Another Sunrise in the White Mountains
Wilbur Mills suggested that I hold my finger over the flash in order to
prevent the spot reflections on the window.
For the picture below his advice came to late.
The bright flash does mark where the highway comes out of Franconia Notch
between Cannon and Lafayette Mountains
Frost in in the air this morning, but we did have two weeks of almost summer.
This has been the coldest and wettest summer up here since the Ice Age.
Below is what we can expect for sunrises in
a couple of months
And I will be ready for the white stuff that
makes the White Mountains white.
Sometimes the snow fall is too deep for my snow thrower.
Lon from the Sunset Hill House Inn then comes and moves it with a real snow
plow.
But I really don't need to haul the snow
thrower up from the barn just yet.
Nice legs!
A rainbow just beyond our wild roses
I looked but there was no pot of gold
I did not take the humor pictures below that
were sent to me by friends.
Cash for Clunkers?
Almost every time I sneeze, cough or laugh, either my radiator leaks or my
exhaust backfires.
Maxine
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
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
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/
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
I would not have expected this video from the liberal and
often snobby magazine called The New Yorker I also wondered whether Hess’s next movie would address
his religious ideas more explicitly; my editors encouraged me to cut that
speculation from the review, and I agreed that it’s better to stay out of the
forecasting business. Imagine my delight when, a month later, “Nacho
Libre” came out: it is, as I discuss in the clip
below, one of the strangest and most personal American movies ever made about
religion. (I’m happy to report that Hess’s new movie, “Gentlemen
Broncos,” is scheduled for
release on October 30th.) Richard Brodie,
Nacho Libre, The New Yorker, August 13, 2009 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2009/08/nacho-libre.html
Jensen Comment
I don't think this is my kind of movie or humor, but I found it interesting to
be featured by The New Yorker. I'm more of a Lillies of the Field
type of person ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillies_of_the_Field
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 Almanac of Higher Education 2009-10
The new Almanac of Higher Education features national and state-by-state data on
colleges and universities, and their students, finances, and faculty and staff
members, as well as regional profiles of the issues facing academe across the
country. Chronicle of Higher Education ---
http://chronicle.com/section/Almanac-of-Higher-Education/141/
Jensen Comment
There's a ton of financial information here, including salary juxtaposed against
cost of living in different regions.
David Talbot Mozilla's Chris Blizzard and Mark
Surman demonstrate a novel insertion of Twitter feeds into real-time video
streams and discuss how open-source video tools will make such innovation
easy.
HardCopyPro is a screen-capture tool, but it has
some nice bells and whistles that make it worth a closer look. Visitors can
use the tabbed dialog box interface to pick images or even capture images at
set time intervals. Also, users can preset the program to capture a certain
rectangle, window, full screen, or even the window located under the mouse
cursor. This version is free for 30 days,
and it is compatible with computers running Windows 95 and newer.
Statement from the Company
HardCopy Pro is the professional, easy to use screen capture utility for
Windows. It can capture rectangular screen areas and whole windows. The
captured images can be cropped very easily and the color depth can be
changed to any desired value from monochrome to true color. Images can be
printed, saved, copied to the clipboard, emailed, edited with any image
editing program, etc. Many options allow the customization of all these
actions to individual user needs.
Jensen Comment
I downloaded this (temporarily free) program by clicking on Downloads and
then choosing HardCopy Pro. I first saved the zip file in a Temp folder and
then unzipped the file under Program Files.
The download link is at
http://www.desksoft.com/HardCopy_Download.htm
The free download version only lasts 30 days, but you
can purchase the software for $20 such that there’s no big investment here
if you like the program. After about 20 days of playing around with this I
will probably buy the software for $20.
I like the HardCopy Pro feature of being able to click
(using PrintScreen) what's on the screen and have it automatically save to a
folder without disrupting the viewing screens. You can just click away as if
a camera was recording each screen you click on. You can then access the
picture files later on for editing and pasting.
Like most low priced screen capturing software, it will
not capture video frames. I use Camtasia Producer
( http://www.techsmith.com/ )
to capture video frames of stored video files, but it will not capture
streaming video frames.
I also use Camtasia SnagIt (
http://www.techsmith.com/ ) for screen captures. One advantage of
SnagIt is that it will capture rolling screens such as a text document or
spreadsheet that will not all fit on one screen. But I’ve not had any
success using SnagIt to capture video of any kind. SnagIt seems to capture
the screen but will not save it as a picture file that I can edit. However,
I’m not running the latest version of SnagIt.
Do a
Google search for “free podcasting software.” You will discover a lot of
free software programs that can produce podcast file formats. Use the links
below to learn more about podcasting and what it can do for course
materials.
When you
ask this question, you are sure to get a lot of different answers. People
who use podcasting as a way to share information tend to have a favorite
software program. The key to selecting a software program is to know
upfront what you want to do with your recording (e.g., How do you want to
share the recording? Do you want the recording public or private? Do you
want students to download the recording and keep it? Do you want students
to only listen/view but not keep the file?).
Tablet PC
computers are similar but quite different. I use an IBM ThinkPad X61. The
“inking” technology works extremely well with the tablet’s features. It has
a fast processor, lots of RAM memory, and tons of disk space. I have not
found any multimedia software that did not perform well on the ThinkPad
X61. This is not the case with all brands of Tablet PCs.
During my
2009 CTLA presentation, I mentioned a great, inexpensive program called “PDF
Annotator” (http://www.ograhl.com/en/pdfannotator/)
that makes it possible to annotate and markup and create PDF files in ways
that Adobe Acrobat Pro does not include. I use PDF Annotator to grade
papers and create graphics.
VoiceThread (http://www.voicethread.com)
is a hosted Web 2.0 service. You do not need to upload the file before it
can be accessed. Uploading is done automatically for you by VoiceThread.
You create your presentation. VoiceThread stores the file on its servers
and then gives you a URL link to the file. You can share the URL link with
students. Students can listen/view the presentation so long as they have
internet access. As I mentioned at my 2009 CTLA presentation, VoiceThread
produces similar results to Camtasia, but does it in a different way, and in
my opinion, is much easier to use. Again, some people like Camtasia. Some
people prefer VoiceThread.
TokBox (http://www.tokbox.com)
is a free, hosted Web 2.0 service similar to VoiceThread. With TokBox, you
can create a video message of up to 10 minutes in length. A 10 minute
streaming video is a “long” video for educational purposes. TokBox gives
you a URL to the video message that you can share with others. TokBox also
gives you html code that you can use to embed a player in a web page. At
2009 CTLA, I explained how I embed a TokBox video message in a class
assignments schedule. I do this when I feel that a video commentary will
provide a warmer connection with my students than printed text.
Uploading
a file, whether MP3 or MP4 (or other file format) may be a little tricky
depending upon the size of the file. This is where “hosted” files make the
creation/sharing process easier to use. Be careful with using free hosting
services, since many of them are always open to the world (i.e., “public”).
Do you really want your materials available to the “public?” Sometimes,
“public” files include material that may create a copyright issue. Just be
careful to consider these issues.
It's best use, in my viewpoint, is by students seeking
to learn something technical that an instructor does not want to have to explain
over and over in office hours ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
Compressed Versus Uncompressed AVI Camtasia Video Files
Podcasting and Vodcasting Using Camtasia and Screencast
Although I've been using Camtasia for years, I've recently been preparing
some Camtasia video for a road show that I will do on education technology.
Camtasia is wonderful for making educational videos, especially narrated
videos of lessons and tutorials on computer screens, videos of narrated
PowerPoint files, interactive videos, podcasts (audio), Vodcasts (video),
and narrated sequences of pictures turned into video files.
One really nice thing about Camtasia is that you do not have to record an
entire video clip continuously, It's easy to record a segment and then hit
the pause button (or F9 that's used both to start a recording session and
pause a recording session). That way you have time for each segment to think
about what you're going to say and to bring up software, video files, audio
files, and/or Websites appropriate for that segment of the clip. When you've
finished the entire clip you can hit the stop button (or F10) to generate a
avi file. Later on you can "produce" a compressed version of the clip.
Camtasia generally captures video as uncompressed avi files. These
uncompressed files are enormous and are not efficient for storing on CDs,
DVDs, Web servers, Blackboard servers, WebCT servers, etc. Fortunately
Camtasia has software called "Producer" in Camtasia Suite that compresses
videos into much smaller files that can be played in common software such as
wmv files for Windows Media Player, rm files for RealMedia, mov files for
Quicktime, scf files for Adobe flash, mp3 files, and other "production"
files.
I thought you might be interested in how much disk space is saved in the
compression process. Last weekend I made a number of Camtasia avi videos and
then compressed them into wmv video for Windows Media Player. I have both an
old Camtasia 2 and a current Camtasia 4 (with updates). I captured the avi
files using Camtasia 4, because this will also capture video playing on the
screen. However, I found that the Producer software in Camtasia 2 gave me
smaller compressed video files for some reason. The savings are shown below
comparing the avi files and my compressed files:
Video
Uncompressed AVI File Size
Compressed
Video File Size
Video Run
Time
Video 1
106,095 KB avi
5,928 KB wmv
02.57minutes
Video 2
319,904 KB avi
29,586 KB wmv
22.28 minutes
Video 3
162,745 KB avi
22,228 KB swf
05.47 minutes
Video 4
25,315 KB avi
4,766 KB wmv
04.49 minutes
Warning: You can only edit the video (e.g., add fades, delete portions
of clips, combine clips, split clits, change volume, etc) in the
uncompressed avi video using Producer software. You lose quality in video
and audio if you have to re-capture a compressed video as a avi file using
Camtasia. Hence, it is best to store the initial avi files somewhere if you
think you might want to edit later on.
The video size to runtime ratio varies greatly with both the capture rate
and the size of the region on a computer screen that you are capturing.
Since all the above videos were captured at the same (default) capture rate,
the ratio of file size to run time varies greatly because the capture region
varies in size in each of the above videos. Capturing only a region greatly
saves on the size of the captured video file. Capturing full or nearly-full
screen sizes greatly adds to the video file size.
