Tidbits on November 10, 2009
Bob Jensen

Video Special This Week
Amazing Nature (I mean really amazing)Birth of a Baby Elephant
Especially note what the mother does when the baby appears to be dead on the floor!

 I have a side business alongside our mountain cottage.
There are four apartments plus a restaurant.
But the restaurant is only open while our black bears hibernate.
And I don't much care for the tenants' rental deposits.
I beginning to think my side business if for the birds.

I charge more for the highest-up apartment with a fireplace and a better view of the mountains.
The restaurant will open, for the first time, around Christmas when the bears commence their long naps.
I learned my lesson when a huge bear ripped down three bird feeders on our deck in early May.

The November days have grown short while we await the snow storms.
Sunsets commence before 4:00 p.m.; Sunrises now commence after 6:00 a.m.
Long nights are winter prices we pay for having daylight until almost 10:00 p.m. in the summer.

The Fourth of July Holiday, like most of our summer, was wet and cold
Our great neighbors up the road invited us to a cookout at the Mountain View Grand Hotel
Route 115 is the site of many car-hits-moose tragedies ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire_Route_115
Since Erika lives in fear (seriously) of a collision with a moose or deer after dark,
We decided to spend the night at the hotel even though it is less than an hour from our home.
The rains mercifully stopped long enough for the Hotel's yummy cookout
And we could stay warm by eating in a ballroom before the fireworks commenced.
We liked our stay so much that we're also celebrating Thanksgiving Day
in much the same manner by spending the night (but without the outdoors cookout).

Those were the days my Friend! New Hampshire at one time had well over 100 luxury resorts.
Most of these disappeared after big cities got air conditioned and passenger trains stopped coming to the mountains.
I've stayed in three NH such resorts that survived --- The Balsams, Mt. Washington Hotel, and the MV Grand
The Mountain View Grand Hotel is a very old luxury hotel with a long history and
a very "grand view" of Mount Washington from the front of the hotel on clear days ---
http://www.mountainviewgrand.com/  (watch the video of pictures)

 

See how heavy the clouds darkened our Holiday stay

One of the reasons most of these NH luxury resorts no longer exist is
the prohibitive cost of heating such big and drafty resort buildings.
The Mountain View Grand hopes to bring down heating and other utility costs
with its new 2009 Windmill that softly goes swish, swish, swish

The golf course overlook

The hotel advertises its fine views of Mt. Washington.
What Mt. Washington?

This is the entrance on the back side of the hotel from the parking lot.

Our room had a third-floor balcony

I took some shots of the waterfall and lily pond from our balcony.

 

 

Mt. Washington hid amongst a dark and gloomy veil.



This is the club house for the golf course in front of the hotel.

Back at our cottage we also had heavy clouds, but the sun came
shining through close to sunset as I looked out from our bedroom window.

Shifting forward a few months,
Here's a foliage shot not far from the Mountain View Grand Hotel.

Great Fall Foliage --- http://home.att.net/~hideaway_extras/66/fall.htm  

MSNBC foliage pictures forwarded by Debbie Bowling --- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33331718/from/ET/?beginSlide=23

October 26, message and photos from Becky Miller [itsyourmom@hotmail.com]
Becky wisely chose not to brag about the football team.

Bob - Like you I enjoy photography. But, I have a significantly different focus - I shoot University of Minnesota Track and Field because, like most non-revenue sports, they get no appreciation.

For a sample, go to www.gophertrackshots.com 

Hope you are having a fabulous fall!

Becky Miller 22339
510 Street
Pine Island, MN 55963

Here are some fun pictures forwarded to me by friends.
About 10 days ago, 50 mph winds swept my lawn clean.

I got a kick out of this one.

Meanwhile here are three about being titillated at Wal-Mart

 

I see from my house by the side of the road
By the side of the highway of life,
The men who press with the ardor of hope,
The men who are faint with the strife,
But I turn not away from their smiles and tears,
Both parts of an infinite plan-
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911)

Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations Between October 27 and November 10, 2009
To Accompany the November 10, 2009 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits091110Quotations.htm    

U.S. Debt/Deficit Clock --- http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Bob Jensen's universal health care messaging --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm

A Personal Experience
Why many physicians will turn away their Medicare patients just like my wife was turned away by her surgeon in the South Texas Spinal Clinic in San Antonio because she was on Medicare
--- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm#SpinalClinic 

Full Text of H.R. 3962 --- http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:H.R.3962

Frightening Clauses in the Pending House Bill (H.R. 3962 passed by the House on November 9)

"The Worst Bill Ever:   Epic new spending and taxes, pricier insurance, rationed care, dishonest accounting: The Pelosi health bill has it all," The Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2009 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm#110709
Jensen Comment
Nancy Pelosi catered to just about every special interest in the United States (except Medicare patients) and doled out earmark frauds like jelly beans to get economy/jobs destroying bill through the House. Please pray for Senate sensibility.

I'm in favor of health care reform that completely nationalizes health insurance in one step with high tax pay-as-you-go restriction and strict cost-saving caps on punitive damage lawsuits. I really favor former Senator Bill Bradley's long-forgotten Canada-like proposal ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
But it must be accompanied with a pay-as-you-go taxation constraint.

For earlier editions of Tidbits go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbitsdirectory.htm

 

 

Tidbits on November 10, 2009
Bob Jensen

For earlier editions of Tidbits go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 

Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter --- Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron" enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and other universities is at http://www.searchedu.com/.


Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations   


Bob Jensen's Threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

Bob Jensen's Home Page is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/

CPA Examination --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination

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

World Clock and World Facts --- http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

U.S. Debt/Deficit Clock --- http://www.usdebtclock.org/

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

Daily News Sites for Accountancy, Tax, Fraud, IFRS, XBRL, Accounting History, and More ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

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

Bob Jensen's essay on the financial crisis bailout's aftermath and an alphabet soup of appendices can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm

Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The Master List of Free Online College Courses ---
http://universitiesandcolleges.org/


On May 14, 2006 I retired from Trinity University after a long and wonderful career as an accounting professor in four universities. I was generously granted "Emeritus" status by the Trustees of Trinity University. My wife and I now live in a cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm

Bob Jensen's blogs and various threads on many topics --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
       (Also scroll down to the table at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ )

Global Incident Map --- http://www.globalincidentmap.com/home.php

If you want to help our badly injured troops, please check out
Valour-IT: Voice-Activated Laptops for Our Injured Troops  --- http://www.valour-it.blogspot.com/




Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI




Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Video Special This Week --- http://useloos.com/mediaplayer/?itemid=8715
Amazing Nature (I mean really amazing)Birth of a Baby Elephant
Especially note what the mother does when her newborn appears to be dead on the floor!

If you missed Sixty Minutes on CBS on November 8, you might still be able to download a really frightening video on how foreign enemies and dubious friends are leaving back door openings into virtually all of our important industrial, military, and other government sites, including advanced weapons systems and the national power grid.
"Sabotaging The System," CBS Sixty Minutes, November 8, 2009 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5578986n&tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel

Tell Me Why (composed and sung by a boy at age 13) --- Click Here

Great PBS Video on the Crash of 1929 --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/crash/

Video:  Yale School of Management Cosponsors NYC Roundtable Discussion on the Financial Crisis (Full Video Now Available)
http://mba.yale.edu/news_events/CMS/Articles/6608.shtml 

Video:  "Advice for President Obama" from the Department of Economics at Cornell University ---
http://www.cornell.edu/video/?VideoID=410

We didn't start the fire (wait until the music starts) --- http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html

The United Nations may criminalize Christianity --- Click Here for the Video 
Hit the Arrow in Quick Clips

Evan Davis talks to Warren Buffett --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8322957.stm

Lake Champlain Maritime Museum [Quick Time] --- http://www.lcmm.org/index.htm

Design USA: Contemporary Innovation [Flash Player] http://exhibitions.cooperhewitt.org/Design-USA/

From PBS
Independent Lens: Butte, America [Flash Player] http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/butte-america/

The Sports Legacy Institute [Brain Damage from Football] --- http://sportslegacy.org/

This Harding College Cartoon Seemed Far-Fetched In 1948 ---
http://nationaljuggernaut.blogspot.com/2009/09/this-cartoon-seemed-far-fetched-in-1948.html

Happy Halloween from Auntie Bev --- http://terrisfp.com/hallo1/ghost1.swf

"Common Objections to Capitalism," by Art Carden, Mises Daily, November 3, 2009 ---
http://mises.org/story/3771
This is a summary of a longer audio lecture available on MP3 (may be slow loading) from
http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/MU2009/MU2009_Carden_07-30-2009.mp3


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

We didn't start the fire (wait until the music starts) --- http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html

Great Conversations in Music [multimedia] --- http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/greatconversations/great-home.html

Ear Chives --- http://www.the-earchives.com/

Tell Me Why (composed and sung by a boy at age 13) --- Click Here 

NPR's Free Music Selections --- http://www.npr.org/templates/topics/topic.php?topicId=1039

Web outfits like Pandora, Foneshow, Stitcher, and Slacker broadcast portable and mobile content that makes Sirius look overpriced and stodgy ---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090327_877363.htm?link_position=link2

TheRadio (my favorite commercial-free online music site) --- http://www.theradio.com/
Slacker (my second-favorite commercial-free online music site) --- http://www.slacker.com/

Gerald Trites likes this international radio site --- http://www.e-radio.gr/
Songza:  Search for a song or band and play the selection --- http://songza.com/
Also try Jango --- http://www.jango.com/?r=342376581
Sometimes this old guy prefers the jukebox era (just let it play through) --- http://www.tropicalglen.com/
And I listen quite often to Soldiers Radio Live --- http://www.army.mil/fieldband/pages/listening/bandstand.html
Also note
U.S. Army Band recordings --- http://bands.army.mil/music/default.asp

Bob Jensen listens to music free online (and no commercials) --- http://www.slacker.com/ 


Photographs and Art

Pictures of Afghanistan --- Click Here
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2009/10/30/photographer-collection-david-guttenfelder-in-afghanistan/

Alexandra Hedison Photography (Pacific Northwest landscapes and trees as noted in Time Magazine, October 26, 2009, Page 63) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Hedison
Photography --- http://www.hedison.com/
Also see http://www.fanofalex.com/

Art Through Time: A Global View --- http://www.learner.org/resources/series211.html

American Museum of Natural History: Division of Anthropology --- http://anthro.amnh.org/

American Museum of Natural History: Science http://www.amnh.org/science/?src=toolbar

Design USA: Contemporary Innovation [Flash Player] http://exhibitions.cooperhewitt.org/Design-USA/

Bob Jensen's threads on history, literature and art ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History


Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

The Challenger Expedition In 1870 ---
http://hercules.kgs.ku.edu/hexacoral/expedition/challenger_1872-1876/challenger.html
Wyville Thomson, Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University, persuaded the Royal Society of London to ask the British Government to furnish one of Her Majesty's ships for a prolonged voyage of exploration across the oceans of the globe. On 7 December 1872, the expedition put to sea from Sheerness aboard the corvette H.M.S. Challenger.

The Maritime Dimension of International Security: Terrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United States ---  http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG697.pdf

Food Timeline --- http://www.foodtimeline.org/index.html

McIntosh Cookery Collection --- http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/cookbooks/

Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI




Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations Between October 27 and November 10, 2009
To Accompany the November 10, 2009 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits091110Quotations.htm    




Sabotaging Life on Earth:  Backdoor Computer Hacking

According a Sixty Minutes Video
National Leaders Secretly Assume All Strategic Computer and Networking Systems are Infected by WMDs
(the one exception might be our nuclear defense system but don't count on it)

Did you know that such WMD computer warfare experiments already transpired on unsuspecting Brazil?

If you missed Sixty Minutes on CBS on November 8, you might still be able to download a really frightening video on how foreign enemies and dubious friends are leaving back door openings into virtually all of our important industrial, military, and other government sites, including advanced weapons systems and the national power grid.
 "Sabotaging the System," CBS Sixty Minutes, November 8, 2009 ---
 http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5578986n&tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel

However, our protests are really controversial since all experts agree that the U.S. is really good at hacking into foreign sites. The issue not discussed in the above video that came to my mind, in theory, is whether back door infiltrations have a positive side somewhat like nuclear or other WMD weapons become a deterrent to WMD warfare when rational opposing nations possess them.

By “rational” I mean that leaders of a nation will not knowingly make the first WMD strike, even after conventional warfare defeat, knowing that there are seriously high probabilities that their own nation will be completely destroyed in retaliation. A non-rational nation would be led by a madman like Hitler who, at the end of the World War II, purportedly in an act of insane anger ordered the German Army to destroy all of Germany. Fortunately for the Germans, his insane order was not carried out.

Purportedly Fidel Castro pleaded with the Soviet Union to commence a nuclear holocaust if President Kennedy eliminated Castro’s regime in Cuba with conventional warfare. The Soviet Union probably was unwilling to make the first WMD strike on U.S. soil even if Kennedy had taken out Castro.

Now the capabilities to take out an entire nation's electric power, transportation, commerce, food, water, and other essential resources for living in a matter of seconds should be viewed as WMDs of frightening proportions. Hopefully, only rational leaders of nations possess the secret back doors of our life support systems.

One drawback of the above theory of WMD deterrence is the serious threat that a first strike will take place by accident ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Warfare

By the late 1960s, the number of ICBMs and warheads was so high on both sides that either the USA or USSR was capable of completely destroying the other country's infrastructure. Thus a balance of power system known as mutually assured destruction (MAD) came into being. It was thought that any full-scale exchange between the powers could not produce a victorious side and thus neither would risk initiating one.

One drawback of this doctrine was the possibility of a nuclear war occurring without either side intentionally striking first. Early warning systems were notoriously error-prone. On 78 occasions in 1979, for example, a "missile display conference" was called to evaluate detections potentially threatening to the North American continent. Some of these were trivial errors, spotted quickly. But several went to more serious levels. On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov received convincing indications of a US first strike launch against the USSR but positively identified the warning as a false alarm. Though it is unclear what role Petrov's actions played in preventing a nuclear war, he has been honored by the United Nations for his actions.

An interesting debate topic is how nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare WMDs become more dangerous in the hands of low-technology fanatics (Al Qaeda) than in the hands of high-technology nations (Russia, Israel, and China) where we've  already have hacked into the high tech weapons systems and vice versa.

Someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away.
Kingston Trio

"Information Processing"  Questions for Dyson," by Stephen Hsu, MIT's Technology Review, November 7, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=354&bpid=24371&nlid=2496
Jensen Comment
When I taught several First Year Seminar classes at Trinity Universities, I featured the Phi Beta Kappa lectures of Freeman Dyson, but that was years ago --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson


"Common Objections to Capitalism," by Art Carden, Mises Daily, November 3, 2009 ---
http://mises.org/story/3771
This is a summary of a longer audio lecture available on MP3 (may be slow loading) from
http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/MU2009/MU2009_Carden_07-30-2009.mp3

"Why Markets Fail," by Ben Shapiro, Townhall, November 4, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/BenShapiro/2009/11/04/why_markets_fail 

"Saturn (Now Defunct Automobile): A Wealth of Lessons from Failure," University of Pennsylvania's Knowledge@Wharton, October 28, 2009 --- http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2366

Economics and Finance Videos of Possible Interest

Great PBS Video on the Crash of 1929 --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/crash/

Video:  Yale School of Management Cosponsors NYC Roundtable Discussion on the Financial Crisis (Full Video Now Available)
http://mba.yale.edu/news_events/CMS/Articles/6608.shtml 

Video:  "Advice for President Obama" from the Department of Economics at Cornell University ---
http://www.cornell.edu/video/?VideoID=410

Evan Davis talks to Warren Buffett --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8322957.stm

Video: Fora.Tv on Institutional Corruption & The Economy Of Influence ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-foratv-on-institutional-corruption-the-economy-of-influence/


"A second (uninspired) look at Apple's Snow Leopard," by Rob Pegoraro, The Washington Post, November 4, 2009
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2009/11/snow_leopard_reassessed.html?wprss=fasterforward


An alternative to Safari Web browsing for Mac Users (Camino is better in some ways)

"Mac Browser Camino 2 Gets A Release Candidate," MJ Siegler, Tech Crunch via The Washington Post, October 27, 2009 --- Click Here

When it was revealed that  Mike Pinkerton, the lead developer for the Mozilla's Mac-based Camino web browser was moving over to Google to take charge of building Chrome for Mac, there was some concern that Camino would be neglected. Pinkerton assured development on Camino would continue, and sure enough it has. Today brings the first release candidate for Camino 2, the new version of the browser.

Camino, though much less prevalent than its Mozilla sibling, Firefox, has a solid following among Mac users who appreciate its speed. It has long been my browser of choice as it's relatively lightweight and very fast compared to Firefox. And compatibility with various sites seems better than Apple's own Safari.

We've been beta testing Camino 2 for several months now, and it's solid. It offers several improvements over the first iterations of Camino, notably in speed and the way it looks. Mozilla notes that this Release Candidate 1 could become the final, first official build of Camino 2 if there are no critical issue found.

So it looks like despite Pinkerton's Chrome time commitments, Camino 2 will beat Chrome for Mac even reaching beta status.

The anticipation for Chrome for Mac continues to build. Even Google co-founder Sergey Brin admits that he's disappointed with how long it has taken to develop. But, as we noted the other day, Chrome for Mac ? not Chromium, the open source browser on which Chrome is based ? looks like it's getting closer to a beta release.

Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm


Question
Don't you wish Microsoft Autorun would've run aground in 1995?

As a feature first introduced way back in Windows 95, Autorun had...well, a pretty good run, particularly considering how long malware has used it as a propagation method. Frankly, I'm surprised that Microsoft kept Autorun as the default option for as long as it did, given the company's Trustworthy Computing security initiative, launched in January 2002 with a memo from Chairman Bill Gates that memorably stated, "When we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security."

"What Windows Autorun Has Wrought," by Brian Krebs, The Washington Post, November 3, 2009 ---
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/11/what_windows_autorun_hath_wrou.html?wprss=securityfix

In its latest "Security Intelligence Report," Microsoft counted the number of threats detected by its anti-malware desktop products, and found that the Conficker worm, along with a Trojan horse program called Taterf which steals passwords and license keys for popular computer games, were detected on 5.21 million and 4.91 million Windows computers, respectively.

The original version of Conficker emerged nearly a year ago, and initially it spread by exploiting a networking vulnerability in Windows. But Conficker infections soared by the millions in January with the arrival of Conficker B, which introduced the ability to spread via the Autorun capability in Windows. Taterf spreads exclusively via Autorun.

Together, these two threats accounted for more than 35 percent of the top 10 malicious software infections in first six months of this year, Microsoft found (click the chart below for a breakdown of those threats). According to the previous Security Intelligence Report, more than 17 percent of infections in the second half of 2008 were by malware that can spread via AutoRun.

In April, after the third version of Conficker became front-page news and even fodder for feature story on 60 Minutes, Microsoft announced that its AutoPlay function would no longer support AutoRun for USB drives. Autorun is disabled for USB drives in Windows 7 (the new OS still automatically plays any inserted CDs and DVDs). In late August, Microsoft released a patch that similarly disables Autorun on Windows XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008 systems.

However, this patch does not appear to have been pushed out through Microsoft's Automatic Updates or Windows Update, so if you'd like to install it, you'll need to visit this link and download the appropriate version for your operating system. Users who install this update will no longer receive a setup message that prompts them to install programs that are delivered by USB thumb drives. Wilders Security Forum has a nice writeup on this patch, and offers some harmless sample code to test whether your Windows box has this feature enabled.

As a feature first introduced way back in Windows 95, Autorun had...well, a pretty good run, particularly considering how long malware has used it as a propagation method. Frankly, I'm surprised that Microsoft kept Autorun as the default option for as long as it did, given the company's Trustworthy Computing security initiative, launched in January 2002 with a memo from Chairman Bill Gates that memorably stated, "When we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security."

On a more positive note, Microsoft found that the number of infections associated with rogue security software fell to 13.4 million in the first six months of this year, down from 16.8 million in the latter half of 2008. Microsoft also tracked a tenfold decrease in infections from Zlob, a Trojan that masquerades as a video player plug-in. Redmond said Zlob infections fell from 21.1 million at its peak in 2007 to 2.3 million in the first half of 2009.

The key findings from Microsoft's Security Intelligence Report Version 7 are available here (PDF).

Bob Jensen's threads on computing and network security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce.htm


My new $20 pair of wool socks and how these socks symbolize the demise of strip malls and small specialty stores
When I'm clearing my drive of snow at near-zero or below-zero temperatures I like an outer pair of wool socks in my boots. For the past several years I've used a heavy pair of woolen socks that were once worn on our Iowa farm by my grandfather. But there were gaping yarn wholes to a point where these socks quite literally fell apart last spring.

I might've spent a half day driving around up here trying to find a pair of really heavy Wool socks. Instead I searched my favorite online store, Amazon, and in less than one minute found what I wanted --- a heavy pair of  Merino wool socks made in Vermont. They cost me $20 for one pair, but chances are that one of my grandchildren living in the north country will one day wear these socks.

And I needed a new electric, oil-filled radiator with seven fins. I could've found this at Wal-Mart or Home Depot stores in Littleton about ten miles from where I live. However, I found a great one through Amazon for $69 that included free shipping. It was also a higher quality model than one that I saw at Home Depot. Amazon keeps sending me $25 gift certificates (almost one per month) such that my net cost delivered by UPS to my garage was $44.

By the way, I like Amazon because I can buy from millions of products and thousands of vendors by only having my credit card on file with one vendor (Amazon). This greatly reduces the risk of identity theft. Just to be on the safe side, I maintain a relatively low credit limit on the credit card that I use only for online shopping.

We also buy a high proportion of our groceries on Amazon. It beats shopping in the supermarket for items that we like to buy and store up for the winter --- like oatmeal, barley, and flax flakes. I think we have a lifetime supply of Jello flavors not commonly found in our local markets. I even buy some meats that arrive within 24 hours such as bratwurst made of veal, another hard-to-find item in our local markets.

Which now brings me to my main point. The convenience and often the savings of shopping online is becoming a major cause the empty small retail stores and sometimes the completely empty strip malls.

From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on November 1, 2009



Retail Vacancies Hit Multiyear Highs
by: Kris Hudson
Date: Oct 08, 2009 

SUMMARY: Retail-vacancy rates hit a multiyear high in the third quarter, adding to pressure on shopping-mall owners.

DISCUSSION: 

1.     What are the statistics regarding vacancies and store closings in malls and shopping centers? How do they compare to the state of retail real estate a year ago? How have rents been affected? What is the outlook for the short-term and the long-term?

2.     What could retail landlords do to stem losses? How could mall and shopping center real estate be used in ways other than for retail stores? What innovative ideas would you suggest to real estate owners? How might these suggestions change in different areas around the country?

3.     What strategies are retail tenants using to take advantage of the current real estate environment? How could this impact future negotiations and the profitability of both the real estate owners and the tenants?

 


"The Real Pending Crisis: Public Pensions," by Bruce Bialosky, Townhall, November 2, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/BruceBialosky/2009/11/02/the_real_pending_crisis_public_pensions 

President Obama often states that the federal budget cannot be balanced without health insurance reform. Even if that were true, the real crisis that exists already and will only worsen over time comes from the horrendous obligations taken on by state and local governments for public employee pension plans.

Keith Richman caught on to this problem while a California Assemblyman. He has formed the non-profit California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility to educate elected officials and the public on the looming budget disaster. Fortunately, he is not the only one touting this pending mess. Ron Seeling, the Chief Actuary for CalPERS (the California public employees’ retirement program), has stated the plan is unsustainable. CalPERS represents state employees and 1,500 local governmental entities.

Some would say the pension problem starts with the unionization of public employees. In California, the major catalyst was SB400, signed by Gray Davis in his first year in office, 1999. The bill lowered retirement age for public safety employees to 50 years old and to non-public safety employees to 55 years old. We are in an era when people are living on average until around 80 years old.

The law gives the employee pension benefits of 3.0% of their final income for each year of service. It also made the 3.0% amount retroactive to the beginning of their employment period. That means if you work 20 years you receive a pension benefit equal to 60% of your final income. The problem was compounded by how they calculated the income on which to base the pension.

Everything including the kitchen sink adds to the final income level. Things such as auto allowance and bonuses boost the final number. If the employee did not use vacation pay or holiday pay for the prior 10 years that adds to the base salary to determine the income. Understanding that in most private sector jobs when you do not use your vacation, you lose your vacation, the ability to accumulate vacation time opens up the system for vast manipulation. Peter Nowicki, the Moraga Orinda fire chief, retired at age 50. His final salary was a whopping $185,000, but small compared to his annual pension benefit of $241,000. Making that matter worse, Nowicki was hired as a consultant to the fire department for an additional $176,000 per year -- on top of his retirement benefit.

This is not an isolated case. In Los Angeles County there are over 3,000 people receiving greater than $100,000 per year in pension benefits. In San Francisco, it was found that 25% of employees’ income spiked up over 10% in the final year of their work. The San Francisco grand jury found that amount cost the city $132 million.

Some would argue why not game the system? Let’s say you start working for the government when you are 30 years old and work for 25 years. Your final income with all the fancy calculations ends up at $120,000. That means you would receive $90,000 plus full health care benefits. You can either live on that very nice retirement or you are free to get another position. After all, being 55 years old, you are still in your prime earnings years. Where in the private sector are there comparative opportunities?

These kinds of retirement ages and benefits are why the estimated unfunded liability is soaring. California has estimated unfunded pension and health care liabilities ranging from $100 to $300 billion. The school systems operate under their separate pension program – CalSTRS. The Los Angeles Unified School System estimate for unfunded retiree benefits comes in at about $10 billion. That is one school system, be it the largest, in one state. Estimates show that the LAUSD will soon carve out 30% of its budget for combined retiree health and pension benefits.

California may be the worst example, but not the only example of deplorable financial planning by governmental entities. The original justification for rich benefits for public employees centered on lower salaries, but that no longer rings true. A recent analysis by the U.S. Bureau of Economics shows that federal employees receive compensation that is double the average of the private sector. Other studies have shown state and government employees to be receiving like levels of compensation.

The genesis of this pending disaster comes from the right of public employees to unionize. This was not always so. The first opportunity occurred in 1958 in New York City under Mayor Robert Wagner. President Kennedy instituted the right for federal employees to unionize in 1962. Since then the right for public employees to unionize has spread, but is not universal. States that have more restrictive laws have blocked public employee unions and thus have not suffered the consequences.

In states like California, the public employee unions fund huge political campaigns. To most observers, the unions have a stranglehold on the state legislature, Los Angeles and San Francisco city governments, and most if not all of the school districts in the state. When the employees control the employers, the results are uncontrollable obligations.

A recent report stated that children born today will live an average life span of 100 years. With public employees retiring at 50 or 55 years of age, it doesn’t take a deep thinker to extrapolate that these retirement benefit programs are unsustainable.

Private sector employees now receive less annual income than their public counterparts. Private sector employees will have to work well into their seventies to pay for these public sector employees’ retirement benefits which far exceed what the private sector offers. The public will, little by little, become aware of this upside-down arrangement. Heroes like Keith Richman are sacrificing to make the public aware of this coming debacle. Our elected officials need to heed his warnings.

U.S. Debt/Deficit Clock --- http://www.usdebtclock.org/

IOUSA (the most frightening movie in American history) ---
(see a 30-minute version of the documentary at www.iousathemovie.com ).

Bob Jensen's threads on the entitlements crisis ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/entitlements.htm


More Cap and Play Bailout Absurdity:  An Unbelievable Deal for Expensive "Golf Carts"

Get up to a Federal $6,000 rebate on a $9,000 "golf cart"

"A Bailout ... for Golf Cars? Business Is Booming for Street-Legal Golf Cars Thanks to the Bush-Era Bailout," by Alice Gomstyn, ABC News, October 21, 2009 ---
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/golf-car-sales-spike-08-bailout/story?id=8875161

Bill Morgan has been in business for a dozen years, but he's never seen demand like this: Customers are flocking to his showroom to purchase electric, street-legal golf cars -- golf carts that can be driven on public roadways as well as golf courses.

"The economy is not good for golf right now," Morgan, the owner of Action Golf Cars in Ormond Beach, Fla., said. But the golf cars are "selling so fast, it's amazing."

It's all thanks, he said, to the federal government. The bailout bill that last year helped keep the U.S. banking system afloat also contained lesser-known provisions to benefit other industries, including the electric car business.

In April, the Internal Revenue Service confirmed that "neighborhood electric vehicles" or NEVs -- a common term for electric-powered golf cars and other low-speed vehicles allowed on public roadways -- bought in 2009 qualified for the tax credit. (The IRS indicated that traditional golf carts used mainly on golf courses -- as opposed to street-legal vehicles -- aren't eligible for the credit. It said in its April statement that "vehicles manufactured primarily for off-road use, such as for use on a golf course, do not qualify." (
(But most of these were manufactured as golf carts with head lights and tail lights added in later on.)

Under the Bush administration's Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, buying a plug-in electric motor vehicle can make a consumer eligible for a tax credit of at least $2,500 plus additional cash depending on a car's battery capacity. The $787 billion stimulus package signed by President Obama in Feburary contained similar provisions.

Morgan said the battery capacity on 12 cars he sells qualifies them for tax credits of $5,335 each.

In recent months, he and golf car dealers across the country have been advertising the tax credit as an incentive to get buyers in the door -- and it's working, they say.

Unlike traditional golf carts, golf cars that are street-legal must include safety features such as headlights, seat belts, parking brakes and driver's side mirrors, according to federal mandates. They are allowed to reach maximum speeds of 25 miles per hour and individual states decide which roadways the cars may travel on.

Morgan said he's sold 40 cars priced between $6,495 and $10,600 in the last six weeks -- more than $260,000 in sales, which he said is a record for his company. Morgan's supplier, South Carolina-based JH Global Services, Inc., told ABCNews.com that it's seen spikes in sales too.

