandate will also reduce the margins of their rivals. This is especially true for businesses of a slightly smaller size that cannot insure on the same scale or currently don't reach the 55% of the 1.4 million Wal-Mart employees who are insured through the company. (Another 40% or so are covered by spouses or the likes of Medicaid.)

    The Wal-Mart-Stern-Podesta troika made sure to specify that "shared responsibility" must be "fair and broad in its coverage," with an emphasis on the latter. The Mom & Pop stores that liberals accuse Wal-Mart of running out of town may get hit hardest. Democrats say they'll exempt certain small businesses, size details to be determined. But if the mandate is limited to large employers, it won't reduce the number of uninsured. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 99% of firms with more than 200 workers provide health benefits, only 62% of smaller firms.

    Businesses are also largely indifferent whether compensation comes in the form of wages or benefits, so an employer mandate -- an indirect tax on employment -- may cause wages to rise more slowly. Or it may simply mean fewer jobs. In a 2007 paper, the economists Katherine Baicker of Harvard and Helen Levy of the University of Michigan estimate that 0.2% of all full-time workers and 1.4% of uninsured workers would lose their jobs because of an employer mandate. Most at risk are the 33% of the uninsured earning within $3 of the minimum wage. Thus many of the same people who shop at Wal-Mart because of its low prices -- and who Democrats claim to speak for -- would be worse off.

    An employer pay-or-play tax is not only a revenue grab to fund government health care, but it is also meant to transfer the choices about coverage to government from consumers. Businesses are going along with this and other gambits in part because of a prisoners' dilemma: They're terrified of being shut out of Democratic health negotiations lest they get stuck with the bill. Wal-Mart may also be trying to pre-empt an employer mandate the Senate is considering that would target companies with predominantly low-wage, low-skilled or entry-level work forces.

    Other big businesses are also trying to buy protection or some political reprieve. Big Pharma recently promised to reduce the cost of prescription drugs by $80 billion over the next decade, and the physician, hospital and insurance lobbies have made similar offerings. Yet the political class is simply pocketing these concessions and demanding more, hastening the day when government controls most U.S. health dollars -- and the businesses become the equivalent of utilities.

    Mr. Stern has been clear that his major goal all along has been to pressure Wal-Mart into endorsing government health insurance. As for Wal-Mart's executives, please don't come running for help when Mr. Stern returns for his next political payoff.


    July 1, 2009 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

    EDUCATING THE NET GENERATION

    "A number of authors have argued that students who are entering the higher education system have grown up in a digital culture that has fundamentally influenced their preferences and skills in a number of key areas related to education. It has also been proposed that today's university staff are ill equipped to educate this new generation of learners -- the Net Generation –- whose sophisticated use of emerging technologies is incompatible with current teaching practice."

    EDUCATING THE NET GENERATION: A HANDBOOK OF FINDINGS FOR PRACTICE AND POLICY (Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2009, ISBN:

    9780734040732) reports on a collaborative project that began in 2006, between staff at the University of Melbourne, the University of Wollongong, and Charles Sturt University. Some of the findings of the study included:

          "The rhetoric that university students are Digital Natives and university staff are Digital Immigrants is not supported."

          "[E]ven though young people's access to and use of computers and some information and communications technologies is high, they don't necessarily want or expect to use these technologies to support some activities, including learning."

          "The use of publishing and information sharing tools, such as wikis, blogs and photo sharing sites, positively impacted on many students' engagement with the subject material, their peers and the general learning community."

          "[M]any Web 2.0 technologies enable students to publicly publish and share content in forums hosted outside their university's infrastructure. This raises complex questions about academic integrity including issues of authorship, ownership, attribution and acknowledgement."

    The handbook is available at http://www.netgen.unimelb.edu.au/

    The Australian Learning and Teaching Council works with 44 Australian higher education institutions "as a collaborative and supportive partner in change, providing access to a network of knowledge, ideas and people." For more information, contact: Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 4-12 Buckland St., Chippendale, Sydney NSW 2008 Australia; tel: 02 8667 8500; fax: 02 8667 8515;
    email info@altc.edu.au;
    Web: http://www.altc.edu.au/

    ......................................................................

    STUDENT COMPUTER SKILLS: PERCEPTION AND REALITY

    "The ubiquitous use of computers in homes and schools has aided the perception that more students are computer literate than past generations. There is a potential 'perfect storm' manifesting between students' perceived proficiency of computer application skills and the actual assessment of those skills."