Video size relative to video run time also depends heavily on the frame
rate at which the video is captured. Camtasia allows you to use a default
setting for both the capture rate and audio interleaving. This is fast
enough to capture video with audio playing on the screen with reasonable lip
synching if the audio shows the face of a speaker. If you were making a
video of a PowerPoint file without adding audio narration you could save
disk space by greatly slowing down the video capture rate. However, I
generally do not mess with the default settings. If you want to change the
frame rates, you can read more about it ---
Click Here
You can also change playback rates ---
Click Here
Camtasia allows you to do some things like highlighting where your cursor
is pointing. I generally use a big yellowish translucent circle around my
mouse pointer. You can also have audio sounds whenever you click on your
mouse and/or keyboard. This may alert student attention. You can also bring
up a pen that allows you to write on video screens without writing on the
computer program, like Excel, that you are running in the video.
You can also pan and zoom. Zoom lets you point to something like a cell
formula in Excel and then make that formula larger and larger and larger.
You can subsequently return to normal size. I use the panning feature when I
am only recording a region of a screen such as a rectangle about a third of
the size of the full computer screen. Capturing only a region greatly saves
on the size of the captured video file. I use the panning feature to allow
me to float the capture region to wherever I move my mouse. This allows me
to capture anything appearing on a computer screen without having to capture
a full screen in every video frame.
Years ago I started using Camtasia to field questions posed by students.
For example, after technical lessons in my Accounting Information Systems
course, I almost always received email messages from students who could not
get something to work, especially in Excel and MS Access. I would then
record a video tutorial and shared my answers with the entire current class
and my future classes. You can download some of my sample wmv tutorials in
this regard from
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
The acronym PQQ stands for Possible Quiz Question source.
I also prepared longer tutorials on more complicated technical lectures
in my Accounting Theory course. Most all of my students were confused after
my lectures in this course until they viewed my video tutorials over and
over and over. Some of my tutorials for the theory course are at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5341/
I have other tutorials that are filed away somewhere on CDs. It would
take some effort to dig them out now.
The nice thing about Camtasia is that it's is so simple to use when
creating and compressing video. Editing video is more complicated. It is
also possible to add hot spots to swf flash video that you have compressed
such that you can create interactive videos for your students, including
examination videos. However, this is extremely tedious. I found it better to
create my interactive examination files in Excel and then link to my
tutorial videos at any time in those Excel files.
The hard thing about Camtasia is getting the audio to sound professional.
Actually, I found my narrations using a cheap microphone adequate for my
course tutorials. This weekend I had satisfactory results using only the
internal microphone that's built into my Dell laptop. However, audio could
be improved with an expensive microphone and a sound proof booth. Ambient
noise in your office can be irritating when recorded in video.
If you are recording in your office, you should probably disconnect the
telephone during recording sessions. Also put a sign on your office door
that you are in a recording session.
It is also possible to make videos of PowerPoint files. If you choose to
do so you can easily add a Camtasia toolbar in your PowerPoint file such
that you can make videos with audio narrations on any any part or all of a
PowerPoint file. That way you can teach from PowerPoint when you're out of
town, retired, or dead.Users can download compressed video files of
PowerPoint files with less virus risk than from any MS Office files such as
doc, xls. or ppt files. However, when I narrate any of my PowerPoint files
and make videos of them, I generally find that even the compressed videos
are enormous since my PowerPoint files usually have more than 50 slides.
Actually, it is probably best to compress PowerPoint vides at a slow frame
rate as swf Flash files. Since Powerpoint is not fast moving video, a slower
frame rate is usually quite satisfactory.
Nevertheless, recording and serving up entire lectures requires huge
amounts of disk space. If your university will not provide you with enough
Web, Blackboard, or WebCT server space for such large video files, I suggest
that you make a DVD disk of compressed video for each lesson and then make
these disks available in the library or by mail to students. Your campus
media center may have more creative solutions.
One of America's great accomplishments in the last
half-century was the so-called "democratization" of the financial markets.
No longer just for the upper crust, investing
became a way for the burgeoning middle class to accumulate wealth. Mutual
funds exploded in size and number, 401k plans made savings and investing
easy, and the excitement of participating in the growth of our economy
gripped an ever larger percentage of the population.
Despite a backdrop of doubters -- those who
knowingly asserted that outperforming the average was an impossibility for
the small investor -- there was a growing consensus that the rules were
sufficient to protect the mom-and-pop investor from the sharks that swam in
the water.
That sense of fair play in the market has been
virtually destroyed by the bubble burstings and market drops of the past few
years.
Recent rebounds notwithstanding, most people now
are asking whether the system is fundamentally rigged. It's not just that
they have an understandable aversion to losing their life savings when the
market crashes; it's that each of the scandals and crises has a common
pattern: The small investor was taken advantage of by the piranhas that hide
in the rapidly moving currents.
And underlying this pattern is a simple theme:
conflicts of interest that violated the duty the market players had to their
supposed clients.
It is no wonder that cynicism and anger have
replaced what had been the joy of participation in the capital markets.
Take a quick run through a few of the scandals:
Analysts at major investment banks promote stocks
they know to be worthless, misleading the investors who rely on their
advice yet helping their investment-banking colleagues generate fees and
woo clients.
Ratings agencies slap AAA ratings on debt they
know to be dicey in order to appease the issuers -- who happen to pay
the fees of the agencies, violating the rating agency's duty to provide
the marketplace with honest evaluations.
Executives receive outsized and grotesque
compensation packages -- the result of the perverted recommendations of
compensation consultants whose other business depends upon the goodwill
of the very CEOs whose pay they are opining upon, thus violating the
consultants' duty to the shareholders of the companies for whom they are
supposedly working.
Mutual funds charge exorbitant fees that investors
have to absorb -- fees that dramatically reduce any possibility of
outperforming the market and that are set by captive boards of captive
management companies, not one of which has been replaced for inadequate
performance, violating their duty to guard the interests of the fund
investors for whom they supposedly work.
"High-speed trading" produces not only the reality
of a two-tiered market but also the probability of front-running -- that
is, illegally trading on information not yet widely known -- that eats
into the possible profits of the retail clients supposedly being served
by these very same market players, violating the obligation of the banks
to get their clients "best execution" without stepping between their
customers and the best available price.
AIG (AIG,
news,
msgs) is bailed out, costing taxpayers
tens of billions of dollars, even though (as we later learned) the big
guys knew that AIG was going down and were able to hedge and cover their
positions. Smaller investors are left holding the stock, and all of us
are left picking up the tab.
The unifying theme is apparent: Access to
information and advice, the very lifeblood of a level playing field, is not
where it needs to be. The small investor still doesn't have a fair shot.
While there have been case-specific remedies, the
aggregate effect of all the scandals is still to deny the market the most
essential of ingredients: the presumption of integrity.
The issue confronting those who wish to solve this
problem is that there really is no simple fix.
I’m not in college any more, thank goodness, but I
remember every penny-pinching moment. Some days I hardly had enough money
for food, mainly because the materials and textbooks I had to buy ripped a
hole in my pocket the size of the Grand Canyon. And so I’m always on the
lookout for ways to help out college students. Today, I found two.
There are numerous methods available to search for
textbooks, including the ever-popular “shopping” search option in Google.
But if you want to go deeper, a few of my favorite sites in the past have
included:
No doubt you’ve used one or two of these already.
But it’s a pain to search each one and compare results. Usually, you find
the book you want, ponder the price and then pay. Not good enough for me. I
want to help students, who are suffering like the rest of us in this hellish
economy, to get the absolute rock-bottom price on any book they’re looking
for.
So I did a little more hunting around and found
some much more powerful search engines, devoted to scouring multiple books
sources at once. The two I like the most are
CAMPUSBOOKS.COM and
BIGWORDS.COM. And
they really are the ultimate search engines for books, especially textbooks.
All you need to know are a few basics about the
book you’re searching for. The easiest way is to have the ISBN number
readily at hand. If that’s not available, you can search by keyword, author,
title, the usual search engine options. And as you can see, the results from
both sites are impressive. Here are two searches I did for an advertising
book I love called “Hey Whipple, Squeeze This.”
Community
College Open-Textbook Project G
Especially note the open sharing sources being used
The
Community College Open Textbook Project begins this week with a member meeting
in California," by Catherine Rampell, Chronicle of Higher Education,
April 29, 2008 --- Click Here
At the
meeting, representatives of institutions around the country will start reviewing
open-textbook models for “quality, usability, accessibility, and
sustainability,” according to a news release. They will initially review four
providers of free online educational resources: Connexions,
run by Rice University; Flat World Knowledge,
a commercial digital-textbook publisher that will begin
offering free textbooks online next
year; the University of California’s
UC College Prep Online,
which offers Advanced Placement and other courses online; and the
Community College Consortium for Open Educational
Resources, which was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community
College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College.
One of the most popular sites for textbooks is Bigwords ---
http://www.bigwords.com/ Be careful, however, when buying cheaper foreign editions such as European
editions of popular textbooks. There are often differences to be aware of such
as different orderings of chapters.
One of the first places to start is to look for used books on Amazon.com and
bn.com
I like buying from Amazon in order to reduce the number of online vendors that
have my credit card numbers. Also Amazon guarantees delivery of used books and
other merchandise from linked vendors.
Cengage Learning
said Thursdaythat it would become the first higher
education publisher to let students rent as well as buy print textbooks directly
from the source. Cengage said it would transform its existing online platform,
known as
iChapters, into a broader
site that would allow students to rent print textbooks at 40 to 70 percent off
retail as well as purchase print and digital texts and other materials.
Publishers have been exploring a range of ways to enter the
burgeoning marketfor renting textbooks. Inside Higher Ed, August 14, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/14/qt#205700
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.
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.
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.
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
A provider of subscription e-textbooks for college
students is making its 7,000-plus titles accessible on Apple Inc.'s iPhone
and iPod Touch as interest heats up in the digital-textbook arena.
The new applications, free for subscribers to
CourseSmart LLC, will let students access their full electronic textbooks,
read their digital notes and search for specific words and phrases.
"Nobody is going to use their iPhone to do their
homework, but this does provide real mobile learning," said Frank Lyman,
CourseSmart's executive vice president. "If you're in a study group and you
have a question, you can immediately access your text."
The move comes as Amazon.com Inc. is shipping its
$489 large-screen Kindle DX e-reader, which is aimed in part at college
students. Amazon is overseeing a DX pilot program at seven colleges this
fall involving hundreds of students who will experiment with reading
textbooks digitally. Last week, McGraw-Hill Education, a unit of McGraw-Hill
Cos., said it is making about 100 college textbooks available for use on
Amazon's Kindle and Kindle DX.