"A month of sales now is almost equal to a couple of quarters in the past," JH Global CEO Jane Zhang said.

The wheels were in motion for the NEV tax credit long before the now-famous Cash for Clunkers program -- last summer's staggeringly popular government subsidy program for car trade-ins -- became law, but buzz over the tax credit has appeared to only pick up speed in the last two months, after NEV manufacturers received certifications from the IRS that particular models did, in fact, qualify for the credit.

The credit is benefitting more than just golf cart retailers. It applies to other low-speed vehicles, including those sold by Susan Sistare of Star Electric Cars in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Sistare said she's seen calls from prospective customers triple since she started advertising the tax credit.

Sistare sells neighborhood electric vehicles that aren't much bigger than golf carts but look more like miniature versions of your typical highway fare than something you'd take out on the links. Her products include a Cadillac Escalade and a Hummer, made by California-based ACG Inc. and licensed from Cadillac and Hummer, respectively.

They are subject to the same speed and safety rules as street-legal golf cars, but Sistare takes pains to emphasize that her products aren't traditional golf carts. The tax credit, she said, is raising awareness of neighborhood electric vehicles like hers.

"This is a wonderful educational tool -- people don't know what low-speed vehicles are," she said. "Every day, I fight the golf car fight."

Both street-legal golf cars and other neighborhood electric vehicles have increased in popularity in recent years. Global Electric Motorcars, a subsidiary of Chrysler that bills itself as the industry's leading NEV maker, says it now has more than 41,000 vehicles on the road.

Ramon Faul, 68, of Pass Christian, Miss., bought his neighborhood electric vehicle in 2007, hoping to save money on gas.

Today, he uses the golf car to pick up groceries and visit neighbors. He can ride about 30 miles without recharging its battery, he said.

"You can ride all week on it," he said.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
There are a few downsides to this otherwise tremendous government gift.

  1. Golf carts can go on golf carts and some city streets. But they cannot go on Interstate highways or other highways that specify minimum speed limits.
     
  2. They are not safe when driving on country roads and some city streets where other faster moving vehicles might rear end slow moving objects. There are no air bags for safety in a golf cart, and they are very easy to be thrown out of in collisions and sharp turns. Also these cars are often more dangerous in ice, snow, and wet roads.
     
  3. These golf carts must have registration and liability insurance just like any other vehicle (laws vary somewhat from state to state) --- http://www.electriccarsociety.com/criticalev.htm
    It's my understanding that you cannot get this huge Federal rebate for a strictly off-road vehicle.
     
  4. You may get very wet operating these vehicles in a pouring rain. Remember those rain coats and goggles that drivers of open-air Model T Fords used to wear.
     
  5. Fifth, you may get very, very cold driving these things in a New Hampshire winter. Also, they're not air conditioned for hot weather.
     
  6. Golf carts are pretty easy to steal since four men may be able to load them into pick up trucks.
     
  7. There is no luggage carrier to speak of, but if you need to catch a flight you can pack your clothing in a golf bag.
     
  8. If you live high up a hill you've got big troubles. For example, I can take a golf cart down to the store in Franconia, but it does not have the power to get back up the steep two-mile hill to my home. So if I want to go to the Franconia store I must hire a tow truck to get my golf cart back up the hill.

Bob Jensen's threads on more absurdities of the bailout are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Everybody


"How Moody's sold its ratings - and sold out investors," by Kevin G. Hall, McClatchy Newspapers, October 18, 2009 --- http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/77244.html

As the housing market collapsed in late 2007, Moody's Investors Service, whose investment ratings were widely trusted, responded by purging analysts and executives who warned of trouble and promoting those who helped Wall Street plunge the country into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

A McClatchy investigation has found that Moody's punished executives who questioned why the company was risking its reputation by putting its profits ahead of providing trustworthy ratings for investment offerings.

Instead, Moody's promoted executives who headed its "structured finance" division, which assisted Wall Street in packaging loans into securities for sale to investors. It also stacked its compliance department with the people who awarded the highest ratings to pools of mortgages that soon were downgraded to junk. Such products have another name now: "toxic assets."

As Congress tackles the broadest proposed overhaul of financial regulation since the 1930s, however, lawmakers still aren't fully aware of what went wrong at the bond rating agencies, and so they may fail to address misaligned incentives such as granting stock options to mid-level employees, which can be an incentive to issue positive ratings rather than honest ones.

The Securities and Exchange Commission issued a blistering report on how profit motives had undermined the integrity of ratings at Moody's and its main competitors, Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor's, in July 2008, but the full extent of Moody's internal strife never has been publicly revealed.

Moody's, which rates McClatchy's debt and assigns it quite low value, disputes every allegation against it. "Moody's has rigorous standards in place to protect the integrity of ratings from commercial considerations," said Michael Adler, Moody's vice president for corporate communications, in an e-mail response to McClatchy.

Insiders, however, say that wasn't true before the financial meltdown.

"The story at Moody's doesn't start in 2007; it starts in 2000," said Mark Froeba, a Harvard-educated lawyer and senior vice president who joined Moody's structured finance group in 1997.

"This was a systematic and aggressive strategy to replace a culture that was very conservative, an accuracy-and-quality oriented (culture), a getting-the-rating-right kind of culture, with a culture that was supposed to be 'business-friendly,' but was consistently less likely to assign a rating that was tougher than our competitors," Froeba said.

After Froeba and others raised concerns that the methodology Moody's was using to rate investment offerings allowed the firm's profit interests to trump honest ratings, he and nine other outspoken critics in his group were "downsized" in December 2007.

"As a matter of policy, Moody's does not comment on personnel matters, but no employee has ever been let go for trying to strengthen our compliance function," Adler said.

Moody's was spun off from Dun & Bradstreet in 2000, and the first company shares began trading on Oct. 31 that year at $12.57. Executives set out to erase a conservative corporate culture.

To promote competition, in the 1970s ratings agencies were allowed to switch from having investors pay for ratings to having the issuers of debt pay for them. That led the ratings agencies to compete for business by currying favor with investment banks that would pay handsomely for the ratings they wanted.

Wall Street paid as much as $1 million for some ratings, and ratings agency profits soared. This new revenue stream swamped earnings from ordinary ratings.

"In 2001, Moody's had revenues of $800.7 million; in 2005, they were up to $1.73 billion; and in 2006, $2.037 billion. The exploding profits were fees from packaging . . . and for granting the top-class AAA ratings, which were supposed to mean they were as safe as U.S. government securities," said Lawrence McDonald in his recent book, "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense."

He's a former vice president at now defunct Lehman Brothers, one of the highflying investment banks that helped create the global crisis.

From late 2006 through early last year, however, the housing market unraveled, poisoning first mortgage finance, then global finance. More than 60 percent of the bonds backed by mortgages have had their ratings downgraded.

"How on earth could a bond issue be AAA one day and junk the next unless something spectacularly stupid has taken place? But maybe it was something spectacularly dishonest, like taking that colossal amount of fees in return for doing what Lehman and the rest wanted," McDonald wrote.

Ratings agencies thrived on the profits that came from giving the investment banks what they wanted, and investors worldwide gorged themselves on bonds backed by U.S. car loans, credit card debt, student loans and, especially, mortgages.

Before granting AAA ratings to bonds that pension funds, university endowments and other institutional investors trusted, the ratings agencies didn't bother to scrutinize the loans that were being pooled into the bonds. Instead, they relied on malleable mathematical models that proved worthless.

"Everyone else goes out and does factual verification or due diligence. The credit rating agencies state that they are just assuming the facts that they are given," said John Coffee, a finance expert at Columbia University. "This system will not get fixed until someone credible does the necessary due diligence."

Nobody cared about due diligence so long as the money kept pouring in during the housing boom. Moody's stock peaked in February 2007 at more than $72 a share.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett's firm Berkshire Hathaway owned 15 percent of Moody's stock by the end of 2001, company reports show. That stake, largely still intact, meant that the Oracle from Omaha reaped huge financial rewards while Moody's overlooked the glaring problems in pools of subprime mortgages.

A Berkshire spokeswoman had no comment.

One Moody's executive who soared through the ranks during the boom years was Brian Clarkson, the guru of structured finance. He was promoted to company president just as the bottom fell out of the housing market.

Several former Moody's executives said he made subordinates fear they'd be fired if they didn't issue ratings that matched competitors' and helped preserve Moody's market share.

Froeba said his Moody's team manager would tell his team that he, the manager, would be fired if Moody's lost a single deal. "If your manager is saying that at meetings, what is he trying to tell you?" Froeba asked.

In the 1990s, Sylvain Raynes helped pioneer the rating of so-called exotic assets. He worked for Clarkson.

"In my days, I was pressured to do nothing, to not do my job," said Raynes, who left Moody's in 1997. "I saw in two instances -- two deals and a rental car deal -- manipulation of the rating process to the detriment of investors."

When Moody's went public in 2000, mid-level executives were given stock options. That gave them an incentive to consider not just the accuracy of their ratings, but the effect they'd have on Moody's -- and their own -- bottom lines.

"It didn't force you into a corrupt decision, but none of us thought we were going to make money working there, and suddenly you look at a statement online and it's (worth) hundreds and hundreds of thousands (of dollars). And it's beyond your wildest dreams working there that you could make that kind of money," said one former mid-level manager, who requested anonymity to protect his current Wall Street job.

Moody's spokesman Adler insisted that compensation of Moody's analysts and senior managers "is not linked to the financial performance of their business unit."

Clarkson couldn't be reached to comment.

Clarkson's own net worth was tied up in Moody's market share. By the time he was pushed out in May 2008, his compensation approached $3 million a year.

Clarkson rose to the top in August 2007, just as the subprime crisis was claiming its first victims. Soon afterward, a number of analysts and compliance officials who'd raised concerns about the soundness of the ratings process were purged and replaced with people from structured finance.

"The CEO is from a structured finance background, most of the people in the leadership were from a structured finance background, and it was putting their people in the right places," said Eric Kolchinsky, a managing director in Moody's structured finance division from January 2007 to November 2007, when he was purged, he said, for questioning some of the ratings. "If they were serious about compliance, they wouldn't have done that, because it isn't about having friends in the right places, but doing the right job."

Another mid-level Moody's executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, recalls being horrified by the purge.

"It is just something unthinkable, putting business people in the compliance department. It's not acceptable. I was very upset, frustrated," the executive said. "I think they corrupted the compliance department."

One of the new top executives was Michael Kanef, who was experienced in assembling pools of residential mortgage-backed securities, but not in compliance, the division that was supposed to protect investors.

"What signal does it send when you put someone who ran the group that assigned some of the worst ratings in Moody's history in charge of preventing it from happening again," Froeba said of Kanef. Clarkson and Kanef, who remains at Moody's, were named in a class-action lawsuit alleging that Moody's misled investors about its independence from companies that paid it for ratings.

Kanef went after Scott McCleskey, the vice president of compliance at Moody's from the spring of 2006 until September 2008, and the man that Moody's said was the one to see for all compliance matters.

"It's speculation, but I think Scott was trying to get people to follow some rules and people weren't ready to accept that there should be rules," Kolchinsky said.

McCleskey testified before the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Sept. 30 and described how he was pushed out on the heels of the people he'd hired.

"One hour after my departure, it was announced that I would be replaced by an individual from the structured finance department who had no compliance experience and who, to my recollection, had been responsible previously for rating mortgage-backed securities," McCleskey testified.

His replacement, David Teicher, had no compliance background. SEC documents describe him as a former team director for mortgage-backed securities from 2006 to 2008.

McCleskey had raised concerns about the integrity of the ratings process, and Moody's had excluded him from meetings in January 2008 with the Securities and Exchange Commission about the eroding quality of pools of subprime loans that Moody's had blessed with top ratings.

SEC officials, however, didn't bother to seek out McCleskey, even though he was the "designated compliance officer" in company filings with the agency. The SEC maintains that its officials met with Kanef because he was McCleskey's superior.

SEC spokesman Erik Hotmire said that officials met with Kanef because "we ask to interview whomever we determine is appropriate."

Another former Moody's executive, requesting anonymity for fear of legal action by the company, said the agency might've understood what was going wrong better if it had talked to the hands-on compliance officials.

"If they had known he'd (Kanef) come from structured finance, the conflict of having him in that position should have been evident from the start," the former executive said.

Others who worked at Moody's at the time described a culture of willful ignorance in which executives knew how far lending standards had fallen and that they were giving top ratings to risky products.

"I could see it coming at the tail end of 2006, but it was too late. You knew it was just insane," said one former Moody's manager. "They certainly weren't going to do anything to mess with the revenue machine."

Moody's wasn't alone in ignoring the mounting problems. It wasn't even first among competitors. The financial industry newsletter Asset-Backed Alert found that Standard & Poor's participated in 1,962 deals in 2006 involving pools of loans, while Moody's did 1,697. In 2005, Standard & Poor's did 1,754 deals to Moody's 1,120. Fitch was well behind both.

"S&P is deeply disappointed in the performance of its ratings on certain securities tied to the U.S. residential real estate market. As far back as April of 2005, S&P warned investors about increased risks in the residential mortgage market," said Edward Sweeney, a company spokesman. S&P revised criteria and demanded greater buffers against default risks before rating pools of mortgages, he said.

Still, S&P continued to give top ratings to products that analysts from all three ratings agencies knew were of increasingly poor quality. To guard against defaults, they threw more bad loans into the loan pools, telling investors they were reducing risk.

The ratings agencies were under no legal obligation since technically their job is only to give an opinion, protected as free speech, in the form of ratings.

"As an analyst, I wouldn't have known there was a compliance function. There was an attitude of carelessness, or careless ignorance of the law. I think it is a result of the mentality that what we do is just an opinion, and so the law doesn't apply to us," Kolchinsky said.

Experts such as Columbia University's Coffee think that Congress must impose some legal liability on credit rating agencies. Otherwise, they'll remain "just one more conflicted gatekeeper," and the process of pooling loans — essential to the flow of credit — will remain paralyzed and economic recovery restrained.

"If (credit) remains paralyzed, small banks cannot finance the housing demand. They have to take them (investment banks) these mortgages and move them to a global audience," said Coffee. "That can't happen unless the world trusts the gatekeeper."

Bob Jensen's threads on the scandals of credit rating companies (corrupt to the core) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#CreditRatingAgencies

Big Four auditors who live in glass houses should not throw stones ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#AuditFirms

Here’s an expanded view of questions raised about which constituencies credit rating agencies (and by analogy auditing firms) really serve.

A message forwarded by my anonymous friend Larry on October 18, 2009

How Moody's sold its ratings -- and sold out investors | McClatchy ---
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/politics/story/77244.html
Instead, Moody's promoted executives who headed its "structured finance" division, which assisted Wall Street in packaging loans into securities for sale to investors. It also stacked its compliance department with the people who awarded the highest ratings to pools of mortgages that soon were downgraded to junk. Such products have another name now: "toxic assets."

"In 2001, Moody's had revenues of $800.7 million; in 2005, they were up to $1.73 billion; and in 2006, $2.037 billion. The exploding profits were fees from packaging . . . and for granting the top-class AAA ratings, which were supposed to mean they were as safe as U.S. government securities," said Lawrence McDonald in his recent book, "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense."

Nobody cared about due diligence so long as the money kept pouring in during the housing boom. Moody's stock peaked in February 2007 at more than $72 a share.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett's firm Berkshire Hathaway owned 15 percent of Moody's stock by the end of 2001, company reports show. That stake, largely still intact, meant that the Oracle from Omaha reaped huge financial rewards while Moody's overlooked the glaring problems in pools of subprime mortgages.

A Berkshire spokeswoman had no comment.

Moody's wasn't alone in ignoring the mounting problems. It wasn't even first among competitors. The financial industry newsletter Asset-Backed Alert found that Standard & Poor's participated in 1,962 deals in 2006 involving pools of loans, while Moody's did 1,697. In 2005, Standard & Poor's did 1,754 deals to Moody's 1,120. Fitch was well behind both.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/politics/story/77244.html

Jensen Comment
I’m frantically searching the writings of my very technical hero, Janet Tavakoli, to discover that all this is not true about my other hero, Warren Buffett. Of course there are huge and unknown, at this points, degrees of culpability.

Janet is pretty rough on the ratings agencies in her writings. However, she’s always kind to Warren. One of my all-time favorite books is her Dear Mr. Buffet book. On Page 107, Janet writes as follows:

At the end of 2007, Berkshire Hathaway owned 78 million shares of Moody’s Corporation, one of the top three rating agencies (the same shares owned when I first met Warren Buffett in 2005), representing just over 19 percent of the capital stock. The cot basis of the shares is $499 million. At the end of 200, the value was just under $1 billion. By the end of 2006, the value was around $3.3 billion, but it dropped to $1.7 billion at the end of 2007. The sharp increase in revenues is due chiefly to revenues generated from rating structured financial products, and the sharp decrease was due to the disillusionment of the market with the integrity of the ratings.

On Page 109, Janet continues to berate the rating agency cartel (where I think it might be possible to substitute auditors for rating agencies interchangeably):

The rating agencies seem to not care about the market’s forgiveness since not only have they not apologized ---  a necessary but not sufficient condition --- they seem to feel the market should change. Specifically, the market should change its point of view about what it expects from the rating agencies. Yet it seems that the market has the right to expect rating agencies to follow the basic principles of statistics.

The tactic has mainly been successful because the rating agencies act as a cartel, leveraging their joint power to have fees magically converge and have ratings so similar that they have participated overrating AAA structured products backed by dodgy loans in 2007 that took substantial principal losses. Meanwhile, many market professionals, including me, pointed out in print that the AAA ratings were maeaningless. The rating agencies presented a farily united front in defending their methods (except for Fitch, which also participated on overrated CDOs and later seemed more responsive to downgrading structured products.

. . .

“Ma and pa” retail investors found that AAA product ended up in their pension funds and mutual funds because their money managers gave too much credence to an AAA rating.

But nowhere have I yet found where Janet alludes to any insider profiteering on the part of Warren Buffett who also lost billions of dollars in the crash The difference between “ma and pa” and Mr. Buffet is that a billion dollars is pocket change to Warren Buffet. He can easily recoup his losses legitimately in trades with stupid hedge fund managers and bankers that rely too much on fallible models (at least that’s what mathematician Janet Tavakoli tells us in a very enlightening way).

Expert Financial Predictions (John Stewart's hindsight video scrapbook) --- http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=354&bpid=23077&nlid=1840
You have to watch the first third of this video before it gets into the scrapbook itself
The problem unmentioned here is one faced by auditors and credit rating agencies of risky clients every day:  Predictions are often self fulfilling
If an auditor issues going concern exceptions in audit reports, the exceptions themselves will probably contribute to the downfall of the clients
The same can be said by financial analysts who elect to trash a company's financial outlook
Hence we have the age-old conflict between holding back on what you really secretly predict versus pulling the fire alarm on a troubled company
There are no easy answers here except to conclude that it auditors and credit rating agencies appeared to not reveal many of their inner secret predictions in 2008
Auditing firms and credit rating agencies lost a lot of credibility in this economic crisis, but they've survived many such stains on their reputations in the past
By now we're used to the fact that the public is generally aware of the fire before the auditors and credit rating agencies pull the alarm lever
On the other hand, financial wizards who pull the alarm lever on nearly every company all the time lose their credibility in a hurry

Bob Jensen's threads on credit rating agencies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#CreditRatingAgencies

Bob Jensen's threads on auditor professionalism are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#Professionalism


"GE's $19 Billion (And Increasing) Toxic Asset Sink Hole," by Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge, November 3, 2009 ---
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/ges-19-billion-and-increasing-toxic-asset-sink-hole

One, and maybe the only, of the recent benefits of the FASB's meager attempts at providing balance sheet transparency has been the requirement for banks and financial companies to disclose the difference between the Fair Market Value and the Carrying (Book) value of their assets, especially as pertains to loans held on the balance sheet. And while even the FMV calculation leaves much to be desired, it does demonstrate which companies take abnormal liberties with their balance sheets, instead of performing needed asset write-downs as more and more loans turn toxic. A good example of just such optimism appears when one evaluates the disclosure by "banking" company General Electric. On page 38 of the firm's just released 10-Q, the firm indicates that the delta between its loan portfolio FMV and Book Value continues increasing, and as of September 30, hit an all time (disclosed) high of $18.8 billion. In other words, General Electric, whose market cap is about $150 billion at last check, is likely impaired by at least $19 billion if it were forced to access the market today and sell off its loans. The $19 billion is 13% of its entire market cap. And the real number is likely much, much worse.

The delta between the Carrying and Fair Market Value of GECC's loans can be seen on the chart below:

A reminder of how GE calculates loan FMV is taken from the company's 10-K:

Based on quoted market prices, recent transactions and/or discounted future cash flows, using rates we would charge to similar borrowers with similar maturities.

In other words FMV uses the traditional Level III evaluation methodology. And even when using DCF (we assume that was used as it will always give the firm the "best", most palatable value reading), GE is still seeing a nearly $20 billion balance sheet shortfall?

What is more troubling, is that even as GECC has been collapsing its balance sheet, with book value of loans dropping from $305 billion to $292 billion from FYE 2009 to Q3 2008, the FMV-Book delta has increased from $12.6 to $18.8 billion. And this is occurring in a time when the credit market is presumably surging? Is there something wrong with this picture? As we pointed out, the $18.8 billion is likely a gross underestimation of the real valuation shortfall, if one were to really mark all of GE's myriads of illiquid loans to market.

Yet if nothing else, this shortfall should explain GE's urgent desire to sell NBCU and to use the ~$30 billion in proceeds to plug what is becoming an ever growing hole.

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

Jeff Gerth and Brady Dennis, "How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue Industrial Giant Becomes Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program," The Washington Post, June 29, 2009 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/28/AR2009062802955.html?hpid=topnews
 

Jensen Comment
GE thus becomes the biggest winner under both the TARP and the Cap-and-Trade give away legislation. It is a major producer of wind turbines and other machinery for generating electricity under alternative forms of energy. The government will pay GE billions for this equipment. GE Capital is also "Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program." Sort of makes you wonder why GE's NBC network never criticizes liberal spending in Congress.
 

Bob Jensen's threads on fair value accounting are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#FairValue

Jensen's threads on the bank rescue swindle are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm z
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm


I think Ed misses the point --- See Exhibit A below.

"Capping Exec. Comp: Good and Bad Concerns," by J. Edward Ketz, SmartPros, November 2009 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x67977.xml 

President Barack Obama recently established a cap on executive pay at those firms which received taxpayer bailout funds -- a cap on one's annual salary of $500,000. It also proposes to curb bonuses to managers. Various individuals have raised concerns about this governmental intervention. As it turns out, some of these concerns are legitimate and need to be addressed, but others seem more self-serving.

One area of concern pertains to economic issues. Does the government really have the information by which it makes good decisions that regulate labor markets? More importantly, does it have the moral integrity and fortitude to legislate matters and limit executive pay fairly for the good of all? Clearly, there are doubts on both fronts so that it is hard, if not impossible, to answer either of these questions with an unqualified yes.

A related area of concern pertains to the encroachment on individual liberties, especially property rights. For some time the United States has seen limits imposed on the freedoms of the individual, and these infringements have been speeding up. Even if one believes that the caps imposed on these executives are proper and fair, where will government interventions end? It is by no means clear that this behemoth has the discipline to respect any property rights of the individual. And it puzzles the imagination to figure out what institutions exist to rein in this beast if it continues to malign human freedoms. The United States is clearly on the road to greater socialism.

And these two concerns lead to the most frightening: the increased power of the central administration. Does the U.S. government really have the authority to intervene in the way it has with respect to banks and other institutions that have received bailout funds? If so, where does the power end and what countervailing forces exist to keep the current and future presidents from abusing their power?

One small comfort is that more Americans are thinking about such issues. A Gallup Poll in September found that 57% of the respondents felt that the government is “doing too much” while only 38% said that it “should do more.” Of course, these thoughts need to translate into actions before it is too late to restrain Washington politicians and bureaucrats.

Having said this, I find it amusing to hear the arguments of bank managers and directors. Their major complaint is that the administration’s cap on executive salaries will drive talent away. That is such a self-centered argument! If they cannot live comfortably on $500,000 per year, then I really feel sorry for them.

But wait—aren’t these the same guys who misunderstood the nature of the derivative instruments that their firms were dealing in? And didn’t these managers make faulty decisions with respect to the housing market and counter-party risk? In short, didn’t these executives bring their own firms to the brink of destruction? Given the foolish and reckless behaviors of these managers, one has to ask what talent they are talking about. If this is talent, let’s given some untalented people the chance the run these companies. They couldn’t do worse.

Besides, where would these executives go? Before these talented people leave their firms, they would desire other positions with salaries greater than $500,000. I doubt that there are enough open positions that pay that much for so many executives. The labor market is slim for this end of the pay spectrum.

And there are other people who could easily replace these businessmen and who could do a credible job. For example, competent university presidents must have great managerial skills. With a median salary of $427,400, some of them might be willing to accept the new challenges of running a bank. And take a pay boost.

There are several legitimate concerns about Obama’s intervention into the pay of bank managers and others who accepted government bailouts. But, concern over the flight of talent is not one of them.

Jensen Comment
The hardest part in the executive rip offs of their own companies is the fact that most of them that failed miserably still made millions. They appointed boards of directors who then gave them generous golden parachutes. Pride gave them reasons to bet big on drawing to inside straits since they were not gambling with their own money. They took high financial risks knowing full well that they'd never be anything other than gloriously rich. 

Exhibit A
Exhibit A is Stanley O'Neal who resigned is disgrace at Merrill Lynch  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_O%27Neal

During August and September 2007, as the sub-prime crisis swept through the global financial market, Merrill Lynch announced losses of $8 billion. O'Neal is largely credited with having steered Merrill Lynch into the disastrous sub-prime arena, and responsible for the losses. As the crisis worsened, O'Neal approached Wachovia Bank without the approval of Merrill's Board of Directors, which led to his ouster. O'Neal walked away with a golden parachute compensation package that included Merrill stock and options valued at $161.5 million at the time.

White Collar Crime Pays Even If You Get Caught
Protecting outrageous golden parachutes is not protecting capitalism. It's protecting members of the corporate executive club and ensures that no member of the club will ever be less than a multi-millionaire except in the case of spending time in prison (read that Club Fed) in which case the millions lie in wait until being released from prison.

November 4, 2009 reply from Linda A Kidwell, University of Wyoming [lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]

One point being missed by many is that the new regime sets up a classic fraud triengle situation. It's the age-old problem where executives being paid for financial statement performance have a heightened incentive to falsify those statements. Add to that the likelihood that some will be able to rationalize their behavior because they resent having their pay managed by the incompetant bureaucrats in the government, and all you need for fraud is opportunity. Are the regulators planning to step up investigations? Are the audit budgets being increased? Are the auditors of those financial institutions adequately adjusting their programs to look more aggressively for fraud?

Bob Jensen's threads on why white collar crime pays are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#CrimePays

Bob Jensen's threads on outrageous executive compensation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation 


"SEC Sues Value Line Inc. and Two Senior Officers for $24 Million Fraudulent Scheme," SEC Press Release, November 4. 2009 ---
http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2009/2009-234.htm

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 2009-234 Washington, D.C., Nov. 4, 2009 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged New York City-based investment adviser Value Line Inc., its CEO, its former Chief Compliance Officer and its affiliated broker-dealer with defrauding the Value Line family of mutual funds by charging over $24 million in bogus brokerage commissions on mutual fund trades funneled through Value Line's affiliated broker-dealer, Value Line Securities, Inc. (VLS).

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Bob Jensen's Security Analyst Frauds ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#InvestmentBanking


"The Financial Crisis as a Symbol of the Failure of Academic Finance? (A Methodological Digression)," by Hans J. Blommestein, SSRN, September 23, 2009 --- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1477399 

The failure of academic finance can be considered one of the symbols of the financial crisis. Two important underlying reasons why academic finance models systematically fail to account for real-world phenomena follow directly from two conventions: (a) treating economics not as a 'true' social science (but as a branch of applied mathematics inspired by the methodology of classical physics); and (b) using economic models as if the empirical content of economic theories is not very low. Failure to understand and appreciate the inherent weaknesses of these 'conventions' had fatal consequences for the use and interpretation of key academic finance concepts and models by market practitioners and policymakers. Theoretical constructs such as the efficient markets hypothesis, rational expectations, and market completeness were too often treated as intellectual dogmas instead of (parts of) falsifiable hypotheses. The situation of capture via dominant intellectual dogmas of policymakers, investors, and business managers was made worse by sins of omission - the failure of academics to communicate the limitations of their models and to warn against (potential) misuses of their research - and sins of commission - introducing (often implicitly) ideological or biased features in research programs Hence, the deeper problem with finance concepts such as the 'efficient markets hypothesis' and 'ratex theory' is not that they are based on assumptions that are considered as not being 'realistic'. The real issue at stake with academic finance is not a quarrel about the validity of the assumption of rational behavior but the inherent semantical insufficiency of economic theories that implies a low empirical content (and a high degree of specification uncertainty). This perspective makes the scientific approach advocated by Friedman and others less straightforward. In addition, there is wide-spread failure to incorporate the key implications of economics as a social science. As response to these 'weaknesses' and challenges, five suggested principles or guidelines for future research programmes are outlined.

Economics and Finance Videos of Possible Interest

Great PBS Video on the Crash of 1929 --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/crash/

Video:  Yale School of Management Cosponsors NYC Roundtable Discussion on the Financial Crisis (Full Video Now Available)
http://mba.yale.edu/news_events/CMS/Articles/6608.shtml 

Video:  "Advice for President Obama" from the Department of Economics at Cornell University ---
http://www.cornell.edu/video/?VideoID=410

Evan Davis talks to Warren Buffett --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8322957.stm

Video: Fora.Tv on Institutional Corruption & The Economy Of Influence ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-foratv-on-institutional-corruption-the-economy-of-influence/

Bob Jensen's threads on the economic crisis are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm


Billionaire left-winger George Soro hates some Nobelists as much as he hates Republicans. Jim Mahar made the following quotation:
First of all I love the sentence "...those marginalized....include Nobelists Joseph Stiglitz, George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Sir James Mirrlees" Marginalized nobelists.