     By administering survey and assessment instruments to over 200 business school students, researchers Donna M. Grant, Alisha D. Malloy, and Marianne C. Murphy compared students' perceived proficiencies in three computer skills areas -- word processing, presentation graphics, and spreadsheets -- with their demonstrated skills. Their research results showed "some differences in the students' perception of their word processing skills and actual performance, no difference in perception and performance for their presentation skills, and a significant difference in perception and performance for their spreadsheet skills.

    The study led to a redesign of an introductory business school course to remedy students' deficiencies.

    The paper, "A Comparison of Student Perceptions of their Computer Skills to their Actual Abilities" (JITE, vol. 8, 2009, pp. 141-60), is available at http://jite.org/documents/Vol8/JITEv8p141-160Grant428.pdf

    The peer-reviewed Journal of Information Technology Education (JITE) [ISSN 1539-3585 (online) 1547-9714 (print)] is published in print by subscription and online free of charge by the Informing Science Institute. For more information contact: Informing Science Institute,

    131 Brookhill Court, Santa Rosa, California 95409 USA; tel:

    707-531-4925; fax: 480-247-5724; Web: http://informingscience.org/

     [Editor's note: At the time this article was written, the JITE website and this paper were accessible; at the time of this mailing, they are not. I have notified the JITE webmaster of the problem in the hope that the site will soon be back online.]

    ......................................................................

     NEW ONLINE JOURNAL ON INSTRUCTION

     The first issue of the online peer-reviewed JOURNAL OF INSTRUCTIONAL PEDAGOGIES [ISSN: 1941-3394], published by the Academic and Business Research Institute, is available at http://aabri.com/jip.html

     Papers in this issue that are related to instructional technology and e-learning include:

     "Student Perceptions of How Technology Impacts the Quality of Instruction and Learning" by Thomas Davies, et al.

    "The Effects of Self-Regulated Learning Strategies and System Satisfaction Regarding Learner's Performance in E-Learning Environment" by Jong-Ki Lee

     "Student Performance in Online Quizzes as a Function of Time in Undergraduate Financial Management Courses" by Oliver Schnusenberg

     "Student Satisfaction in Web-enhanced Learning Environments" by Charles Hermans, et al.

     The Academic and Business Research Institute supports the research and publication needs of business and education faculty. For more information about the journal, contact: Raymond Papp, Editor;
    email:
    jip@aabri.com

    ......................................................................

    CRITIQUE OF E-LEARNING IN BLACKBOARD

     "Just as utopic visions of the Internet predicted an egalitarian online world where information flowed freely and power became irrelevant, so did many proponents of online education, who viewed online classrooms as a way to free students and instructors from traditional power relationships . . ."

     In "A Critical Examination of Blackboard's E–Learning Environment"

    (FIRST MONDAY, vol. 14, no. 6, June 1, 2009), Stephanie J. Coopman, professor at San Jose State University, identifies the ways that the Blackboard 8.0 and Blackboard CE6 platforms "both constrain and facilitate instructor–student and student–student interaction." She argues that while the systems have improved the instructor's ability to track and measure student activity, this "creates a dangerously decontextualized, essentialized image of a class in which levels of 'participation' stand in for evidence of learning having taken place.

    Students are treated not as learners, as partners in an educational enterprise, but as users."

    The paper is available at

    http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2434/2202

    First Monday [ISSN 1396-0466] is an online, peer-reviewed journal whose aim is to publish original articles about the Internet and the global information infrastructure. It is published in cooperation with the University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. For more information, contact: First Monday, c/o Edward Valauskas, Chief Editor, PO Box 87636, Chicago IL 60680-0636 USA; email: ejv@uic.edu; Web:

    http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/

    ......................................................................

    GOOGLE BOOK SEARCH BIBLIOGRAPHY

    Charles W. Bailey, Jr. has just published the 4th version of the "Google Book Search Bibliography." "It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories." The bibliography is available at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/gbsb/gbsb.htm

    Links to Bailey's other extensive publications, including "Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" and the "Open Access Webliography," are available at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/

    ......................................................................

     RECOMMENDED READING

    "Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column.

    OASIS: Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook By Alma Swan and Leslie Chan http://www.openoasis.org/

    "OASIS aims to provide an authoritative 'sourcebook' on Open Access, covering the concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving it. The site highlights developments and initiatives from around the world, with links to diverse additional resources and case studies."

    Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce.htm


    Rednecks probably were the first to pee into a gas tank.
    Now it's not such a far-fetched idea.
    "Producing hydrogen from urine," PhysOrg, July 3, 2009 --- http://www.physorg.com/news165836803.html


    Woman Banned from Internet Downloading
    Just weeks after a federal jury ruled that a Minnesota woman must pay $1.92 million for illegally sharing copyright-protected music, the recording industry wants to make sure she doesn't do it again.
    PhysOrg, July 6, 2009 --- http://www.physorg.com/news166115446.html


    "Executive Compensation and Boards of Directors," by J. Edward Ketz, SmartPros, July 2009 ---
    http://accounting.smartpros.com/x67023.xml

    It has been amazing to listen to the discourse over executive compensation during the past year or so. On one side we have the pure capitalists who tell us that government ruins everything, neatly forgetting that unbridled capitalism exploits those with little power and ignoring the fact that many CEOs do not provide enough value to shareholders to justify their compensation. On the other extreme we have those who trust government to cure all ills, overlooking the idiocy of many bureaucrats and the possibility of a dangerous slide toward totalitarianism. We shall not find a solution at either end of this spectrum.

    The Bush administration leaned toward the pure capitalists by appointing Harvey Pitt and Christopher Cox to head the SEC. Both of them slept during scandalous times, Enron and WorldCom occurring on Pitt’s watch and the collapse of the banking industry on Cox’s. They failed shareholders by allowing CEOs to run roughshod over the investors.

    The Obama administration wants to intervene by setting maximum compensation levels for corporate managers and to regulate bonuses. It may come as a shock to this administration and its supporters, but neither Obama nor anybody on his team is omniscient. They just do not have a sufficient knowledge of business and economics to determine these parameters. In fact, some of the decisions already made are so faulty that one wonders just how much economics anybody in this administration understands (increasing the deficit by more than the deficits produced by all previous presidents combined and attempting to pass an energy tax during a recession are two examples).

    It is no wonder the public is starting to stir over the compensation issue—some CEOs are indeed overpaid. While numerous current examples exist, my favorite illustration remains Sprint in 2003. Somehow Sprint CEO William Esrey and President Ronald LeMay finagled the firm to give, and the board of directors to approve, so many stock options that they made approximately $1.9 billion. Clearly, the two of them did not add that much value to the firm! But the question is what to do about these problems.

    After lying dormant on this issue for years, the SEC on July 1 voted 5-0 to require business entities that received bailout money to permit shareholders to vote on executive pay {http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2009/2009-147.htm}. They also voted to require all SEC registrants to disclose more information about executive compensation. These issues must still be aired in public for two months before becoming final. This is a step in the right direction as it attempts to deal with the issue but without having Big Brother dictate the actual salary and bonus.

    The SEC proposal is quite disappointing, however, because the vote is nonbinding. Given that, I’m not sure what the point is. It is almost as if they want to fail so that Big Brother will have to intervene and set prices for all of us.

    What the SEC and Congress and the President should be doing is creating incentives and disincentives so that the economic system would function more smoothly. They should stay out of the details because they don’t have the knowledge to make the right decisions and because we would like to keep some freedoms in our society. Perhaps they should read Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.

    The central problem continues to be the enervation of shareholders by the management class. We need to rectify this imbalance and empower the shareholders to regain control over their own companies. After all, they are the owners!

    The other thing to do is to put some fire under the directors at corporate enterprises. The board of directors supposedly represents the shareholders, but often belies that point by assisting mangers in their grab for power and wealth. The Congress could help by enacting legislation that would allow investors to sue directors when the directors abrogate their duties to the shareholders. (Recall that the Supreme Court greatly restricted the liability of directors in Central Bank of Denver v. First Interstate Bank of Denver.)

    Of course, the impotence of most boards of directors is frequently the consequence of allowing managers to choose their buddies to be on the board. “Independent directors” is a joke; I don’t if very many of them are really independent. So another thing that should be done is to give shareholders the right to vote for the directors. And not with a manager-stacked deck of choices as if we lived in some communist country. Give the shareholders the opportunity to add candidates to the ballot. Again, they are the owners!

    The executive compensation issue remains a hot-button item. But it cannot be ignored by the pure capitalists nor remedied by the governments’ controlling the price of labor. A more moderate approach is appropriate. I think the key institution in this matter is the board of directors. If empowered and if held accountable for their decisions, I think the board of directors could properly address the issue of executive compensation.