CourseSmart's titles aren't available on either
Amazon device. Mr. Lyman said he would like to see his books available
wherever college students want them but that the two companies haven't yet
had any conversations.
CourseSmart, which was created in 2007 as a joint
venture of six higher-education publishers, including McGraw-Hill Education
and Pearson PLC's Pearson Education, operates on a subscription model.
Typically students rent a book for 180 days; when their subscription
expires, they lose access to the title.
The company, which doesn't release financial
results, offers its digital books at about 50% of the retail price of the
corresponding physical textbook. Although students can't resell their
e-textbooks, Mr. Lyman said they typically don't get more than 50% of what
they paid for a new book when they resell it.
"Textbooks are the missing link in the e-reader
content base," said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst with Forrester Research,
Inc. "The problem so far is that college students haven't really been
interested in reading on their laptops. The iPhone will help create
excitement and generate awareness of e-textbooks."
Mr. Lyman said he believes that lack of awareness
has been the largest barrier to students trying e-textbooks.
Albert N. Greco, a professor at the Fordham
Graduate School of Business Administration who studies the book industry,
estimates that sales of printed college textbook this year will reach $5.02
billion, up 3.5% from last year. He expects college e-textbooks to hit
$117.5 million in sales in 2009, up 10.3%. "Once the recession ends, we will
see a major, national push to make all higher education textbooks available
in digital formats, as well as a move in that direction for high-school
textbooks," Mr. Greco said.
Jensen Comment
I am truly amazed at the large number of accounting textbook listings, far
more than are available on Kindle or Google eBooks. Perhaps this is because
books are more difficult to copy books not actually stored on iPods and
iPhones. Many of the books have 2008 and 2009 copyrights such that these are
not obsolete editions. I cannot, however, even imagine reading textbooks on
such small screens. Also the subscription prices seem quite high.
Instructors can request examination copies.
For example, enter "Accounting" into the Instructor's search box at
http://www.coursesmart.com/
I think the
best way for us as academics to help students with the textbook pricing
problem is to self publish our books. Since we publish the textbooks, we
have some control over that in the longer term, and for those who have not
yet published a text, it could be done in the shorter term.
The current
publishing indistry is an anachronism that survives only through their
marketing system, the entrenched habits of writers, the fixed long term
contracts that they cannot get out of, and the residual attachment of some
prestige (arguably falsely grounded) to the traditional publications means
as opposed to self publishing To use my book as a comparison, it sells for
$125 per copy. The royalty is 20% of net sales. Lets ignore the net aspect
for the moment. That means a royalty of $25 per copy. If I were to publish
this same book through LuLu, for example, the "royalty" would be 80%, which
means I could sell the same book for $31.25 and make the same $25 each. If I
were to sell it through Booksurge, which has some marketing capability
through Amazon and other online outlets, the royalty would be 35%, so the
same book could be priced at $72 to make the 25 each. The fly in the
ointment is that LuLu has no marketing arm cruising around the universities
selling the books or displaying them at conferences. However, if we
academics made a little adjustment in our buying choices, and checked out
sources like LuLu, we could make a difference. It's really all in our hands.
If I could
get out of my existing contract, which I can't, I would love to move it over
to LuLu or Booksurge or an equivalent. I'd price the book at 19.95, giving
the students a break and still getting back some reward for my efforts. I
would also have more control over my book and could still get it reviewed by
colleagues. If I ever write another textbook, it will definitely be done
that way.
We could
change our ways and make life a little easier for the students if we really
wanted to.
The issue lies in what one
expects from a textbook. I seldom cared much about the text part itself,
because I usually thought I had better text in my course notes, my videos,
and my Websites.
But I almost always
assigned a textbook, and the reason was almost always to provide students
with problems, cases, and other assignments. It just took too much of my
time to develop the end-of-chapter stuff (complete with an answer book) for
my own materials. For example, I think one of the best textbooks ever
written was the one I assigned repeatedly for my accounting theory course
(where I did not assign accounting theory textbooks):
Before my students could
begin to comprehend FAS 133 and IAS 39, they had to understand derivatives.
I can, and did, explain derivatives in class. But I could not find the time
to develop assignment material like that found in Strong’s textbook. Nor
could I teach some of the hedging strategies developed by Strong in that
book.
I might add that one of
the huge problems in free textbooks is the loss of incentive to update the
end-of-chapter stuff that, in many cases, is not even written by the
textbook authors. Publishers often outsource the end-of-chapter stuff, and
with a free textbook there’s no longer any incentive to pay a lot of money
for updating the end-of-chapter material so vital to a textbook.
Of course there are many
textbook revisions that badly suffer from having updated the chapters
without updating the end-of-chapter material or only superficially updating
what’s at the end of the chapter.
When a
publisher’s rep sent me a new edition of a textbook to examine, the first
thing I always did is compare the ends of chapters between the old and the
new editions if I was seriously contemplating an adoption of the new
edition. I figure that the revision
is a cheapie if it does not significantly revise what’s at the end of the
chapters.
Question
If your budget forces you to drop the Department Bad Luck that has one or more
required courses in the general education curriculum, what department should be
eliminated?
Hints:
That department may also
have one or more courses required of all accounting, finance, and general
business majors.
That department may also
have one or more courses required of all social science majors.
That department is
quite popular in many colleges for students planning on entering MBA
programs and law schools.
. But that
department may not be quite as popular at Southern Mississippi as it is in
most colleges.
That department teaches
subject matter closest to astrology.
"So,Department Bad Luck
was right in line with Accounting, Management, and
Marketing for [Credit Hour Production]/FTE -- three degree programs that
produced over 300 graduates last year compared to 3 for Department
Bad Luck," Nail wrote in an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed.
Amid the worst economic crisis since the Great
Depression, the University of Southern Mississippi is poised to eliminate --
of all things -- its economics department, faculty were informed this week.
The elimination of economics, along with five
tenured and four tenure-track faculty positions, is part of a plan to reduce
spending by $11 to $12 million, universitywide, within a year. While
university officials stress the plan isn't yet final, they are slated to
decide by September 1 whether to go forward with the proposed cuts,
according to a news release. Tenured and tenure-track faculty are legally
required to a year's notice prior to termination, and economics faculty say
they've already received such notice.
The proposal was crafted by
a provost-led committee, which also included faculty. The committee’s
proposal recommends 12 tenured or tenure-track positions be cut across the
university, and three quarters of those will come from economics.
George Carter, a professor
of economics at Southern Mississippi, sent a
letter to colleagues proclaiming that “USM will
stand alone as a major university without an economics faculty.” He went
further, attesting that “due process has been denied” to economics
professors who were unrepresented on the budget committee and kept in the
dark about its deliberations throughout the process.
Much of the justification
for eliminating the economics department was tied to student demand. An
outline of the
plan drafted by the committee notes that the
program has “less than five graduates per year,” but that number is in
dispute. Until recently, the department housed the university’s
international business program, which produced 17 graduates in 2007-8. If
those graduates were added to the total, economics would have produced 20
graduates that year.
Even with the international
business graduates included, however, economics trails all other departments
in the college in the number of degrees awarded. The highest degree producer
in 2007-8 was Management and Marketing, which had 293 graduates. The
second-lowest was Tourism and Management, which had 29 graduates -- nine
more than economics, even with international business included in the tally.
While faculty in the
department acknowledge the need to boost degree numbers in core economics
programs, they note that the economics courses they teach support many other
majors.
“We actually have, I
believe, the highest student credit hours per [full-time equivalent faculty
member] in the College of Business, and maybe one of the highest at the
university," said Mark Klinedinst, a professor in the department.
"[Administrators] were constantly complaining 'Oh, we're overstaffed.' How
can we be overstaffed if we teach one of the heavier course loads at the
college and the university?"
Southern Mississippi did
not provide universitywide data on teaching loads requested by Inside
Higher Ed, but the teaching loads economics faculty carry are actually
relatively close to two of the four other departments within the college,
according to data provided by the faculty and Lance Nail, dean of the
college. About 275 credit hours were produced by each full-time equivalent
economics faculty member in 2007-8, according to slightly differing data
supplied by both the dean and faculty. That ratio is similar to the load
carried by the Department of Accountancy and Information Systems -- 310
credit hours per FTE -- and Management and Marketing -- 307 per FTE, Nail's
data show.
To Nail, the credit hour
data illustrate that faculty in other departments are producing just as many
credit hours, while also producing more degrees than economics.
"So, ECON was right in
line with Accounting, Management, and Marketing for [Credit Hour
Production]/FTE -- three degree programs that produced over 300 graduates
last year compared to 3 for ECON," Nail wrote in an e-mail to Inside
Higher Ed.
Dean's Process
Criticized
Economics faculty are
still smarting that the international business program was moved to another
department, but their primary complaint is about the process by which that
change took place. The move was part of an overall redesign proposed by
Nail, who went ahead with the plan over the objections of the university’s
Academic Council, December
meeting minutes indicate. While the council
acknowledged that it did not have governing authority over the redesign, it
nonetheless voted against the proposal in a symbolic gesture. The
Mississippi Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning,
however, endorsed the redesign, and it went forward.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Economics faculty are among the most articulate faculty and trench
fighters on campus. My guess is that this "just ain't going to happen."
Otherwise Southern Mississippi will become the most frowned upon university in
the world.
What would corporations do when faced with such fiscal emergencies? Many will
turn to what accountants call zero-based budgeting ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Based_Budgeting
Given only the facts in the article, it would seem that zero-based budgeting
alone may point to ECON as the bad luck department because of having almost no
majors. But this is precisely the mistake that zero-based budgeting can make in
the academy since the academy is much more than a business.
Years ago, Colorado College dropped Accounting (and I think the entire
department of Business Administration).. But in fear of losing a huge number of
applicants to the university, a sufficient number new accounting courses were
offered in the Economics Department such that graduates became eligible for sit
for the CPA examination in Colorado --- ergo old wine in new bottles. I don't
think there was any difference between Intermediate Accounting and the Economics
of Intermediate Accounting. I think Colorado College soon afterwards brought
back accounting, finance, and business administration.