Jim writes the following in his Finance Professor Blog on October 30, 2009 ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/

"Converting the Preachers:  George Soros launches a $50 million effort to purge economics of its free-market zeal," by Michael Hiirsh, Newsweek Magazine, October 27, 2009 --- .http://www.newsweek.com/id/219720
"...financier George Soros is announcing a $50 million effort to speed things along. This week Soros is gathering some of the leading practitioners of the market-skeptic school, who were marginalized during the era of 'free-market fundamentalism,' among them Nobelists Joseph Stiglitz, George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Sir James Mirrlees. He's also creating an 'Institute for New Economic Thinking' to make research grants, convene symposiums, and establish a journal, all in an effort to take back the economics profession from the champions of free-market zealotry who have dominated it for decades"

First of all I love the sentence "...those marginalized....include Nobelists Joseph Stiglitz, George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Sir James Mirrlees" Marginalized nobelists. Great! LOL.

But seriously, Soros has yet to convince me.

Do we need regulation? Yes. Free markets are not perfect and people do have an incentive to hide the truth, to create information asymmetries. However too much regulation and intervention is worse than too little. A free market system where people can take chances will win out over a centrally controlled system where who you know matters more than what you know.

Sure any free system will have painful excesses and bubbles, but these problems, as painful in the short run as they may be, must be weighed against the corruption and politics of any regulatory system. I am confident that if a proper accounting is done, the advantage will lie closer to the free market camp than the so called new economists believe.

George Soros, your success has earned you the right to say what you want and I respect your ideas, but in this case, I think history will show that you are on the wrong side of the market

Jim Mahar

 


"Feminists Psychoanalyze Themselves Again," by Phyllis Schlafly, Townhall, October 27, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/PhyllisSchlafly/2009/10/27/feminists_psychoanalyze_themselves_again 

The feminists are going through one of their periodic soul-searching psychological examinations of what the women's liberation movement did or did not do for them, and why they are not happy with the result. Feminist dominance in newspapers, magazines, book publishers, television and academia makes it easy to command a full media rollout for their agonizing.

The media are glad to divert public attention from the failure of Barack Obama's stimulus to create jobs. So, we have ponderous discussions: Maria Shriver's report (with help from a liberal think tank) called "A Woman's Nation Changes Everything," a Time Magazine cover story headlined with the double entendre "The State of the American Woman," Gail Collins' book "When Everything Changed" and articles from all the feminist columnists.

We wonder if it's just a coincidence that this torrent of words immediately precedes Halloween. The writers are scared of their own research because it contradicts much of their gender-neutral ideology.

These well-educated writers long ago identified the major goal of the women's liberation movement as getting more wives out of the home and into the labor force. They've been strikingly successful with this goal -- women are now half the labor force, and 40 percent of women are essential family breadwinners.

In the current recession, the majority of workers laid off have been men (especially from construction and manufacturing). Jobs where women predominate have not been much affected.

Even so, the feminists demanded that the Obama administration give half the stimulus jobs to women rather than to the shovel-ready work that was the reason for passing the stimulus funds. Whatever the feminists demand from the Democrats they get, and the stimulus money was directed to jobs in education, health care and social services.

So what are the feminists complaining about? They want the taxpayers to provide high-quality daycare and paid family leave, to pass laws to prohibit employers from ordering women to work overtime (as men are often required to do) and probably to force men to assume half the household and baby-care duties.

The feminists are still crying about President Richard Nixon vetoing a federal program to make daycare a middle-class entitlement. But Nixon's action was popular then and still is because the majority of Americans don't want their tax dollars to pay for babysitters for other people's children.

No doubt this will come as a shock to the feminists, but Time Magazine reports that "a majority of both men and women still say it is best for children to have a father working and a mother at home."

Women's percentage in the labor force keeps rising because of who is going to college. Thirty years ago, the ratio of males to females on college campuses was 60 to 40; now it's 40 to 60, and women receive the majority of college degrees.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness


"[Oh No!] Five Myths About Our Land of Opportunity," Simoleon Sense, November 3, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/

I wonder what Buffett would think about this….Makes me think of the Ovarian Lottery

Click Here For An Expanded Version of 5 Myths About Our Land Of Opportunity

Introduction (Via Brookings)
Americans have always believed that their country is unique in providing the opportunity to get ahead. Just combine hard work with a bit of talent and you’ll climb the ladder—or so we’ve told ourselves for generations. But rising unemployment and financial turmoil are puncturing that self-image. The reality of this “land of opportunity” is considerably more complex than the myths would suggest:

Excerpt (Via Brookings)

1. Americans enjoy more economic opportunity than people in other countries.

Actually, some other advanced economies offer more opportunity than ours does. For example, recent research shows that in the Nordic countries and in the United Kingdom, children born into a lower-income family have a greater chance than those in the United States of forming a substantially higher-income family by the time they’re adults.

2. In the United States, each generation does better than the past one.

As a result of economic growth, each generation can usually count on having a higher income, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than the previous one. For example, men born in the 1960s were earning more in the 1990s than their fathers’ generation did at a similar age, and their families’ incomes were higher as well. But that kind of steady progress appears to have stalled. Today, men in their 30s earn 12 percent less than the previous generation did at the same age.

3. Immigrant workers and the offshoring of jobs drive poverty and inequality in the United States.

Although immigration and trade are often blamed, a more important reason for our lack of progress against poverty and our growing inequality is a dramatic change in American family life. Almost 30 percent of children now live in single-parent families, up from 12 percent in 1968. Since poverty rates in single-parent households are roughly five times as high as in two-parent households, this shift has helped keep the poverty rate up; it climbed to 13.2 percent last year. If we had the same fraction of single-parent families today as we had in 1970, the child poverty rate would probably be about 30 percent lower than it is today.

4. If we want to increase opportunities for children, we should give their families more income.

Of course money is a factor in upward mobility, but it isn’t the only one; it may not even be the most important. Our research shows that if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class in the United States, you need to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time and marry before you have children. If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent, and your chances of joining the middle class or above rise from 56 to 74 percent. (We define middle class as having an income of at least $50,000 a year for a family of three.)

5. We can fund new programs to boost opportunity by cutting waste and abuse in the federal budget.

Can we cut enough ineffective programs or impose enough new taxes to put better teachers in classrooms, expand child-care assistance for working families and provide more financial aid to disadvantaged students while reducing projected deficits? The answer is a resounding no. Certainly, we should eliminate fraud, waste and abuse; raise new revenues; and scrub the budget for additional savings. But these alone won’t get the job done. Just three rapidly growing programs - Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid - along with interest on the debt threaten to crowd out all other spending in a few decades.

Click Here For An Expanded Version of 5 Myths About Our Land Of Opportunity

November 4, 2009 reply from Jagdish Gangolly [gangolly@GMAIL.COM]

Bob,

I must take an exception to the fifth one, revision of "contract" between generations. A politically correct ploy to pick the pockets of seniors.

A more sensible alternative might be to revise the "contract" between the taxpayers and the politicians. Perhaps all elected politicians should earn the median family income for the US, and get the same health insurance and retirement as the median family does. I think Obama suggested a variant of this before he became comfortable situated as the president, and has perhaps forgotten that he said it.

The present system provides perverse incentives for the elected politicians the same way as the top executives in the private sector. They have absolutely no incentives to raise the standards of living for the rest of us peasants, since they are comfortably situated, thanks to the taxpayer generosity.

Jagdish S. Gangolly Department of Informatics College of Computing & Information State University of New York at Albany Harriman Campus, Building 7A, Suite 220 Albany, NY 12222
Phone: 518-956-8251, Fax: 518-956-8247

The Most Criminal Class in America --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#Lawmakers

Entitlements Crisis in the United States --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/entitlements.htm


A Special Tribute to My Open Sharing Friend Will Yancey

Bob Jensen's statement on open sharing ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/AAAaward_files/AAAaward02.htm

Questions
Why is so very, very much given away for free on the Web, blogs, social networks, and listservs?
How can you seriously study and share your own ancestry?

Answer
The question about free sharing is a complicated question that has many complicated answers. Many, many people and companies and other organizations are truly being benevolent without any intention other than to do good things for the world. In some of those instances they do so as anonymously as possible. In other instances they get non-monetary rewards for recognitions and honors received for their efforts to do good things in the world. Sometimes the open sharing is from wealthy people, large companies, or prestigious universities feeling a need to share for reasons other than added wealth or recognitions --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

In some instances they eventually hope to make money for themselves and to maintain the often high costs of giving things away for free on the Web, with Google being the poster child of a company that started giving things away that turned the free things into billions upon billions of revenue (that among other things helps maintain the costs of over a million Web servers giving away free searches).

It often, very often, pays more to give than to receive
In many instances sharing expertise for free on the Web is the key to financial success, although not all successful open sharing Web sites were created initially with the intention of making profits. Neither Will Yancey nor Bob Jensen created enormous Websites with the original intent of making a dime from our efforts, and neither of us make any sales pitch whatsoever on our open sharing sites. We both will continue to open share if we never make another dollar from open sharing.
 

A Tribute to former tax professor and Eagle Scout Will Yancey --- http://www.willyancey.com/vita.htm
This is a huge success story about a professor of taxation who left academe to build a tremendously successful consulting business (surprisingly not in tax accounting) which he operates mostly out of his home via telephone and the Internet. Among other things he's building a fortune on, among other things, stratified sampling expertise and compliance.

In many instances sharing expertise for free on the Web is the key to financial success
Some successful professor consultants do so on the basis of their degrees and or current employment at prestigious universities like Harvard, Wharton, MIT, Stanford, Chicago, etc. More often than not these professors do not share freely on the Internet. I call these halo consultants living under the halos of affiliations with prestigious universities.

What makes the Will Yancey story interesting is that Will, like me, attributes much of his success to open-sharing (free) in the Internet ---
http://www.willyancey.com/
In a much more successful way than me, however, corporations seek out Will Yancey for lucrative consulting based often on finding his free Website material via Web crawlers like Google, Yahoo, and Bing --- http://www.willyancey.com/
And he makes a fortune barefooted while looking out from his ocean-front office. Mostly he consults on the Telephone and via email and, of course, writing reports and doing statistical analysis in his home offices in Maine and Texas.

Will's son is now a first-year student at Trinity University. Good choice ---
http://web.trinity.edu/x837.xml

On October 25, 2009 Will Yancey was an overnight guest in our cottage on his return to Maine from a homecoming weekend at Dartmouth College. Will and his wife, Carol, have two beautiful homes, one in Dallas and the other fantastic home is a new place about ten miles north of Bar Harbor (by boat) on Lemoines Point ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hancock_County,_Maine

Turning Lemons into Lemonade Consulting ---  http://www.willyancey.com/vita.htm
Will Yancey earned an accountancy PhD at the University of Texas and then served on the faculty at TCU for six years as a tax professor. While at he was at TCU and I was still slaving away at Trinity University, I was impressed by his early-on free Web site of taxation helpers. His Web site was recognized in The CPA Journal, Technology Section, "Website of the Month: WillYancey.com", December 2004, page 60. Will's site was recognized by Forbes as one of the top eight web sites for tax planning (Forbes Interactive Money Guide, Fall 1999, page 77, www.forbes.com/bow/b2c/review.jhtml?id=497).

Will Yancey no longer maintains the detailed taxation part of his huge Web site but links to a tremendous taxation helper site started by an avid hunter and professor at the University of Northern Iowa, Dennis Schmidt, that was later sold for big bucks to a commercial outfit --- http://www.taxsites.com/help.html (another story of free sharing turned into financial success).

It is difficult to pigeon hole the expertise of Will Yancey that is now the basis of his consulting practice. You get clues by scanning the various categories and extensive referencing of literature available at http://www.willyancey.com/

At dinner Sunday evening, Will brought up a puzzle about how best to very precisely estimate the weight of a catch of over ten tons of fish catch comprised of fish of various sizes from minnows to large Blue Fin Tuna. The added catch is that your scale is limited to weighing 100 lbs at a time.

A Will Yancey Puzzle for You to Figure Out
Will Yancey does not fish or weigh fish, but the above puzzle is a key to much of his success in consulting in health care compliance, legal ruling and government regulation compliance, and other types of categories shown at http://www.willyancey.com/

If you want to study your own genealogy, Will Yancey's site provides many helpful links on how to go about doing so --- http://willyancey.com/finding.htm#family-history
An added thing that impressed me about Will Yancey is his dedication to his Jewish and Lutheran family ancestry. Will's family is rooted in a large and wealthy Lutheran estate owners in Poland and Germany --- http://willyancey.com/famhist.htm
Some of his ancestors were murdered in Hitler's death camps.
Especially note the Jewish history links at http://willyancey.com/sources.htm 

A truly fascinating story is the history of Will's mother who was sent alone as a very small child first to England (to escape being murdered by the Nazi regime) and then on to America. She lived in the home of a British diplomat in London who later moved his family to the country to protected them from the Blitzkrieg. She was a brilliant master of seven languages and attended prestigious universities to become a chemist before giving birth to Will Yancey. Will's father was also a chemist.

This report is about the trip by Will Yancey and his mother, Marianne Yancey, in May 1997 to southern England and Wroclaw, Poland --- http://willyancey.com/europe97.htm

Here's their estate house where Marianne Yancey was born --- http://willyancey.com/Paschkerwitz/Paschkerwitz_en.htm
Will Yancey found a small piece of the old house while walking about on the grounds in 1997.
Especially note all the links and old photographs and the evacuation link, in the left-side column.
Here's the estate house where she was born that was later destroyed by partying Russian soldiers:

While listening to Will Yancey talk about his family roots, Erika was especially fascinated because she too was a refuge forced to as a small child to be a refuge on the road, only in her case she was forced out of Czechoslovakia by communists at the end of World War II who forced her family off the farm in front of gun barrels. Erika and her mother were eventually smuggled into Germany by an American soldier in a Jeep who picked them up on the side of the road --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/erika/xmas00.htm
Erika spent part of her early life living in an unheated garden shack on the outskirts of Munich and attended her first years of school in a school building with bomb holes in the roof. Some nights she helped crawl in the dark to steal a few survival potatoes in nearby fields.

Finding People, Places, and Firms
[ Finding People and Firms | Investigative Services | Government | Maps | Maine | Texas | Web Search Engines ]
Also see http://www.willyancey.com/finding.htm#family-history

A Special Tribute to My Open Sharing Friend Will Yancey ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Yancey.htm

Giving Stuff Away Free on the Internet ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm#Free 


"Saturn (Now Defunct Automobile): A Wealth of Lessons from Failure," University of Pennsylvania's Knowledge@Wharton, October 28, 2009 --- http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2366

"Cornell Theory Center Aids Social Science Researchers," PR Web, June 19, 2006 --- http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/6/prweb400160.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on theory ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm


"Efficient Market Theory and the Crisis: Neither the rating agencies' mistakes nor the overleveraging by financial firms was the fault of an academic hypothesis," by Jeremy J. Siegel, The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703573604574491261905165886.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

Financial journalist and best-selling author Roger Lowenstein didn't mince words in a piece for the Washington Post this summer: "The upside of the current Great Recession is that it could drive a stake through the heart of the academic nostrum known as the efficient-market hypothesis." In a similar vein, the highly respected money manager and financial analyst Jeremy Grantham wrote in his quarterly letter last January: "The incredibly inaccurate efficient market theory [caused] a lethally dangerous combination of asset bubbles, lax controls, pernicious incentives and wickedly complicated instruments [that] led to our current plight."

But is the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) really responsible for the current crisis? The answer is no. The EMH, originally put forth by Eugene Fama of the University of Chicago in the 1960s, states that the prices of securities reflect all known information that impacts their value. The hypothesis does not claim that the market price is always right. On the contrary, it implies that the prices in the market are mostly wrong, but at any given moment it is not at all easy to say whether they are too high or too low. The fact that the best and brightest on Wall Street made so many mistakes shows how hard it is to beat the market.

This does not mean the EMH can be used as an excuse by the CEOs of the failed financial firms or by the regulators who did not see the risks that subprime mortgage-backed securities posed to the financial stability of the economy. Regulators wrongly believed that financial firms were offsetting their credit risks, while the banks and credit rating agencies were fooled by faulty models that underestimated the risk in real estate.

After the 1982 recession, the U.S. and world economies entered into a long period where the fluctuations in variables such as gross domestic product, industrial production, and employment were significantly lower than they had been since World War II. Economists called this period the "Great Moderation" and attributed the increased stability to better monetary policy, a larger service sector and better inventory control, among other factors.

The economic response to the Great Moderation was predictable: risk premiums shrank and individuals and firms took on more leverage. Housing prices were boosted by historically low nominal and real interest rates and the development of the securitized subprime lending market.

According to data collected by Prof. Robert Shiller of Yale University, in the 61 years from 1945 through 2006 the maximum cumulative decline in the average price of homes was 2.84% in 1991. If this low volatility of home prices persisted into the future, a mortgage security composed of a nationally diversified portfolio of loans comprising the first 80% of a home's value would have never come close to defaulting. The credit quality of home buyers was secondary because it was thought that underlying collateral—the home—could always cover the principal in the event the homeowner defaulted. These models led credit agencies to rate these subprime mortgages as "investment grade."

But this assessment was faulty. From 2000 through 2006, national home prices rose by 88.7%, far more than the 17.5% gain in the consumer price index or the paltry 1% rise in median household income. Never before have home prices jumped that far ahead of prices and incomes.

This should have sent up red flags and cast doubts on using models that looked only at historical declines to judge future risk. But these flags were ignored as Wall Street was reaping large profits bundling and selling the securities while Congress was happy that more Americans could enjoy the "American Dream" of home ownership. Indeed, through government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Washington helped fuel the subprime boom.

Neither the rating agencies' mistakes nor the overleveraging by the financial firms in the subprime securities is the fault of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. The fact that the yields on these mortgages were high despite their investment-grade rating indicated that the market was rightly suspicious of the quality of the securities, and this should have served as a warning to prospective buyers.

With few exceptions (Goldman Sachs being one), financial firms ignored these warnings. CEOs failed to exercise their authority to monitor overall risk of the firm and instead put their faith in technicians whose narrow models could not capture the big picture. One can only wonder if the large investment banks would have taken on such risks when they were all partnerships and the lead partner had all his wealth in the firm, as they were just a few decades ago.

The misreading of these economic trends did not just reside within the private sector. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan stated before congressional committees last December that he was "shocked" that the top executives of the financial firms exposed their stockholders to such risk. But had he looked at their balance sheets, he would have realized that not only did they put their own shareholders at risk, but their leveraged positions threatened the viability of the entire financial system.

As home prices continued to climb and subprime mortgages proliferated, Mr. Greenspan and current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke were perhaps the only ones influential enough to sound an alarm and soften the oncoming crisis. But they did not. For all the deserved kudos that the central bank received for their management of the crisis after the Lehman bankruptcy, the failure to see these problems building will stand as a permanent blot on the Fed's record.

Our crisis wasn't due to blind faith in the Efficient Market Hypothesis. The fact that risk premiums were low does not mean they were nonexistent and that market prices were right. Despite the recent recession, the Great Moderation is real and our economy is inherently more stable.

But this does not mean that risks have disappeared. To use an analogy, the fact that automobiles today are safer than they were years ago does not mean that you can drive at 120 mph. A small bump on the road, perhaps insignificant at lower speeds, will easily flip the best-engineered car. Our financial firms drove too fast, our central bank failed to stop them, and the housing deflation crashed the banks and the economy.

Dr. Siegel, a professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, is the author of "Stocks for the Long Run," now in its 4th edition from McGraw-Hill.

Eugene Fama Lecture: Masters of Finance, Oct 2, 2009
Videos Fama Lecture: Masters of Finance From the American Finance Association's "Masters in Finance" video series, Eugene F. Fama presents a brief history of the efficient market theory. The lecture was recorded at the University of Chicago in October 2008 with an introduction by John Cochrane.
http://www.dimensional.com/famafrench/2009/10/fama-lecture-masters-of-finance.html#more 

Fama Video on Market Efficiency in a Volatile Market
Widely cited as the father of the efficient market hypothesis and one of its strongest advocates, Professor Eugene Fama examines his groundbreaking idea in the context of the 2008 and 2009 markets. He outlines the benefits and limitations of efficient markets for everyday investors and is interviewed by the Chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors in Europe, David Salisbury.
http://www.dimensional.com/famafrench/2009/08/fama-on-market-efficiency-in-a-volatile-market.html#more

Other Fama and French Videos --- http://www.dimensional.com/famafrench/videos/

Jensen Comment
This does not mean the EMH and its wildly popular stepchild CAPM are not in deep keeshee (theory and practice) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#EMH

Warren Buffett did a lot of almost fatal damage to the EMH
If you really want to understand the problem you’re apparently wanting to study, read about how Warren Buffett changed the whole outlook of a great econometrics/mathematics researcher (Janet Tavkoli). I’ve mentioned this fantastic book before --- Dear Mr. Buffett. What opened her eyes is how Warren Buffet built his vast, vast fortune exploiting the errors of the sophisticated mathematical model builders when valuing derivatives (especially options) where he became the writer of enormous option contracts (hundreds of millions of dollars per contract). Warren Buffet dared to go where mathematical models could not or would not venture when the real world became too complicated to model. Warren reads financial statements better than most anybody else in the world and has a fantastic ability to retain and process what he’s studied. It’s impossible to model his mind.

I finally grasped what Warren was saying. Warren has such a wide body of knowledge that he does not need to rely on “systems.” . . . Warren’s vast knowledge of corporations and their finances helps him identify derivatives opportunities, too. He only participates in derivatives markets when Wall Street gets it wrong and prices derivatives (with mathematical models) incorrectly. Warren tells everyone that he only does certain derivatives transactions when they are mispriced.

Wall Street derivatives traders construct trading models with no clear idea of what they are doing. I know investment bank modelers with advanced math and science degrees who have never read the financial statements of the corporate credits they model. This is true of some credit derivatives traders, too.
Janet Tavakoli, Dear Mr. Buffett, Page 19

October 28, 2009 reply from Paul Williams [Paul_Williams@NCSU.EDU]

Bob, et al,
I never cease to marvel at the powers of rationalization defenders of sacred institutions can muster. The above characterization of EMH was certainly not the version pedaled by its accounting disciples (notably Bill Beaver) back in the late 60s and early 70s. An accounting research industry was created based on a version of EMH that was decidedly more certain that securities were "properly priced." [Why else do studies to debunk the Briloff effect?].

Given the interpretation offered above, "Information Content Studies" make no sense. The whole idea of this methodology was that accounting data that correlated with prices implied market participants found it useful for setting prices based on publicly available data, which implied such prices were the ones that would exist in an idealized world of perfectly informed investors. Thus, this data met the test of being information and was to be preferred to other "non-information" to which the market did not react.

But now we are told that this latest version of EMH does not justify such sanguinity because "...the prices in the market are mostly wrong...", thus prices are not an indicator of the value of data, i.e., just because there is a price effect we still don't know if that data is truly "information." Think of the millions and millions of taxpayer dollars that have been wasted over the last forty years subsidizing people to search for something that is indeterminate given the methodology they are employing.

And for this the AAA awarded Seminal Contributions. Jim Boatsman had an ingenious little paper in Abacus eons ago titled, "Why Are There Tigers and Things," that cast serious doubts on the whole enterprise of "testing" market efficiency. It addressed the issue Carl Devine harped on about needing an independent definition of "information." And this is related to the logical slight of hand EMH required of surmising there is a way to know what the "true" price is since we glibly talk about over and under and mis-priced securities.

But there is no way to know this, since security prices are CREATED by the institution of the securities market. There does not exist a natural process against which market performance can be compared. "Market value," which is what a price is, is a value established by the market. The market is all there is. To paraphrase NC's current governor's favorite expression, "The price is what it is."

It isn't over or under or mis or proper or anything else, other than what a particular institution created by us at one moment in time determines it is. If we lived in a society in which mob rule settled issues of justice, it would make little sense to argue that someone the mob hung was "not guilty." Of course he was guilty, because the mob hung him!!

Paul Williams
paul_williams@ncsu.edu 
(919)515-4436

Bob Jensen's threads on the economic crisis are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm


"Business: Big Major on Campus:  A flight to safety is driving up enrollment at many undergraduate business programs, but that's making it tougher to get in," by Alison Damast, Business Week, September  24, 2009 --- http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/sep2009/bs20090924_680815.htm?link_position=link1

And for Liberal Arts Universities Without Undergraduate Business Majors There are Courses and Certificates
New undergraduate business or finance certificate programs added on to arts colleges at Princeton, Northwestern, and Columbia

New undergraduate courses (but not degrees) are being offered at colleges like Dartmouth

Some like the University of Pennsylvania have long-standing undergraduate business degree programs

"Business: The New Liberal Art:  Interest in business is surging at elite liberal arts colleges, and schools that once shunned the business major are now offering coursework," Business Week, October 22, 2009 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/oct2009/bs20091022_146227.htm?link_position=link1 

Ever since fleeing Europe's tyranny for the New World, Americans have established a collegiate system which emphasizes a broad, liberal arts education. Even as larger state schools mimicked European universities and offered undergraduate majors in vocational fields, the Ivy League schools and their peers, for the most part, resisted. "In America, we think more in terms of a broad undergraduate education," says Paul Danos, dean of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business (Tuck Full-Time MBA Profile). "Other parts of the world are much more specific. They believe in the benefit of students going directly into their major and taking several years of very narrow, technical work. We don't think of it that way."

But as the financial industry becomes an increasingly sought-after destination for talented undergraduates, some top schools are reconsidering that age-old bias. In the last three years, liberal arts colleges that once shunned the business major have begun making business courses available to undergrads. And with the job market in turmoil, interest in these programs has surged. At Tuck, growing demand has led the school to triple the number of business classes it offers. Columbia, which has seen increased interest among undergrads for the business courses in its catalog, is considering a program similar to one at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management that yields a business certificate upon completion. That program itself has been so popular that it expanded just a year after its inception.

Once wholly committed to their vision of students well-versed in philosophy, history, and science, these schools appear to be changing course. According to Amir Ziv, vice-dean at Columbia Business School (Columbia Full-Time MBA Profile), behind this shift in attitude is "a lot of demand from the undergrads to know something about business."

For liberal arts students, a little bit of business knowhow is a powerful thing, giving them the confidence they need to work in a business setting. "It's hard for students coming from a liberal arts education not to feel disadvantaged when they're up against students from, say, the Wharton (Wharton Undergraduate Business Profile) undergraduate program," says Charles Friedland, a senior majoring in economics at Dartmouth. Friedland, 21, accepted a summer internship offer last spring from Bank of America (BAC) without a single credit in business to his name. But as one of the students to enroll in financial accounting, the first Tuck business class ever offered to undergraduate students, he had the credit by his first day of work. "After the first or second day of the internship, it was already evident how much taking the class helped in terms of being comfortable in the atmosphere of a large finance firm," he says.

The last thing highly ranked schools want is for a large number of students to be at a perceived disadvantage when vying for full-time jobs. "Students realize that when they go to their first job they want to know something about business," says Ziv. "If you've had an accounting class, that gives you an advantage. You understand what profit-and-loss sheets are and what balance sheets are. And that helps."

The overwhelming popularity and growing necessity of the finance offerings is forcing schools to expand their assortment of classes. Dartmouth initially introduced just two sections of accounting to undergraduates and already has plans to add two more sections of marketing and eventually two sections of management. Meanwhile, Columbia is considering parlaying its selection of undergraduate courses into a more formalized concentration that upon completion would be recognized on students' transcripts, a program similar to one already offered by Kellogg.

Northwestern Succumbs In 2007, 41 years after it terminated its once well-regarded undergraduate program to focus on building a prestigious graduate business school, Kellogg responded to the unyielding demand for its business classes on the undergraduate level by reopening its doors to college-age students. Many undergrads wanted something formal, perhaps a major to put on their résumés. Kellogg compromised. It began offering an undergraduate certificate to students who fulfill a set of business pre-requisites and earn a B average in four advanced-level business classes.

"We wanted to build on the breadth of the undergraduate program," says Janice Eberly, a Kellogg professor with a hand in establishing the business certificate. "So we made the decision to layer business skills, in the form of a certificate program, on that existing, strong educational foundation that Northwestern students already have." As the economy collapsed, interest in the program has surged—not only are applications up sharply, but a second certificate in engineering and business has been added.

At Kellogg, undergraduate students can access the certificate program classes only via an extensive application process. Once accepted, undergrads have access to many of the same resources that their graduate counterparts do. Classes are taught by Kellogg professors, and a career services counselor is dedicated solely to the undergraduate job search. Among top private schools now offering some business education, it's the closest any have come to an actual business major.

Holding the Line The new and expanding business programs like those at Columbia and Kellogg are valuable for students like Tom Evans. A senior at Kellogg's certificate program, Evans entered Northwestern with a fleeting interest in physics, but within a year came to realize that finance was his calling. He majored in mathematical methods in social science & economics, and applied for the certificate program during the first year of its existence, hoping to get a grounding in the way economic theories play out in the world of business. His only regret: not being able to major in business. "It's very limiting and restricting for schools to stay stuck in their ways," he says. "They should be more conscious of the necessity to accommodate people of varying interests."

While undergraduate business offerings at liberal arts schools are gaining traction, no one expects them to morph into full-blown business majors any time soon. Danos believes that a basic understanding of finance is crucial to any learned young man or woman; from the English majors who aspire to law to the future doctors sitting in an organic chemistry class. And in spite of the steadily rising interest in business at these schools, the intellectual breadth that liberal arts schools aim to offer is as dear to them now as it was when Harvard was founded in 1636.