    Bob Jensen's threads on corporate governance are at
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Governance

    Bob Jensen's threads on outrageous executive compensation even for executives with failed performance ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation

    Richard Campbell notes a nice white collar crime blog edited by some law professors --- http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/whitecollarcrime_blog/ 


    From the Scout Report on July 3, 2009

    TeamViewer 4.1.6320 --- http://www.teamviewer.com/index.aspx

    Various web technologies can help bring people together for business or pleasure, and TeamViewer is just one of the many applications dedicated to this mission. This application allows multiple users to screen-share and also transfer files across machines. The drop-down toolbar helps users easily maximize or minimize the other computer's screen, and the application's server remembers which computers users have connected to as well. This version is compatible with computers running Windows or Max OS X.


    Weather Watcher 5.6.51 --- http://www.singerscreations.com/Weather-Watcher.asp

     Mike Singer has been working on his Weather Watcher application for sometime, and his hard work has paid off for those with a particular penchant for matters of an atmospheric nature. This version of Weather Watcher will automatically retrieve the current conditions, hourly forecast, daily forecast, and detailed forecast as reported by The Weather Channel.


    Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance, economics, and statistics --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

    Business Week's most popular white papers as of July 2, 2009 ---
    http://whitepapers.businessweek.com/data/web/bw/bw_topres.jsp


    Education Tutorials

    Inspiration:  Games Versus Teachers
    "Creator of 'The Sims' Talks Educational Gaming," Chronicle of Higher Education, July 14, 2009 ---
    http://chronicle.com/media/video/v55/i41.5/wright/?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
    Introduction to (video) Game Design 2009 --- http://pod.gscept.com/intro2gd2009.xml
    Bob Jensen's threads on networked learning simulations --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Simulation
    Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment and learning games --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
    Bob Jensen's threads on virtual worlds in education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife

    PBS creates a library of digital resources for free use in schools ---
    http://thejournal.com/articles/2009/07/08/pbs-creates-library-of-digital-resources-targeted-to-classroom-use.aspx

    From a Special Edition of the Scout Report via Email on July 2, 2009

    Best of 2008-2009
    - Smithsonian's History Explorer
    - Academic Earth
    - Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
    - National Science Foundation: Discoveries
    - The Mannahatta Project
    - The Great Issues Forum [iTunes, RealPlayer]
    - Philadelphia Architects and Buildings
    - Reclaiming the Everglades: South Florida's Natural History, 1884-1934
    - LabCAST: The MIT Media Lab Video Podcast

     

    Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch


    Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

    Support for Students Exposed to Trauma --- http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/2009/RAND_TR675.pdf

    National Institutes of Health: History of Medicine --- http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/
    Includes books, reports, pictures, videos, etc.

    Aging in the Know (medicine) --- http://www.healthinaging.org/agingintheknow/

    Environmental Protection Agency: Wetlands --- http://www.epa.gov/wetlands/

    The Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems --- http://casfs.ucsc.edu/index.html

    Bob Jensen's threads on free online science, engineering, and medicine tutorials are at --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science


    Social Science and Economics Tutorials

    Freedom of Information Act --- http://www.archives.gov/foia/

    P.J. O'Rourke is a 21st-century H.L. Mencken-a libertarian satirist and quote-machine who's deeply suspicious of most any office-holder ("Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit") ---
    http://reason.com/blog/show/134561.html

    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

    From a Special Edition of the Scout Report via Email on July 2, 2009

    Best of 2008-2009
    - Smithsonian's History Explorer
    - Academic Earth
    - Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
    - National Science Foundation: Discoveries
    - The Mannahatta Project
    - The Great Issues Forum [iTunes, RealPlayer]
    - Philadelphia Architects and Buildings
    - Reclaiming the Everglades: South Florida's Natural History, 1884-1934
    - LabCAST: The MIT Media Lab Video Podcast

    Video:  Nassim Taleb Talks About The Book “Dancing With Chance” ---
    http://www.simoleonsense.com/nassim-taleb-talks-about-the-book-dancing-with-chance/

    “Dance With Chance” Table Of Contents (Via Decision Science News)

    Preface

    The illusion of control from Chapter 1: Three Wishes from a Genie

    Some national puzzles from Chapter 2: The Ills of Pills

    Mind over medicine from Chapter 3: Getting the Right Medicine

    The power of luck from Chapter 5: Watering Your Money Plant

    Mediocrity and failure from Chapter 6: Lessons from Gurus

    The creative destruction of copper from Chapter 7: Creative Destruction

    Take a chance on me from Chapter 8: Does God Play Dice?