Economics is probably more vulnerable than Business Administration in terms
of appeal to applicants seeking careers, but economics is so part and parcel to
business education and research, I just cannot imagine having a business
administration department that is not served by economics courses in one
structure or another. If the Department of Economics is eventually dropped at
Southern Mississippi, watch for new courses called Finance of Economics
Principles, Finance of the Macro Economy, Principles of Microeconomics in
Business, etc.
The bit about astrology was just a joke (... er... well sort of anyway).
Missouri woman charged with cyberbullying on Craigslist A Missouri woman has been charged with cyberbullying
for allegedly posting photos and personal information of a teenage girl on the
"Casual Encounters" section of Craigslist after an Internet argument.
Prosecutors said 40-year-old Elizabeth A. Thrasher posted the 17-year-old's
picture, e-mail address and cell phone number on the Web site in a posting that
suggested the girl was seeking a sexual encounter. St. Charles County Lt. Craig
McGuire said Tuesday that the victim is the daughter of Thrasher's ex-husband's
girlfriend. The girl, who has not been named, received lewd messages and
photographs from men she didn't know and contacted police. Thrasher, of St.
Peters, is the first person charged with felony cyberbullying under a law passed
in Missouri after the suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier, who was the victim of
an Internet hoax that drew international attention.
MIT's Technology Review, August 18, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/23285/?nlid=2283&a=f
The disaster we call doctoral programs in economics and accounting
As Southern Mississippi, having almost no majors in accounting, seriously
contemplates dropping its Economics Department, the following article is
critical of what has happened in economics and in particular doctoral programs
in accounting.
Gone was the accounting history course that exposed
students to market failures and the importance of the evolution of
accounting traditions and standards in the evolution of business and
financial contracting.. In their place: mathematically-oriented courses
devoid of any historical content or context. … In the mid 1980s the
accountics community discovered it could use mathematics to restrict entry
into accounting doctoral programs.
Most US economists believe globalization is good. The
unfettered flow of goods, labor, and intellectual capital across our
international borders reduces costs and improves competitiveness of most sectors
of the economy. … Foreign students increasingly dominate US doctoral programs in
economics. Although the number of doctorates has remained relatively stable ove
the past 35 years, the fraction of these degrees conferred on foreign students
has increased dramatically–from 20.5 percent in 1972 to 72 percent in 2005. …
The best and the brightest? Perhaps. Most PhD candidates in economics are
Asians–from Japan, Korea, India, and China, and Taiwan. … But there is one
problem: while the Asians are whizzes at math, they generally do not speak
English well. Had they been high-schoolers, remedial English classes would have
been mandatory for most of them. … Gone was the history of economic thought.
Gone was the economic history course that exposed students to market failures
and the importance of psychological factors–what Keynes dubbed ‘animal spirits’–
to a prosperous economy. In their place: mathematically-oriented courses devoid
of any historical content or context. … In the mid 1980s the financial community
discovered it could use mathematics to make money
"A Rant On 'Economathematicians," Simoleon Sense, August 17, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/a-rant-on-economathematicians/
Public reviews are also available on Amazon for many current textbooks.
However, most of these reviews emphasize the positive and eliminate the
negative. Perhaps, as with the classics, the authors must die before members of
our academy feel free to write negative as well as positive reviews.
A music composer at Trinity University once had a cartoon on his door that
said composers have no chance whatsoever until they've been dead at least 200
years.
One superb innovation of recent times is the
readers' review section on Amazon.com. Here ordinary people get to voice
their opinions, acting as cultural watchdogs to shield their fellow book
lovers from duds. Certain individuals have built quite a reputation for
themselves online, their aperçus vying with the phoned-in ruminations of the
snooty, burned-out hacks who masquerade as professionals at our top
magazines and papers.
Of course, some reviewers can get a bit coarse and
personal in the rough-and-tumble world of Internet interfacials, but for the
most part these gifted amateurs inject a much-needed breath of fresh air
into the reviewing process. Most appealing is their absolute fearlessness
when it comes to trashing high-profile authors that mainstream reviewers
would hesitate to mix it up with.
Beholden to no man, cloaked in anonymity, they do
not hesitate to take even the brightest stars —Joyce Carol Oates, Paul
Auster, Dan Brown—to task. This is what makes citizen reviewers such a
welcome addition to the body politic: Their courageous sniping from behind
the bushes, emulating Ethan Allen and the Swamp Fox back in 1776, reaffirms
that democracy functions best when you fire your musket and then run away.
It is always fun to go back in time and speculate
on what might have happened had Anne Boleyn been on Facebook, or had
Pharaoh's army included amphibious equipment. This is why I cannot help
wondering what a typical Amazon.com review might have looked like had the
Internet existed centuries ago:
• "King Lear"—Average reader rating: Two stars. The
author tells us: "As like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill
us for their sport." Oh, right, like I didn't know that? Like I didn't know
that to be or not to be is the question? Like I didn't know that the fault
lies not in us but in the stars? Tell me something I don't know, Mr. Bard of
Whatever.
• "The 120 Days of Sodom"—Average Reader's Rating:
Five stars. OK, so I like totally pre-ordered this book based on the
author's name, which just happens to be the same as my maiden name—Marquis
de. Yeah, a sketchy reason to buy a book, but I was pumped. But when it got
here I didn't understand it at all. It just didn't go anywhere. It just kept
repeating itself. I went through it a few times more, searching for some
deeper, awesome meaning, but just ended up totally bummed. Actually, some
parts of it were kind of gross.
• "Oedipus Rex"—Average reader rating: Four stars.
Sophocles is a satisfying author who writes in clear, snappy prose.
Youngsters in particular could learn a lot by imitating Mr. Rex, until he
goes a bit off the rails toward the end. Nothing earth-shattering here, but
zippy stuff. Have to admit I'm still puzzled by the weird subplot involving
Mr. Rex's mother.
• "The Aeneid"—Average reader's rating: Two stars.
Whine, whine, whine! Okay, so your hometown burnt to the ground and your
family got wiped out, but do you have to keep bellyaching about it? Where's
that gonna get you, Mr. Grumpy? Basically, Virgil is a poor man's Tacitus.
He goes on and on about Priam and Dido and Zeus, when all the reader wants
is to get to the good part when the Trojans defile the Vestal Virgins. And
talk about a rip-off: He doesn't even include the story about the one-eyed
giant who can turn pigs into Greeks!
• "On the Revolution of the Celestial
Spheres"—Average Reader Rating: Three stars. Those who have read my
countless reviews elsewhere know that I am a mathematician, astronomer,
polyglot and philosopher in my own right, and therefore uniquely qualified
to discuss everything from Zeno's Paradox to Gordian's Knot. Mostly, I think
my fellow polymath Copernicus has done a pretty solid job here. The thing
most laymen don't realize—unlike mathematicians/
philosophers/astronomers/polymaths like me (as those familiar with my
numerous other reviews can tell you)—is that people like Copernicus are
really good with numbers. Just as I am. Really, really good. (Me, that is.)
Readers seeking more of my unique insights can reach me at Igor@mymommysbasement.com.
• "Deuteronomy"—Average Reader's Rating: Three
stars. I don't get it. I've read most of the books in this series, and they
totally kick butt, but this one leaves me scratching my head. Is there a
story here? Am I missing something? Why so much talk about clean and unclean
beasts? The author really got on a roll with Genesis and Exodus, and I was
on the edge of my seat when I read The Book of Numbers. But this one runs
out of gas early. Now I'm glad I skipped Leviticus!
• "Mein Kampf"—Average reader's rating: One star.
Lively writing, but just too, too depressing. Why does he keep using big
words that normal people can't understand, like lebensraum and
oberkommandant? Hey! I own a thesaurus, too! And what's up with the Jewish
thing?
Mr. Queenan, a
satirist and writer, is the author, most recently, of the memoir "Closing
Time" (Viking, 2009).
Jensen Comment
Public reviews are also available on Amazon for many current textbooks. However,
most of these reviews emphasize the positive and eliminate the negative.
Perhaps, as with the classics, the authors must die before members of our
academy feel free to write negative as well as positive reviews.
A music composer at Trinity University once had a cartoon on his door that
said composers have no chance whatsoever until they've been dead at least 200
years.
Although Amazon sells many of the classics, most classics can also be
downloaded for free ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
The above link also includes free textbooks and videos that can be downloaded
for free.
The Critical Importance of Retrieval For Learning
From the Financial Rounds Blog on August 14, 2009 ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
The author is an associate professor of finance who is studying for the CFA
examination. His studies were sidetracked for a period of time while his young son was dying from cancer.
I just read a study that is highly applicable to
anyone who's studying for the CFA exams, since there's a ridiculous amount
of information that must be retained. When people ask me how much they have
to study for the L1 exam, I answer "about 16 pounds", since that's the
weight of the curriculum.
But the study is applicable to students in many other disciplines.
The study is titled "The Critical Importance of Retrieval For Learning" by
Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger, and it's in the February 2008 issue of
the journal Science. They examine the question of how best to improve
long-term recall. Specifically, they tested whether, once a student can
recall a piece of knowledge once, they most improve their long term recall
by repeated studying of the material, by repeated testing of the material,
or both. Here's the abstract:
Learning
is often considered complete when a student can produce the correct
answer to a question. In our research, students in one condition
learned foreign language vocabulary words in the standard paradigm
of repeated study-test trials. In three other conditions, once a
student had correctly produced the vocabulary item, it was
repeatedly studied but dropped from further testing, repeatedly
tested but dropped from further study, or dropped from both study
and test. Repeated studying after learning had no effect on delayed
recall, but repeated testing produced a large positive effect. In
addition, students' predictions of their performance were
uncorrelated with actual performance. The results demonstrate the
critical role of retrieval practice in consolidating learning and
show that even university students seem unaware of this fact.
So, the takeaway is that the best way to retain (for
example), the
Black-Scholes option pricing formula isn't to keep
going over the formula once you've gotten it down - it's to repeatedly TEST
yourself on it. I don't necessarily mean a formal test -- just put the
formula on a flash card and periodically (every couple of days at first, but
eventually at longer intervals) try to write it out. After that, check your
results against the flash card.
Of course, if you're studying for the CFA exams, most of the test-prep
companies have test banks with numerous questions on each topic, so using
them would be perfectly consistent with this approach.
I almost forgot - you can read the Science article
here.