"The trend is to get some exposure of business," Danos says. "But I don't think that we're going to go the route of the big schools with full, two year majors in business—certainly Dartmouth won't."

Jensen Comment
One of the prestige-university holdouts that resisted a cash cow MBA program (unlike Harvard, Yale, MIT, Penn, Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, Stanford, Rice, and others) is Princeton University. However, I found that Princeton now offers and undergraduate certificate program in finance --- http://www.princeton.edu/bcf/undergraduate/

The certificate program in finance has four major requirements at Princeton University:

Brown University offers a wide range of finance courses coupled with the ability to customized undergraduate majors at Brown --- http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/undergraduate.php

In 2006, several finance related course underwent renumbering.  The following list shows you the old and current numbers of the courses in this area.
Current Course Number. Name Pre-1996 Course Number. Name
1710. Investments 1770. Financial Markets I
1720. Corporate Finance 1790. Corporate Finance
1750. Options and Derivatives (Investments II) 1780. Financial Markets II
1760. Financial Institutions 1760. Financial Institutions
1770. Fixed Income Securities 1710. Fixed Income Securities
1780. Corporate Strategy 1330. Econ. Competitive Strategy
1790. Corp. Govern. and Manag. 1340. Econ. Corp. Governance

October 31, 2009 reply from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

This view is not universally held. At my previous school, I suggested in an e-mail to university faculty, that exposure to business classes in the gen ed core might prove to be a good thing for several reasons. One of those reasons is that students might get an exposure to another field of study and would broaden their academic experience. I was panned and mocked by everyone including business faculty, but my idea was received well by music faculty.

November 1, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi David,

The new financial certificate undergraduate programs such as those at Princeton and Columbia will not solve a basic societal problem about ignorance in personal finance and taxation, because these programs reach so few students. The same may be said about colleges having one or more elective finance courses in the general education core.

The overwhelming majority of college graduates (including most PhD graduates, medical school graduates, and law school graduates) is that they do not have a clue about personal finance, investing, personal accounting, financial risk and insurance, business law, and most importantly tax planning. I’ve encountered attorneys that, in my viewpoint, are financially ignorant even though they are advising clients about estate planning and real estate investing.

This ignorance among most of our college graduates has huge societal externalities. The fundamental cause of divorce in society is rooted in personal financial disasters and spending fights between spouses that often carries over into life-long behavioral destruction of children. How much of this could be avoided by requiring that all college graduates have the rudiments of personal financial responsibility?

Many of our graduates do not realize that personal bankruptcy laws have changed. They still believe it is relatively simple to accumulate huge debts and repeatedly declare bankruptcy over and over when needed to clear out their unpaid debts.

I’ve got news for them about Chapter 7 changes that took place in 2005 --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_Abuse_Prevention_and_Consumer_Protection_Act 

Partly as a result of their financial ignorance, many college graduates get themselves early-on in financial messes due to student loans they can’t afford, credit card balances they cannot afford, and vote for spending legislation that messes up entire communities or the nation as a whole. They do not understand the rudiments of time value of money and cannot make wise choices about such things as investing in taxable versus tax-free investments.

Unfortunately, the finance certificate undergraduate programs (such as those at Princeton) reach less than one percent of the undergraduate. Even our business and accounting undergraduate degree programs do not reach a majority of the graduating class.

And so my rant for educating all college students about personal finances and taxation goes on and on to deaf ears among higher education faculty and administrators controlling the general education curricula. There may be innovative ways to educate students along these lines. Firstly, I would try to educate the faculty about personal finance and taxation since these faculty members most likely advise students in ways that affect the lives of those students. Secondly, it may be possible to require these items as “training” requirements much like colleges require physical education by whatever name.

Bob Jensen’s personal finance helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers 

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


"No Child Left Behind:  New evidence that charter schools help even kids in other schools," The Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703574604574499592392782438.html

Opponents of school choice are running out of excuses as evidence continues to roll in about the positive impact of charter schools.

Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby recently found that poor urban children who attend a charter school from kindergarten through 8th grade can close the learning gap with affluent suburban kids by 86% in reading and 66% in math. And now Marcus Winters, who follows education for the Manhattan Institute, has released a paper showing that even students who don't attend a charter school benefit academically when their public school is exposed to charter competition.

Mr. Winters focuses on New York City public school students in grades 3 through 8. "For every one percent of a public school's students who leave for a charter," concludes Mr. Winters, "reading proficiency among those who remain increases by about 0.02 standard deviations, a small but not insignificant number, in view of the widely held suspicion that the impact on local public schools . . . would be negative." It tuns out that traditional public schools respond to competition in a way that benefits their students.

Imagine that. Competition works.

School choice opponents insist that charters diminish the overall public school system by luring away the best students, the most motivated parents and scarce per-pupil dollars. However, Ms. Hoxby's research has shown that "creaming" can't explain the academic success of charter schools given that the typical urban charter student is a poor black or Hispanic kid living in a home with adults who possess below-average education credentials.

It's true that the growth of charters has reduced enrollment at some traditional public schools in places like Detroit and Washington, D.C. But charters are themselves public schools, albeit without the burden of work rules and other constraints imposed by unions and the bureaucracy. They are hugely popular with parents, and more than 1.4 million kids now attend 4,578 charters in 41 states.

The result has been, on balance, a superior education for the charter-bound kids and pressure on local public schools to improve or lose students. Public schools that must compete with charters are no longer insulated from the consequences for failing to educate their charges. How is that a bad outcome?

One of the most encouraging findings by Mr. Winters is how charter competition reduces the black-white achievement gap. He found that the worst-performing public school students, who tend to be low-income minorities, have the most to gain from the nearby presence of a charter school. Overall, charter competition improved reading performance but did not affect math skills. By contrast, low-performing students had gains in both areas, and their reading improvement was above average relative to the higher-performing students.

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are using the leverage of federal dollars to promote an increase in charter schools, which are still limited in many states by caps on their number and on funding. State and local policy makers who cave to union demands and block the growth of charters aren't doing traditional public school students any favors.

Bob Jensen's threads on remedial needs of K-12 graduates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#RemedialNeeds


Questions
What is driving tuition increases in law schools?
Are these same cost drivers impacting on some business schools and accountancy programs for the same reasons?
Why are minority enrollments increasing with the exception of African American law students?

Jensen Comment
Before reading the argument below, it should be noted that court decisions have been adverse to affirmative action admissions and financial aid, most notably the famous case that shook the foundations of the University of Michigan ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AcademicStandards

"Law-School Cost Is Pushed Up by Quest for Prestige, Not Accreditation, GAO Survey Finds," by Eric Kelderman, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 26, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Competition-Not/48940/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Critics have sometimes blamed the accreditation standards of the American Bar Association for driving up the cost of law school and making it more difficult for students of color to be admitted to those programs.

But a report released on Monday by the Government Accountability Office says that most law schools surveyed instead blamed competition for better rankings and a more hands-on approach to educating students for the increased price of a law degree. In addition, the federal watchdog agency reported that, over all, minorities are making up a larger share of law-school enrollments than in the past, although the percentage of African-American students in those programs is shrinking. The GAO attributed that decrease to lower undergraduate grade-point averages and scores on law-school admissions tests.

Law-school accreditation is technically voluntary but practically important: 19 states now require candidates to have a degree from an institution approved by the bar association to be eligible to take the bar examination. And a degree from an ABA-accredited institution makes a student eligible to take the bar exam in any state.

The costs of getting a law degree, however, have increased at a faster rate than the costs of comparable professional programs, says the report, "Higher Education: Issues Related to Law School Cost and Access." In-state tuition and fees at public law schools averaged $14,461 in the 2007-8 academic year, 7.2 percent higher than the cost 12 years earlier. In comparison, the cost of a medical degree from a public institution increased 5.3 percent over the same period, to $22,048 annually.

Law-school costs for nonresidents and at private institutions also increased at a slower rate over that period, but now total about twice as much or more in dollars compared with residents' costs at public institutions.

The reasons for the fast-rising costs are that law schools are providing courses and student-support programs that require more staff and faculty, the federal survey found. In addition, law schools spent more on faculty salaries and library resources, among other things, to boost their standing in the U.S. News & World Report annual rankings, law-school officials told the GAO.

Those findings stand in contrast to some criticisms that the accreditation standards for faculty and facilities are a major factor in the cost of law schools. "Officials from more than half of the ABA-accredited schools we spoke with stated they would meet or exceed some ABA accreditation standards even if they were not required," the report says.

Law-school officials also cited recent declines in state appropriations as a reason for rising tuition, federal researchers reported.

Accreditation standards also were not widely blamed for the declining share of African-American law students, most of those surveyed said. Between the 1994-95 and 2006-7 academic years, the percentage of black students has shrunk from 7.5 percent of law school students to 6.5 percent, even as the number of blacks earning bachelor's degrees has grown by two percentage points.

"Most law-school officials, students, and minority-student-group representatives we interviewed focused on issues such as differences in LSAT scores, academic preparation, and professional contacts, rather than accreditation standards, to explain minority access issues," the report says.

But the report also noted that some officials blamed not only accreditation, but also rankings by U.S. News & World Report for lower or static enrollment rates of minorities: "Schools are reluctant to admit applicants with lower LSAT scores because the median LSAT score is a key factor in the U.S. News & World Report rankings."

The study was a requirement of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, passed in 2008, and was meant to compare the costs and level of minority enrollment at law schools to similar professional-degree programs, including medical, dental, and veterinary colleges. Federal researchers surveyed officials at 22 institutions, including three that are not accredited by the ABA, and students in two law programs, one of which did not have the ABA's stamp of approval.

A Very Critical Article About College Rankings by the Media
"It’s the Student Work, Stupid," by Sherman Dorn, Inside Higher Ed, April 7, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/04/07/dorn

Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings

Bob Jensen's threads on accreditation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#AccreditationIssues


"FDIC: Uptick in 'money mule' scams," by Brian Krebs, The Washington Post, November 3, 2009 ---
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/11/fdic_uptick_in_money_mule_scam.html?wprss=securityfix

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is warning financial institutions about an uptick in scams involving unauthorized funds transfers from hacked online bank accounts to so-called "money mules," people hired through work-at-home scams to help cyber criminals overseas launder money.

According to the FDIC, the following are examples of events that may indicate money mule account activity:

-A customer who just opened a new account suddenly receives one or several deposits, each totaling a little less than $10,000, and then withdraws all but approximately eight to 10 percent of the total (the mule's "commission").

-A foreign exchange student with a J-1 Visa and fraudulent passport opening a student account with a high volume of incoming/outgoing money transfer/wire activity.

In tracking more than 50 companies over the past five months that have been victimized with the help of willing or unwitting money mules, I've spoke to dozens of folks who got caught up in these scams.

While a majority of mules I interviewed received a single fraudulent payment from only one victimized company, some were sent money from multiple victims, or signed up with more than one mule recruitment firm. In fact, one mule I tracked down recently admitted to receiving funds from at least two hacked companies. This individual also was among the phantom employees added to a company's payroll after a breach last month at payroll processing giant PayChoice.

"The FDIC alert and reporting by the Washington Post suggest that cyber criminals are increasingly using money mules to target banks and related financial databases," PayChoice chief executive Robert Digby said in an e-mailed statement. "The recent attack on PayChoice appears to fit that pattern."

On Sept. 23, unknown hackers broke into Moorestown, N.J.-based PayChoice, a company that provides direct payroll processing services and licenses its online employee payroll management product to at least 240 other payroll processing firms, serving 125,000 organizations. The thieves stole the names, e-mail addresses, user names and passwords that a large number of PayChoice's customers used to access onlinemployer.com, PayChoice's service portal. Not long after that, the attackers then included that information in spoofed e-mails to PayChoice's clients, addressing each recipient by name and warning them that they needed to download a Web browser plug-in in order to maintain uninterrupted access to onlineemployer.com. The supposed plug-in was instead malicious software designed to steal the victim's user names and passwords.

When I first got wind of that breach, I immediately wondered if the culprits might be the same individuals responsible for a rash of incidents I've investigated this year in which attackers used password-stealing Trojans to swipe the banking credentials of small to mid-sized firms. In every case, the attackers used that access to put money mules on the payrolls of those companies and then send the mules sub-$10,000 bank transfers.

PayChoice responded to that breach by forcing customers to change their passwords. But sometime during the week of Oct. 12, some PayChoice customers reported seeing phantom employees added to their outgoing payroll. PayChoice alerted its customers that hackers had again breached its systems, and urged customers to be on the lookout for unauthorized payroll transfers to four specific people and associated bank accounts. PayChoice said one of those individuals was named Ronald Cutshall, and that an account associated with Cutshall ended in the numbers 7766.

Security Fix recently caught up a Ronnie Cutshall from Greeneville, N.C. who acknowledged having an account at the local GreenBank ending in those four digits.

Cutshall, 48, runs a small horse carriage service called Greeneville Carriage Co.. Cutshall said he had never heard of PayChoice, but he did admit to receiving $9,600 from a company called American Realty on Oct. 6. At least, that was the name of the company on the receipt his erstwhile employers sent him (see the screenshot below). The bank routing number on the $9,600 payment Cutshall said he received from American Realty traced back to Georgia, but attempts to reach the victim were unsuccessful (there are more than 100 companies in Georgia with some approximation of that name).

According to Cutshall, approximately three weeks prior to receiving that $9,600 bank transfer, he had been recruited over the Internet as a finance manager by a company called the Fairline Group (the company's Web site is at fairline-group.cn), which said it had found his resume on a popular job search site.

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


"The Power of Race," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, November 3, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/03/elite

Thomas J. Espenshade, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, used that question to answer a question about his new book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life (Princeton University Press), co-written with Alexandria Walton Radford, a research associate at MPR Associates. In fact, he could probably use the glass image to answer questions about numerous parts of the book.

While Espenshade and Radford -- in the book and in interviews -- avoid broad conclusions over whether affirmative action is working or should continue, their findings almost certainly will be used both by supporters and critics of affirmative action to advance their arguments. (In fact, a talk Espenshade gave at a meeting earlier this year about some of the findings is already being cited by affirmative action critics, although in ways that he says don't exactly reflect his thinking.)

Unlike much writing about affirmative action, this book is based not on philosophy, but actual data -- both on academic credentials and student experiences -- from 9,000 students who attended one of 10 highly selective colleges and universities. (They are not named, but include public and private institutions, research universities and liberal arts colleges.)

Among the findings:

Based on these findings, and the reality that some states have barred affirmative action and that the U.S. Supreme Court's blessing for consideration of race in admissions came with a 25-year time limit, the authors suggest that it's time for a massive federally supported effort, equivalent in intensity to the Manhattan Project, to determine the source of academic achievement gaps and to develop plans to shrink them.

The Test Score Advantage

Among the potential bombshells in the book are data on the advantages or disadvantages of SAT or ACT scores by race, ethnicity and economic class. Many studies -- including those released annually by the College Board and the ACT -- show gaps in the average tests scores by members of different racial or ethnic groups. This research takes that further, however, by controlling for numerous factors, including gender, status as an athlete or alumni child, high school grades and test scores, type of high school attended and so forth.

The "advantage" referred to, to take an example from the book, is what it would take to have equivalent odds of admission, after controlling for other factors. So the table's figure of a 3.8 black ACT "advantage" means that a black student with an ACT score of 27 would have the same chances of admission at the institutions in the study as a white student with a score of 30.8.

As the following table shows, there are large black advantages in the way colleges consider SAT and ACT scores, and notable disadvantages for Asian applicants. On issues of wealth, the SAT shows an expected affirmative action tilt, with the most disadvantaged students gaining and the wealthiest losing. But there is also a gain for upper middle class students. On the ACT, analysis found the advantages go to wealthier students.

The table uses ACT scores for public institutions and SAT scores for privates. The "norm" score was considered white for the race section, and middle class for the class section.

Advantages by Race and Class on the SAT and ACT at Selective Colleges, Fall 1997

Group Public Institutions (on ACT scale of 36) Private Institutions (on SAT scale of 1,600)
Race    
--White -- --
--Black +3.8 +310
--Hispanic +0.3 +130
--Asian -3.4 -140
Class    
--Lower -0.1 +130
--Working +0.0 +70
--Middle -- --
--Upper-Middle +0.3 +50
--Upper +0.4 -30

Much of the debate about affirmative action historically has focused on the advantages given to those from some minority groups. But the research in No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal may also be of particular interest to advocates for Asian students. Many such advocates and guidance counselors who serve those students have charged in recent years that elite colleges have de facto higher standards for Asian applicants. Is the Asian disadvantage of 3.4 points on the ACT and 140 points on the SAT evidence to bolster that claim?

Espenshade said in an interview that he does not think his data establish this bias. He noted that while his formulas are notably more complete than typical test score comparisons by race and ethnicity, he doesn't have the "softer variables," such as teacher and high school counselor recommendations, essays and lists of extracurricular activities. It is possible, he said, that such factors explain some of the apparent SAT and ACT disadvantage facing Asian applicants.

At the same time, he said he understood that these numbers would certainly not reassure Asian applicants or those who believe they are suffering discrimination.

"I understand the worry of Asian students, but do I have a smoking gun? No," he said.

As to the large racial gaps on SAT scores, he said it was "distressing" in that it showed the difficulties colleges face in using their traditional criteria for admissions and still producing diverse student bodies.

The book notes that dropping the SAT or ACT as requirements would result in gains for black and Latino students. Espenshade has given papers previously showing that the biggest gains in such models are for colleges that drop consideration of testing entirely, as opposed to just making it optional. (To date, only one institution -- Sarah Lawrence College -- has taken that step.)

Beyond shifting test policies, may other ideas have been proposed over the years to achieve a racially diverse student body without affirmative action as currently practiced. Here the book is quite discouraging. It reviews simulations based on class-based affirmative action (extra points for low-income applicants), reducing the emphasis given to academic credentials and priority admissions for those in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. And the book considers various combinations of these policies, looking for a formula that would yield diversity similar to what colleges have obtained to date.

"In this exhaustive examination of a wide variety of potential admissions policies, we have looked for but have not found any feasible policy alternative to the current practice of race-sensitive admission that has the capacity to generate the same minority student representation on campus," the book says. "The closest we have come among private institutions is a 15 percent minority student share among all students, achieved by lifting affirmative action, adding more weight for low-income students, and paying no attention whatsoever to students' academic qualifications. This policy stands no chance of being implemented at any academically selective institution."

Do Students Mix?

The new book doesn't just explore how students get into college, but what happens with them once there -- especially in terms of interactions with people from different backgrounds. The book notes that this is a question with important legal ramifications because colleges have justified affirmative action by pointing to the educational value of educating students in heterogeneous groups.

Here, the book finds evidence of significant interactions outside students' own racial and ethnic groups.

The figures reflect all students, so the numbers are boosted in part by minority students on largely white campuses who may have relatively few fellow minority students with whom to interact.

Espenshade said that there is "no gold standard" for how much social interaction one would like to see among members of different groups, so it's hard to judge whether these numbers over all reflect positive or negative news. But he was heartened, he said, that survey questions showing that students who developed friendships across racial lines reported learning from those perspectives and gaining from the experience. Generally, he said, students reported the most gains in understanding coming from informal activities, such as socializing, and not from formal activities.

So if a college wants to encourage this sort of relationship, Espenshade said he would favor random freshman roommate selection, so more students end up living with people different from themselves, and policies that encourage groups that are based on race or ethnicity to co-sponsor events with other groups. But Espenshade said that the data suggest students are not moved by formal requirements. "I wouldn't advise diversity training," he said. "Students react negatively if they think they are being forced to take a diversity orientation session."

Across the various types of cross-racial interactions, not all groups interact evenly. Looking at who interacts, the data give the following order of likelihood: white-Hispanic, white-Asian, Hispanic-Asian, black-Hispanic, black-Asian, black-white.

The data in the book also suggest that ethnic studies courses are reaching a significant minority of all college students, but that the percentages of students at the colleges studied who majored or minored in them is extremely small, even with regard to their own groups. Nearly 40 percent of students at the colleges studied -- including nearly one third of white students -- took at least on ethnic studies course. But only 2.2 percent of students are majoring.

Ethnic Studies Coursework, by Race

  Total White Black Hispanic Asian
African-American studies          
--Major 0.5% 0.2% 4.2% 0.3% 0.3%
--Minor 1.4% 1.0% 7.7% 0.7% 0.4%
--Course 24.3% 20.9% 75.6% 20.9% 15.1%
Chicano/Latino studies          
--Major 0.8% 0.6% 1.1% 4.5% 0.4%
--Minor 1.7% 1.6% 1.5% 5.4% 1.1%
--Course 12.1% 10.9% 19.0% 40.7% 6.3%
Asian-American studies          
--Major 1.0% 0.7% 0.7% 0.2% 3.7%
--Minor 1.0% 0.4% 1.2% 0.7% 4.7%
--Course 17.3% 12.8% 14.7% 13.2% 52.2%
One or more of the above          
--Major 2.2% 1.4% 5.5% 5.1% 4.2%
--Minor 3.6% 2.6% 9.5% 6.2% 5.8%
--Course 39.6% 32.4% 79.8% 51.2% 58.5%

Measures of Academic Success

One of the most sensitive issues in discussions of affirmative action concerns academic success. Critics of affirmative action have long argued that the intended beneficiaries are in fact victims, because they might have more success in college -- and gain more confidence in themselves -- at less selective colleges. This "mismatch theory" was recently repudiated in a landmark study of public flagships, the book Crossing the Finish Line. That book found that minority students have the greatest level of success (measured by graduating) at the most competitive institution that admits them.

With regard to academic performance at the colleges studied in No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, the data on graduation rates largely back the conclusions of Crossing the Finish Line. The average six-year graduation rates for these institutions is 89 percent, with Asian students most likely to graduate (92 percent) and black students the least likely (78 percent). Similarly, those from the upper classes are more likely (90 percent) to graduate than those from working class families (79 percent). But here, even the numbers for black students and working class students far exceed national averages, and many institutions report much larger gaps by ethnic and racial groups.

It is among graduates that the new data raise questions about academic performance, because there are large differences in academic achievement (as judged by class rank) found both by race and economic class.

Class Rank by Race and Economic Class

Group Highest Quintile Second Highest Quintile Middle Quintile Second Lowest Quintile Lowest Quintile
Race          
--White 25.5% 20.8% 20.6% 17.3% 15.8%
--Black 4.8% 8.2% 13.6% 23.0% 50.5%
--Hispanic 9.3% 13.1% 17.1% 27.7% 32.8%
--Asian 20.2% 20.7% 21.9% 20.4% 16.9%
Economic class          
--Lower and working 13.0% 10.9% 19.9% 20.1% 36.1%
--Middle 20.3% 18.6% 19.2% 20.7% 21.1%
--Upper and upper middle 25.7% 21.6% 20.8% 16.9% 15.0%

Asked about the class rank data, Radford said that she doesn't think it's very significant, compared to the graduation rate data, which show that minority students are finishing their degrees.

"How much does a G.P.A. difference affect your life?" she asked. "It's not preventing these students from attending prestigious graduate schools or going on to have successful careers."

Espenshade said that he realized that there are data in the book that will be embraced by people on all sides of the debates over affirmative action. Describing himself as a "staunch moderate" on such issues, he said he will be pleased if advocates with differing views find evidence they like in the study.

"My main objective here is to be a mouthpiece for the data," he said. "My job is to let the data talk. What I may or may not feel about affirmative action doesn't matter. What matters is how the Supreme Court feels about it and how the voters feel about it."

Bob Jensen's threads on affirmative action in student admissions and academic standards ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AcademicStandards


Faculty Plagiarism at Central Michigan University
Central Michigan University has agreed to return $619,489 to the National Science Foundation after concluding that two members of its mathematics department plagiarized material both in a grant application and in the resulting project, which was intended to help improve the education of secondary-school math teachers3
"Finding Plagiarism, Central Michigan U. Will Return $619,000 Grant to NSF," Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Finding-Plagiarism-Central/8698/

Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize


I'm sorry David Friehling, when you say you were duped I don't believe a single word of your plea for leniency!
Madoff's CPA only pleads guilty to one (wink, wink) professional failure apart from the crimes to which he confessed.
He should get 150 years in the same cell as Bernie.

From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on November 5, 2009

Madoff Auditor Says He Was Duped, Too
by Chad Bray
Nov 04, 2009
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com

TOPICS: Audit Quality, Auditing, Auditing Services, Auditor Independence, Fraudulent Financial Reporting

SUMMARY: David Friehling, former accountant for the Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC, pleaded guilty to fraud and other charges in connection with his auditing work for the firm of convicted swindler Bernard Madoff.

CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The article can be used in an auditing class to cover topics of collecting sufficient competent evidential matter, auditor responsibilities for detecting fraud, business risk associated with taking on personal tax work associated with corporate clients, and overall ethical conduct of an accounting practice.

QUESTIONS: 
1. (Introductory) According to the article, what work did Mr. Friehling do for Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC and for people related to those businesses? List all work that you see identified in the article.

2. (Introductory) Of what professional failure did Mr. Friehling plead guilty at a hearing before U.S. District Judge in Manhattan?

3. (Advanced) Mr. Friehling states that he "took the information given to him by Mr. Madoff or Mr. Madoff's employees at 'face value.'" How does that statement imply a failure to conduct adequate audit procedures?

4. (Advanced) Is it evident from the results of the Madoff fraud case that the firm's auditors must have been guilty of some audit failure? In your answer, comment on an auditor's responsibility to detect fraud and on the likelihood of detecting fraud in cases of collusion.

5. (Introductory) How is the tax work done by Mr. Friehling for persons related to the Madoff firm resulting in even greater violations of the law and ethical conduct of his practice?

6. (Advanced) Refer to the second related article. Is it a "GAAP rule" that prevents an auditor or accountant from "just accepting what a client tells you about his financial statements, without doing more..."?

Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island

RELATED ARTICLES: 
Bernie Madoff's Small-Town CPA
by Thomas Coyle
Nov 04, 2009
Online Exclusive

Is Friehling's Guilty Plea A Warning Shot to Madoff's Family?
by Ashby Jones
Nov 04, 2009
Online Exclusive

"Madoff Auditor Says He Was Duped, Too:   Friehling Pleads Guilty, but Denies Knowing About the Scheme; 'Biggest Mistake of My Life'," by Chad Bray, The Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125725853747925287.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC

David Friehling, the former accountant to convicted Ponzi-scheme operator Bernard Madoff, pleaded guilty to fraud and other charges Tuesday in connection with his auditing work for Madoff's firm, but denied knowing about the underlying Ponzi scheme.

Mr. Friehling pleaded guilty to securities fraud, aiding or abetting investment advisor fraud, three counts of obstructing or impeding the administration of Internal Revenue laws, and four counts of making false filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in Manhattan.

Mr. Friehling, 49 years old, admitted that he failed to conduct independent audits of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC's financial statements, saying he took the information given to him by Mr. Madoff or Madoff's employees at "face value."

However, he denied any knowledge of Mr. Madoff's Ponzi scheme and said he entrusted his own retirement and his family's investments to Mr. Madoff, saying he had about $500,000 with the firm.

In what was "the biggest mistake of my life, I placed my trust in Bernard Madoff," Mr. Friehling said.

Mr. Friehling, who is cooperating with prosecutors, faces a statutory maximum of 114 years in prison on the charges.

He was previously charged in the matter in March. Mr. Friehling will be allowed to remain free on $2.5 million bail pending sentencing, which is tentatively set for February.

Separately, Mr. Friehling, without admitting or denying wrongdoing, agreed to a partial settlement in the SEC's separate civil case. Mr. Friehling, sole practitioner at Friehling & Horowitz CPAs PC, agreed to a permanent injunction restraining him or his accounting firm from violating securities laws.

Disgorgement, prejudgment interest and civil penalties will be determined at a later date. Mr. Friehling and his firm will be precluded from arguing that they didn't violate federal securities laws as alleged by the SEC for the purposes of determining disgorgement and any penalties.

Prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan alleged that Mr. Friehling, from 1991 to 2008, created false and fraudulent certified financial statements for Madoff's firm.

Mr. Friehling, who is married and has three children, said Tuesday that he was introduced to Mr. Madoff by Mr. Friehling's father-in-law, Jerome Horowitz.

Mr. Friehling, a certified public accountant, said Mr. Horowitz retired in 1991 but continued to assist him with Madoff's audits until 1998. Mr. Horowitz, who served as Madoff's auditor until the 1990s, died in March.

Prosecutors also alleged that Mr. Friehling failed to conduct independent audits of Madoff's firm that complied with generally accepted auditing standards and conformed with generally accepted accounting principles, and falsely certified that he had done so.

At the hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisa Baroni said Mr. Friehling prepared false tax returns for Mr. Madoff and others, but declined to say who those others are. "Just 'others' at this time," Ms. Baroni said.

The court-appointed trustee in charge of liquidating Madoff's firm said recently that he had identified $21.2 billion in cash investor losses.

Mr. Friehling is the third person to plead guilty to criminal charges in the case, including Mr. Madoff himself.

Mr. Madoff, 71, admitted in March to running a decades-long Ponzi scheme that bilked thousands of investors out of billions of dollars and is serving a 150-year sentence in a federal prison in North Carolina.

Frank DiPascali Jr., a key lieutenant to Mr. Madoff, pleaded guilty to criminal charges in August. Mr. DiPascali, who also is cooperating with prosecutors, has been jailed pending sentencing.

Mr. Madoff ran the scam for years through the investment advisory arm of his business by promising steady returns and by presenting an air of exclusivity by not taking all comers and recruiting investors via friends and associates.

Mr. Madoff claimed to have as much as $65 billion in his firm's accounts at the end of last November, but prosecutors said the accounts only held a small fraction of that.