    The statistician who ate humble pie from Chapter 9: Past or Future

    A black Monday and a black swan from Chapter 10: Of Subways and Coconuts – Two Types of Uncertainty

    Blinking marvelous from Chapter 11: Genius or Fallible?

    Predicting marital happiness from Chapter 12: The Inevitability of Decisions

    Increasing the sum of human happiness from Chapter 13: Happiness, Happiness, Happiness

    Also see http://www.cnbc.com/id/31706523

    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

    Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics


    History Tutorials

    Video:  Historical Thinking Matters --- http://historicalthinkingmatters.org/

    From Harvard University
    Open Collections Programs: Expeditions and Discoveries --- http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/expeditions/

    John Jacob Omenhausser Civil War Sketchbook --- http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/record.jsp?pid=umd:50498 

    American Civil War History Site --- http://www.factasy.com/

    The State University of New York Digital Repository --- http://dspace.sunyconnect.suny.edu/

    Western Soundscape Archive --- http://westernsoundscape.org/

    British Museum: London 1753
    http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/online_tours/britain/london_1753/london_1753.aspx 

    The British Museum: Research http://www.britishmuseum.org/research.aspx

    Henry VIII: Man and Monarch http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/henryviii/index.html 

    Edinburgh World Heritage --- http://www.ewht.org.uk/Home.aspx 

    Taking Liberties (U.K. history) ---  http://www.bl.uk/takingliberties

    Lianhuanhua: Picture Storybook --- http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/storybook/index.php?c=1

    Libraries to the Rescue --- http://www.imls.gov/resources/podcasts_Jun09.shtm

    Institute of Museum and Library Services: Primary Source http://www.imls.gov/news/source.shtm

    The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960
    http://repository.library.northwestern.edu/winterton/

    Aluka (art history in Africa) --- http://www.aluka.org/

    SFMOMA: Kerry James Marshall [African-American Art]  --- http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/interactive_features/79 

    About 800 pages of the world's oldest surviving Christian Bible have been pieced together and published on the Internet for the first time, experts in Britain said Monday --- http://www.physorg.com/news166106367.html

    Searchable Bible Online --- http://www.biblegateway.com/  Poets House --- http://www.poetshouse.org/ 

    From Harvard University
    Open Collections Programs: Expeditions and Discoveries --- http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/expeditions/

    The State University of New York Digital Repository --- http://dspace.sunyconnect.suny.edu/

    Libraries to the Rescue --- http://www.imls.gov/resources/podcasts_Jun09.shtm

    Institute of Museum and Library Services: Primary Source http://www.imls.gov/news/source.shtm

    Random House Modern Library's 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century --- http://www.listsofbests.com/list/17

    Magnificent
    The Farmers by Artist Robert Duncan (Slide Show) --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Farmers.pps

    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

     

    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/


    Caffeine May Fight Alzheimer's Memory Loss

    Drinking Coffee May Combat Brain Protein Linked to Alzheimer’s Disease

    By Jennifer Warner
    WebMD Health News --- Click Here

    Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

    July 6, 2009 -- Getting your daily caffeine hit may help keep your memory sharp.

    A new study shows caffeine reversed memory loss in mice bred to develop Alzheimer’s disease and reduced the level of beta-amyloid protein in the blood and brain. Plaques containing beta-amyloid protein are found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

    "The new findings provide evidence that caffeine could be a viable 'treatment' for established Alzheimer's disease, and not simply a protective strategy," researcher Gary Arendash, PhD, a neuroscientist at the University of South Florida, says in a news release. "That's important because caffeine is a safe drug for most people, it easily enters the brain, and it appears to directly affect the disease process."

    Caffeine Reduces Memory Loss

    In the study, mice bred to develop symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease were given 500 milligrams of caffeine (equivalent to five cups of regular coffee) in their daily drinking water once they started developing memory problems at age 18 to 19 months, about age 70 in human years.

    After two months, the mice that drank the caffeinated water performed much better on tests of their memory and thinking skills -- to the level of normal mice of the same age. Those given plain water continued to do poorly on these tests. The study also showed that the brains of the caffeinated mice experienced a nearly 50% reduction in the level of beta-amyloid.

    The researchers also looked at long-term caffeine treatment in normal mice. With 10 months of caffeine treatment, there was no improvement in memory and thinking skills.