Jensen Comment
Studying for memory examinations like the CPA, CFA, CMA, and almost every other
triple imaginable the Karpicke and Roediger approach makes intuitive sense and
is indeed how I studied as a student. But as one gets older and seeks more
breadth of knowledge, it becomes overwhelming to try to keep honing recall in
such the intense manner needed to pass a certification examination. My alternate
solution has been to develop "knowledge databases" for what I learn each and
every day. This started out, believe it or not, with a steel filing cabinets for
IBM Cards. At one time I had over 88,000 cards punched, much of it dealing with
mathematical statistics believe it or not.
Later, I transferred my punched-card knowledge base onto magnetic tape that,
on occasion, I printed out by the ton so I could have hard copy access (before
the days of personal computers and networking). Searching computer tape was slow,
slow, slow.
I immediately jumped on two Web servers and a LAN server once this newer
technology became available at Trinity University. Now my knowledge databases
are pretty much contained in these three servers. You can access my two Web
servers with the following links. Printing out the entire contents would
probably take a million pages of hard copy.
The two servers above contain knowledge (including portions of many articles)
that I feel I can legally retain myself and share with the world. My private LAN
server contains my digitized library that I cannot share with the world largely
because I do not have legal authority to share copyrighted material with the
world.
My memory skills thus changed from being a student studying for examinations
to a professor seeking to facilitate learning of my students and to personally
aid me in my own scholarship and research. My memory skills thus shifted from
test-reinforcement skills to knowledge-base searching skills.
But in the process of searching my knowledge bases an interesting thing
happened along the way. For example, I've accessed the Black-Scholes Model so
many hundreds of times over the years I'm actually prepared to take an
examination on its technicalities. Hence, knowledge based searching hones memory
for things frequently searched. And for things not
frequently searched, I can sometimes impress you with what seems to be something
that I recall in my brain but in reality my brain only helps be recall what I've
stored in huge knowledge bases that I maintain.
Also the modules in my knowledge base must be typed or pasted into the
computer. Since I've done virtually all of this input myself, I've honed my
memory skills while inputting the modules.
Many Finance Ph.D.s also are on a CFA track,
especially if they specialize in investments. They pass the first level exam
after their first year in the program and take the two other levels each
year there after. But they are also required to have three years of
experience, but academic experience is allowed as a substitute. Actually,
getting a CFA was an important part of the Ph.D. program several years ago,
but now the desire is much less. Perhaps, there is a general decline in the
interest in the security business due the excesses of Wall Street's recent
past. However, the data may just be a short-term trend, not a long-term
trend.
Recovering Hard Drive Data
Replace a Laptop's Crashed Hard Drive Don Homan's hard drive crashed. What
should he do? If you don't have an up-to-date backup, your first
priority will be getting your data back. Depending on how you use your PC, that
could include business documents, photos, music, email, and so on. Several
companies specialize in recovering data from broken drives. I hesitate to
recommend one because I've never needed one myself and there's no practical way
to test them. But I can say thatOntrack and
DriveSavershave long and mostly positive
reputations. Recovery could cost you thousands of dollars, but that's the price
of not backing up. If you decide to get into the backup habit, see
What's the Best Way to Backup What I Need to Backup?
Lincoln Spector, PC World via The Washington Post, August
21, 2009 ---
Click Here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/17/AR2009081701632.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter
Guaranty Bank became the second-largest U.S. bank
to fail this year after the Texas lender was shut down by regulators and
most of its operations sold at a loss of billions of dollars for the U.S.
government to a major Spanish bank. The transaction approved by the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corp. marked the first time a foreign bank has bought a
failed U.S. bank.
The bank failure, the 10th largest in U.S. history,
is expected to cost the deposit insurance fund an estimated $3 billion.
The FDIC seized Austin-based Guaranty Bank, with
about $13 billion in assets and $12 billion in deposits, and on Friday sold
all of its deposits and $12 billion of its assets to BBVA Compass, the U.S.
division of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA, Spain's second-largest bank.
In addition, the FDIC agreed to share losses with BBVA on about $11 billion
of Guaranty Bank's loans and other assets.
Guaranty Bank, with 162 branches in Texas and
California, saw its investments in real estate lending and mortgage-backed
securities bought from other banks sour and had been teetering near collapse
for weeks. Its parent, Guaranty Financial Group Inc., reaffirmed Monday in a
regulatory filing that the company was critically short of capital and
didn't believe it could stay in business.
In April, the federal Office of Thrift Supervision
said the company had engaged in "unsafe and unsound" banking practices and
ordered it to raise fresh capital, find a buyer or face a takeover by the
government.
Guaranty's failure, along with those of three small
banks in Georgia and Alabama Friday, brought to 81 the number of U.S. bank
failures this year amid rising loan defaults spurred by tumbling home prices
and spiking unemployment. That is the highest number in a year since 1992 at
the height of the savings and loan crisis; it compares with 25 last year and
three in 2007.
Last week the FDIC seized Colonial Bank, a big
lender in real estate development, and sold its $20 billion in deposits, 346
branches in five states and about $22 billion of its assets to BB&T Corp. It
was the biggest bank failure so far this year, and the sixth-largest in U.S.
history.
Birmingham, Ala.-based BBVA Compass, with 600
branches from Florida to California, said its acquisition of Guaranty
creates the 15th-largest commercial bank in the U.S., with about $49 billion
in deposits. "This compelling transaction makes excellent strategic sense
and represents an exciting growth opportunity for BBVA Compass as we
continue to build the leading banking franchise in the high-growth Sunbelt
region," Jose Maria Garcia Meyer, chairman of BBVA Compass, said in a
statement.
Like Spain's biggest bank, Banco Santander, BBVA
has managed to skirt the turmoil that swept the industry worldwide by
staying away from toxic assets such as mortgage-backed securities.
Instead, BBVA and other big Spanish lenders stuck
to their nuts-and-bolts business of lending to consumers and businesses,
relying on it for the bulk of their revenue, Nuria Alvarez, an analyst with
Madrid-based brokerage firm Renta 4, said earlier this week.
With its strong presence in the American South
through BBVA Compass, the bank had made no secret that it was open to
expanding.
"It is no surprise. BBVA had never ruled out buying
assets or banks, so long as attractive opportunities arose," Alvarez said.
The deal is especially attractive because it enables BBVA to expand in
Texas, she said.
The financial crisis is giving Spanish banks "the
opportunity to make acquisitions and keep expanding their international
presence at much more affordable prices than they would have if this crisis
had not emerged," Alvarez said.
The FDIC also announced Friday the closures of
Internet-based ebank, located in Atlanta, with $143 million in assets and
$130 million in deposits; First Coweta, based in Newnan, Ga., with $167
million in assets and $155 million in deposits; and CapitalSouth Bank, based
in Birmingham, Ala., with $617 million in assets and $546 million in
deposits.
Stearns Bank, based in St. Cloud, Minn., agreed to
buy the assets and deposits of ebank. United Bank, based in Zebulon, Ga., is
assuming the deposits and $155 million of the assets of First Coweta; the
FDIC will retain the rest for eventual sale. IberiaBank, based in Lafayette,
La., is assuming the deposits and $589 million of the assets of CapitalSouth
Bank.
Those failures are expected to cost the insurance
fund an estimated $63 million for ebank, $48 million for First Coweta and
$151 million for CapitalSouth Bank.
Bank Meltdown
Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and Credit Derivatives (CDR) Got Too Much
of the Blame As more U.S. banks get shut down by the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corp., it is becoming clear that most bank failures have nothing to do
with investments in complex financial products that bear risks that are
difficult for laymen to understand. Today, banks fail the old-fashioned way:
They make loans but do not ever get the money back. These loans are going bad at
a rate far beyond what banks and regulators imagined.
"Most Failing Banks Are Doing It the Old-School Way," by Floyd Norris, The
New York Times, August 20, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/business/21norris.html?_r=1&ref=business
Banks are now losing money and going broke the
old-fashioned way: They made loans that will never be repaid.
As the number of banks closed by the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation has grown rapidly this year, it has become
clear that most of them had nothing to do with the strange financial
products that seemed to dominate the news when the big banks were nearing
collapse and being bailed out by the government.
There were no C.D.O’s, or S.I.V.’s or AAA-rated
“supersenior tranches” that turned out to have little value. Certainly there
were no “C.D.O.-squareds.”
Staying away from strange securities has not made
things better. Jim Wigand, the F.D.I.C.’s deputy director of resolutions and
receiverships, says banks that are failing now are in worse shape — in terms
of the amount of losses relative to the size of the banks — than the ones
that collapsed during the last big wave of failures, from the savings and
loan crisis.
The severity of the current string of bank failures
shows that many of the proposed remedies batted about since the financial
crisis erupted would have done nothing to stem this wave of closures. These
banks did not get in over their heads with derivatives or hide their bad
assets in off-balance sheet vehicles. Nor did their traders make bad bets;
they generally had no traders. They did not make loans that they expected to
sell quickly, so they had plenty of reason to care that the loans would be
repaid.
What they did do is see loans go bad, in some cases
with stunning rapidity, in volumes that they never thought possible.
The fact that so many loans are souring is a
testament to how bad the recession, and the collapse in property prices, has
been. But looking at some of the banks in detail shows that they were also
victims of their own apparent success. Year after year, these banks grew and
grew, and took more and more risks. Losses were minimal. Cautious bankers
appeared to be missing opportunities.
As the great economist Hyman P. Minsky pointed out,
stability eventually will be destabilizing. The absence of problems in the
middle of this decade was taken as proof that nothing very bad was likely to
happen. Any bank that did not lower its lending standards from 2005 through
mid-2007 would have stopped growing, simply because its competitors were
offering more and more generous terms.
Take the recent failure of Temecula Valley Bank, in
Riverside County, Calif. For most of this decade, it grew rapidly. Deposits
leapt by 50 percent a year, rising to $1.1 billion in 2007, from less than
$100 million in 2001.
That growth was powered by construction loans, on
which it suffered virtually no losses for many years. By 2005, loans to
builders amounted to more than half its total loans — and to 450 percent of
its capital.
Temecula appeared to be very well capitalized. But
virtually all that capital vanished when the boom stopped.
When the F.D.I.C. stepped in last month, the bank
had $1.5 billion in assets. The agency thinks it will lose about a quarter
of that amount.