Charles Ponzi (1882-1949) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ponzi
Ponzi Frauds --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_game

Bernard Madoff --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff

Ponzi Schemes Where Bernie Madoff Was King and the SEC was at best negligent and at worst fraudulent ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#Ponzi

Bob Jensen's threads on index and mutual fund frauds are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#MutualFunds


"Sins of Emission:  The ethanol boondoggle is also an environmental catastrophe," The Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703574604574500013927534676.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

Donning FDR's cape, Eisenhower's stripes and JFK's boat shoes, President Obama observed in Florida on Tuesday that his "clean energy economy" will require "mobilization" on the order of fighting World War II, building the interstate highway system and going to the moon. Of course, the only "mobilization" going on at the moment is on behalf of ethanol, whose many political dispensations the biofuels lobby is finding new ways to preserve even as the evidence of its destructiveness piles up.

The latest embarrassment arrives via the peer-reviewed journal Science, not known for its right-wing inclinations. A new paper calls attention to what the authors (led by Princeton's Tim Searchinger) call "a critical accounting error" in the way carbon emissions from biofuels are measured in climate-change programs world-wide. Bernie Madoff had a few critical accounting errors too.

Though you won't hear it from the biofuels lobby, ethanol actually generates the same amount of greenhouse gas as fossil fuels, or more, per unit of energy. But this was still supposed to be better than coal or oil because ethanol's CO2 is "recycled." Since plants absorb and store carbon that is already in the atmosphere, burning them as fuel would create no new emissions, whereas fossil fuels release CO2 that has been buried for millions of years.

With everything supposedly balancing out, the cap-and-trade programs run by the United Nations and European Union—and maybe soon the U.S.—treat biofuels as carbon-neutral. The Science study argues that this is a false economy, because it doesn't consider changes in land use. If mature forests are cleared to make room for biofuel-growing farms, then the carbon that would otherwise accumulate in those forests ought to be counted on ethanol's balance sheet as well.

Cap-and-trade programs exacerbate the problem because developed countries (where emissions are putatively capped) get credit for reductions from ethanol—despite the fact that their biofuels are generally grown in developing countries (where emissions aren't capped). So if Malaysians burn down a rain forest to grow palm oil that ends up in German biodiesel, Malaysia doesn't count the land-use emissions and Germany doesn't count the tail-pipe emissions.

Given these incentives, the authors cite a study showing that by 2050, "based solely on economic considerations, bioenergy could displace 59% of the world's natural forest cover. . . . The reason: When bioenergy from any biomass is counted as carbon neutral, economics favor large-scale land conversion for bioenergy regardless of the actual net emissions." In other words, not only is cap and trade self-defeating on its own terms but it also risks creating a genuine ecological disaster.

By way of a solution, Mr. Searchinger and his coauthors modestly suggest doing away with the regulatory three-card monte and counting net ethanol emissions from where they are actually emitted. But this is political heresy on Rep. Henry Waxman's Energy and Commerce Committee, which passed its own cap-and-tax program in July with the votes of farm-state Democrats, because the bill all but banned the Environmental Protection Agency from studying land-use changes. So much for letting "the science" guide public policy.

In Florida, Mr. Obama said the only people who could oppose his climate plan are "those who are afraid of the future." On this one, at least, the President is right.


"First-Time Fraudsters:  A tax credit so silly even a four-year-old can exploit it," The Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703574604574501253942115922.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

It's hard not to laugh when viewing the results of the federal first-time home-buyer tax credit. The credit, worth up to $8,000 for the purchase of a home, has only been available since April of last year. Yet news of the latest taxpayer-funded mortgage scam has traveled fast. The Treasury's inspector general for tax administration, J. Russell George, recently told Congress that at least 19,000 filers hadn't purchased a home when they claimed the credit. For another 74,000 filers, claiming a total of $500 million in credits, evidence suggests that they weren't first-time buyers.

It's hard not to laugh when viewing the results of the federal first-time home-buyer tax credit. The credit, worth up to $8,000 for the purchase of a home, has only been available since April of last year. Yet news of the latest taxpayer-funded mortgage scam has traveled fast. The Treasury's inspector general for tax administration, J. Russell George, recently told Congress that at least 19,000 filers hadn't purchased a home when they claimed the credit. For another 74,000 filers, claiming a total of $500 million in credits, evidence suggests that they weren't first-time buyers.

Among those claiming bogus credits, at least some of them were definitely first-timers. The credit has already been claimed by 500 people under the age of 18, including a four-year-old. This pre-K housing whiz likely bought because mom and dad make too much to qualify for the full credit, which starts to phase out at $150,000 of income for couples, $75,000 for singles.

As a "refundable" tax credit, it guarantees the claimants will get cash back even if they paid no taxes. A lack of documentation requirements also makes this program a slow pitch in the middle of the strike zone for scammers. The Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department are pursuing more than 100 criminal investigations related to the credit, and the IRS is reportedly trying to audit almost everyone who claims it this year.

Speaking of the IRS, apparently its own staff couldn't help but notice this opportunity to snag an easy $8,000. One day after explaining to Congress how many "home-buyers" were climbing aboard this gravy train, Mr. George appeared on Neil Cavuto's program on the Fox Business Network. Mr. George said his staff has found at least 53 cases of IRS employees filing "illegal or inappropriate" claims for the credit. "In all honesty this is an interim report. I expect that the number would be much larger than that number," he said.

The program is set to expire at the end of November, so naturally given its record of abuse, Congress is preparing to extend it. Republican Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia is so pleased with the results that he wants to expand the program beyond first-time buyers and double the income limits.

This is the point in the story when a taxpayer's sense of humor is bound to give way to a different emotion. The credit's cost is running at about $1 billion a month and $15 billion for the year. Also, even when employed by an honest buyer, it's another distortion that drives capital into housing and away from other more productive uses. For America's tens of millions of tax-paying renters, it's another subsidy they provide for their neighbors to be able to sell their houses at a higher price.

While the credit seems to have boosted home sales, many of those sales would have happened anyway and have merely been stolen from the future. Meanwhile, the credit continues to distort the housing market and postpone the day when home prices can find a floor that is a basis for a stable recovery.

More than two years into the housing bust, trillions of dollars in taxpayer losses or guarantees via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and amid an ongoing plague of redefaults in federal programs to prevent foreclosures, politicians are still trying to manipulate housing prices. And leave it to Congress to design a program that even a four-year-old can scam.

 "Congress Scrutinizes Problems in Home Buyer Credit," SmartPros, October 22, 2009 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x67907.xml

Tens of thousands of people may have taken advantage of the first-time home buyer tax credit to defraud the government, an IRS watchdog office said Thursday, in testimony that could jeopardize efforts to extend the popular program.

Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George told a House panel that more than 19,000 people filed 2008 tax returns or amended returns claiming the credit for homes they had not yet purchased. Those claims amounted to $139 million and it was not clear that the IRS planned to go back to verify that those purchases actually took place, he said.

George said his office had identified another $500 million in claims, by some 74,000 taxpayers, where there were indications of prior home ownership.

George's office said the IRS did not require taxpayers to provide documentation to substantiate the purchase of a home. They were told by the tax agency that it did not have the ability to accept such documentation electronically.

He told a House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee that they also found 580 taxpayers under the age of 18 who claimed $4 million in first-time home buyer credit. One was 4 years old.

George said that while the IRS has since taken steps to tighten oversight, "some key controls were missing to prevent an individual from erroneously or fraudulently claiming the credit."

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., chairman of the subcommittee, said he was concerned that the quick IRS response to the new credit came at a cost. "There are possibly hundreds of millions of dollars that have been paid to taxpayers who are not entitled to the credit," he said.

The top Republican on the panel, Rep. Charles Boustany, Jr., of Louisiana, said that while the issue of extending the credit was not the purpose of the hearing, "every time Congress creates a new refundable credit ... the incentive for fraud is magnified."

Linda Stiff, IRS' deputy commissioner for services and enforcement, agreed that "any time that there is an opportunity to receive cash back it tends to attract people that might have an intent to defraud the government." The agency "recognizes that there is potential for both fraud and errors" when a new tax credit is enacted. She said the agency "will vigorously pursue those who filed fraudulent claims."

The home buyer credit was a key element of the $787 billion stimulus package enacted last February. Under the measure, low- and middle-income first-time home buyers purchasing a home between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30 of this year could claim a credit of up to $8,000 on their 2008 or 2009 income tax return.

The Internal Revenue Service says it has processed claims from more than 1.5 million individuals or families. The General Accountability Office, in a report to the subcommittee, said that represented about $10 billion in tax revenue.

With the program scheduled to expire in a month and the housing market's recovery still shaky, there have been various proposals in Congress to extend and expand it.

At one end, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., says the program should be extended for a month while lawmakers take another look at how it is being run. On the other end, Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., with the backing of banking committee chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., wants to extend it through next June 30, and expand it to include all home buyers, at an estimated cost of $16.7 billion.

Housing and Human Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, in testimony to Congress earlier this week, was noncommittal, saying the administration understands the urgency of the housing situation but wants to get a better grasp of the costs involved.

As of the end of September the IRS, according to the GAO report, has frozen more than 110,000 refunds pending civil or criminal examinations, identified 167 criminal schemes and commenced 115 criminal investigations.

George said the IRS has implemented computer programming to reject claims from people who have not yet purchased a new home. He also acknowledged that the agency has installed filters to catch claimants who had entered information on tax returns indicating they may have owned a home in the three previous years. Those could include deductions for home mortgage interest or real estate taxes.

George also noted that through late July his office had identified some 3,200 taxpayers claiming credits totaling more than $20.8 million on tax returns filed with Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, an identifier that is used mainly by resident immigrants and does not indicate whether an individual is authorized to live or work in the U.S. The stimulus act specifically denies the credit to nonresident immigrants.

Stiff stressed that those claims flagged as potentially erroneous may be found, on further examination, to be legitimate.

While the program has widespread support in Congress, there are growing concerns about the costs. The cause, said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., "is a worthy one." But "I hope we can find ways to pay for it."

Critics have also characterized the program as a subsidy for people who would have bought a new home regardless of the tax credit. The National Association of Realtors has estimated that one-fourth of those who have claimed the credit, about 350,000, would not have purchased their homes without the credit.

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

What do you want to bet that Marvene got back into the action? ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze


"Ford's Quality Horrors--and Turnaround--Detailed in Plant Foreman's Book," by Jim Motavalli, BNET, October 30, 2009 --- http://industry.bnet.com/auto/10002809/fords-quality-horrors-and-turnaround-detailed-in-plant-foremans-book/

Bob Dewar, author of the new book A Savage Factory, was general foreman at the Ford Sharonville transmission plant in Ohio in the 1970s, and says he saw upfront the industry’s ethic of waste and meet-the-quota at all costs, quality be damned.

Car and Driver said A Savage Factory details “the savage but darkly funny war waged between the hourly line workers, the factory foreman, management, the UAW, and the ‘Detroit Mafia’a/k/a the ‘suits from Dearborn.’ If One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had taken place in a plant in the 1970s, it would be A Savage Factory.”

So far so typical: Detroit meeting the worst of lowered expectations. But here’s the twist. Dewar, who now works in packaging, took a tour of his old factory recently and found it transformed—and ready for the 21st century. In fact, he affirmed that Ford is now exhibiting the kind of quality control that justifies the automaker’s stellar performance in this week’s 2009 Consumer Reports reliability survey.

According to Dewar in an interview, the Sharonville transmission plant, which had 5,800 employees, made 5,000 C4 trannies a day for the F150 pickup, for the Lincoln line, and just about everything with a Ford badge, including the ill-fated Pinto.

“There was very little concern for quality,” Dewar told me. I had gotten my MBA, worked at Procter and Gamble, and when I arrived at Ford I was appalled at the conditions in the factory, the way the plant was managed, and the quality standards. After I’d been there a couple of months, I was saying, ‘No way can a place be managed like this and stay in business over the long term.’ I would have bet my house and everything I owned that Ford would be bankrupt by 1990. So I began to take detailed notes so I could document how the American auto industry lost out in the global auto race.”

Dewar said the quality standards on paper were not the real story. “On the ground, all that mattered was meeting the quota, and there was many times we turned out junk because we had to meet the numbers. These were transmissions that we knew would fail, and that’s what led to the attempted recall of millions of Ford transmissions because they were reported to jump out of park and into reverse.”

According to Dewar, only an appeal to newly elected President Reagan that the recall would bankrupt Ford Motor Company derailed the recall. “We had a thing called ‘engineering deviation,’” Dewar said. “If a run of transmissions did not meet specifications, then quality control would reject it, but then production would say we had to meet the quota and engineering would then write an ‘engineering deviation’ allowing us to run the lot at those standards. That was done a lot.”

Dewar was laid off in 1979 in one of the auto industry’s periodic crises. Tens of thousands of others were terminated too, and Sharonville went from 5,800 employees to 1,800—retaining only workers with 25 years or more seniority.

But then a funny thing happened. Dewar was given a tour of his old Sharonville factory as research for his new book, and he found it fully modernized and efficient. “It was not even recognizable,” he said. “All the old machines were gone, and they were turning out one heck of a good transmission [for the Lincoln LS and Ford Crown Victoria]. It was apparent that Alan Mulally had hit the ground running like a paratrooper and made changes immediately. It does indeed give me much more confidence about the future of the auto industry,” said Dewar, who still drives a Ford today.

Sharonville was once slated for closing, but now it appears to be likely to stay open–to proudce ultra-modern six-speed transmissions. A revitalized Ford may need the production capacity.

“I wrote the book because I felt that the American people had a right to know how auto plants were run. If Detroit failed, I wanted it on the record that people turned to foreign makes because U.S. cars were junk, made that way in American factories. If we forget the past, we’re doomed to repeat it. I just hope that if we have a recovery and auto sales go through the roof, companies like Ford just go back to their old ways just to make the numbers. But from what I saw, the whole attitude has changed, and much for the better.”

Continued in article

 


Pissing Into a Tornado
Bernanke Urges U.S. to Cut Budget Deficit
Back in Iowa we called this pissing into a Dakota wind
Now in Washington DC it's like pissing into Pelosi's San Francisco westerlies

SmartPros, October 19, 2009 --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/x67887.xml

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke called Monday for the United States to whittle down its record-high budget deficits and for countries like China to get their consumers to spend more.

Bernanke said those moves would help reduce "global imbalances" - uneven trade and investment flows among countries that contributed to the financial crisis.

The Fed chief's remarks to a Fed conference in Santa Barbara, California, came after the government said Friday that the U.S. budget deficit hit a $1.42 trillion deficit for the 2009 budget year that ended Sept. 30. The previous year's deficit was $459 billion.

Bernanke's comments also followed pledges made by leaders of the Group of 20 nations at their summit last month in Pittsburgh to reduce global imbalances, such as Asians savings too much and Americans savings too little. Some improvement has been made in this area, but more progress is needed, he said.

Money from countries with trade surpluses like China has flowed into the United States, a factor thought to have contributed to the low interest rates that helped feed the U.S. housing bubble.

Bernanke said the best way for the United States to increase savings is to steadily reduce the federal budget deficits. He didn't suggest ways to do so.

Fielding questions after his speech, Bernanke said the United States is in a "difficult fiscal situation" and that Congress and the White House must find ways to boost confidence in the U.S. economy and the dollar. He said he thinks those stakes are "very well understood in Washington."

Red ink from the budget deficit reflects costs of spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and on fighting the financial crisis at home. It also reflects the bite of the recession on tax revenue, which plunged.

Countries with trade surpluses, like China and most Asian economies, must get their consumers to spend more and rely less on export-led growth, Bernanke said.

"In large part, such action should focus on boosting consumption," Bernanke said.

The bulk of Bernanke's speech was a scholarly assessment of Asia and how it fared during the global financial crisis, the focus of the Fed's conference. He didn't discuss the state of the U.S. economy or the future course of interest rates.

Bernanke and his colleagues last month held a key bank lending rate at an all-time low near zero and pledged to hold it there for an "extended period." Many economists think that means through the rest of this year and into next year.

Deciding when to boost interest rates and reel in the money plowed into the U.S. economy will be one of the biggest challenges facing the Fed in coming months. Removing those supports too soon could derail the recovery. But leaving them in place for too long risks unleashing inflation.

"Unwinding the stimulative policies introduced during the crisis will require careful judgment," Bernanke said, not only for industrialized countries like the United States but others countries as well.

Internationally, "Asia appears to be leading the global recovery," Bernanke said. "Recent data from the region suggest that a strong rebound is, in fact, under way."

Many economists say they think the U.S. economy - the epicenter of the financial crisis - started growing again in the third quarter at a pace of at least 3 percent and is still expanding in the current quarter. Economic activity contracted in the second quarter at an annualized rate of 0.7 percent, marking a record four straight quarters of decline.

Uneven trade and investment flows among countries contributed not only to the most recent financial crisis but also to others, like the 1990s Asian financial crisis, Bernanke said.

That's why guarding against another is so "extraordinarily urgent," he said.

Bob Jensen's threads on the deficit crisis ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#NationalDebt


A Controversial Teaching Case:  The Market for Lemons

Learning to Love Insider Trading
by Donald J. Boudreaux
Oct 24, 2009
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com

TOPICS: Insider Trading, Market Efficiency

SUMMARY: Donald J. Boudreaux is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a Senior Fellow at the Mercatus Center. He quotes a description of regulation against insider trading as a "cockamamie regulatory system" which keeps asset prices from adjusting as efficiently as possible in a free market. Henry Manne, dean emeritus at George Mason University School of Law, said a few years ago in a radio interview, 'I don't think the [Enron, Global Crossing, and other] scandals would ever have erupted if we had allowed insider trading because there would be plenty of people in those companies who would know exactly what was going on, and who couldn't resist the temptation to get rich by trading on the information, and the stock market would have reflected those problems months and months earlier than they did...."

CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The article is useful as a viewpoint on the recent arrests of corporate leaders accused of relaying insider information to hedge fund Galleon Group and its leader, Raj Rajaratnam. The author views insider trading as beneficial for efficient markets and therefore the overall economy, preferring instead to rely on markets and corporate decisions on what information to allow or disallow insiders to trade.

QUESTIONS: 
1. (Introductory) Define the terms inside information and insider trading.

2. (Introductory) Summarize the argument made by Professor Boudreaux for allowing insider trading to obtain overall improved economic efficiency.

3. (Advanced) Consider improved asset pricing in stock markets to be the benefit of allowing insider trading. What would be the cost associated with this system? Who bears that cost?

4. (Introductory) How would the vast impact of corporate scandals such as Enron and Global Crossing have been prevented by allowing insider trading? Choose one of these corporate scandals and briefly describe the event in your answer.

5. (Advanced) Allowing insider trading bears a cost because some inside information should be protected for the benefit of economic efficiency. What alternative system is suggested in the article to avoid this problem?

Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island

"Learning To Love Insider Trading Here's a hot tip: Want to keep companies honest, make the markets work more efficiently and encourage investors to diversify? Let insiders buy and sell, argues Donald J. Boudreaux," The Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2009 --- Click Here

It's Halloween season, and the scariest demons in the world of business are insider traders, lurking behind every stockbroker's desk and four-star restaurant banquette. They whisper dark corporate secrets into the ears of venal speculators, and inflict pain and agony upon ordinary investors.

Time to stop telling horror stories. Federal agents are wasting their time slapping handcuffs on hedge fund traders like Raj Rajaratnam, the financier charged last week with trading on nonpublic information involving IBM, Google and other big companies. The reassuring truth: Insider trading is impossible to police and helpful to markets and investors. Parsing the difference between legal and illegal insider trading is futile—and a disservice to all investors. Far from being so injurious to the economy that its practice must be criminalized, insiders buying and selling stocks based on their knowledge play a critical role in keeping asset prices honest—in keeping prices from lying to the public about corporate realities.

Prohibitions on insider trading prevent the market from adjusting as quickly as possible to changes in the demand for, and supply of, corporate assets. The result is prices that lie.

And when prices lie, market participants are misled into behaving in ways that harm not only themselves but also the economy writ large.

Remember the 1970s-era price ceiling on gasoline? By causing prices at the pump to lie about the scarcity of oil, that price ceiling led Americans to waste untold hours waiting in lines to fuel their cars. Similar wastes occur when corporate assets are mispriced.

Suppose that unscrupulous management drives Acme Inc. to the verge of bankruptcy. Being unscrupulous, Acme's managers succeed for a time in hiding its perilous financial condition from the public. During this lying time, Acme's share price will be too high. Investors will buy Acme shares at prices that conceal the company's imminent doom. Creditors will extend financing to Acme on terms that do not compensate those creditors for the true risks that they are unknowingly undertaking. Perhaps some of Acme's employees will turn down good job offers at other firms in order to remain at what they are misled to believe is a financially solid Acme Inc.

Eventually, of course, those misled investors, creditors and workers will suffer financial losses. But the economy as a whole loses, too. Capital that would otherwise have been invested in firms more productive than Acme Inc. never gets to those firms. So compared with what would have happened had people not been misled by Acme's deceitfully high share price, those better-run firms don't enhance their efficiencies as much. They don't expand their operations as much. They don't create as many good jobs. Consumers don't enjoy the increased outputs, improved product qualities and lower prices that would otherwise have resulted.

In short, overall economic efficiency is reduced.

It's in the public interest, therefore, that prices adjust as quickly and as completely as possible to underlying economic realities—that prices adjust to convey to market participants as clearly as possible the true state of those realities.

As argued forcefully by Henry Manne in his 1966 book "Insider Trading and the Stock Market," prohibitions on insider trading prevent asset prices from adjusting in this way. Mr. Manne, dean emeritus at George Mason University School of Law, pointed out that when insiders trade on their nonpublic, nonproprietary information, they cause asset prices to reflect that information sooner than otherwise and therefore prompt other market participants to make better decisions.

This achievement can have ramifications beyond a few percentage-point increases in productivity growth.

According to Mr. Manne, corporate scandals such as Enron and Global Crossing would occur much less frequently and impose fewer costs if the government didn't prohibit insider trading. As Mr. Manne said a few years ago in a radio interview, "I don't think the scandals would ever have erupted if we had allowed insider trading because there would be plenty of people in those companies who would know exactly what was going on, and who couldn't resist the temptation to get rich by trading on the information, and the stock market would have reflected those problems months and months earlier than they did under this cockamamie regulatory system we have."

Another potential benefit of lifting the ban on insider trading is explained by Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron: "In a world with no ban, small investors might fear to trade individual stocks and would face a greater incentive to diversify; that is also a good thing."

Not only do insider-trading prohibitions slow economic growth, promote corporate mismanagement and discourage investment diversification, their application also is unavoidably biased.

These prohibitions are meant to prevent all insiders with non-public information from profiting from the use of such information before it becomes public. It follows that unbiased application of these prohibitions should target not only traders whose inside information prompts them to actively buy or sell assets, but also traders whose inside information prompts them not to make asset purchases or sales that they would have made were it not for their inside information.

The insider who learns that the Food and Drug Administration will approve a new blockbuster drug developed by a major drug company, for example, obviously profits from this information if it prompts him to buy 1,000 shares of the company that he otherwise wouldn't have bought. So, too, though, does the insider profit who, upon learning the same information, abandons her plans to sell 1,000 shares of the company. But because insider "nontrading" is undetectable, only the former insider is practically subject to prosecution and punishment.

And because opportunities to profit through insider "non-trading" might well occur with the same frequency as opportunities to profit through insider trading, as many as half of those investment decisions influenced by inside information might be undetectable.

This bias is not only a source of prosecutorial unfairness; its existence casts doubt on the assumption that insider trading is so harmful that it must be treated as a criminal offense. After all, if capital markets continue to function as well as they do given that many investment decisions potentially influenced by inside information are unstoppable because they are undetectable, why believe that the detectable portion of investment decisions influenced by inside information would be harmful if they were legal?

There are, of course, situations in which it is in the interest of both a company and the public for that company to delay the release of information. Such information should be protected as company property.

If, say, a big software firm plans to acquire a small, publicly traded software firm because such a merger would create greater production efficiencies, then an early leak of this information could undermine its merger efforts—and, hence, jeopardize the prospect of achieving greater efficiencies. With the public knowing that the big firm is seeking a controlling interest in the smaller firm, the price of that smaller firm's shares might well rise so high that it is no longer profitable for the big company to acquire a controlling share.

The big company, therefore, has a legitimate interest in preventing insiders from trading on the knowledge that it plans to acquire the smaller firm. And the general public has an interest in permitting the company (and other firms in similar circumstances) to prevent trading on such inside information.

As University of Michigan law professor Adam Pritchard emphasizes, the challenge is to distinguish information that should be treated as proprietary from information that does not warrant such treatment. While this challenge is theoretically easy—protect only that information whose revelation to the public through insider trading would likely reduce overall economic efficiency—practically it is devilishly difficult.

Fortunately, neither elected officials nor government bureaucrats need to bother themselves with solving this challenge.

Discovering what types of inside information are proprietary and which are not proprietary—and, hence, which types of information are appropriate to protect and which not to protect from insider trading—can be left to corporations themselves.

Each corporation should be free to specify in its by-laws the types of information that insiders may not trade on. Any insiders who trade on such information would violate that firm's by-laws and, hence, subject themselves to suit by that firm. Corporations whose by-laws prohibit all or some insider trading will have standing to sue anyone who violates their by-laws. People who trade on inside information not protected by corporate by-laws would be acting perfectly legally.

Won't corporations simply make all of their inside information off-limits to inside trading?

No. The reason is that corporations must compete for that most demanding and vigilant of all clients: capital. Shares in a corporation whose by-laws prevent insiders from trading on, say, knowledge of executive malfeasance will be a riskier—and a less attractive—investment than shares in a corporation that doesn't proscribe such insider trading. Corporations that allow trading on inside knowledge will enjoy a lower cost of capital than will corporations that prevent such trading.

Competition is a beautiful thing: It will punish firms that are either overly inclusive or under-inclusive in the sorts of information that they shield from inside trading.

This decentralized competitive method for selecting information that is proprietary, and thus off-limits to inside traders, isn't perfect. But the relevant comparison isn't with an ideal, perfectly working world. The relevant comparison is with the existing approach: Government officials have decided that all insider trading is unlawful and that anyone accused of insider trading is subject to criminal prosecution.

A less heavy-handed, less bureaucratic, less politicized, and more decentralized method for determining when inside information should, and when it shouldn't, be traded on is preferable to Uncle Sam's blanket proscription.

In addition to taking the responsibility of defining insider trading from political agencies that are inevitably political, allowing proscriptions on insider trading to be defined exclusively by companies permits corporations to customize their insider-trading proscriptions.

Different corporations have different mixes of investments in physical, human, financial and intellectual capital. Corporations also differ in their business plans. Companies whose successes depend heavily upon their financial-investment strategies will be more likely to have stronger and broader prohibitions on insider trading than will companies whose successes depend upon the development of new consumer products.

Or not. The above is simply my best guess. Perhaps there's something I'm missing about companies whose successes depend upon the development of new consumer products that makes them especially vulnerable to insider trading. And that's the point. My "best guess" isn't very reliable, and nor are those of politicians and bureaucrats.

By allowing companies as they compete for capital to experiment with different ways of dealing with insider trading, we would discover which proscriptions work best for some kinds of firms and which proscriptions work best for other kinds of firms.

Relying upon competition and the self-interest of shareholders and creditors (both actual and potential) to discover which types of information are proprietary—and, hence, protected from insider trading—and which types of information are not proprietary removes politics from this vital task. Importantly, it also replaces the unreliable judgments and "best guesses" of political officials with the much more reliable determinations of competition.

Here's a comment that that I sent to the WSJ and is now online among the other comments posted by the WSJ for this article.
Bob Jensen

 

Hi John,

Surely you jest or have not read about "the market for lemons" in which the market is only left with lemons that nobody will buy.

And do you want to buy and sell securities knowing that insiders are selling secret information to the counterparty to your trades that remains hidden on your side of the table?

Do you want to buy new shares of Phizer not knowing what a big seller knows about the huge new cancer prevention drug that Phizer counted on causes brain damage?

Do you want to sell your shares in Exxon without knowing what a big buyer knows about a new slant drilling discovery that allows tapping of the second largest natural gas field in the world (in Pennsylvania and upstate NY).

Yeah its really fair to allow fat cats and drug dealers to buy inside information kept secret from you.

The bottom line is that you and millions of other investors will pull out of the asymmetrical information trading markets.

The Market for Lemons --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_for_Lemons

"The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" is a 1970 paper by the economist George Akerlof. It discusses information asymmetry, which occurs when the seller knows more about a product than the buyer. Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz jointly received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 for their research related to asymmetric information. Akerlof's paper uses the market for used cars as an example of the problem of quality uncertainty. There are good used cars and defective used cars ("lemons"), but because of asymmetric information about the car (the seller knows much more about the problems of the car than the buyer), the buyer of a car does not know beforehand whether it is a good car or a lemon. So the buyer's best guess for a given car is that the car is of average quality; accordingly, he/she will be willing to pay for it only the price of a car of known average quality. This means that the owner of a good used car will be unable to get a high enough price to make selling that car worthwhile. Therefore, owners of good cars will not place their cars on the used car market. This is sometimes summarized as "the bad driving out the good" in the market. "Lemon market" effects have also been noted in other markets, such as used computers and the online dating "market" . There are also parallels in the insurance market, where, unless a mandate for insurance is in place, it is those most likely to need insurance compensation (i.e., those most likely to get in accidents) who tend most to buy insurance, eliminating the advantage of diffusing risk that insurance is supposed to provide (adverse selection).

 

1 Asymmetric information
2 Used cars
3 Criteria
4 Impact on markets
5 Laws in the United States
6 Criticism
7 See also
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links

Bob Jensen's rotten to the core threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm


"SEC Proposes Changes for 'Dark Pools'," SmartPros, October 21, 2009 --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/x67909.xml 

Federal regulators are proposing tighter oversight for so-called "dark pools," trading systems that don't publicly provide price quotes and compete with major stock exchanges.