    Based on these findings, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Arendash and colleagues say they plan to start human trials to see whether caffeine can benefit people with early signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

    4 Must-See Articles

    ·         New Risk Index Helps Predict Alzheimer's

    ·         Brain Changes May Precede Memory Loss

    ·         Brain Scans May Predict Alzheimer's

    ·         New Steps Toward Stopping Alzheimer’s

     

    Will Coffee Be the Next Alzheimer’s Drug?"  by Shannon Firth, Finding Dulcinea, July 7, 2009 ---
    http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/health/2009/july/Will-Coffee-Be-the-Next-Alzheimer-s-Drug.html 

    Caffeine may help reverse memory problems associated with Alzheimer’s disease, say researchers at the University of Florida. Previous studies have found other health benefits associated with regular coffee consumption.


    "Link between obesity and diabetes discovered," PhysOrg July 8th, 2009 ---
    http://www.physorg.com/news166270497.html

    A Monash University study has proven a critical link between obesity and the onset of Type 2 diabetes, a discovery which could lead to the design of a drug to prevent the disease.

    The team, led by Associate Professor Matthew Watt, discovered that fat cells release a novel protein called PEDF (pigment epithelium-derived factor), which triggers a chain of events and interactions that lead to development of Type 2 diabetes.

    "When PEDF is released into the bloodstream, it causes the muscle and liver to become desensitised to insulin. The pancreas then produces more insulin to counteract these negative effects, " Associate Professor Watt said.

    This insulin release causes the pancreas to become overworked, eventually slowing or stopping insulin release from the pancreas, leading to Type 2 diabetes."

    "It appears that the more fat tissue a person has the less sensitive they become to insulin. Therefore a greater amount of insulin is required to maintain the body's regulation of blood-glucose," Associate Professor Watt said.

    "Our research was able to show that increasing PEDF not only causes Type 2 diabetes like complications but that blocking PEDF reverses these effects. The body again returned to being insulin-sensitive and therefore did not need excess insulin to remain regulated."

    Associate Professor Watt said identifying the link is a significant breakthrough in explaining the reasons why obesity triggers the onset of Type 2 Diabetes.

    "Until now scientists knew there was a very clear pattern and had strong suspicions that a link existed between the two conditions, but our understanding of the chain of events that are caused by the release of PEDF shows a causal link," Associate Professor Watt said.

    "Type 2 diabetes patients will benefit knowing the two conditions are linked. We already know that weight-loss generally improves the management of blood glucose levels in diabetes patients. Researchers can now move forward knowing this link exists and we can begin to design new drugs to improve the treatment of Type 2 diabetes," Associate Professor Watt said.


    "A Limb Regeneration Mystery Solved:  Salamanders regrow limbs with less drastic cellular changes than previously thought," y Courtney Humphries, MIT's Technology Review, July 2, 2009 ---
    http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22955/?nlid=2147


    Support for Students Exposed to Trauma --- http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/2009/RAND_TR675.pdf




    Forwarded by John Stancil

    Seems that a prof allowed an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper for the note card during a closed-book examination.

    One student says “Let me get this straight. I can use anything I put on the card?”

    Prof say, “Yes.”

    The day of the test, the student brought a blank sheet of paper, put it on the floor and had a grad student stand on the paper.


    R-Rated
    Video on Training Your Dog to Greet Your Mother-in-Law --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWfsVK4LAtI


    High School Sophomore Might Get a Darwin Award
    Alexa Longueira Suffers Deep Cuts, Bruises After Landing In Raw Sewage, Blames DEP For Leaving Hole Unattended: Alexa Longueira, a high school sophomore, was walking along Victory Boulevard near Travis Avenue on Staten Island Wednesday evening when she felt the earth move and was plunged into smelly darkness.
    WCBSTV, July 11, 2009 --- http://wcbstv.com/local/texting.manhole.raw.2.1081403.html


    Dimwitted thieves steal fake cell phones in Mexico
    Call it the case of the dead cells - both telephones and the ones in the brain. Employees at a Telefonica Movistar cell-phone store in Morelia, Mexico say they arrived Tuesday morning to find that the store had been broken into. An examination of the shop revealed the only items missing were hollow replica phones for display that are completely useless for making calls. Employees say the clueless thieves overlooked real cell phones and cash in another part of the shop. Store owners nonetheless reported the theft to local police, who are investigating.
    MyWay --- http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090708/D99A874G0.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