Across the country, at Security Bank of Bibb
County, Ga., the story was remarkably similar. Its fast growth was powered
by construction loans, although in this case the loans mostly financed
commercial buildings, not houses. When those loans went bad, what had
appeared to be a well-capitalized bank went under. The F.D.I.C. estimates
its losses will be almost 30 percent of the bank’s $1.2 billion in assets.
In both of those cases, to get another bank to take
over the failed bank, the F.D.I.C. had to agree to share future losses on
most of the loans. That is one reason the agency’s estimates of its eventual
losses could turn out to be wrong. In the best of all worlds, the loss
estimates would be too high because the economy and property prices recover
rapidly. But if the recovery is slow, the losses could grow.
In either case, the F.D.I.C. may soon need to seek
more money to pay for failing banks. It could seek that cash from the
Treasury, where it has a line of credit, or it could seek to raise the fees
it charges banks.
So far this year, the F.D.I.C. has closed 77 banks,
and there almost certainly will be more on Friday, the agency’s preferred
day for bank closures. Last Friday there were five. Not since June 12 has
there been a Friday without a bank closing. By contrast, there were three
failures in 2007 and 25 in 2008.
Of the 77 failures in 2009, the F.D.I.C. could not
even find a bank to acquire eight of them. Of the other 69, the agency
signed loss-sharing agreements on 41.
By contrast, the agency found acquirers for all of
the 25 failed banks in 2008, and had to sign loss-sharing agreements for
just three of the banks.
“Loss-sharing” is something of a misnomer. In
practice, the vast majority of the losses are borne by the F.D.I.C.
Typically, it takes 80 percent of the losses up to a negotiated limit, and
95 percent of losses above that level.
Mortgage Fraud Increasing Despite the attention paid to mortgage fraud committed
by borrowers and lenders since declines in the real estate values and the
subprime loan crisis triggered severe problems in the banking industry, the
number of Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) investigations of mortgage
fraud and associated financial crimes is increasing. “The FBI has experienced
and continues to experience an exponential rise in mortgage fraud
investigations,” John Pistole, Deputy Director, told the Senate Judiciary
Committee in April. AccountingWeb, August 18, 2009 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/topic/mortgage-loan-fraud-increasing
Jensen Comment
I think mortgage fraud will continue to rise as long as remote third parties
like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and FHA continue to buy up mortgages negotiated by
banks and mortgage companies basking in moral hazard. The biggest hazards are
fraudulent real estate appraisals and lies about income in mortgage
applications. We need to bring back George Bailey (James Stewart) in It's a
Wonderful Life ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life
The banks that negotiate the mortgages should have to hang on to those
mortgages.
Watch the video at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJJN9qwhkkE
The IRS Embraces the Virtual World of Second Life Software The virtual world of Second Life is home to
entrepreneurs, visionaries, crackpots, nerds, CPAs (!), Fortune 500 businesses -
basically anyone with a computer and a willingness to explore a 3-D world - and
it also includes the IRS among its denizens. The IRS uses Second Life as a
recruiting tool, and claims that, depending on how one looks at it, the taxing
agency is actually saving millions of taxpayer dollars by devoting some time and
money to this virtual world instead of using its resources in more expensive
venues, like, say, NASCAR?
Gail Perry, "IRS might be saving millions by recruiting in Second Life,"
AccountingWeb, August 19, 2009 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/topic/irs-might-be-saving-millions-recruiting-second-life
You’re sitting at your computer doing preliminary
research for a course on Israeli history. A Web search shows that Stanford
University had an extensive exhibit on the history of Tel Aviv that opened
in April, but either you've missed it, or you don’t have the time or money
to hop a flight to California.
That's no problem. Sign onto
Second Life
and check out the university's exhibit there.
The university library's special-collections
department has begun to post exhibits and materials both on campus and
online, letting anyone view temporary presentations, even long after they
have been physically removed from public viewing.
The Stanford University Second Life library began
as an experiment in 2006, say Mimi Calter, special-projects librarian and
Deni Wicklund, manager of the library’s technical-support group. Ms.
Wicklund began by purchasing a small plot of land on a Second Life island.
At first, some content was added, along with links to university Web sites.
Slowly, scanned materials for the library exhibits were also posted. Then
manuscript boxes that looked identical to those in the library were added.
Now, a few exhibits and even a documentary are available online, and more
content is on the way. Just last month the university had an open house
where users could tour the Second Life library.
Stanford is not the only university to open online
versions of its library on Second Life.
Harvard has its own island, and
San Jose State University’s
School of Library and Professional Services has its own portal.
While many colleges and universities have used
Second Life in
different ways, Ms. Wicklund understands that
Second Life is not for everybody.
"The collaborative potential for it is so great
that you have to try it to understand the full impact that it can have," she
says. "This is just one more tool to be used in the cause of education and
learning."
A poster titled "Freshman Counseling" hangs on the
wall in the least conspicuous corner of my office. I inherited it from my
predecessor as she gleefully departed. The image, in dungeon-and-dragon
style, is daunting.
A tall guard, perhaps the executioner himself,
stands masked and towering above a meek first-year student. The guard holds
the end of a long chain around the student's neck; on the other side of the
desk sits the homely and obese dean in hooded medieval garb, hunched
I recall one semester when that poster, merely a
source of amusement for me on my busiest days, took on new meaning. On the
first day of classes, I sat in my office on the third floor of the imposing
ivy-covered administrative building at Mount Holyoke College, awaiting my
first "probationer." The student — let us call her Emily — entered with her
head hanging low. Her eyes avoided mine quite deliberately as she gripped
the letter outlining her poor performance and the terms of academic
probation.
Emily was already shrugging her shoulders and
expressing despair, shame, and apology, even before reaching the seat on the
other side of my desk. She glanced over at the poster. Ironically, the
ominous image served to put her at ease, and we had a good laugh for a
moment. "I feel just like that kid," she said. What she learned over the
course of the next six months was how to get rid of the executioner and the
chain around her neck, the one she had conjured up in her imagination as a
result of her failure.
In my role as an academic dean, I frequently meet
with students on probation who have not yet learned how to fail and are
consequently paralyzed academically. One of the most pivotal skills for a
student who wishes to succeed in the academic arena is the ability to fail
well.
"Good failing" requires the strength to make use of
a self-generated mess. As Anne Lamott explains in Bird by Bird,
"perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It
will keep you cramped and insane your whole life." She urges her writers to
"go ahead and make big scrawls and mistakes. Use up lots of paper.
Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the
artist's true friend. ... We need to make messes in order to find out who we
are and why we are here."
Of course after the mess, the learning can begin,
and that is precisely what the students whom I work with discover. It is a
lesson more valuable than the lessons learned in the courses in which they
will ultimately earn A's. The energy, even courage, to rethink a failed
piece of work, write, rewrite, inquire, and respond to the comments and
questions of a critical reader is crucial for anyone aiming to excel in
college. Moreover, the shame and embarrassment of producing a
less-than-perfect paper or exam becomes a handy shield against the hard work
it takes to build on failure.
Unfortunately, more often than not, students placed
on academic probation because of a poor performance in their first semester
of college resisted turning in an imperfect paper, completing a flawed exam,
or appearing in subsequent classes because they were too paralyzed by
criticism to prepare or move forward. Their self-defeating actions stem from
fear of criticism. In short, they are bad at failing.
How can we turn such students around? To be sure,
no matter how much we advise, they may continue to perform poorly in a
discipline that doesn't tap their interests or abilities. But the first year
of college is a time to discover strengths and weaknesses. The role of a
good adviser or dean is to engage the student in dialogue, to encourage her
to examine the causes of failure, to give her room for honest
self-assessment, and then to guide her toward taking responsibility for
improvement.
Simple questions work: What do you think went
wrong? What will you do differently? Did you meet with the professor or only
communicate through e-mail messages? Did you go to the writing center? Seek
the help of the reference librarian? The goal is to help students listen to
themselves and make the needed connections so that their failure fuels
success.
A good example of "bad failing" is the pattern
Emily confessed as she sat before me in shame during our first meeting. In
her first semester, Emily said, she had stared in shock at the grades for
her papers and exams in each course, and subsequently internalized the low
grades (not yet F's) as symbols of her inadequacies rather than as
opportunities for growth. While on probation, Emily learned that criticism
is the best gift college can provide. Failure can and should be the key
impetus for success. A quick review of her experience will serve to
demonstrate my point.
I asked Emily which of the courses from her first
semester was her favorite. She selected the course for which she received a
C-minus. That impressed me. "Great Books," a first-year writing-intensive
seminar, opened Emily's eyes to a range of interpretations and analyses of
classical texts, and challenged her to read and write more often than she
ever had in high school. She loved the reading but dreaded the writing. When
her first paper came back with exclamation points and question marks in the
margins, and the words "we need to meet" at the top of the first page, Emily
hid. Her professor continued to urge her to come in, but that was the last
thing she could imagine doing. To her mind, he was the equivalent of the
judgmental figure behind the big desk in my poster, and only some guard
pulling her along with a chain could have gotten her to that office.
Avoiding the professor was her way of erasing the reality of those marked-up
papers.
It was as if she had convinced herself that if she
ignored the comments on her papers, somehow they weren't really there. So
she dutifully continued to hand in her assignments, and each one was worse
than the one that came before. Her final grade seemed to her something
tragic from which she might never recover. Literature was, after all, the
field in which she hoped to major.
A decision had to be made now about whether or not
to continue into the second semester of the seminar with the same teacher.
"How will you feel if you drop it?" I asked. "Will you miss the discussions
and the readings? Were you excited about what you were learning even though
the grades were low? Tell me about what you learned."
Continued in article
Hereeeeeee's Johnnie! Johnnie who?
From Beloit College: Get to know the Class of 2013 Better If the entering college class of 2013 had been more
alert back in 1991 when most of them were born, they would now be experiencing a
severe case of déjà vu. The headlines that year railed about government
interventions, bailouts, bad loans, unemployment and greater regulation of the
finance industry. The Tonight Show changed hosts for the first
time in decades, and the nation asked “was Iraq worth a war?” Each August since
1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a
look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering
college. It is the creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom
McBride and Emeritus Public Affairs Director Ron Nief. It is used around the
world as the school year begins, as a reminder of the rapidly changing frame of
reference for this new generation. It is widely reprinted and the Mindset List
website athttp://www.beloit.edu/mindset/ receives
more than 300,000 hits annually.