The Securities and Exchange Commission voted Wednesday to propose new rules that would require more stock quotes in the "dark pool" systems to be publicly displayed. The changes could be adopted sometime after a 90-day public comment period.

The alternative trading systems, private networks matching buyers and sellers of large blocks of stocks, have grown explosively in recent years and now account for an estimated 7.2 percent of all share volume. SEC officials have identified them as a potential emerging risk to markets and investors.

The SEC initiative is the latest action by the agency seeking to bring tighter oversight to the markets amid questions about transparency and fairness on Wall Street. The SEC has floated a proposal restricting short-selling - or betting against a stock - in down markets.

Last month, the agency proposed banning "flash orders," which give traders a split-second edge in buying or selling stocks. A flash order refers to certain members of exchanges - often large institutions - buying and selling information about ongoing stock trades milliseconds before that information is made public.

Institutional investors like pension funds may use dark pools to sell big blocks of stock away from the public scrutiny of an exchange like the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq Stock Market that could drive the share price lower.

"Given the growth of dark pools, this lack of transparency could create a two-tiered market that deprives the public of information about stock prices," SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said before the vote at the agency's public meeting.

Republican Commissioners Kathleen Casey and Troy Paredes, while voting to put out the proposed new rules for public comment, cautioned against rushing to overly broad regulation that could have a negative impact on market innovation and competition.

Dark pools might decide to maintain stock trading at levels below those that trigger required public display under the proposed rules, Paredes said. "Darker dark pools" could be worse than the current situation, he suggested.

When investors place an order to buy or sell a stock on an exchange, the order is normally displayed for the public to view. With some dark pools, investors can signal their interest in buying or selling a stock but that indication of interest is communicated only to a group of market participants.

That means investors who operate within the dark pool have access to information about potential trades which other investors using public quotes do not, the SEC says.

The SEC proposal would require indications of interest to be treated like other stock quotes and subject to the same disclosure rules.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on mutual fund and index fund and insurance company scandals are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#MutualFunds

Bob Jensen's threads on the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH) are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#EMH 

 


Question
Why not bail out everybody?

"Rolling up the TARP The $700 billion for banks has become an all-purpose bailout fund," The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2009 --- Click Here

The Troubled Asset Relief Program will expire on December 31, unless Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner exercises his authority to extend it to next October. We hope he doesn't. Historians will debate TARP's role in ending the financial panic of 2008, but today there is little evidence that the government needs or can prudently manage what has evolved into a $700 billion all-purpose political bailout fund.

We supported TARP to deal with toxic bank assets and resolve failing banks as a resolution agency of the kind that worked with savings and loans in the 1980s. Some taxpayer money was needed beyond what the FDIC's shrinking insurance fund had available. But TARP quickly became a Treasury tool to save failing institutions without imposing discipline (Citigroup) and even to force public capital onto banks that didn't need it. This stigmatized all banks as taxpayer supplicants and is now evolving into an excuse for the Federal Reserve to micromanage compensation.

TARP was then redirected well beyond the financial system into $80 billion in "investments" for auto companies. These may never be repaid but served as a lever to abuse creditors and favor auto unions. TARP also bought preferred stock in struggling insurers Lincoln and Hartford, though insurance companies are not subject to bank runs and pose no "systemic risk." They erode slowly as customers stop renewing policies.

TARP also became another fund for Congress to pay off the already heavily subsidized housing industry by financing home mortgage modifications. Not one cent of the $50 billion in TARP funds earmarked to modify home mortgages will be returned to the Treasury, says the Congressional Budget Office.

As of the end of September, Mr. Geithner was sitting on $317 billion of uncommitted TARP funds, thanks in part to bank repayments. But this sum isn't the limit of his check-writing ability. Treasury considers TARP a "revolving fund." If taxpayers are ever paid back by AIG, GM, Chrysler, Citigroup and the rest, Treasury believes it has the authority to spend that returned money on new adventures in housing or other parts of the economy.

A TARP renewal by Mr. Geithner could thus put at risk the entire $700 billion. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas) and former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins sit on TARP's Congressional Oversight Panel. They warn that the entire taxpayer pot could be converted into subsidies. They are especially concerned about expanding the foreclosure prevention programs that have been failing by every measure.

TARP inspector general Neil Barofsky agrees that the mortgage modifications "will yield no direct return" and notes charitably that "full recovery is far from certain" on the money sent to AIG and Detroit. Mr. Barofsky also notes that since Washington runs huge deficits, and interest rates are almost sure to rise in coming years, TARP will be increasingly expensive as the government pays more to borrow.

Even with the banks, TARP has been a double-edged sword. While its capital injections saved some banks, its lack of transparency created uncertainty that arguably prolonged the panic. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson recently admitted to Mr. Barofsky what everyone figured at the time of the first capital injections. Although they claimed in October 2008 they were providing capital only to healthy banks, Mr. Bernanke now says some of the firms were under stress. Mr. Paulson now admits that he thought one in particular was in danger of failing. By forcing all nine to take the money, they prevented the weaklings from being stigmatized.

Says Mr. Barofsky, "In addition to the basic transparency concern that this inconsistency raises, by stating expressly that the 'healthy' institutions would be able to increase overall lending, Treasury created unrealistic expectations about the institutions' conditions and their ability to increase lending."

The government also endangered one of the banks that they considered healthy at the time. In December, Mr. Paulson pressured Bank of America to complete its purchase of Merrill Lynch. His position is that a failed deal would have hurt both firms, but this is highly speculative. Mr. Barofsky reports that, according to Fed documents, the government viewed BofA as well-capitalized, but officials believed that its tangible common equity would fall to dangerously low levels if it had to absorb the sinking Merrill.

In other words, by insisting that BofA buy Merrill, Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke were spreading systemic risk by stuffing a failing institution into a relatively sound one. And they were stuffing an investment bank into one of the nation's largest institutions whose deposits were guaranteed by taxpayers. BofA would later need billions of dollars more in TARP cash to survive that forced merger, and when that news became public it helped to extend the overall financial panic.

Treasury and the Fed would prefer to keep TARP as insurance in case the recovery falters and the banking system hits the skids again. But the more transparent way to address this risk is by buttressing the FDIC fund that insures bank deposits and resolves failing banks. The political class has twisted TARP into a fund to finance its pet programs and constituents, and the faster it fades away, the better for taxpayers and the financial system.

Bob Jensen's threads on bailing out everybody ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Everybody

 


 


From the Scout Report on October 23, 2009

ManyCam Virtual Webcam 2.4.44 --- http://www.manycam.com/ 

If you're the kind of person you has a need for being in several different places at once, the ManyCam application is worth a look. Essentially, the application allows interested parties the ability to use their webcam with multiple programs simultaneously. The application also allows users to customize their backgrounds with falling snow, flickering flames, or a pelagic view that gives the appearance of being 20,000 leagues under the sea. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 95 and newer and Mac OS X 10.5 and newer.  


Download Accelerator Plus 9.3.0.5 --- http://www.speedbit.com/ 

Download Accelerator Plus works by splitting files into smaller pieces and looking for multiple versions of the same file. As a result, it is able to speed up download times significantly, and it also allows users to pause downloads. The program also gives users the option to blacklist certain suspect sites. Finally, the program also contains a media buffer that helps prevents streaming-video "hiccups". This version is compatible with computers running Windows 98 and newer.


As the World Monopoly Championships come to an end, a curious case involving the popular game is remembered How A Fight Over a Board Game Monopolized an Economist's Life http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125599860004295449.html

 Tourists, Vegas residents bring Monopoly game to Las Vegas Strip
http://snipurl.com/monopolylvstrip  [www_lasvegassun_com] 

Official Site for Monopoly
http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/en_US/

 Anti-Monopoly
http://www.antimonopoly.com/

What's the significance of the Monopoly playing pieces?
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2009/whats-the-significance-of-the-monopoly-playing-pieces 

Computers Generate Monopoly Game Strategy
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/20/arts/computers-generate-monopoly-game-strategy.html

The popularity of certain video games and other entertainment options seems to change with the seasons, but the board game Monopoly has remained tremendously popular with the American public for more than seven decades.

One member of the American public, retired economics professor Ralph Anspach, continues to actively promote his own version of the game. It's titled "Anti-Monopoly", and the controversy surrounding the game has included a lengthy legal battle with the company Parker Brothers that has seen many twists and turns. Among other things, Anspach takes exception to the official company line regarding the original game's origins, which state that Charles B. Darrow developed the game during the Great Depression.

Anspach refers to this creation story as a "corporate fairy tale". Parker Brothers remains less than thrilled about the "Anti-Monopoly" created by Anspach back in the early 1970s. He created the game in order to inform his son about the potential downside of monopolies, and several years afterwards Anspach received a letter from a Parkers Brothers attorney requesting him to stop selling his new game. Over the past three decades, Anspach has attempted to schedule events around past World Monopoly Championships in order to bring attention his cause. After a lengthy and very costly court battle, Anspach was, in a sense, victorious, as the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled in 1979 that the trademark "Monopoly" was generic, and using the name was not in fact a trademark violation. As of this writing, Professor Anspach had not made plans to attend the World Monopoly Championships, which are being held in Las Vegas this week.

The first link will take visitors to a piece from this Tuesday's Wall Street Journal that discusses the ongoing saga surrounding "Anti-Monopoly". The second link whisks interested parties away to a news article from this Monday's Las Vegas Sun that talks about an oversized Monopoly board that's all the rage on the Strip. Moving on, the third link leads to the official Monopoly site. Here, visitors can learn about the various officially sanctioned spinoff products, game history, and of course, Mr. Monopoly. The other side of Monopoly can be found at the fourth site, which is the official homepage of the "Anti-Monopoly" board game. The fifth link leads to a classic piece of reporting from the Straight Dope about the significance of the Monopoly playing pieces. Lastly, the sixth link leads to a 1987 article from the New York Times that profiles "Winning Monopoly", a popular paperback guide to succeeding at Monopoly created by Kaz Darzinskis.

Bob Jensen's threads on applications of the Monopoly game in higher education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Monopoly

Bob Jensen's threads on other edutainment applications ---  
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment


The Greatest Swindle in the History of the World
"The Greatest Swindle Ever Sold," by Andy Kroll, The Nation, May 26, 2009 ---
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/kroll/print

Taibbi vs. Goldman Sachs: Whose side are you on?

The Greatest Swindle in the History of the World
"The Greatest Swindle Ever Sold," by Andy Kroll, The Nation, May 26, 2009 ---
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/kroll/print

Place a barf bag in your lap before watching these videos!
But are they accurate?
In June and July Goldman Sachs put up a pretty good defense.
Now I'm not so sure.

Questions
Why is the SEC still hiding the names of these tremendously lucky naked short sellers in Bear Sterns and Lehman Bros.?
Was it because these lucky speculators were such good friends of Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner?
Or is Matt Taibbi himself a fraud as suggested last summer by Wall Street media such as Business Insider?

Jensen Comment
Evidence suggests that the SEC may be protecting these Wall Street thieves!
Or was all of this stealing perfectly legal? If so why the continued secrecy on the part of the SEC?
Suspicion:  The stealing may have taken place in top investors needed by the government for bailout (Goldman Sachs?)

"Wall Street's Naked Swindle" by Matt Taibbi
Watch the Video at one of the following sites:
You Tube --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqZUbe9KIMs
Google video --- Click Here
Read the complete article --- Click Here

Video Updates for Matt Taibbi
GRITtv: Matt Taibbi & Michael Lux: Goldman's Coup --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFWjXQLDkXg

"Matt Taibbi's Goldman Sachs Story Is A Joke," Joe Weisenthal, Business Insider, July 13, 2009 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/matt-taibbis-goldman-sachs-story-is-a-joke-2009-7

 "Goldman Sachs responds to Taibbi Post," by: Felix Salmon, Rueters, June 26, 2009 ---
Calls Taibbi "Hysterical" ---
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/26/goldman-sachs-responds-to-taibbi/

Others Now Argue it Is Not a Joke
"Taibbi's Naked-Shorting Rage: Goldman's Lobbying, SEC's Fail,
"l by bobswern. Daily Kohs, September 30, 2009 ---
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/9/30/787963/-Taibbis-Naked-Shorting-Rage:-Goldmans-Lobbying,-SECs-Fail 

Now, off we go to Goldman Sachs' notorious lobbying hubris, the historically-annotated, umpteenth oversight failure of the Securities Exchange Commission ("SEC"), and what I'm quickly realizing may well turnout to be the story with regard to it becoming the poster child for regulatory capture and supervisory breakdown as far as our Wall Street-based corporatocracy/oligarchy is concerned. Here's the link to Taibbi's preview blog post: "An Inside Look at How Goldman Sachs Lobbies the Senate."

Yesterday, as described in this lead-in piece from the Wall Street Journal, the SEC held a public roundtable discussion on "New Rules for Lending of Securities." (See link here:  "SEC Weighs New Rules for Lending of Securities.")

SEC Weighs New Rules for Lending of Securities
BY KARA SCANNELL AND CRAIG KARMIN
Wall Street Journal
Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Securities regulators are exploring new regulations for the multitrillion-dollar securities-lending market, the first major step regulators have taken in the area in decades.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro said she wants to shine a light on the "opaque market." After many large investors lost millions in last year's credit crunch, she said, "we need to consider ways to enhance investor-oriented oversight."

The SEC is holding a public round table Tuesday to explore several issues around securities lending, which has expanded into a big moneymaker for Wall Street firms and pension funds. Regulation hasn't kept pace, some industry participants...
 

Enter Taibbi: "An Inside Look at How Goldman Sachs Lobbies the Senate."

An Inside Look at How Goldman Sachs Lobbies the Senate
Matt Taibbi
TruSlant.com
(very early) Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

 

The SEC is holding a public round table Tuesday to explore several issues around securities lending, which has expanded into a big moneymaker for Wall Street firms and pension funds. Regulation hasn't kept pace, some industry participants contend. Securities lending is central to the practice of short selling, in which investors borrow shares and sell them in a bet that the price will decline. Short sellers later hope to buy back the shares at a lower price and return them to the securities lender, booking a profit. Lending and borrowing also help market makers keep stock trading functioning smoothly.

--SNIP--

Later on this week I have a story coming out in Rolling Stone that looks at the history of the Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapses. The story ends up being more about naked short-selling and the role it played in those incidents than I had originally planned -- when I first started looking at the story months ago, I had some other issues in mind, but it turns out that there's no way to talk about Bear and Lehman without going into the weeds of naked short-selling, and to do that takes up a lot of magazine inches. So among other things, this issue takes up a lot of space in the upcoming story.

Naked short-selling is a kind of counterfeiting scheme in which short-sellers sell shares of stock they either don't have or won't deliver to the buyer. The piece gets into all of this, so I won't repeat the full description in this space now. But as this week goes on I'm going to be putting up on this site information I had to leave out of the magazine article, as well as some more timely material that I'm only just getting now.

Included in that last category is some of the fallout from this week's SEC "round table" on the naked short-selling issue.

The real significance of the naked short-selling issue isn't so much the actual volume of the behavior, i.e. the concrete effect it has on the market and on individual companies -- and that has been significant, don't get me wrong -- but the fact that the practice is absurdly widespread and takes place right under the noses of the regulators, and really nothing is ever done about it.

It's the conspicuousness of the crime that is the issue here, and the degree to which the SEC and the other financial regulators have proven themselves completely incapable of addressing the issue seriously, constantly giving in to the demands of the major banks to pare back (or shelf altogether) planned regulatory actions. There probably isn't a better example of "regulatory capture," i.e. the phenomenon of regulators being captives of the industry they ostensibly regulate, than this issue.
 

Taibbi continues on to inform us that none of the invited speakers to this government-sponsored event represented stockholders or companies that could, or have, become targets/victims of naked short-selling. Also "...no activists of any kind in favor of tougher rules against the practice. Instead, all of the invitees are (were) either banks, financial firms, or companies that sell stuff to the first two groups."

Taibbi then informs us that there is only one panelist invited that's in favor of what may be, perhaps, the most basic level of regulatory control with regard to this industry practice: a "simple reform" called "pre-borrowing." Pre-borrowing requires short-sellers to actually possess the stock shares before they're sold.

It's been proven to work, as last summer the SEC, concerned about predatory naked short-selling of big companies in the wake of the Bear Stearns wipeout, instituted a temporary pre-borrow requirement for the shares of 19 fat cat companies (no other companies were worth protecting, apparently). Naked shorting of those firms dropped off almost completely during that time.

The lack of pre-borrow voices invited to this panel is analogous to the Max Baucus health care round table last spring, when no single-payer advocates were invited. So who will get to speak? Two guys from Goldman Sachs, plus reps from Citigroup, Citadel (a hedge fund that has done the occasional short sale, to put it gently), Credit Suisse, NYSE Euronext, and so on.

Taibbi then tells us of increased efforts by industry players, specifically noting Goldman Sachs being at the forefront of this effort,  and having "their presence felt."

Taibbi mentioned that he'd received two completely separate calls from two congressional staffers from different offices--folks whom Taibbi never met before--who felt compelled to inform him of Goldman's actions.

We learn that these folks both commented on how these Goldman folks were lobbying against restrictions on naked short-selling. One of the aides told Taibbi that they had passed out a "fact sheet about the issue that was so ridiculous that one of the other staffers immediately thought to send it to me. "

I would later hear that Senate aides between themselves had discussed Goldman's lobbying efforts and concluded that it was one of the most shameless performances they'd ever seen from any group of lobbyists, and that the "fact sheet" the company had had the balls to hand to sitting U.S. Senators was, to quote one person familiar with the situation, "disgraceful" and "hilarious."

Checkout the whole story on his blog. Apparently, in the upcoming Rolling Stone piece, he gets into the nitty gritty with regard to how naked short-selling brought down both Bear Stearns and Lehman, last  year.

Should be pretty powerful stuff.

Meanwhile, getting back to the SEC roundtable, noted above, strike up the fifth item that I've now documented in the past 48 hours where it's becoming self-evident that our elected representatives and our government agencies aren't even bothering to author the new regulations and legislation that's so needed to prevent a recurrence of events such as those we witnessed through the economic/market catastrophes of the past 24 months; these legislators and high-ranking government officials are actually having the lobbyists navigate the discussion and write the damn stuff, too!

How much worse can it get? I really don't want to know the answer  to that rhetorical question. But, with the inmates running the asylum, we may just find out sooner than we think!

Bob Jensen's threads on noble and ignoble agendas of the bailout machine ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#IgnobleAgendas


Bailing Out Big Banks Engaged in Sleaze and Sex
"Goldman Laid Down with Dogs," by Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review, November 4, 2009 ---
http://www.cjr.org/index.php 
This link was forwarded by my friend Larry.

Dean Starkman has been applauding McClatchy’s series on Goldman Sachs (an Audit funder) for a couple of days now. Add another Audit appreciation today.

McClatchy has been doing what Dean has been calling for for a long time now: Looking much more closely at how Wall Street fueled the mortgage crisis and how it was deeply connected to the shadier parts of the housing industry. Or as McClatchy’s Greg Gordon puts it:

… one of Wall Street’s proudest and most prestigious firms helped create a market for junk mortgages, contributing to the economic morass that’s cost millions of Americans their jobs and their homes.

Today, McClatchy examines Goldman’s relationship with New Century Financial, a firm that was something of the canary in the coalmine of this financial crisis—it was the second-biggest subprime mortgage lender when it went belly-up in April 2007, which was very, very early. In other words, it was one of the worst actors in the whole mess:

Perhaps no mortgage lender was more emblematic of the go-go atmosphere in the sprouting industry that was seizing an outsize share of the home loan market.

 

Traversing the country in private jets and zipping around Southern California in Mercedes Benzes, Porsches and even a Lamborghini, New Century executives reveled as the firm’s annual residential mortgage sales rocketed from $357 million in 1996 to nearly $60 billion a decade later…

What does that have to do with Goldman Sachs and Wall Street?

For $100 million in mortgages, New Century could command fees from Wall Street of $4 million to $11 million, ex-employees told McClatchy. The goal was to close loans fast, bundle them into pools and sell them to generate money for the next round.

 

Inside the mortgage company, the former employees said, pressure was intense to increase the firm’s share of an exploding market for mortgages that depended almost entirely on Wall Street’s seemingly unlimited hunger for bigger, faster returns.

Aha! But wait—why did Wall Street want to buy this trash?

Goldman and other investment banks could put $20 million in the till by taking a 1 percent fee for assembling, securitizing and selling a $2 billion pool of mostly triple-A rated bonds backed by subprime loans — and that was just stage one.

That takes you toThe Giant Pool of Money.” And that was far from the only juice being squeezed from these lemons. Goldman et al got servicing fees and the like, plus they “extended lines of credit to New Century — known as “warehouse loans” — totaling billions of dollars to finance the issuance of more home loans to other marginal borrowers. Goldman Sachs’ mortgage subsidiary gave the firm a $450 million credit line.”

In other words, Wall Street lent the money to the predatory firms to create the shady loans so it could buy them from them, slice them into securities and sell them to the greater fools. This was so profitable there weren’t enough decent loans to be made. So to feed the beast, mortgage lenders came up with disastrous inventions like NINJA loans (No Income, No Jobs, No Assets) and Wall Street, ahem, looked the other way.

It was a vicious circle of profit (virtuous—if you were one of those who lined their pockets through it) and was interrupted only when the underlying loans got so bad that borrowers like the ones with no income, no jobs, and no assets in many instances couldn’t even make a single payment on the loan. Panic!

McClatchy does well to report on the New Century culture, helpful in illustrating the lie-down-with-dogs-get-up-with-fleas thing, writing about the sexualization of some of the work, something reminds us of BusinessWeek’s fascinating story on the subprime industry’s descent into decadence (the sub headline on that one should be all that’s needed to entice you to read that one: “The sexual favors, whistleblower intimidation, and routine fraud behind the fiasco that has triggered the global financial crisis.”)

But it wasn’t just sex. New Century was giving kickbacks to mortgage brokers to get their loans, McClatchy quotes a former top underwriter there as saying.

Let’s not forget, and McClatchy doesn’t, thankfully, that borrowers were the marks here and took it on the chin:

The loans laid out financial terms that protected investors but punished homebuyers. They offered above-market interest rates, typically starting at 8 percent, with provisions that Lee said were “rigged” to guarantee the maximum 3 percent rise in interest rates after two years and almost assuredly another 3 percent increase through ensuing, twice-yearly adjustments.

This is top-notch work by McClatchy. It deserves a wide airing.

Bob Jensen's threads on Bailing Out Big Banks and Mortgage Companies Engaged in Sleaze and Sex ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze


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


Education Tutorials

The Writing Center at Harvard University --- http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/resources.html

Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries

Art Through Time: A Global View --- http://www.learner.org/resources/series211.html

How to embed a YouTube video window into PowerPoint (which can be viewed when online if the link is not broken)
October 24, 2009 message from Rohan Chambers [rohanchambers@ROHANCHAMBERS.COM]

I just learnt this! I know that some of you already know how to do it, but for the others who are interested:

1 (a) Embed a Youtube video into powerpoint that can be viewed while connected to the internet.
  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yzUxNbi1h4

1 (b) You must also view this FAQ video:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR-dz8IMNsw&feature=related

2. Embed a Youtube video into powerpoint that can be viewed while not connected to the internet
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwqyg5uNClY&feature=related

     Ps -The FAQ video above may also be relevant

Regards, 

Rohan Chambers


"The Ph.D. Problem On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal," by Louis Menand, Harvard Magazine, November/December 2009 ---
http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy

Reprinted from The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. Copyright © 2009 by Louis Menand. With the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Bass professor of English Louis Menand is a literary critic and intellectual and cultural historian—author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He is also a scholar of his discipline (he co-edited the modernism volume in the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism) and of the very notion of the academy itself (Menand edited The Future of Academic Freedom, 1997). His new book, The Marketplace of Ideas, to be published in December by W.W. Norton, is informed in part by his recent service as faculty co-leader in the development of Harvard College’s new General Education curriculum, introduced this fall (the book is dedicated to his colleagues in that protracted task).

In this work, Menand examines general education, the state of the humanities, the tensions between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, and, in chapter four, “Why Do Professors All Think Alike?” The following excerpts, from the third and fourth chapters and his conclusion, probe the professionalization of a research-oriented professoriate and the practice and consequences of contemporary doctoral education, and the resulting implications for liberal-arts colleges, universities, and the wider society. ~The Editors

It is easy to see how the modern academic discipline reproduces all the salient features of the professionalized occupation. It is a self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields. The discipline relies on the principle of disinterestedness, according to which the production of new knowledge is regulated by measuring it against existing scholarship through a process of peer review, rather than by the extent to which it meets the needs of interests external to the field. The history department does not ask the mayor or the alumni or the physics department who is qualified to be a history professor. The academic credential is non-transferable (as every Ph.D. looking for work outside the academy quickly learns). And disciplines encourage—in fact, they more or less require—a high degree of specialization. The return to the disciplines for this method of organizing themselves is social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create. Incompetent practitioners are not admitted to practice, and incompetent scholarship is not disseminated.

Since it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers. The academic disciplines effectively monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) the production of knowledge in their fields, and they monopolize the production of knowledge producers as well. This is why, for example, you cannot take a course in the law (apart from legal history) outside a law school. In fact, law schools urge applicants to major in areas outside the law. They say that this makes lawyers well-rounded, but it also helps to ensure that future lawyers will be trained only by other lawyers. It helps lawyers retain a monopoly on knowledge of the law.

Weirdly, the less social authority a profession enjoys, the more restrictive the barriers to entry and the more rigid the process of producing new producers tend to become. You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years. And the more self-limiting the profession, the harder it is to acquire the credential and enter into practice, and the tighter the identification between the individual practitioner and the discipline.

Disciplines are self-regulating in this way for good academic freedom reasons. The system of credentialing and specialization maintains quality and protects people within the field from being interfered with by external forces. The system has enormous benefits, but only for the professionals. The weakest professional, because he or she is backed by the collective authority of the group, has an almost unassailable advantage over the strongest non-professional (the so-called independent scholar) operating alone, since the non-professional must build a reputation by his or her own toil, while the professional’s credibility is given by the institution. That is one of the reasons that people are willing to pay the enormous price in time and income forgone it takes to get the degree: the credential gives them access to the resources of scholarship and to the networks of scholars that circulate their work around the world. The non-academic writer or scholar is largely deprived of those things. This double motive—ensuring quality by restricting access—is reflected in the argument all professions offer as their justification: in order to serve the needs of others properly, professions must be accountable only to themselves.

A national conversation about the condition and future of the Ph.D. has been going on for about 10 years. The conversation has been greatly helped by two major studies: “Re-envisioning the Ph.D.,” which was conducted by researchers at the University of Washington, and “Ph.D.s—Ten Years Later,” which was carried out at Berkeley. Both studies identified roughly the same areas where the investigators thought that reform is desirable in doctoral education. These are: interdisciplinarity, practical training, and time to degree.

The studies were necessary in part because data on graduate education are notoriously difficult to come by. Until very recently, departments tended not to track their graduate students very assiduously. Departments knew how many students they admitted, and they knew how many they graduated; but they did not have a handle on what happened in between—that is, on where students were in their progress through the program. This was partly because of the pattern of benign neglect that is historically an aspect of the culture of graduate education in the United States, and it was partly because when some students finish in four years and other students in the same program finish in 12 years, there is really no meaningful way to quantify what is going on. “Are you still here?” is a thought that often pops into a professor’s head when she sees a vaguely familiar face in the hall. “Yes, I am still here,” is the usual answer, “and I’m working on that Incomplete for you.” There was also, traditionally, very little hard information about where students went after they graduated. Graduate programs today are increasingly asked to provide reports on job placement—although, for understandable reasons, these reports tend to emit an unnatural glow. An employed graduate, wherever he or she happens to be working, is ipso facto a successfully placed graduate, and, at that moment, departmental attention relaxes. What happens to people after their initial placement is largely a matter of rumor and self-report.

English was one of the fields surveyed in the two studies of the Ph.D. It is useful to look at, in part because it is a large field where employment practices have a significance that goes beyond courses for English majors. What the surveys suggest is that if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about 30 years ago, it zoomed straight off a cliff, went into a terrifying fall, grabbed a branch on the way down, and has been clinging to that branch ever since. Things went south very quickly, not gradually, and then they stabilized. Statistically, the state of the discipline has been fairly steady for about 25 years, and the result of this is a kind of normalization of what in any other context would seem to be a plainly inefficient and intolerable process. The profession has just gotten used to a serious imbalance between supply and demand.

Up to half of all doctoral students in English drop out before getting their degrees (something that appears to be the case in doctoral education generally), and only about half of the rest end up with the jobs they entered graduate school to get—that is, tenured professorships. Over the three decades since the branch was grabbed, a kind of protective shell has grown up around this process, a culture of “realism,” in which exogenous constraints are internalized, and the very conditions that make doctoral education problematic are turned into elements of that education. Students are told from the very start, almost from the minute they apply to graduate school, that they are effectively entering a lottery. This has to have an effect on professional self-conception.

The hinge whereby things swung into their present alignment, the ledge of the cliff, is located somewhere around 1970. That is when a shift in the nature of the Ph.D. occurred. The shift was the consequence of a bad synchronicity, one of those historical pincer effects where one trend intersects with its opposite, when an upward curve meets a downward curve. One arm of the pincer has to do with the increased professionalization of academic work, the conversion of the professoriate into a group of people who were more likely to identify with their disciplines than with their campuses. This had two, contradictory effects on the Ph.D.: it raised and lowered the value of the degree at the same time. The value was raised because when institutions began prizing research above teaching and service, the dissertation changed from a kind of final term paper into the first draft of a scholarly monograph. The dissertation became more difficult to write because more hung on its success, and the increased pressure to produce an ultimately publishable work increased, in turn, the time to achieving a degree. That was a change from the faculty point of view. It enhanced the selectivity of the profession.