Most students entering college for the first time
this fall were born in 1991.
For these students, Martha Graham, Pan
American Airways, Michael Landon, Dr. Seuss, Miles Davis, The Dallas
Times Herald, Gene Roddenberry, and Freddie Mercury have always
been dead.
Dan Rostenkowski, Jack Kevorkian, and Mike
Tyson have always been felons.
The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the
big guy picking vegetables.
They have never used a card catalog to find a
book.
Margaret Thatcher has always been a former
prime minister.
Salsa has always outsold ketchup.
Earvin "Magic" Johnson has always been
HIV-positive.
Tattoos have always been very chic and highly
visible.
They have been preparing for the arrival of
HDTV all their lives.
Rap music has always been main stream.
Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream has
always been a flavor choice.
Someone has always been building something
taller than the Willis (née Sears) Tower in Chicago.
The KGB has never officially existed.
Text has always been hyper.
They never saw the “Scud Stud” (but there have
always been electromagnetic stud finders.)
Babies have always had a Social Security
Number.
They have never had to “shake down” an oral
thermometer.
Bungee jumping has always been socially
acceptable.
They have never understood the meaning of
R.S.V.P.
American students have always lived anxiously
with high-stakes educational testing.
Except for the present incumbent, the
President has never inhaled.
State abbreviations in addresses have never
had periods.
The European Union has always existed.
McDonald's has always been serving Happy Meals
in China.
Condoms have always been advertised on
television.
Cable television systems have always offered
telephone service and vice versa.
Christopher Columbus has always been getting a
bad rap.
The American health care system has always
been in critical condition.
Bobby Cox has always managed the Atlanta
Braves.
Desperate smokers have always been able to
turn to Nicoderm skin patches.
There has always been a Cartoon Network.
The nation’s key economic indicator has always
been the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Their folks could always reach for a Zoloft.
They have always been able to read books on an
electronic screen.
Women have always outnumbered men in college.
We have always watched wars, coups, and police
arrests unfold on television in real time.
Amateur radio operators have never needed to
know Morse code.
Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Uzbekistan,
Armenia, Latvia, Georgia, Lithuania, and Estonia have always been
independent nations.
It's always been official: President Zachary
Taylor did not die of arsenic poisoning.
Madonna’s perspective on Sex has always been
well documented.
Phil Jackson has always been coaching
championship basketball.
Ozzy Osbourne has always been coming back.
Kevin Costner has always been Dancing with
Wolves, especially on cable.
There have always been flat screen
televisions.
They have always eaten Berry Berry Kix.
Disney’s Fantasia has always been available on
video, and It’s a Wonderful Life has always been on Moscow television.
Smokers have never been promoted as an
economic force that deserves respect.
Elite American colleges have never been able
to fix the price of tuition.
Nobody has been able to make a deposit in the
Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).
Everyone has always known what the evening
news was before the Evening News came on.
Britney Spears has always been heard on
classic rock stations.
They have never been Saved by the Bell
Someone has always been asking: “Was Iraq
worth a war?”
Most communities have always had a
mega-church.
Natalie Cole has always been singing with her
father.
The status of gays in the military has always
been a topic of political debate.
Elizabeth Taylor has always reeked of White
Diamonds.
There has always been a Planet Hollywood.
For one reason or another, California’s future
has always been in doubt.
Agent Starling has always feared the Silence
of the Lambs.
“Womyn” and “waitperson” have always been in
the dictionary.
Members of Congress have always had to keep
their checkbooks balanced since the closing of the House Bank.
There has always been a computer in the Oval
Office.
CDs have never been sold in cardboard
packaging.
Avon has always been “calling” in a catalog.
NATO has always been looking for a role.
Two Koreas have always been members of the UN.
Official racial classifications in South
Africa have always been outlawed.
The NBC Today Show has always been seen on
weekends.
Vice presidents of the United States have
always had real power.
Conflict in Northern Ireland has always been
slowly winding down.
Migration of once independent media like
radio, TV, videos and compact discs to the computer has never amazed
them.
Nobody has ever responded to “Help, I’ve
fallen and I can’t get up.”
Congress could never give itself a mid-term
raise.
Does going to college make students better-educated
citizens? A new study of more than 14,000 randomly selected college students
from across the country concludes that the answer is often no. Not only did
many respondents at the 50 participating colleges fail to answer half of the
basic civics questions correctly, but at such elite schools as Cornell,
Berkeley and Johns Hopkins, the college freshmen scored higher than the
college seniors. Josiah Bunting, III, chairman of the National Civic
Literacy Board of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), the nonprofit
that funded the study, decried “the students’ dismal scores” as providing
“high-quality evidence of … nothing less than a coming crisis in American
citizenship.” Mike Ratliff, a senior vice president at the ISI spoke to
NEWSWEEK’s Pat Wingert about the study’s findings, which were released
today.
. . .
How did you pick the participating schools?
We surveyed 14,000 students at 50 schools as part of the largest study ever
done on this topic. The University of Connecticut’s Department of Public
Policy picked 25 schools on a random basis. Then we oversampled among the
most selective schools, and added 25 schools like Harvard, Yale and
Princeton.
What did you find?
Basically, we found that the freshmen arriving on campus were not very well
prepared to take on their future responsibility as citizens. They earned a
failing grade on our test. [The average participating freshman got 51.7
percent of the questions correct.] But after four to five years in college,
we found that seniors, as a group, scored only 1.5 percent better than the
entering freshmen.
What was most surprising was the finding that at 16
of the 50 schools, the freshmen did better than the seniors. We were
startled by the extent of what we call “negative
learning.” When courses are not offered or
required, the students forget what they knew when they entered as freshmen,
and that 16 included some of the best schools in the country, Berkeley,
Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Duke.
Continued in article
The Russians are Scamming; The Russians are Scamming
"Bank-fraud scam alleged in Denver and Aurora: Investigators say 700
people were involved in a Denver-based scheme run by Russian immigrants, with
losses topping $80 million," by Felisa Cardona, The Denver Post, August
15, 2009 ---
http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_13104106
A alleged massive organized bank-fraud scheme
involving 16 Russian immigrants was busted by federal agents Friday, with 15
raids at several locations, including an Aurora auto dealership and a Denver
medical-marijuana business.
Federal agents said the Denver-based scheme led to
losses of more than $80 million and involved 700 people — mostly students in
the U.S. on visas who were recruited by the criminal enterprise.
Described by authorities as a "bust out" scam, the
allegations involved using the identity and credit line of a business to
obtain loans and goods with no intention of repaying the money or paying for
the merchandise, according to the case affidavit unsealed Friday.
Additionally, some of the 700 obtained credit cards to buy luxury items with
no intention of paying for them, while others took out cash loans without
repaying, it is alleged.
As part of the investigation, federal agents
searched CannaMed, a medical-marijuana dispensary on Leetsdale Drive in
Denver. But medical marijuana was not the focus of the search or the
investigation, said Jeff Dorschner, spokesman for the Colorado U.S.
attorney's office.
"The focus of the investigation is fraud and has
nothing to do with medical marijuana, and there is no link to the initial
investigation and medical marijuana," he said.
Medical marijuana is legal in Colorado. But under
federal law, once a federal agent comes in contact with marijuana, the
plants must be seized because the drug is illegal.
A person involved with the medical-marijuana
dispensary is potentially involved in unrelated criminal conduct, according
to a source close to the investigation.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents also came in
contact with a marijuana-growing operation at another home that was searched
Friday.
Maaliki Motors on South Havana Street in Aurora was
raided as well, but the business was searched solely because some of the
suspect credit cards were used there to purchase vehicles, according to the
affidavit.
Valeria Igorevna Glukhova, 22, used a Washington
Mutual credit card on Sept. 22, 2008, at the dealership and spent $10,000 on
a 2005 Lexus RX 330, court records say. Glukhova has not been arrested.
Four women were arrested during the bust, but only
two were in U.S. District Court in Denver on Friday for an initial
appearance.
Natallia Vishnevskaya, 26, and Nadezda Nikitina,
23, remained in custody and through a Russian interpreter were told by U.S.
Magistrate Judge Michael Hegarty that they have a detention hearing
Wednesday to determine whether they should be released on bail.
Vishnevskaya and Nikitina are each charged with
bank fraud and submitting a false and fraudulent application for credit. The
charges carry maximum terms of 30 years in prison.
The court documents say that Nikitina formed a
business, A&N Enterprises, and filed articles of organization with the
Colorado Secretary of State.
However, the Colorado Department of Labor reported
that she did not have any employment income at the time she filled out
applications for credit on which she said she earned $180,000 a year.
In May 2008, Nikitina tried to buy Jet Skis at
Vickery Motorsports, and the store denied her loan application when it saw
the number of loans on her credit reports.
Susan Ghardashyan, 69, and Seda Sahakyan, 77, were
taken to a medical facility after their arrests. They may make an initial
appearance in court next week, but the charges against them were unavailable
Friday.
Court documents say Ghardashyan spent $20,300 at
Maaliki Motors from February to April using a Target National Bank Card and
another $10,000 on a Nordstrom card at the dealership. In late February, two
attempts were made at charging another $21,000 to the Nordstrom card at
Maaliki, but the charges were declined, the records show.
Dorschner declined to comment on whether anyone
involved in the businesses knew that the cards were being used fraudulently.
"Google Books to add Creative Commons books," The Washington Post,
August 14, 2009 ---
Click Here
Google Inc. is now enabling authors and publishers
who release their work under Creative Commons licenses to distribute it
through Google Books, a free service that allows users to search and read
books online.
Creative Commons is a nonprofit group that
encourages writers, artists and others to use its licensing tools to let
their work to be reused and shared by others in certain ways.
In a blog post Thursday, Google Books associate
product manager Xian Ke wrote that rights holders who are already part of
Google Books' partner program can update their account settings. Those who
aren't can sign up to be a partner and choose one of seven different
Creative Commons licenses.
People will be able to download these books from
Google Books and share them. If rights holders indicate that people can
modify their books, readers will be able to do that, too.