The change from the institutional point of view, though, had the opposite effect. In order to raise the prominence of research in their institutional profile, schools began adding doctoral programs. Between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased 500 percent, but the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent. On the one hand, a doctorate was harder to get; on the other, it became less valuable because the market began to be flooded with Ph.D.s.

This fact registered after 1970, when the rapid expansion of American higher education abruptly slowed to a crawl, depositing on generational shores a huge tenured faculty and too many doctoral programs churning out Ph.D.s. The year 1970 is also the point from which we can trace the decline in the proportion of students majoring in liberal-arts fields, and, within that decline, a proportionally larger decline in undergraduates majoring in the humanities. In 1970-71, English departments awarded 64,342 bachelor’s degrees; that represented 7.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, including those awarded in non-liberal-arts fields, such as business. The only liberal-arts category that awarded more degrees than English was history and social science, a category that combines several disciplines. Thirty years later, in 2000-01, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in all fields was 50 percent higher than in 1970-71, but the number of degrees in English was down both in absolute numbers—from 64,342 to 51,419—and as a percentage of all bachelor’s degrees, from 7.6 percent to around 4 percent.

Fewer students major in English. This means that the demand for English literature specialists has declined. Even if a department requires, say, a course in eighteenth-century literature of its majors, the fact that there are fewer majors means that there is less demand for eighteenth-century specialists. But although the average number of credit hours devoted to courses in English literature has gone down over the last 20 years, the number-one subject, measured by the credit hours that students devote to it, has remained the same. That subject is English composition. Who teaches that? Not, mainly, English Ph.D.s. Mainly, ABDs—graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations. There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs.

The same trend can be observed in most of the liberal-arts fields. In 1971, 24,801 students received bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and statistics, about 3 percent of all bachelor’s degrees. In 2001, there were 11,171 undergraduate degrees in those fields, less than 1 percent of the total number. Again, it is not that students do not take math; it is that fewer students need specialized courses in mathematics, which are the courses that graduate students are trained to teach. There was a similar fall-off in bachelor’s degrees awarded in the social sciences and history. There was upward movement in only two major liberal-arts areas: psychology and the life sciences. American higher education has been expanding, but the liberal arts part of the system has been shrinking.

The Berkeley study, “Ph.D.s—Ten Years Later,” was based on lengthy questionnaires sent to just under 6,000 people, in six fields, who received Ph.D.s between 1982 and 1985. One of those fields was English. People who received their Ph.D.s in English between 1982 and 1985 had a median time to degree of 10 years. A third of them took more than 11 years to finish, and the median age at the time of completion was 35. By 1995, 53 percent of those with Ph.D.s that had been awarded from 10 to 15 years earlier had tenure; another 5 percent were in tenure-track positions. This means that about two-fifths of English Ph.D.s were effectively out of the profession as it is usually understood. (Some of these people were non-tenure-track faculty, and some were educational administrators. Most of the rest worked in what is called BGN—business, government, and NGOs.) Of those who had tenure, less than a fifth had positions in the kind of research universities in which they had been trained—that is, about 5 percent of all English Ph.D.s. Ph.D.s who began in a tenure-track position took an average of 6.1 years to get tenure. Ph.D.s who began in non-tenure track positions but who eventually received tenure, which about half did, took an average of 8.1 years to get tenure.

The placement rate for Ph.D.s has fluctuated. Between 1989 and 1996, the number of starting positions advertised in history dropped 11 percent; in art and art history, 26 percent; in foreign languages, 35 percent; and in political science, 37 percent. Yet every year during that period, universities gave out more Ph.D.s than they had the year before. It was plain that the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life. That meant if not quite a lost generation of scholars, a lost cohort. This was a period that coincided with attacks on the university for “political correctness,” and it is not a coincidence that many of the most prominent critics of academia were themselves graduate-school dropouts: Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, Richard Bernstein, David Lehman. Apart from their specific criticisms and their politics, they articulated a mood of disenchantment with the university as a congenial place to work.

There were efforts after 1996 to cut down the size of doctoral programs, with apparently some positive effect on the job market. But time-to-degree numbers did not improve. In the sixties, the time-to-degree as a registered student was about 4.5 years in the natural sciences and about six years in the humanities. The current median time to degree in the humanities is nine years. That does not include what is called stop-time, which is when students take a leave or drop out for a semester or longer. And it obviously does not take into account students who never finish. It is not nine years from the receipt of the bachelor’s degree, either; it is nine years as a registered student in a graduate program. The median total time it takes to achieve a degree in the humanities including stop-time is 11.3 years. In the social sciences, it is 10 years, or 7.8 as a registered student. In the natural sciences, time-to-degree as a registered student is just under seven years. If we put all these numbers together, we get the following composite: only about half of the people who enter doctoral programs in English finish them, and only about half of those who finish end up as tenured faculty, the majority of them at institutions that are not research universities. An estimate of the total elapsed time from college graduation to tenure would be somewhere between 15 and 20 years. It is a lengthy apprenticeship.

That it takes longer to get a Ph.D. in the humanities than it does in the social or natural sciences (although those fields also have longer times-to-degree than they once did) seems anomalous, since normally a dissertation in the humanities does not require extensive archival, field, or laboratory work. William Bowen and Neil Rudenstine, in their landmark study In Pursuit of the Ph.D., suggested that one reason for this might be that the paradigms for scholarship in the humanities have become less clear. People are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute, and graduate students therefore spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a novel theoretical twist on canonical texts or an unusual contextualization. Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious. This makes it a challenge for entering scholars to know where to make their mark.

The conclusion of the researchers who compiled the statistics on English Ph.D.s for the Berkeley study was, See? It’s not so bad! The reason they give for this is the reason that is often heard when the issues of time-to-degree and job placement are raised, which is that most people who get Ph.D.s, whether they end up teaching or not, report high job satisfaction. (Job satisfaction is actually higher among Ph.D.s with non-academic careers than it is among academics, partly because spousal problems—commuting marriages—are not as great outside academia.) And the majority say that they do not regret the time they spent in graduate school (although they have a lot of complaints about the quality of the mentorship they received). Students continue to check into the doctoral motel, and they don’t seem terribly eager to check out. They like being in a university, and, since there is usually plenty of demand for their quite inexpensive teaching, universities like having them. Business is good. Where is the problem?

The effort to reinvent the Ph.D. as a degree qualifying people for non-academic as well as academic employment, to make the degree more practical, was an initiative of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation when it was headed by Robert Weisbuch. These efforts are a worthy form of humanitarianism; but there is no obvious efficiency in requiring people to devote 10 or more years to the mastery of a specialized area of scholarship on the theory that they are developing skills in research, or critical thinking, or communication. Professors are not themselves, for the most part, terribly practical people, and practical skills are not what they are trained to teach. They are trained to teach people to do what they do and to know what they know. Those skills and that knowledge are not self-evidently transferable. The ability to analyze Finnegans Wake does not translate into an ability to analyze a stock offering. If a person wanted to analyze stock offerings, he should not waste his time with Joyce. He should go to business school. Or get a job analyzing stock offerings.

It may be that the increased time-to-degree, combined with the weakening job market for liberal arts Ph.D.s, is what is responsible for squeezing the profession into a single ideological box. It takes three years to become a lawyer. It takes four years to become a doctor. But it takes from six to nine years, and sometimes longer, to be eligible to teach college students for a living. Tightening up the oversight on student progress might reduce the time-to-degree by a little, but as long as the requirements remain, as long as students in most fields have general exams, field (or oral) exams, and monograph-length dissertations, it is not easy to see how the reduction will be significant. What is clear is that students who spend eight or nine years in graduate school are being seriously over-trained for the jobs that are available. The argument that they need the training to be qualified to teach undergraduates is belied by the fact that they are already teaching undergraduates. Undergraduate teaching is part of doctoral education; at many institutions, graduate students begin teaching classes the year they arrive. And the idea that the doctoral thesis is a rigorous requirement is belied by the quality of most doctoral theses. If every graduate student were required to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net result would probably be a plus for scholarship.

One pressure on universities to reduce radically the time-to-degree is simple humanitarianism. Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that graduate students constitute a cheap labor force. There are not even search costs involved in appointing a graduate student to teach. The system works well from the institutional point of view not when it is producing Ph.D.s, but when it is producing ABDs. It is mainly ABDs who run sections for lecture courses and often offer courses of their own. The longer students remain in graduate school, the more people are available to staff undergraduate classes. Of course, overproduction of Ph.D.s also creates a buyer’s advantage in the market for academic labor. These circumstances explain the graduate-student union movement that has been going on in higher education since the mid 1990s.

But the main reason for academics to be concerned about the time it takes to get a degree has to do with the barrier this represents to admission to the profession. The obstacles to entering the academic profession are now so well known that the students who brave them are already self-sorted before they apply to graduate school. A college student who has some interest in further education, but who is unsure whether she wants a career as a professor, is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out. The result is a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field, and a widening of the philosophical and attitudinal gap that separates academic from non-academic intellectuals. Students who go to graduate school already talk the talk, and they learn to walk the walk as well. There is less ferment from the bottom than is healthy in a field of intellectual inquiry. Liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy, if only in order to keep on its toes.

And the obstacles at the other end of the process, the anxieties over placement and tenure, do not encourage iconoclasm either. The academic profession in some areas is not reproducing itself so much as cloning itself. If it were easier and cheaper to get in and out of the doctoral motel, the disciplines would have a chance to get oxygenated by people who are much less invested in their paradigms. And the gap between inside and outside academia, which is partly created by the self-sorting, increases the hostility of the non-academic world toward what goes on in university departments, especially in the humanities. The hostility makes some disciplines less attractive to college students, and the cycle continues.

The moral of the story that the numbers tell once seemed straightforward: if there are fewer jobs for people with Ph.D.s, then universities should stop giving so many Ph.D.s—by making it harder to get into a Ph.D. program (reducing the number of entrants) or harder to get through (reducing the number of graduates). But this has not worked. Possibly the story has a different moral, which is that there should be a lot more Ph.D.s, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo. If Ph.D. programs were determinate in length—if getting a Ph.D. were like getting a law degree—then graduate education might acquire additional focus and efficiency. It might also attract more of the many students who, after completing college, yearn for deeper immersion in academic inquiry, but who cannot envision spending six years or more struggling through a graduate program and then finding themselves virtually disqualified for anything but a teaching career that they cannot count on having.

It is unlikely that the opinions of the professoriate will ever be a true reflection of the opinions of the public; and, in any case, that would be in itself an unworthy goal. Fostering a greater diversity of views within the professoriate is a worthy goal, however. The evidence suggests that American higher education is going in the opposite direction. Professors tend increasingly to think alike because the profession is increasingly self-selected. The university may not explicitly require conformity on more than scholarly matters, but the existing system implicitly demands and constructs it.

My aim has been to throw some light from history on a few problems in contemporary higher education. If there is a conclusion to be drawn from this exercise, it might be that the academic system is a deeply internalized one. The key to reform of almost any kind in higher education lies not in the way that knowledge is produced. It lies in the way that the producers of knowledge are produced. Despite transformational changes in the scale, missions, and constituencies of American higher education, professional reproduction remains almost exactly as it was a hundred years ago. Doctoral education is the horse that the university is riding to the mall. People are taught—more accurately, people are socialized, since the process selects for other attributes in addition to scholarly ability—to become expert in a field of specialized study; and then, at the end of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization, they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever: to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors to be better at these things, then we ought to train them differently.

Still, as is the case with every potential reform in academic life, there are perils. The world of knowledge production is a marketplace, but it is a very special marketplace, with its own practices, its own values, and its own rules. A lot has changed in higher education in the last 50 years. What has not changed is the delicate and somewhat paradoxical relation in which the university stands to the general culture. It is important for research and teaching to be relevant, for the university to engage with the public culture and to design its investigative paradigms with actual social and cultural life in view. That is, in fact, what most professors try to do—even when they feel inhibited from saying so by the taboo against instrumentalist and presentist talk. Professors teach what they teach because they believe that it makes a difference. To continue to do this, academic inquiry, at least in some fields, may need to become less exclusionary and more holistic. That may be the road down which the debates I have been describing are taking higher education.

But at the end of this road there is a danger, which is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the public culture. That would be a catastrophe. It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate. Academics need to look to the world to see what kind of teaching and research needs to be done, and how they might better train and organize themselves to do it. But they need to ignore the world’s demand that they reproduce its self-image.

Reprinted from The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. Copyright © 2009 by Louis Menand. With the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

This material may not be reproduced, rewritten, or redistributed without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Fewer students major in English. This means that the demand for English literature specialists has declined. Even if a department requires, say, a course in eighteenth-century literature of its majors, the fact that there are fewer majors means that there is less demand for eighteenth-century specialists. But although the average number of credit hours devoted to courses in English literature has gone down over the last 20 years, the number-one subject, measured by the credit hours that students devote to it, has remained the same. That subject is English composition. Who teaches that? Not, mainly, English Ph.D.s. Mainly, ABDs—graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations. There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs.

The same trend can be observed in most of the liberal-arts fields. In 1971, 24,801 students received bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and statistics, about 3 percent of all bachelor’s degrees. In 2001, there were 11,171 undergraduate degrees in those fields, less than 1 percent of the total number. Again, it is not that students do not take math; it is that fewer students need specialized courses in mathematics, which are the courses that graduate students are trained to teach. There was a similar fall-off in bachelor’s degrees awarded in the social sciences and history. There was upward movement in only two major liberal-arts areas: psychology and the life sciences. American higher education has been expanding, but the liberal arts part of the system has been shrinking.

The Berkeley study, “Ph.D.s—Ten Years Later,” was based on lengthy questionnaires sent to just under 6,000 people, in six fields, who received Ph.D.s between 1982 and 1985. One of those fields was English. People who received their Ph.D.s in English between 1982 and 1985 had a median time to degree of 10 years. A third of them took more than 11 years to finish, and the median age at the time of completion was 35. By 1995, 53 percent of those with Ph.D.s that had been awarded from 10 to 15 years earlier had tenure; another 5 percent were in tenure-track positions. This means that about two-fifths of English Ph.D.s were effectively out of the profession as it is usually understood. (Some of these people were non-tenure-track faculty, and some were educational administrators. Most of the rest worked in what is called BGN—business, government, and NGOs.) Of those who had tenure, less than a fifth had positions in the kind of research universities in which they had been trained—that is, about 5 percent of all English Ph.D.s. Ph.D.s who began in a tenure-track position took an average of 6.1 years to get tenure. Ph.D.s who began in non-tenure track positions but who eventually received tenure, which about half did, took an average of 8.1 years to get tenure.

The placement rate for Ph.D.s has fluctuated. Between 1989 and 1996, the number of starting positions advertised in history dropped 11 percent; in art and art history, 26 percent; in foreign languages, 35 percent; and in political science, 37 percent. Yet every year during that period, universities gave out more Ph.D.s than they had the year before. It was plain that the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life. That meant if not quite a lost generation of scholars, a lost cohort. This was a period that coincided with attacks on the university for “political correctness,” and it is not a coincidence that many of the most prominent critics of academia were themselves graduate-school dropouts: Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, Richard Bernstein, David Lehman. Apart from their specific criticisms and their politics, they articulated a mood of disenchantment with the university as a congenial place to work.

There were efforts after 1996 to cut down the size of doctoral programs, with apparently some positive effect on the job market. But time-to-degree numbers did not improve. In the sixties, the time-to-degree as a registered student was about 4.5 years in the natural sciences and about six years in the humanities. The current median time to degree in the humanities is nine years. That does not include what is called stop-time, which is when students take a leave or drop out for a semester or longer. And it obviously does not take into account students who never finish. It is not nine years from the receipt of the bachelor’s degree, either; it is nine years as a registered student in a graduate program. The median total time it takes to achieve a degree in the humanities including stop-time is 11.3 years. In the social sciences, it is 10 years, or 7.8 as a registered student. In the natural sciences, time-to-degree as a registered student is just under seven years. If we put all these numbers together, we get the following composite: only about half of the people who enter doctoral programs in English finish them, and only about half of those who finish end up as tenured faculty, the majority of them at institutions that are not research universities. An estimate of the total elapsed time from college graduation to tenure would be somewhere between 15 and 20 years. It is a lengthy apprenticeship.

That it takes longer to get a Ph.D. in the humanities than it does in the social or natural sciences (although those fields also have longer times-to-degree than they once did) seems anomalous, since normally a dissertation in the humanities does not require extensive archival, field, or laboratory work. William Bowen and Neil Rudenstine, in their landmark study In Pursuit of the Ph.D., suggested that one reason for this might be that the paradigms for scholarship in the humanities have become less clear. People are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute, and graduate students therefore spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a novel theoretical twist on canonical texts or an unusual contextualization. Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious. This makes it a challenge for entering scholars to know where to make their mark.

The conclusion of the researchers who compiled the statistics on English Ph.D.s for the Berkeley study was, See? It’s not so bad! The reason they give for this is the reason that is often heard when the issues of time-to-degree and job placement are raised, which is that most people who get Ph.D.s, whether they end up teaching or not, report high job satisfaction. (Job satisfaction is actually higher among Ph.D.s with non-academic careers than it is among academics, partly because spousal problems—commuting marriages—are not as great outside academia.) And the majority say that they do not regret the time they spent in graduate school (although they have a lot of complaints about the quality of the mentorship they received). Students continue to check into the doctoral motel, and they don’t seem terribly eager to check out. They like being in a university, and, since there is usually plenty of demand for their quite inexpensive teaching, universities like having them. Business is good. Where is the problem?

The effort to reinvent the Ph.D. as a degree qualifying people for non-academic as well as academic employment, to make the degree more practical, was an initiative of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation when it was headed by Robert Weisbuch. These efforts are a worthy form of humanitarianism; but there is no obvious efficiency in requiring people to devote 10 or more years to the mastery of a specialized area of scholarship on the theory that they are developing skills in research, or critical thinking, or communication. Professors are not themselves, for the most part, terribly practical people, and practical skills are not what they are trained to teach. They are trained to teach people to do what they do and to know what they know. Those skills and that knowledge are not self-evidently transferable. The ability to analyze Finnegans Wake does not translate into an ability to analyze a stock offering. If a person wanted to analyze stock offerings, he should not waste his time with Joyce. He should go to business school. Or get a job analyzing stock offerings.

It may be that the increased time-to-degree, combined with the weakening job market for liberal arts Ph.D.s, is what is responsible for squeezing the profession into a single ideological box. It takes three years to become a lawyer. It takes four years to become a doctor. But it takes from six to nine years, and sometimes longer, to be eligible to teach college students for a living. Tightening up the oversight on student progress might reduce the time-to-degree by a little, but as long as the requirements remain, as long as students in most fields have general exams, field (or oral) exams, and monograph-length dissertations, it is not easy to see how the reduction will be significant. What is clear is that students who spend eight or nine years in graduate school are being seriously over-trained for the jobs that are available. The argument that they need the training to be qualified to teach undergraduates is belied by the fact that they are already teaching undergraduates. Undergraduate teaching is part of doctoral education; at many institutions, graduate students begin teaching classes the year they arrive. And the idea that the doctoral thesis is a rigorous requirement is belied by the quality of most doctoral theses. If every graduate student were required to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net result would probably be a plus for scholarship.

One pressure on universities to reduce radically the time-to-degree is simple humanitarianism. Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that graduate students constitute a cheap labor force. There are not even search costs involved in appointing a graduate student to teach. The system works well from the institutional point of view not when it is producing Ph.D.s, but when it is producing ABDs. It is mainly ABDs who run sections for lecture courses and often offer courses of their own. The longer students remain in graduate school, the more people are available to staff undergraduate classes. Of course, overproduction of Ph.D.s also creates a buyer’s advantage in the market for academic labor. These circumstances explain the graduate-student union movement that has been going on in higher education since the mid 1990s.

But the main reason for academics to be concerned about the time it takes to get a degree has to do with the barrier this represents to admission to the profession. The obstacles to entering the academic profession are now so well known that the students who brave them are already self-sorted before they apply to graduate school. A college student who has some interest in further education, but who is unsure whether she wants a career as a professor, is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out. The result is a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field, and a widening of the philosophical and attitudinal gap that separates academic from non-academic intellectuals. Students who go to graduate school already talk the talk, and they learn to walk the walk as well. There is less ferment from the bottom than is healthy in a field of intellectual inquiry. Liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy, if only in order to keep on its toes.

And the obstacles at the other end of the process, the anxieties over placement and tenure, do not encourage iconoclasm either. The academic profession in some areas is not reproducing itself so much as cloning itself. If it were easier and cheaper to get in and out of the doctoral motel, the disciplines would have a chance to get oxygenated by people who are much less invested in their paradigms. And the gap between inside and outside academia, which is partly created by the self-sorting, increases the hostility of the non-academic world toward what goes on in university departments, especially in the humanities. The hostility makes some disciplines less attractive to college students, and the cycle continues.

The moral of the story that the numbers tell once seemed straightforward: if there are fewer jobs for people with Ph.D.s, then universities should stop giving so many Ph.D.s—by making it harder to get into a Ph.D. program (reducing the number of entrants) or harder to get through (reducing the number of graduates). But this has not worked. Possibly the story has a different moral, which is that there should be a lot more Ph.D.s, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo. If Ph.D. programs were determinate in length—if getting a Ph.D. were like getting a law degree—then graduate education might acquire additional focus and efficiency. It might also attract more of the many students who, after completing college, yearn for deeper immersion in academic inquiry, but who cannot envision spending six years or more struggling through a graduate program and then finding themselves virtually disqualified for anything but a teaching career that they cannot count on having.

It is unlikely that the opinions of the professoriate will ever be a true reflection of the opinions of the public; and, in any case, that would be in itself an unworthy goal. Fostering a greater diversity of views within the professoriate is a worthy goal, however. The evidence suggests that American higher education is going in the opposite direction. Professors tend increasingly to think alike because the profession is increasingly self-selected. The university may not explicitly require conformity on more than scholarly matters, but the existing system implicitly demands and constructs it.

My aim has been to throw some light from history on a few problems in contemporary higher education. If there is a conclusion to be drawn from this exercise, it might be that the academic system is a deeply internalized one. The key to reform of almost any kind in higher education lies not in the way that knowledge is produced. It lies in the way that the producers of knowledge are produced. Despite transformational changes in the scale, missions, and constituencies of American higher education, professional reproduction remains almost exactly as it was a hundred years ago. Doctoral education is the horse that the university is riding to the mall. People are taught—more accurately, people are socialized, since the process selects for other attributes in addition to scholarly ability—to become expert in a field of specialized study; and then, at the end of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization, they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever: to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors to be better at these things, then we ought to train them differently.

Still, as is the case with every potential reform in academic life, there are perils. The world of knowledge production is a marketplace, but it is a very special marketplace, with its own practices, its own values, and its own rules. A lot has changed in higher education in the last 50 years. What has not changed is the delicate and somewhat paradoxical relation in which the university stands to the general culture. It is important for research and teaching to be relevant, for the university to engage with the public culture and to design its investigative paradigms with actual social and cultural life in view. That is, in fact, what most professors try to do—even when they feel inhibited from saying so by the taboo against instrumentalist and presentist talk. Professors teach what they teach because they believe that it makes a difference. To continue to do this, academic inquiry, at least in some fields, may need to become less exclusionary and more holistic. That may be the road down which the debates I have been describing are taking higher education.

But at the end of this road there is a danger, which is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the public culture. That would be a catastrophe. It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate. Academics need to look to the world to see what kind of teaching and research needs to be done, and how they might better train and organize themselves to do it. But they need to ignore the world’s demand that they reproduce its self-image.

Reprinted from The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. Copyright © 2009 by Louis Menand. With the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

This material may not be reproduced, rewritten, or redistributed without the prior written permission of the publisher.

. . .

Still, as is the case with every potential reform in academic life, there are perils. The world of knowledge production is a marketplace, but it is a very special marketplace, with its own practices, its own values, and its own rules. A lot has changed in higher education in the last 50 years. What has not changed is the delicate and somewhat paradoxical relation in which the university stands to the general culture. It is important for research and teaching to be relevant, for the university to engage with the public culture and to design its investigative paradigms with actual social and cultural life in view. That is, in fact, what most professors try to do—even when they feel inhibited from saying so by the taboo against instrumentalist and presentist talk. Professors teach what they teach because they believe that it makes a difference. To continue to do this, academic inquiry, at least in some fields, may need to become less exclusionary and more holistic. That may be the road down which the debates I have been describing are taking higher education.

But at the end of this road there is a danger, which is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the public culture. That would be a catastrophe. It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate. Academics need to look to the world to see what kind of teaching and research needs to be done, and how they might better train and organize themselves to do it. But they need to ignore the world’s demand that they reproduce its self-image.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on some doctoral programs in need of big changes ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DoctoralProgramChange

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


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Video Special This Week --- http://useloos.com/mediaplayer/?itemid=8715
Amazing Nature (I mean really amazing)Birth of a Baby Elephant
Especially note what the mother does when her newborn appears to be dead on the floor!

The Challenger Expedition In 1870 ---
http://hercules.kgs.ku.edu/hexacoral/expedition/challenger_1872-1876/challenger.html
Wyville Thomson, Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University, persuaded the Royal Society of London to ask the British Government to furnish one of Her Majesty's ships for a prolonged voyage of exploration across the oceans of the globe. On 7 December 1872, the expedition put to sea from Sheerness aboard the corvette H.M.S. Challenger.

Introducing the AMSER Science Reader Monthly (free) --- http://www.amser.org/AMSER--ScienceReader.php

BioSciEdNet --- http://www.biosciednet.org/portal/

American Museum of Natural History: Division of Anthropology --- http://anthro.amnh.org/

American Museum of Natural History: Science http://www.amnh.org/science/?src=toolbar

The Sports Legacy Institute [Brain Damage from Football] --- http://sportslegacy.org/

Food Timeline --- http://www.foodtimeline.org/index.html

McIntosh Cookery Collection --- http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/cookbooks/

Design USA: Contemporary Innovation [Flash Player] http://exhibitions.cooperhewitt.org/Design-USA/

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


Social Science and Economics Tutorials

If you missed Sixty Minutes on CBS on November 8, you might still be able to download a really frightening video on how foreign enemies and dubious friends are leaving back door openings into virtually all of our important industrial, military, and other government sites, including advanced weapons systems and the national power grid.
"Sabotaging The System," CBS Sixty Minutes, November 8, 2009 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5578986n&tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel

Yale School of Management Cosponsors NYC Roundtable Discussion on the Financial Crisis (Full Video Now Available_
http://mba.yale.edu/news_events/CMS/Articles/6608.shtml 

Hoover Digest --- http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/

American Museum of Natural History: Division of Anthropology --- http://anthro.amnh.org/

The Archaeology Channel Video Guide --- http://www.archaeologychannel.org/content/videoguide.asp

Archaeological Collage (features photographs)  http://www.reed.edu/~cosmo/AC.html 

Interactive Dig: El Carrizal --- http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/veracruz/
Located in south-central Veracruz state, the El Carrizal site in Mexico is one of the latest archaeological excavation sites profiled on the Archaeology magazine website. Offered as part of their "Interactive Dig"

"The Financial Crisis as a Symbol of the Failure of Academic Finance? (A Methodological Digression)," by Hans J. Blommestein, SSRN, September 23, 2009 --- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1477399 

The failure of academic finance can be considered one of the symbols of the financial crisis. Two important underlying reasons why academic finance models systematically fail to account for real-world phenomena follow directly from two conventions: (a) treating economics not as a 'true' social science (but as a branch of applied mathematics inspired by the methodology of classical physics); and (b) using economic models as if the empirical content of economic theories is not very low. Failure to understand and appreciate the inherent weaknesses of these 'conventions' had fatal consequences for the use and interpretation of key academic finance concepts and models by market practitioners and policymakers. Theoretical constructs such as the efficient markets hypothesis, rational expectations, and market completeness were too often treated as intellectual dogmas instead of (parts of) falsifiable hypotheses. The situation of capture via dominant intellectual dogmas of policymakers, investors, and business managers was made worse by sins of omission - the failure of academics to communicate the limitations of their models and to warn against (potential) misuses of their research - and sins of commission - introducing (often implicitly) ideological or biased features in research programs Hence, the deeper problem with finance concepts such as the 'efficient markets hypothesis' and 'ratex theory' is not that they are based on assumptions that are considered as not being 'realistic'. The real issue at stake with academic finance is not a quarrel about the validity of the assumption of rational behavior but the inherent semantical insufficiency of economic theories that implies a low empirical content (and a high degree of specification uncertainty). This perspective makes the scientific approach advocated by Friedman and others less straightforward. In addition, there is wide-spread failure to incorporate the key implications of economics as a social science. As response to these 'weaknesses' and challenges, five suggested principles or guidelines for future research programmes are outlined.

Economics and Finance Videos of Possible Interest

Great PBS Video on the Crash of 1929 --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/crash/

Video:  Yale School of Management Cosponsors NYC Roundtable Discussion on the Financial Crisis (Full Video Now Available)
http://mba.yale.edu/news_events/CMS/Articles/6608.shtml 

Video:  "Advice for President Obama" from the Department of Economics at Cornell University ---
http://www.cornell.edu/video/?VideoID=410

Evan Davis talks to Warren Buffett --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8322957.stm

Video: Fora.Tv on Institutional Corruption & The Economy Of Influence ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-foratv-on-institutional-corruption-the-economy-of-influence/

"Common Objections to Capitalism," by Art Carden, Mises Daily, November 3, 2009 ---
http://mises.org/story/3771
This is a summary of a longer audio lecture available on MP3 (may be slow loading) from
http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/MU2009/MU2009_Carden_07-30-2009.mp3

Bob Jensen's threads on the economic crisis are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and Philosophy tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social


Law and Legal Studies

Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law


Math Tutorials

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


History Tutorials

"Common Objections to Capitalism," by Art Carden, Mises Daily, November 3, 2009 ---
http://mises.org/story/3771
This is a summary of a longer audio lecture available on MP3 (may be slow loading) from
http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/MU2009/MU2009_Carden_07-30-2009.mp3

Great PBS Video on the Crash of 1929 --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/crash/
American Experience: The Crash of 1929 (video) ---  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/crash/

Yale School of Management Cosponsors NYC Roundtable Discussion on the Financial Crisis (Full Video Now Available)
http://mba.yale.edu/news_events/CMS/Articles/6608.shtml 

Lake Champlain Maritime Museum [Quick Time] --- http://www.lcmm.org/index.htm

The Challenger Expedition In 1870 ---
http://hercules.kgs.ku.edu/hexacoral/expedition/challenger_1872-1876/challenger.html
Wyville Thomson, Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University, persuaded the Royal Society of London to ask the British Government to furnish one of Her Majesty's ships for a prolonged voyage of exploration across the oceans of the globe. On 7 December 1872, the expedition put to sea from Sheerness aboard the corvette H.M.S. Challenger.