Those who download the books will be agreeing that
they will only use them in the ways the license says they may. This could
include giving the author credit if they remix the work or distribute it
publicly,
"New Carnegie Mellon U. Project Will Build Online Community-College
Courses," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 14, 2009 ---
Click Here
Carnegie Mellon University is expanding its open
online-learning efforts with
a new project focused on community colleges.
The Community College Open Learning Initiative is
the second wave of an educational experiment that
gained attention recently from the Obama administration.
Carnegie Mellon's work has given about 300 classrooms
around the world access to software-enhanced, college-level online-course
material in subjects like biology and statistics. These digital environments
track students’ progress, give them feedback, and tip off professors about
where students are struggling so the instructors can make better use of
class time.
Now Carnegie Mellon plans to work with a consortium
of community colleges to set up four "high gatekeeper" courses, defined as
classes that have poor success rates but are important to getting degrees.
The goal is to raise completion rates by 25 percent in those courses. The
courses will be team-designed by community-college faculty experts,
scientists who study how people learn, human-computer-interaction
specialists, and software engineers.
Candace Thille, director of the Open Learning
Initiative, said the community-college project had secured $4.5-million.
Multiple foundations are backing the effort, but Ms. Thille declined to
identify all of them. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has supported
Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative since 2002.
When the Open Learning Initiative began, the idea
was to offer students outside Carnegie Mellon online courses that gave them
a shot at learning the same information a traditional course would convey,
but without an instructor. Researchers have also studied a hybrid mode,
meaning online teaching combined with some classroom time, though less than
in a traditional course. Results showed that students in the hybrid course
"successfully learned as much material in half the time," according to an
overview of the Community College Open Learning Initiative proposal that was
provided to The Chronicle.
The community-college project intends to use the
hybrid style.
Because of work and family responsibilities,
community-college students' schedules are often less flexible than those of
students in residential four-year colleges, Ms. Thille said. Blended
learning gives community-college students more flexibility, she said, and it
has the potential to keep them in classes they might otherwise have to drop
"because life got in the way."
The new project involves partnerships with a
variety of associations and state systems in North Carolina, West Virginia,
Kentucky, and Washington. The proposal calls for reaching 40
community-college partners within three years.
Should There Be a Publisher of Last Resort for Your Rejected Papers?
Over 40 years of submitting research papers for publications, I've had a lot
of these papers rejected for reasons that were darned good --- reasons that in
retrospect embarrassed me. As a referee I've sometimes rejected papers that for
reasons that later embarrassed me when the authors presented their rejoinders.
There are also some instances were I felt the referees of my own papers had
their heads where the sun doesn't shine.
I provide three very old examples of where I had rejected papers that, with
encouragement, could've been turned into good work in my opinion. You can read
these examples called "The Big Ones That Got Away" at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/default4.htm
Admiring Google searchers quite frequently seek me out to this day regarding my
rejected Working Paper 127.
In the course of those 40+ years, there were also some research papers that "got
away." For a variety of reasons, journal referees and editors did not find sufficient
merit in the drafts of these papers to accept them for publication. Most of my drafts that
got away were deservedly rejected. (Probably in a conspiracy to
keep me humble.) However, as I reflect upon my past work, I think that at least
three of my favorites were rejected even though I liked the papers better than most of my
work that was accepted for publication. The powers of the Internet now allow me to make
these "big ones" available to the world. The papers below are HTML versions of
the original (not revised) drafts. Please keep the dates of the papers in mind in you take
the time and trouble to examine my big ones that got away.
Note that I'm not arguing that these three papers did not need revising,
especially revising to make them more concise and readable. Like Andy Bailey, I
always had difficulty writing papers that were less than a hundred pages long.
I might point out that for much of my career as a teacher of accounting my
research was more in the area of mathematics, economics, and operations
research. I considered it too difficult to make an
original contribution to accountancy.
"Hear the One About the Rejected Mathematician? Call it a scholarly 'Island
of Misfit Toys,' Chronicle of Higher Education, August 12, 2009 ---
Click Here
Rejecta Mathematica is an open-access online journal that publishes
mathematical papers that have been rejected by others. Rejecta's motto is
caveat emptor, which is to say that the journal has no technical peer-review
process.
As The Economist notes in its article on the
journal, there are plenty of examples of scholars who have suffered
rejection, only to go on to become giants in their field. (OK, two.)
Nonetheless, if you have lots of free time on your hands, by all means,
check out the inaugural issue.
And if deciphering mathematical formulae isn't your
thing, stand by: Rejecta says it may open the floodgates to other
disciplines. Prospective franchisees are invited to contact the journal.
Next up: Rejecta Rejecta, a journal for articles
too flawed for Rejects Mathematica, printed on single-ply toilet paper.
Jensen Comment
If any rejected paper is automatically published, it behooves the author to also
share the anonymous referee reports that hopefully give reasons for rejection,
such as proof that the research findings have been previously published by
somebody else and were not referenced in the rejected paper. When I was in the
doctoral program at Stanford, one of my friends was getting a PhD in electrical
engineering. The original contribution of his thesis was to be a mathematical
proof I never did understand. After he'd worked out his elegant proof, somebody
pointed out that a monk had developed an identical proof hundreds of years
earlier. My friend then had to search for a new thesis idea.
After so many moves in my life I no longer have the referee reports for the
above three rejected papers. Suffice it to say that none of the referees
questioned the originality of my works. They mostly complained that my writing
was incomprehensible. Sigh!
If you've ever wanted to just listen to a
particular YouTube video at your leisure as a mp3 file, this application may
be just the thing. Visitors simply need to install the program and drop the
YouTube URLs in question into a box. The application will convert the files
into the mp3 format. This version is compatible with computers running
Windows XP or Vista.
Jensen Comment
I tried this and my first saved file was a MP3 file of Les Paul and
Mary Ford
The full video file on YouTube is at
World is Waiting for the Sunrise ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iGXP_UBog4
It's neat the way the program can download in background from YouTube.
This way you can start a download and then go about your business in other
software. Your computer will give a tiny bleep when the download is
finished. If you then download another file, be sure to first change the
"Output" file name so as to not write over the previous download file.
A clear advantage to saving YouTube audio or video is that these links
come and go on YouTube all the time. The above link to the Les Paul and Mary
Ford video might even have been removed between now and when I pasted the
above link into this document. But my MP3 recording is now subject to my
control, although care must be taken with respect to copyrights. I assumed
that this demo will not upset anybody. U.C. Berkeley and other universities
who put full length lectures and courses on YouTube encourage users to
download the audio or video files (the video takes up an enormous amount of
file space).
Another advantage is that you easily edit the MP3 file and/or make
clipped portions to be saved as other audio files. For example, a six-minute
clip might be saved from a 75-minute YouTube lecture from MIT.
I was amazed at the ease with which YouTube audio can be captured and
saved as a file on my hard drive. When it’s audio that’s more important than
video of a talking head or unneeded viewing of music performers, there is a
great savings in storage requirements for audio files versus video files.
This includes the wasted space of talking heads in videos and the desire to
hear music without necessarily always having to watch it performed while you
are playing it in background.
This application is a nice way to create an
organized and cross-referenced catalog for books, movies, and music.
Visitors can keep track of loaned material, and they can easily import
detailed cataloging information from popular sites like Amazon. Also, the
application allows users to export these lists onto iPod and other such
devices. This version can be used for fifteen days at no cost, and it is
compatible with computers running Windows XP and newer and those running Max
OS X 10.4 and newer.
Amidst ongoing financial difficulties, the United States Postal Service
thinks about the future Talking Business: The Postal Service May Be Headed
the Way of the Pony Express [Free registration may be required] ---
Click Here
Archaeologists find cache of tablets in 2,700-year old Turkish temple Excavations led by a University of Toronto
archaeologist at the site of a recently discovered temple in southeastern Turkey
have uncovered a cache of cuneiform tablets dating back to the Iron Age period
between 1200 and 600 BCE. Found in the temple's cella, or 'holy of holies', the
tablets are part of a possible archive that may provide insights into Assyrian
imperial aspirations.
PhysOrg, August 10, 2009 ---
http://www.physorg.com/news169121163.html
Center for Aging Services Technologies ---
http://www.agingtech.org The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation tutorials in
medicine, medical insurance, healthcare administration ---
http://www.rwjf.org/
Center for Aging Services Technologies ---
http://www.agingtech.org The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation tutorials in
medicine, medical insurance, healthcare administration ---
http://www.rwjf.org/
Breakthrough in Maple Sugar Production Function An innovative new maple spout developed by the
University of Vermont's Proctor Maple Research Center with funding from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture secured by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, will have a
dramatic impact on maple syrup production and will boost job creation and
economic development in the state, the senator announced at a press conference
August 17.
"Innovative spout will increase maple production up to 90 percent," PhysOrg,
August 18, 2009 ---
http://www.physorg.com/news169814651.html
Bumper Stickers
Obamacare: Call us when
you're shovel ready
Bankrupt America? Yes we
can
America needs a leader, not a
(teleprompter) reader
"On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study," by Ali
Rahimi1, Ben Recht 2, Jason Taylor 2, Noah Vawter 2, MIT Department of
Electrical Engineering, February 17, 2005 ---
http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/
Link forwarded by Rose Cohen-Brown
[Rose.Cohen-Brown@trinity.edu]
Forwarded by Maureen
The light turned yellow, just in front of him. He did the right thing by
stopping at the crosswalk even though he could have beaten the red light by
accelerating through the intersection.
The tailgating woman was furious and honked her horn, screaming in
frustration, as she missed her chance to get through the intersection,
dropping her cell phone and makeup. As she was still in mid-rant, she heard a
tap on her window and looked up into the face of a very serious police
officer.
The officer ordered her to exit her car with her hands up. He took her to the
police station where she was searched, fingerprinted, photographed, and placed
in a holding cell.
After a couple of hours, a policeman approached the cell and opened the door.
She was escorted back to the booking desk where the arresting officer was
waiting with her personal effects.
He said, ''I'm very sorry for this mistake. You see, I pulled up behind your
car while you were blowing your horn, flipping off the guy in front of you
and cussing a blue streak at him. I noticed the 'What Would Jesus Do'
bumper sticker, the 'Choose Life' license plate holder, the 'Follow Me to
Sunday-School' bumper sticker, and the chrome-plated Christian fish emblem on
the trunk, so naturally...I assumed you had stolen the car.''
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 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.
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.
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
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.