From PBS
Independent Lens: Butte, America [Flash Player] http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/butte-america/

Art Through Time: A Global View --- http://www.learner.org/resources/series211.html

Canadian Printer and Publisher (history of various trades and industries) ---  http://link.library.utoronto.ca/cpp/
You can search for various industry terms such as accounting, cost, bookkeeping, etc.

Online Archive of the Japanese American Relocation during World War II http://departments.oxy.edu/digitalarch/web/index.htm 

Hoover Digest --- http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/

American Museum of Natural History: Division of Anthropology --- http://anthro.amnh.org/

American Museum of Natural History: Science http://www.amnh.org/science/?src=toolbar

The Archaeology Channel Video Guide --- http://www.archaeologychannel.org/content/videoguide.asp

Archaeological Collage (features photographs)  http://www.reed.edu/~cosmo/AC.html 

Interactive Dig: El Carrizal --- http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/veracruz/
Located in south-central Veracruz state, the El Carrizal site in Mexico is one of the latest archaeological excavation sites profiled on the Archaeology magazine website. Offered as part of their "Interactive Dig"

The Maritime Dimension of International Security: Terrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United States ---  http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG697.pdf

Food Timeline --- http://www.foodtimeline.org/index.html

McIntosh Cookery Collection --- http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/cookbooks/

Design USA: Contemporary Innovation [Flash Player] http://exhibitions.cooperhewitt.org/Design-USA/

"Brief history of men's underwear," by Ethan Trex, CNN, October 27, 2009 ---     http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/homestyle/10/27/mf.men.underwear.history/index.html

Some Accounting History Sites

Bob Jensen's Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
 

Accounting History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) --- http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.

MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting --- http://maaw.info/

Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/

Sage Accounting History --- http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269

A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm 

A nice timeline of accounting history --- http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING

From Texas A&M University
Accounting History Outline --- http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html

Canadian Printer and Publisher (history of various trades and industries) ---  http://link.library.utoronto.ca/cpp/
You can search for various industry terms such as accounting, cost, bookkeeping, etc.

Bob Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds

History of Fraud in America --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

 

Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm  


Language Tutorials

Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages


Music Tutorials

 

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


Writing Tutorials

The Writing Center at Harvard University --- http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/resources.html

Psychologists Go Manic:  Much Ado About Writing Style
Hell hath no fury like a style-guide user scorned. When the American Psychological Association published the sixth edition of its Publication Manual, in July, it didn't take long for APA style mavens to pick up on errors and inconsistencies—and to start complaining on e-mail lists and blogs . . . The association published online an eight-page list of corrections, along with a set of corrected sample papers. That wasn't enough to satisfy purchasers who considered their new manuals faulty merchandise. At least one scholar, John D. Foubert, an associate professor in the School of Educational Studies at Oklahoma State University, called for a boycott of the edition by scholars, instructors, and journal editors. The cumulative outrage finally carried the day. The association has just announced that it will "recycle" remaining softcover copies of the sixth edition. Anyone who gets in touch with the association between November 2 and December 15 and asks for a replacement will receive a free copy of the emended second printing, according to Rhea Faberman, director of communications. (She recommends that people contact the APA's service center to submit those requests.)
Jennifer Howard, "Hot Type: Style Guide's Errors Prompt a Recall and Doubts About Manuals' Value," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 27, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Style-Guides-Errors-Prompt-a/48947/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries


Updates from WebMD --- http://www.webmd.com/

October 27, 2009

October 28, 2009

October 29, 2009

October 13, 2009

October 31, 2009

November 2, 2009

November 4, 2009

November 5, 2009

November 6, 2009

November 7, 2009

November 9, 2009


The Sports Legacy Institute [Brain Damage from Football] --- http://sportslegacy.org/


Not intended to be humorous
"New Cure for 4-Hour Erections? Orphan Drug Stops Priapism, Reverses Penis Damage in Mice," By Daniel J. DeNoon, WebMD, November 4, 2009 ---
http://www.webmd.com/sexual-conditions/news/20091104/new-cure-for-4-hour-erections

Men suffering penis pain and damage from erections lasting longer than four hours may benefit from an orphan drug used to treat severe "bubble boy" immune deficiency, mouse studies suggest.

The condition, called priapism, seems funny only to those who have never suffered it. More than 40% of men with sickle-cell anemia suffer priapism. It also strikes some men with diabetes and can be a side effect of erectile dysfunction drugs -- particularly those injected into the penis. It's not a joke -- it's a medical emergency.

Swelling from priapism can be exquisitely painful. But that's not the worst of it. Erections lasting longer than four hours cut off the supply of fresh blood to the penis. The result: Penile fibrosis, the formation of scar tissue in the main body of the penis. This often means permanent erectile dysfunction.

Perhaps not any more. While studying mice missing the gene that malfunctions in kids with severe combined immune deficiency (SCID), Yang Xia, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Texas, Houston, noticed that the mice suffered priapism and penile fibrosis.

Replacing the enzyme made by the gene -- adenosine deaminase -- not only relieved priapism, but markedly reduced the animals' penile fibrosis.

"We identified a new application to treat priapism with a drug that is commonly used to treat SCID," Xia tells WebMD. "When we treated the mice, we do not see any side effects or any abnormality. Actually, the mice look better. We can quickly correct the priapism and prevent and treat penile fibrosis."

Current treatments for priapism are not optimal, says Harinder Juneja, MD, a University of Texas hematologist who treats many patients with sickle-cell disease.

If drug injections can't tighten the muscle that controls blood flow to the penis, the excess blood must be withdrawn from the main body of the penis. To do this, doctors may withdraw the blood with a needle or surgically install a shunt to divert blood flow from the penis. Aside from being painful, these treatments often fail to prevent penile fibrosis.

Now Xia and colleagues have found that priapism and penile fibrosis result from excess amounts of adenosine in the blood.

"The discovery of excess adenosine as the causative factor for both prolonged penile erection and penile fibrosis in mice opens up the possibility of treating and even preventing this painful and dangerous disorder," they conclude.

Juneja says he's trying to get a clinical trial under way. The good news is that the treatment, PEG-ADA, is already known to be safe in humans. The bad news is that it is very rarely used. As a consequence, it's an extremely expensive "orphan drug" produced with government assistance.

"This will take a while to get to the stage of a treatment," Juneja warns.

Xia and colleagues report their findings in the Oct. 26 issue of The FASEB Journal.

 




Forwarded by Paula

Aprons
My Nana made all her aprons. In addition to the two patterns below, she also bought Simplicity Patterns and Butterick Patterns.

Remember making an apron in Home Ec? Read below:

The History of 'APRONS'

I don't think our kids know what an apron is. The principal use of Grandma's apron was to protect the dress underneath, because she only had a few, it was easier to wash aprons than dresses and they used less material, but along with that, it served as a potholder for removing hot pans from the oven.

It was wonderful for drying children's tears, and on occasion was even used for cleaning out dirty ears. From the chicken coop, the apron was used for carrying eggs, fussy chicks, and sometimes half-hatched eggs to be finished in the warming oven.

When company came, those aprons were ideal hiding places for shy kids.

And when the weather was cold grandma wrapped it around her arms. Those big old aprons wiped many a perspiring brow, bent over the hot wood stove.

Chips and kindling wood were brought into the kitchen in that apron.

From the garden, it carried all sorts of vegetables. After the peas had been shelled, it carried out the hulls.

In the fall, the apron was used to bring in apples that had fallen from the trees.

When unexpected company drove up the road, it was surprising how much furniture that old apron could dust in a matter of seconds.

When dinner was ready, Grandma walked out onto the porch, waved her apron, and the menfolks knew it was time to come in from the fields to dinner.

It will be a long time before someone invents something that will replace that 'old-time apron' that served so many purposes.

Send this to those who would know (and love) the story about Grandma's aprons.

Changing Times:

Grandma used to set her hot baked apple pies on the window sill to cool. Her granddaughters set theirs on the window sill to thaw.

They would go crazy now trying to figure out how many germs were on that apron.

I don't think I ever caught anything from an apron.




Forwarded by Gene and Joan
Freedom and Jeff --- http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/freedom.asp
Freedom and I have been together 10 years this summer. She came in as a baby in 1998 with two broken wings. Her left wing doesn't open all the way even after surgery, it was broken in 4 places. She's my baby.

When Freedom came in she could not stand and both wings were broken. She was emaciated and covered in lice. We made the decision to give her a chance at life, so I took her to the vets office. From then on, I was always around her. We had her in a huge dog carrier with the top off, and it was loaded up with shredded newspaper for her to lay in. I used to sit and talk to her, urging her to live, to fight; and she would lay there looking at me with those big brown eyes. We also had to tube feed her for weeks. This went on for 4-6 weeks, and by then she still couldn't stand. It got to the point where the decision was made to euthanize her if she couldn't stand in a week. You know you don't want to cross that line between torture and rehab, and it looked like death was winning. She was going to be put down that Friday, and I was supposed to come in on that Thursday afternoon. I didn't want to go to the center that Thursday, because I couldn't bear the thought of her being euthanized; but I went anyway, and when I walked in everyone was grinning from ear to ear. I went immediately back to her cage; and there she was, standing on her own, a big beautiful eagle. She was ready to live. I was just about in tears by then. That was a very good day.

We knew she could never fly, so the director asked me to glove train her. I got her used to the glove, and then to jesses, and we started doing education programs for schools in western Washington . We wound up in the newspapers, radio (believe it or not) and some TV. Miracle Pets even did a show about us.

In the spring of 2000, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I had stage 3, which is not good (one major organ plus everywhere), so I wound up doing 8 months of chemo. Lost the hair - the whole bit. I missed a lot of work. When I felt good enough, I would go to Sarvey and take Freedom out for walks. Freedom would also come to me in my dreams and help me fight the cancer. This happened time and time again.

Fast forward to November 2000, the day after Thanksgiving. I went in for my last checkup. I was told that if the cancer was not all gone after 8 rounds of chemo, then my last option was a stem cell transplant. Anyway, they did the tests; and I had to come back Monday for the results. I went in Monday, and I was told that all the cancer was gone.

Jensen Update
The above story commenced in 1998. In an unrelated incident a bald eagle was shot on November 6, 2009 in Millsford, NH ---
http://www.examiner.com/x-13230-Manchester-Bird-Watching-Examiner~y2009m11d6-Bald-eagle-shot-in-Millsfield-NH

 New Hampshire Fish and Game reported on Friday that a juvenile bald eagle has been shot in Millsfield, NH. The shooting resulted in a broken wing and other injuries to the bald eagle which is currently being cared for by an authorized animal rehabilitator. It is expected that the bald eagle will recover enough to fly again and will eventually be released back into the wild.

The injured eagle was discovered by local sportsmen in Wildlife Management Area B adjacent to the Millsfield Loop Road. Officials estimate that the eagle was shot on or about October 22nd, 2009 in the area in which it was found. Shooting or otherwise harming a bald eagle is a crime under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act as well as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. New Hampshire Fish and Game enforcement officers will be working with federal agents to investigate the incident and try to bring the guilty party to justice.

The juvenile bald eagle is harder to identify than the adult since it does not develop the characteristic white feathers on its head until its fifth year. A misidentification, however, is not considered disculpatory in terms of the violation of the law.

A $2,500 cash reward is being offered for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the shooting of the bald eagle. Anyone with information about the shooting of the juvenile bald eagle should call the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department Operation Game Thief 24-hour hotline at: 1-800-344-4262, or make an online report at http://www.HuntNH.com/OGT. Tipsters can remain anonymous.




Forwarded by Dr. Wolff

I would never trade my amazing friends, my wonderful life, my loving family for less gray hair or a flatter belly. As I've aged, I've become kinder to myself, and less critical of myself. I've become my own friend. I don't chide myself for eating that extra cookie, or for not making my bed, or for buying that silly cement gecko that I didn't need, but looks so avant garde on my patio. I am entitled to a treat, to be messy, to be extravagant.

I have seen too many dear friends leave this world too soon; before they understood the great freedom that comes with aging.

Whose business is it if I choose to read or play on the computer until 4 AM and sleep until noon? I will dance with myself to those wonderful tunes of the 60 &70's, and if I, at the same time, wish to weep over a lost love ... I will.

I will walk the beach in a swim suit that is stretched over a bulging body, and will dive into the waves with abandon if I choose to, despite the pitying glances from the jet set.

They, too, will get old. I know I am sometimes forgetful. But there again, some of life is just as well forgotten. And I eventually remember the important things.

Sure, over the years my heart has been broken. How can your heart not break when you lose a loved one, or when a child suffers, or even when somebody's beloved pet gets hit by a car? But broken hearts are what give us strength and understanding and Compassion. A heart never broken is pristine and sterile and will never know the joy of being imperfect.

I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning gray, and to have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep grooves on my face. So many have never laughed, and so many have died before their hair could turn silver.

As you get older, it is easier to be positive. You care less about what other people think. I don't question myself anymore. I've even earned the right to be wrong.

So, to answer your question, I like being old. It has set me free. I like the person I have become. I am not going to live forever, but while I am still here, I will not waste time lamenting what could have been, or worrying about what will be. And I shall eat dessert every single day(if I feel like it).
MAY OUR FRIENDSHIP NEVER COME APART ESPECIALLY WHEN IT'S STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART!

MAY YOU ALWAYS HAVE A RAINBOW OF SMILES ON YOUR FACE AND IN YOUR HEART FOREVER AND EVER! FRIENDS FOREVER!




An old one forwarded by Maureen

Until a child tells you what they are thinking, we can't even begin to imagine how their mind is working.... Little Zachary was doing very badly in math. His parents had tried everything...tutors, mentors, flash cards, special learning centers. In short, everything they could think of to help his math.

Finally, in a last ditch effort, they took Zachary down and enrolled him In the local Catholic school. After the first day, little Zachary came home with a very serious look on his face. He didn't even kiss his mother hello. Instead, he went straight to his room and started studying.

Books and papers were spread out all over the room and little Zachary was hard at work. His mother was amazed. She called him down to dinner...

To her shock, the minute he was done, he marched back to his room without a word, and in no time, he was back hitting the books as hard as before.

This went on for some time, day after day, while the mother tried to understand what made all the difference.

Finally, little Zachary brought home his report Card.. He quietly laid it on the table, went up to his room and hit the books. With great trepidation, His Mom looked at it and to her great surprise, Little Zachary got an 'A' in math. She could no longer hold her curiosity.. She went to his room and said, 'Son, what was it? Was it the nuns?' Little Zachary looked at her and shook his head, no.. 'Well, then,' she replied, Was it the books, the discipline, the structure, the uniforms? WHAT WAS IT?'

Little Zachary looked at her and said, 'Well, on the first day of school when I saw that guy nailed to the plus sign, I knew they weren't fooling around.'

 

 




I can't remember who sent me this. I think it was Will somebody.

Someone had to remind me, so I'm reminding you, too. Don't laugh....

It is all true!

Perks of reaching 50 or being over 60 And heading towards 70!

1. Kidnappers are not very interested in you.

2. In a hostage situation, you are likely to be released first.

3. No one expects you to run -- anywhere.

4. People call at 9 PM and ask, 'Did I wake you?'

5. People no longer view you as a hypochondriac.

6. There is nothing left to learn the hard way.

7. Things you buy now won't wear out.

8. You can eat supper at 4 PM.

9. You can live without sex but not your glasses.

10. You get into heated arguments about pension plans.

11. You no longer think of speed limits as a challenge.

12. You quit trying to hold your stomach in no matter who walks into the room.

13. You sing along with elevator music.

14. Your eyes won't get much worse.

15. Your investment in health insurance is finally beginning to pay off.

16. Your joints are more accurate meteorologists than the national weather service.

17. Your secrets are safe with your friends because they can't remember them either.

18.

Your supply of brain cells is finally down to a manageable size.

19. You can't remember who sent you this list. 

Forward this to everyone you can remember right now!

ONE MORE THING:

Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill, and a laxative on the same night!


Forwarded by Auntie Bev

A few Senior Moments
Garage Door

The boss walked into the office one morning not knowing his zipper was down and his fly area wide open. His assistant walked up to him and said, 'This morning when you left your house, did you close your garage door?' The boss told her he knew he'd closed the garage door, and walked into his office puzzled by the question.

As he finished his paperwork, he suddenly noticed his fly was open, and zipped it up.... He then understood his assistant's question about his 'garage door.'

He headed out for a cup of coffee and paused by her desk to ask, 'When my garage door was open, did you see my Hummer parked in there?'

She smiled and said, 'No, I didn't. All I saw was an old mini van with two flat tires..
________________________________________
An elderly gentleman....
Had serious hearing problems for a number of years. He went to the doctor and the doctor was able to have him fitted for a set of hearing aids that allowed the gentleman to hear 100%
The elderly gentleman went back in a month to the doctor and the doctor said, 'Your hearing is perfect. Your family must be really pleased that you can hear again.'
The gentleman replied, 'Oh, I haven't told my family yet.
I just sit around and listen to the conversations. I've changed my will three times!'
________________________________________

Two elderly gentlemen from a retirement center were sitting on a bench under a tree when one turns to the other and says: 'Slim, I'm 83 years old now and I'm just full of aches and pains. I know you're about my age. How do you feel?'
Slim says, 'I feel just like a newborn baby.'
'Really!? Like a newborn baby!?'
'Yep. No hair, no teeth, and I think I just wet my pants.'
________________________________________

An elderly couple had dinner at another couple's house, and after eating, the wives left the table and went into the kitchen.
The two gentlemen were talking, and one said, 'Last night we went out to a new restaurant and it was really great.... I would recommend it very highly.'
The other man said, 'What is the name of the restaurant?'
The first man thought and thought and finally said, 'What is the name of that flower you give to someone you love?
You know.... The one that's red and has thorns.'
'Do you mean a rose?'
'Yes, that's the one,' replied the man. He then turned towards the kitchen and yelled, 'Rose, what's the name of that restaurant we went to last night?'
________________________________________

Hospital regulations require a wheel chair for patients being discharged. However, while working as a student nurse, I found one elderly gentleman already dressed and sitting on the bed with a suitcase at his feet, who insisted he didn't need my help to leave the hospital.
After a chat about rules being rules, he reluctantly let me wheel him to the elevator.
On the way down I asked him if his wife was meeting him.
'I don't know,' he said. 'She's still upstairs in the bathroom changing out of her hospital gown.'
________________________________________
Couple in their nineties are both having problems remembering things. During a checkup, the doctor tells them that they're physically okay, but they might want to start writing things down to help them remember ...
Later that night, while watching TV, the old man gets up from his chair. 'Want anything while I'm in the kitchen?' he asks.
'Will you get me a bowl of ice cream?'
'Sure..'
'Don't you think you should write it down so you can remember it?' she asks.
'No, I can remember it.'
'Well, I'd like some strawberries on top, too. Maybe you should write it down, so as not to forget it?'
He says, 'I can remember that. You want a bowl of ice cream with strawberries.'
'I'd also like whipped cream. I'm certain you'll forget that, write it down?' she asks.
Irritated, he says, 'I don't need to write it down, I can remember it! Ice cream with strawberries and whipped cream - I got it, for goodness sake!'
Then he toddles into the kitchen. After about 20 minutes, The old man returns from the kitchen and hands his wife a plate of bacon and eggs.. She stares at the plate for a moment.
'Where's my toast ?'
________________________________________

A senior citizen said to his eighty-year old buddy:
'So I hear you're getting married?'
'Yep!'
'Do I know her?'
'Nope!'
'This woman, is she good looking?'
'Not really.'
'Is she a good cook?'
'Naw, she can't cook too well.'
'Does she have lots of money?'
'Nope! Poor as a church mouse.'
'Well, then, is she good in bed?'
'I don't know.'
'Why in the world do you want to marry her then?'
'Because she can still drive!'
________________________________________

Three old guys are out walking.
First one says, 'Windy, isn't it?'
Second one says, 'No, it's Thursday!'
Third one says, 'So am I.. Let's go get a beer.'
________________________________________

A man was telling his neighbor, 'I just bought a new hearing aid. It cost me four thousand dollars, but it's state of the art.. It's perfect.'
'Really,' answered the neighbor . 'What kind is it?'
'Twelve thirty..'
________________________________________

Morris, an 82 year-old man, went to the doctor to get a physical.
A few days later, the doctor saw Morris walking down the street with a gorgeous young woman on his arm.
A couple of days later, the doctor spoke to Morris and said, 'You're really doing great, aren't you?'
Morris replied, 'Just doing what you said, Doc: 'Get a hot mamma and be cheerful''
The doctor said, 'I didn't say that... I said, 'You've got a heart murmur; be careful..'
________________________________________

One more. . ...!
A little old man shuffled slowly into an ice cream parlor and pulled himself slowly, painfully, up onto a stool.. After catching his breath, he ordered a banana split.
The waitress asked kindly, 'Crushed nuts?'
'No,' he replied, 'Arthritis.'

Now , before you 'forget', send them on to some other folks you know who could use a good laugh !!

 


"Brief history of men's underwear," by Ethan Trex, CNN, October 27, 2009 ---     http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/homestyle/10/27/mf.men.underwear.history/index.html


I wonder if putting fins on a Fiat could possible save Chrysler?

You have to be over 60 years of age to appreciate my joke.
Fins would appeal more to seniors.

 

 

 




Here are a few links to my view pictures:

Sunrises --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080904.htm
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090817.htm

Autumn --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080925.htm
Also see   http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090924.htm
Also see   http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits091005.htm

Springtime --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090603.htm

Summertime --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090702.htm

Ducks on the Golf Course --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090714.htm

Inside the Cottage --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090723.htm

Ice --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080219.htm
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090504.htm

Wind --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits071206.htm

Snow --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070409.htm
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090210.htm

Rainbows --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits091015.htm

Erika's Flowers of the Field --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080625.htm

Wild Cranberries --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090509.htm

Wild Birds --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090526.htm

Erika's Domestic Roses --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits091026.htm
Our Wild Roses --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090807.htm

Phlox (my favorite) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090807.htm

Amaryllis --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080212.htm

More photographs and history of this area --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm

Sunset Hill House Hotel --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080824.htm

Iron Ore --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070924.htm

White Mountain Intrusion --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits071001.htm 

Robert Frost --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070905.htm

Grandpa Dourte's Champion Draft Horse --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080118.htm

Church --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080916.htm

Bette Davis --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070801.htm

Patti Page --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080715.htm

Bode Miller --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080331.htm

Cannon Mountain --- http://www.trinity.edu/%7Erjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits071226.htm

Mittersill --- http://www.trinity.edu/%7Erjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070515.htm

Mt. Washington Winds --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits071218.htm

My Walk Down Lovers Lane --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090623.htm 

Polly's Pancake Parlor --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090105.htm

The Sugar Hill Sampler --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090303.htm

Harman's Cheese and Country Store --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090115.htm

------------------------

And you might also look at (Randy Pausch) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080415.htm

Poem from a Marine to his Dad --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080801.htm

Stories About Growing Up

·         Short story entitled My Glimpse of Heaven:  What I learned from Max and Gwen
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/max01.htm

 

·         Short story entitled Mrs. Applegate's Boarding House (with Navy pictures)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070723.htm

 

·         A Year 2000 message of love from my wife, Erika.  
She describes how a Munich street urchin became Cinderella filled with love and joy --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/erika/xmas00.htm 

 

·         A Year 2001 message of love from my wife, Erika 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/erika/xmas01.htm 

 
 
I see from my house by the side of the road
By the side of the highway of life,
The men who press with the ardor of hope,
The men who are faint with the strife,
But I turn not away from their smiles and tears,
Both parts of an infinite plan-
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911)

For earlier editions of Tidbits go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbitsdirectory.htm

For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 

 

 




Tidbits Archives --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm

Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter --- Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron" enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and other universities is at http://www.searchedu.com/

World Clock --- http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/

Interesting Online Clock and Calendar --- http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones --- http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) --- http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
         Also see http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
        
Facts about population growth (video) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth --- http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq --- http://www.costofwar.com/ 
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons --- http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.

Three Finance Blogs

Jim Mahar's FinanceProfessor Blog --- http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
FinancialRounds Blog --- http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Karen Alpert's FinancialMusings (Australia) --- http://financemusings.blogspot.com/

Some Accounting Blogs

Paul Pacter's IAS Plus (International Accounting) --- http://www.iasplus.com/index.htm
International Association of Accountants News --- http://www.aia.org.uk/
AccountingEducation.com and Double Entries --- http://www.accountingeducation.com/
Gerald Trites'eBusiness and XBRL Blogs --- http://www.zorba.ca/
AccountingWeb --- http://www.accountingweb.com/   
SmartPros --- http://www.smartpros.com/

Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

The Master List of Free Online College Courses --- http://universitiesandcolleges.org/

Shared Open Courseware (OCW) from Around the World: OKI, MIT, Rice, Berkeley, Yale, and Other Sharing Universities --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Free Textbooks and Cases --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

Free Mathematics and Statistics Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

Free Science and Medicine Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science

Free Social Science and Philosophy Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social

Free Education Discipline Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm

Teaching Materials (especially video) from PBS

Teacher Source:  Arts and Literature --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/arts_lit.htm

Teacher Source:  Health & Fitness --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/health.htm

Teacher Source: Math --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/math.htm

Teacher Source:  Science --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/sci_tech.htm

Teacher Source:  PreK2 --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/prek2.htm

Teacher Source:  Library Media ---  http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/library.htm

Free Education and Research Videos from Harvard University --- http://athome.harvard.edu/archive/archive.asp

VYOM eBooks Directory --- http://www.vyomebooks.com/

From Princeton Online
The Incredible Art Department --- http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/

Online Mathematics Textbooks --- http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html 

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives --- http://enlvm.usu.edu/ma/nav/doc/intro.jsp

Moodle  --- http://moodle.org/ 

The word moodle is an acronym for "modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment", which is quite a mouthful. The Scout Report stated the following about Moodle 1.7. It is a tremendously helpful opens-source e-learning platform. With Moodle, educators can create a wide range of online courses with features that include forums, quizzes, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and surveys. On the Moodle website, visitors can also learn about other features and read about recent updates to the program. This application is compatible with computers running Windows 98 and newer or Mac OS X and newer.

Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials

Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting educators.
Any college may post a news item.

Accountancy Discussion ListServs:

For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for free) go to   http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM (Educators)  http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/ 
AECM is an email Listserv list which provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets, multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc

Roles of a ListServ --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
 

CPAS-L (Practitioners) http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/ 
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments, ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed. Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or education. Others will be denied access.
Yahoo (Practitioners)  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA. This can be anything  from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.
AccountantsWorld  http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1 
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and taxation.
Business Valuation Group BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com 
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag [RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM

Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) --- http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm

 

Some Accounting Blogs

Paul Pacter's IAS Plus (International Accounting) --- http://www.iasplus.com/index.htm
International Association of Accountants News --- http://www.aia.org.uk/
AccountingEducation.com and Double Entries --- http://www.accountingeducation.com/
Gerald Trites'eBusiness and XBRL Blogs --- http://www.zorba.ca/
AccountingWeb --- http://www.accountingweb.com/   
SmartPros --- http://www.smartpros.com/
Management and Accounting Blog
--- http://maaw.info/

Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Here are a few links to my view pictures:

Our New Hampshire Cottage in the White Mountains --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm

Sunrises --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080904.htm

Autumn --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080925.htm
Also see   http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090924.htm
Also see   http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits091005.htm

Ice --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080219.htm

Wind --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits071206.htm

Snow --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070409.htm

Rainbows --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits091015.htm

 

More photographs and history of this area --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm

Sunset Hill House Hotel --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080824.htm

Iron Ore --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070924.htm

White Mountain Intrusion --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits071001.htm 

Robert Frost --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070905.htm

Bette Davis --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070801.htm

Patti Page --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080715.htm

Bode Miller --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080331.htm

Cannon Mountain --- http://www.trinity.edu/%7Erjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits071226.htm

Mittersill --- http://www.trinity.edu/%7Erjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070515.htm

Mt. Washington Winds --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits071218.htm

My Walk Down Lovers Lane --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090623.htm 

Polly's Pancake Parlor --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090105.htm

The Sugar Hill Sampler --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090303.htm

Harman's Cheese and Country Store --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090115.htm

------------------------

And you might also look at (Randy Pausch) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080415.htm

Stories About Growing Up

·         Short story entitled My Glimpse of Heaven:  What I learned from Max and Gwen
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/max01.htm

 

·         Short story entitled Mrs. Applegate's Boarding House (with Navy pictures)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070723.htm

 

·         A Year 2000 message of love from my wife, Erika.  
She describes how a Munich street urchin became Cinderella filled with love and joy --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/erika/xmas00.htm 

 

·         A Year 2001 message of love from my wife, Erika 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/erika/xmas01.htm 

 
 
I see from my house by the side of the road
By the side of the highway of life,
The men who press with the ardor of hope,
The men who are faint with the strife,
But I turn not away from their smiles and tears,
Both parts of an infinite plan-
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911)

 

 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone:  603-823-8482 
Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu