Sunrises are the best time of day while
sitting at my desk that looks out
at the Kinsman, Twin, and Presidential Mountain Ranges in the White Mountains
No two sunrises and sunsets are exactly alike if there are clouds
In October a half-mile parade of antique
cars parked in front of our cottage for the mountain views
They took a lot of pictures of this tree
We have lots of Tiger Lillies up here
Here are some fun pictures sent to my by
friends.
Yummy parts not included in the cavity of the bird you buy for Thanksgiving
Turkey Testicle Festival ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TTfestival.wmv
San Antonio Duck Story ---
Click Here
Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America
by Lee Alan Dugatkin (University of Chicago Press; 2009, 166 pages; $26).
Examines how the moose figured in Thomas Jefferson's efforts to refute European
disparagements of American flora and fauna. Not available online.
Larry in Iraq
(slide show) --- Click Here
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations Between November 18-25,
2009
To Accompany the November 17, 2009 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits091125Quotations.htm
U.S. Debt/Deficit Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
The Real National Debt (booked + unbooked
entitlements) 2008
Source ---
http://www.pgpf.org/about/nationaldebt/
The New York Times Timeline History of Health Care Reform in the
United States ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm#History
Click the arrow button on the right side of the NYT timeline.
What went so wrong with health care system reform in the United States?
Mostly what went wrong is our ill-conceived and underfunded attempts to
reform the system!
Bob Jensen's threads on health care are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Tidbits on November 25, 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/
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
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: President Obama lectures China on its
shortcomings
The Best One Yet from Saturday Night Live ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZorJZ5ixOo
Jagdish Gangolly clued me into this video
Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl2LwnaUA-k
Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren discusses her effort
to change the consumer protecting (including credit card company abuses),
Video from The New Yorker, November 16, 2009 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/jamessurowiecki/2009/11/video-elizabeth-warren.html
This video will only be online for a short while.
Climate Science Video (not politically correct) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk&feature=player_embedded
Video: How gullible are you (priming)? ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW2SByfHpYg
Dancing With Her Grandson video ---
Click Here
You must watch this one well beyond the slow beginning
They call this dancing guy (Robert Muraine) "Mr Fantastic"
after the rubber-limbed comic-book hero in the Fantastic Four.
Funny Toyota Commercial ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOkKCeZPw0g
United Airlines has flying guitars after the planes have
landed ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo&NR=1
The Power of YouTube
Dave spent over 9 months trying to get
United to pay for damages caused by baggage handlers to his custom Taylor
guitar. During his final exchange with the United Customer Relations
Manager, he stated that he was left with no choice other than to create a
music video for Youtube exposing their lack of cooperation. The Manager
responded : "Good luck with that one, pal".
So Dave posted a retaliatory video on
Youtube. The video has since received over 5.5 million hits. United Airlines
contacted the musician and attempted settlement in exchange for pulling the
video. Naturally his response was: "Good luck with that one, pal". Taylor
Guitars sent the musician 2 new custom guitars in appreciation for the
product recognition from the video that has lead to a sharp increase in
orders.
Video: German Coast Guard Trainee ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR0lWICH3rY
Saturday Night Live Comedy About President Obama
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Beethoven and the Moon Slide Show ---
Click Here
United Airlines has flying guitars after the
planes have landed ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo&NR=1
The Power of YouTube
So he posted a retaliatory video on Youtube. The video has since received over
5.5 million hits. United Airlines contacted the musician and attempted
settlement in exchange for pulling the video. Naturally his response was: "Good
luck with that one, pal". Taylor Guitars sent the musician 2 new custom guitars
in appreciation for the product recognition from the video that has lead to a
sharp increase in orders.
Dancing With Her Grandson video ---
Click Here
You must watch this one well beyond the slow beginning
An Unlikely African-American Music Historian
(Polk Miller) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120398673
George Shearing On Piano Jazz ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120607605
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
Jazz And The 50 Most Important Albums Of
2000-2009 ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2009/11/jason_moran_the_bad_plus_decade.html
Katie Couric dirty dancing ---
Click Here
Watch the slide show video ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nPjO_zT7po
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
San Antonio Duck Story ---
Click Here
World Atlas of Panoramic Aerial Images ---
http://geogdata.csun.edu/world_atlas/
Beethoven and the Moon Slide Show ---
Click Here
NASA Photos of the Day: A United States
engineering marvel named Space Shuttle Atlantis (slow loading) ---
Click Here
Julia Morgan-An Online Exhibition
http://lib.calpoly.edu/specialcollections/architecture/juliamorgan/
American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life,
1765-1915
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/americanstories/
The Erie Railroad Glass Plate Negative Collection
http://libwww.syr.edu/information/spcollections/digital/erierr/
The Swingle Plant Anatomy Reference Collection
(over 1,700 images) ---
http://swingle.miami.edu/
OSU Multimedia History of
History (especially American History) ---
eHistory at
OSU: Multimedia Histories [Real Player]
http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/
Dartmouth Flood
Observatory ---
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~floods/index.html
Animal Science Image Gallery ---
http://anscigallery.nal.usda.gov/
Horse Genome Project ---
http://www.uky.edu/Ag/Horsemap/
Caribbean Art and Visual Culture ---
http://scholar.library.miami.edu/caribbeanvisual/
Obama Hosts First State Dinner (a gala affair)
---
Click Here
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
World Wide Words ---
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/lfsh.htm
101 Best Websites for Writers
---
http://www.writersdigest.com/101sites/2005_index.asp
UW Student Newspapers Archive ---
http://content.lib.washington.edu/dailyweb/index.html
Amazon's Kindle for the PC (Beta) is
now available for free download ---
Click Here
The 360,000 books currently available for downloading into your PC are not free.
It appears that that all books available for the Kindle Reader are also
available for the Kindle PC.
Since most (all?) of the available books are not multimedia books, the
multimedia advantage of the PC is not utilized to date.
"Preparing to Sell E-Books, Google Takes on Amazon," by Motoko Rich, The
New York Times, May 31, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/technology/internet/01google.html?hpw
The Kindle Reader ($259) is easier to hold/carry than a PC, and a multimedia
version is on the drawing boards.
The more expensive DX version has some features worth noting, including larger
capacity and a headphone jack and speakers. Kindle DX holds the most (up to
3,500 books) relative to its competitors.
Most popular textbooks in academic
disciplines, especially accountancy, are not yet available for download.
Adobe offers a DRM technology called
Adobe Content Server 4. Sony and a number of other online bookstores--most
notably Borders--sell commercial titles in ePub/ACS4 format, and some libraries
let patrons check out ePub books.
A comparison chart of Kindle DX, Kindle
2, Sony, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Sony PRS 7 is available at ---
Click Here
http://ereader-comparisons.com/p138939-why-buy-ereader-complete-ebook.cfm?gclid=CMP2_qfulp4CFZho5QodpVcFsA
To date, Nook
is the only reader that can download multiple color pages.
It also has the largest screen and a
dual screen
PC World compared five brands of
eBook readers (not PC versions) and still prefers the Sony Reader. Sony's $300
reader matches the Kindle 2's screen size and quality but adds a touchscreen and
support for free e-books and Adobe ePub, an e-book file format that book
publishers and resellers have widely embraced --- See below.
Kindle 2 is the most popular seller to
date.
Bob Jensen's links to free books.
textbooks, and poems available for download into your PC or Mac without special
software are provided at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
These are not, of course, the latest titles emerging in the current market.
Bob Jensen's links to free video
lectures and course materials from prestigious universities are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Thousands of free tutorials and videos in various academic disciplines are
linked at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations Between November 18 and November 25,
2009
To Accompany the November 10, 2009 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits091125Quotations.htm
U.S. Debt/Deficit Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Obama Criticizes Himself, Warns on High Deficits
President Barack Obama gave his sternest warning yet
about the need to contain rising U.S. deficits, saying on Wednesday that if
government debt were to pile up too much, it could lead to a double-dip
recession. With the U.S. unemployment rate at 10.2 percent, Obama told Fox News
his administration faces a delicate balance of trying to boost the economy and
spur job creation while putting the economy on a path toward long-term deficit
reduction . . . As if things could not possibly get more weird and delusional,
President Obama now criticizes the very high government deficits he himself
supported, promoted, and helped create.
Reuters, November 18, 2009 ---
Click Here
Also see
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/11/18/obama-warns-double-dip-recession/
In the Testimony of a Former Congressional Budget Office Director
"The Coming Deficit Disaster: The president says he understands the
urgency of our fiscal crisis, but his policies are the equivalent of steering
the economy toward an iceberg." by Douglas Hotlz-Eagen, The Wall Street
Journal, November 20, 2009 ---
Click Here
President Barack Obama took office promising to
lead from the center and solve big problems. He has exerted enormous
political energy attempting to reform the nation's health-care system. But
the biggest economic problem facing the nation is not health care. It's the
deficit. Recently, the White House signaled that it will get serious about
reducing the deficit next year—after it locks into place massive new
health-care entitlements. This is a recipe for disaster, as it will create a
new appetite for increased spending and yet another powerful interest group
to oppose deficit-reduction measures.
Our fiscal situation has deteriorated rapidly in
just the past few years. The federal government ran a 2009 deficit of $1.4
trillion—the highest since World War II—as spending reached nearly 25% of
GDP and total revenues fell below 15% of GDP. Shortfalls like these have not
been seen in more than 50 years.
Going forward, there is no relief in sight, as
spending far outpaces revenues and the federal budget is projected to be in
enormous deficit every year. Our national debt is projected to stand at
$17.1 trillion 10 years from now, or over $50,000 per American. By 2019,
according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of the
president's budget, the budget deficit will still be roughly $1 trillion,
even though the economic situation will have improved and revenues will be
above historical norms.
The planned deficits will have destructive
consequences for both fairness and economic growth. They will force upon our
children and grandchildren the bill for our overconsumption. Federal
deficits will crowd out domestic investment in physical capital, human
capital, and technologies that increase potential GDP and the standard of
living. Financing deficits could crowd out exports and harm our
international competitiveness, as we can already see happening with the
large borrowing we are doing from competitors like China.
At what point, some financial analysts ask, do
rating agencies downgrade the United States? When do lenders price
additional risk to federal borrowing, leading to a damaging spike in
interest rates? How quickly will international investors flee the dollar for
a new reserve currency? And how will the resulting higher interest rates,
diminished dollar, higher inflation, and economic distress manifest itself?
Given the president's recent reception in China—friendly but fruitless—these
answers may come sooner than any of us would like.
Mr. Obama and his advisers say they understand
these concerns, but the administration's policy choices are the equivalent
of steering the economy toward an iceberg. Perhaps the most vivid example of
sending the wrong message to international capital markets are the
health-care reform bills—one that passed the House earlier this month and
another under consideration in the Senate. Whatever their good intentions,
they have too many flaws to be defensible.
First and foremost, neither bends the health-cost
curve downward. The CBO found that the House bill fails to reduce the pace
of health-care spending growth. An audit of the bill by Richard Foster,
chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, found that
the pace of national health-care spending will increase by 2.1% over 10
years, or by about $750 billion. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's bill
grows just as fast as the House version. In this way, the bills betray the
basic promise of health-care reform: providing quality care at lower cost.
Second, each bill sets up a new entitlement program
that grows at 8% annually as far as the eye can see—faster than the economy
will grow, faster than tax revenues will grow, and just as fast as the
already-broken Medicare and Medicaid programs. They also create a second new
entitlement program, a federally run, long-term-care insurance plan.
Finally, the bills are fiscally dishonest, using
every budget gimmick and trick in the book: Leave out inconvenient spending,
back-load spending to disguise the true scale, front-load tax revenues, let
inflation push up tax revenues, promise spending cuts to doctors and
hospitals that have no record of materializing, and so on.
If there really are savings to be found in
Medicare, those savings should be directed toward deficit reduction and
preserving Medicare, not to financing huge new entitlement programs. Getting
long-term budgets under control is hard enough today. The job will be nearly
impossible with a slew of new entitlements in place.
In short, any combination of what is moving through
Congress is economically dangerous and invites the rapid acceleration of a
debt crisis. It is a dramatic statement to financial markets that the
federal government does not understand that it must get its fiscal house in
order.
What to do? The best option would be for the
president to halt Congress's rush to fiscal suicide, and refocus on slowing
the dangerous growth in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He should
call on Congress to pass a comprehensive reform of our income and payroll
tax systems that would generate revenue sufficient to fund its spending
desires in a pro-growth and fair fashion.
Reducing entitlement spending and closing tax
loopholes to create a fairer tax system with more balanced revenues is
politically difficult and requires sacrifice. But we will avert a
potentially devastating credit crisis, increase national savings, drive
productivity and wage growth, and enhance our international competitiveness.
The time to worry about the deficit is not next
year, but now. There is no time to waste.
Mr. Holtz-Eakin is former director of the Congressional Budget Office
and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This is adapted from testimony he
gave before the Senate Committee on the Budget on Nov. 10.
U.S. Debt/Deficit Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
The New York Times Timeline History of Health Care Reform in the
United States ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm#History
Click the arrow button on the right side of the NYT timeline.
What went so wrong in the health care system of the United States?
Mostly what went wrong is our ill-conceived and underfunded attempts to
reform the system!
Bob Jensen's threads on health care are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
"HDTV Buying Guide: Select the Right Flat-Panel Technology Before you
drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on the wrong flat-panel HDTV, read our
comprehensive breakdown of everything you need to know. Our HDTV buying guide
might
just help you save some money," by Andy Poor, PC World via The
Washington Post, November 25, 2009 ---
Click Here
http://snipurl.com/hdtvwp112509 [www_washingtonpost_com]
How Stuff Works HDTV Buying Guide ---
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/hdtv3.htm
How Stuff Works has more pages on techie explanations of HDTV
Eventually 3-D HDTV will create another buying wave, but don't hold your breath.
Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm
I think David is correct. I would warn students not to send credit card numbers
to this outfit.
The Dog Swallowed My Homework and Pooped Out the Answers
On November 26, 2009 I was spammed by a so-called Mike
Watson providing a link to a site where students can supposedly submit their
assignments for “help” from experts ---
http://www.pupilhelp.com/
The site also offers live chats with a paying student
regarding a homework assignment.
Pupilhelp
was born in the month of July 2006. Pupilhelp was started with a vision to help
students with their assignments and homework at an affordable price. More than
ten thousand students have benefited from the services of pupilhelp. The service
at pupilhelp is available for students all over the world. We at pupilhelp
believe in having the best among the best in the tutor team. Tutors are
recruited after a laborious process which tests their skills, knowledge on the
subject and willingness to work anytime, anywhere. Every tutor in pupilhelp
holds a master's degree or a doctorate degree in their respective subject. The
feed backs from our students have always been motivating and inspiring. We would
like to continue providing quality work at an affordable price which has always
been our unique feature. We would like to extend our thanks to students who have
supported us and we request you to continue your support. We hope that many more
students across the globe will use our service.
Pupilhelp
provides e-mail based Homework/Assignment Help to students from grade 12 to
Ph.D. level. Our primary objective is to help you in improving your grades and
to achieve academic excellence. With our help you can quickly and easily get
your assignment done by one of over 300 experts. Our service is focused on, time
delivery, superior quality, creativity, and originality for every service we
provide.
The discipline categories include “Accounting.”
My hunch is that the so-called assignment “counselors” are
probably sitting on top of hundreds of solutions manuals for major and even
minor textbooks. Text phrases from end-of-chapter assignments are probably
linked to answers in solutions manuals.
In any case, it is advised that instructors do not rely
heavily on end-of-chapter assignments for grading purposes. Perhaps students can
learn a great deal from counselors at this site, but for me the site does not
pass the smell test even though it claims to have a supposed "no plagiarism"
policy. I wonder how closely the recommended solutions follow the copyrighted
solutions in textbook manuals supposedly available only to course instructors.
Of course many of these solutions manuals are for sale at used book sites and
even on eBay and Craigslist.
November 27, 2009 message from David Albrecht
[albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]
I received 52 e-mails from him on Thursday. That it
took 52 to deliver the message made me think it was a bogus site.
I think most HW real person solutions differ from
the solutions manual only in terms of layout, as there's only one way the
answer can be.
I can't ever remember a publishers SM that provided
explanation that would benefit students. Presumably instructors don't need
the explanation, so it isn't provided. I recall the last time I taught
Advanced Accounting, and used a certain textbook with its HW problems. I had
to seek help to get some of those solutions explained to me. If
pupilhelp.com provides explanations, then it might be a service worth paying
for.
Given the publisher sites nowhave algorithmic HW,
I'm confident that pupilhelp.com has seen a decline in business. Of course,
with the economy it undoubtedly has a decline in revenues just like everyone
else. That could explain the spam-like broadcast advertising.
Jensen Comment
I think David is correct. I would warn students not to send credit card numbers
to this outfit.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
How well can free computer software do language translations?
Especially note Paul Pacter’s test runs described below.
Paul helped set U.S. accounting standards at the FASB, international accounting
standards at the IASB, and now works very closely helping to set accounting
standards in China. He’s headquartered in Deloitte’s office in Hong Kong.
Keep in mind that accounting or other technical
translations are difficult even for language professors since there are often
technical terms that they’ve never encountered. Also note that the tests given
below by Paul are not really very technical.
Incidentally, Paul has about 100,000 pictures from China,
Tibet, and elsewhere, many of which are posted at
http://www.whencanyou.com/index.htm
One thing nice about a picture is that it can say a
lot that doesn’t require language translation.
Not new, but a useful reminder
"Google Translate (to a foreign language) Adds As-You-Type Translations,
Phonetic Pronunciation," LifeHacker, November 2009 ---
Click Here
What bothers me is that if I send off a message translated
into Chinese I can’t be certain what is really being sent to my Chinese friend.
It’s a little bit like instrument landing in the dark and in a fog so dense you
can’t see for three feet ahead. However, someday I might try this for fun in a
message to my good friend Paul Pacter in Hong Kong.
November 24, 2009 reply from Jim McKinney
[jim@MCKINNEYCPA.COM]
I used to have to send letters to
Japanese business partners. For formal communications, I hired a translator.
However for informal communications I used translation software. To see if I
made sense, I would have my letter translated to Japanese by the software. I
would then have the software translate the letter back to English. I would
then adjust phrases and words until the English-Japanese-English letter made
sense.
November 25, 2009 reply from Hong Kong's Paul Pacter ---
Pacter, Paul (CN - Hong Kong)
[paupacter@DELOITTE.COM.HK]
After
reading these emails, I did a little test:
I took this sentence:
On the balance sheet, assets are on the left and liabilities are on the
right.
And translated it into French using 3 on-line free translators:
Free Translation
http://www.freetranslation.com/
Sur le bilan, les biens sont sur la gauche et les responsabilités sont sur
la droite.
And translating the French back to English:
Using Google:
On balance, the property is on the left
and responsibilities are on the right.
Using Babelfish:
On the assessment, the goods are on the
left and the responsibilities are on the line.
Using Free Translation:
On the report, the well being on the left and the responsibilities are on
the right.
Babelfish
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/
Sur le bilan, les capitaux sont du côté gauche et les responsabilités sont
du côté droit.
And translating the French back to English:
Using Google:
On balance, capital
is on the left and responsibilities are on the right.
Using Babelfish:
On the assessment, the capital is left
side and the responsibilities are right-sided.
Using Free Translation::
On the report, the capitals are left side and the responsibilities are
straight side.
Google
http://translate.google.com
Au bilan, les actifs sont sur la gauche et les passifs sont à droite.
And translating the French back to English:
Using Google:
On the balance sheet, assets are on the left and liabilities are right.
Using Babelfish:
With the assessment, the credits are on
the left and the passive ones are on the right.
Using Free Translation:
To the report, the active ones are on the left and the passive ones are at
right.
I
am ok (no more) at speaking and writing French. To me clearly in
translating from English to French, Google did the best job (it got the
words for assets, liabilities, and balance sheet right). But in going back
from French to English, none did well except for Google translating its own
French back to English. (The ‘on balance’ and ‘on assessment’ and ‘on the
report’ problem was caused when both Free Translation and Babelfish used
“sur le bilan” rather than “au bilan”.)
As
one would expect, at Deloitte in Hong Kong there is a huge amount of
translating written text between English and both traditional (HK/TW/ML/SG)
and simplified (PRC) Chinese text. Most is done manually because the
clean-up effort required is even more costly. For fun I have sent automated
translations of text from English to Chinese to Chinese friends, and usually
they understand the message.
Paul
And I always thought little boys were built out of "snakes and snails."
"The Puzzle of Boys: Scholars and others debate what it means to grow up
male in America," by Thomas Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education's
Chronicle Review, November 22, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Puzzle-of-Boys/49193/
My son just turned 3. He loves trains,
fire trucks, tools of all kinds, throwing balls, catching balls, spinning
until he falls down, chasing cats, tackling dogs, emptying the kitchen
drawers of their contents, riding a tricycle, riding a carousel, pretending
to be a farmer, pretending to be a cow, dancing, drumming, digging, hiding,
seeking, jumping, shouting, and collapsing exhausted into a Thomas the Tank
Engine bed wearing Thomas the Tank Engine pajamas after reading a Thomas the
Tank Engine book.
That doesn't make him unusual; in fact, in
many ways, he couldn't be more typical. Which may be why a relative recently
said, "Well, he's definitely all boy." It's a statement that sounds
reasonable enough until you think about it. What does "all boy" mean?
Masculine? Straight? Something else? Are there partial boys? And is this
relative aware of my son's fondness for Hello Kitty and tea sets?
These are the kinds of questions asked by
anxious parents and, increasingly, academic researchers. Boyhood
studies—virtually unheard of a few years ago—has taken off, with a shelf
full of books already published, more on the way, and a new journal devoted
to the subject. Much of the focus so far has been on boys falling behind
academically, paired with the notion that school is not conducive to the way
boys learn. What motivates boys, the argument goes, is different from what
motivates girls, and society should adjust accordingly.
Not everyone buys the boy talk. Some
critics, in particular the American Association of University Women, contend
that much of what passes for research about boyhood only reinforces
stereotypes and arrives at simplistic conclusions: Boys are competitive!
Boys like action! Boys hate books! They argue that this line of thinking
miscasts boys as victims and ignores the very real problems faced by girls.
But while this debate is far from settled,
the field has expanded to include how marketers target boys, the nature of
boys' friendships, and a host of deeper, more philosophical issues, all of
which can be boiled down, more or less, to a single question: Just what are
boys, anyway?
One of the first so-called boys' books,
Michael Gurian's The Wonder of Boys, was not immediately embraced by
publishers. In fact, it was turned down by 25 houses before finally being
purchased by Tarcher/Putnam for a modest sum. This was in the mid-1990s, and
everyone was concerned about girls. Girls were drowning in the "sea of
Western culture," according to Carol Gilligan. In Reviving Ophelia, Mary
Pipher bemoaned a "girl-poisoning" culture that emphasized sexiness above
all else.
Boys weren't the story. No one wanted to
read about them.
Or so publishers thought. The Wonder of
Boys has since sold more than a half-million copies, and Gurian, who has a
master's degree in writing and has worked as a family counselor, has become
a prominent speaker and consultant on boys' issues. He has written two more
books about boys, including The Purpose of Boys, published this year, which
argues that boys are hard-wired to desire a sense of mission, and that
parents and teachers need to understand "boy biology" if they want to help
young men succeed.
Drawing on neuroscience research done by
others, Gurian argues that boy brains and girl brains are fundamentally
dissimilar. In the nature versus nurture debate, Gurian comes down squarely
on the side of the former. He catches flak for supposedly overinterpreting
neuroscience data to comport with his theories about boys. In The Trouble
With Boys, a former Newsweek reporter, Peg Tyre, takes him to task for
arguing that female brains are active even when they're bored, while male
brains tend to "shut down" (a conclusion that Ruben Gur, director of the
Brain Behavior Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, tells Tyre
isn't supported by the evidence). Gurian counters that his work has been
misrepresented and that the success of his programs backs up his scientific
claims.
Close on Gurian's heels was Real Boys, by
William Pollack. Pollack, an associate clinical professor of psychology at
Harvard Medical School and director of the Centers for Men and Young Men,
writes that behind their facade of toughness, boys are vulnerable and
desperate for emotional connection. Boys, he says, tend to communicate
through action. They are more likely to express empathy and affection
through an activity, like playing basketball together, than having a
heart-to-heart talk. Pollack's view of what makes boys the way they are is
less rooted in biology than Gurian's. "What neuroscientists will tell you is
that nature and nurture are bonded," says Pollack. "How we nurture from the
beginning has an effect." Real Boys earned a stamp of approval from Mary
Pipher, who writes in the foreword that "our culture is doing a bad job
raising boys."
Pollack's book, like Gurian's, was an
enormous success. It sold more than 750,000 copies and has been published in
13 countries. Even though it came out a decade ago, Pollack says he still
receives e-mail every week from readers. "People were hungry for it," he
says.
The following year, Raising Cain, by Dan
Kindlon, an adjunct lecturer in Harvard's School of Public Health, and
Michael Thompson, a psychologist in private practice, was published and was
later made into a two-hour PBS documentary. Their book ends with seven
recommendations for dealing with boys, including "recognize and accept the
high activity level of boys and given them safe boy places to express it."
The book is partially about interacting with boys on their own terms, but it
also encourages adults to help them develop "emotional literacy" and to
counter the "culture of cruelty" among older boys. It goes beyond academic
performance, dealing with issues like suicide, bullying, and romance.
Perhaps the most provocative book of the
bunch is The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young
Men, by Christina Hoff Sommers. As the subtitle suggests, Sommers believes
that she's found the villain in this story, making the case that it's boys,
not girls, who are being shortchanged and that they need significant help if
they're going to close the distance academically. But that does not mean,
according to Sommers, that they "need to be rescued from their masculinity."
Those books were best sellers and continue
to attract readers and spirited debate. While the authors disagree on the
details, they share at least two broad conclusions: 1) Boys are not girls,
and 2) Boys are in trouble. Why and how they're different from girls, what's
behind their trouble, and what if anything to do about it—all that depends
on whom you read.
A backlash was inevitable. In 2008 the
American Association of University Women issued a report, "Where the Girls
Are: the Facts About Gender Equity in Education," arguing not only that the
alleged academic disparity between boys and girls had been exaggerated, but
also that the entire crisis was a myth. If anything, the report says, boys
are doing better than ever: "The past few decades have seen remarkable gains
for girls and boys in education, and no evidence indicates a crisis for boys
in particular."
So how could the boys-in-trouble crowd
have gotten it so wrong? The report has an answer for that: "Many people
remain uncomfortable with the educational and professional advances of girls
and women, especially when they threaten to outdistance their peers." In
other words, it's not genuine concern for boys that's energizing the
movement but rather fear of girls surpassing them.
The dispute is, in part, a dispute over
data. And like plenty of such squabbles, the outcome hinges on the numbers
you decide to use. Boys outperform girls by more than 30 points on the
mathematics section of the SAT and a scant four points on the verbal
sections (girls best boys by 13 points on the recently added writing
section). But many more girls actually take the test. And while it's a fact
that boys and girls are both more likely to attend college than they were a
generation ago, girls now make up well over half of the student body, and a
projection by the Department of Education indicates that the gap will widen
considerably over the next decade.
College isn't the only relevant benchmark.
Boys are more likely than girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit
disorder, but girls are more likely to be diagnosed with depression. Girls
are more likely to report suicide attempts, but boys are more likely to
actually kill themselves (according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, 83 percent of suicides between the ages of 10 and 24 are male).
Ask a representative of the AAUW about a pitfall that appears to
disproportionately affect boys, like attention-deficit disorder, and the
representative will counter that the disparity is overplayed or that girls
deal with equally troubling issues.
But it's not statistics that have
persuaded parents and educators that boys are in desperate straits,
according to Sara Mead, a senior research fellow with the New America
Foundation, a public-policy institute. Mead wrote a paper in 2006 that
argued, much like the later AAUW report, that the boys' crisis was bunk.
"What seems to most resonate with teachers and parents is not as much the
empirical evidence but this sense of boys being unmoored or purposeless in a
vaguely defined way," Mead says in an interview. "That's a really difficult
thing to validate more beyond anecdote." She also worries that all this
worrying—much of it, she says, from middle-class parents—could have a
negative effect on boys, marking them as victims when they're nothing of the
sort.
Pollack concedes, as Mead and others point
out, that poor performance in school is also tied to factors like race and
class, but he insists that boys as a group—including white, middle-class
boys—are sinking, pointing to studies that suggest they are less likely to
do their homework and more likely to drop out of high school. And he has a
hunch about why some refuse to acknowledge it: "People look at the adult
world and say, 'Men are still in charge.' So they look down at boys and say,
'They are small men, so they must be on the way to success,'" says Pollack.
"It's still a man's world. People make the mistake of thinking it's a boy's
world."
If the first round of books was focused on
the classroom, the second round observes the boy in his natural habitat. The
new book Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons From Superheroes, Slackers, and
Other Media Stereotypes offers an analysis of what boys soak in from TV
shows, video games, toys, and other facets of boy-directed pop culture. The
news isn't good here, either. According to the book, boys are being taught
they have to be tough and cool, athletic and stoic. This starts early with
toddler T-shirts emblazoned with "Future All-Star" or "Little Champion."
Even once-benign toys like Legos and Nerf have assumed a more hostile
profile with Lego Exo-Force Assault Tigers and the Nerf N-Strike Raider
Rapid Fire CS-35 Dart Blaster. "That kind of surprised us," says one of the
book's three authors, Lyn Mikel Brown, a professor of education and human
development at Colby College. "What happened to Nerf? What happened to
Lego?"
Brown also co-wrote Packaging Girlhood. In
that book, the disease was easier to diagnose, what with the Disney princess
phenomenon and sexy clothes being marketed to pre-adolescent girls. Everyone
was worried about how girls were being portrayed in the mass media and what
that was doing to their self-esteem. The messages about boys, however, were
easier to miss, in part because they're so ubiquitous. "We expect a certain
amount of teasing, bullying, spoofing about being tough enough, even in
animated films for the littlest boys," Brown says.
For Packaging Boyhood, the authors
interviewed more than 600 boys and found that models of manhood were turning
up in some unexpected places, like the Discovery Channel's Man vs. Wild, in
which the star is dropped into the harsh wilderness and forced to forage.
They're concerned that such programs, in order to compete against all the
stimuli vying for boys' attentions, have become more aggressively
in-your-face, more fearlessly risk-taking, manlier than thou. Says Brown:
"What really got us was the pumping up of the volume."
Brown thinks boys are more complicated,
and less single-minded, than adults give them credit for. So does Ken
Corbett, whose new book, Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities, steers clear of
generalizations and doesn't try to elucidate the ideal boyhood (thus the
plural "masculinities"). Corbett, an assistant professor of psychology at
New York University, wants to remind us not how boys are different from
girls but how they're different from one another. His background is in
clinical psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer studies—in other words, as he
points out in the introduction, "not your father's psychoanalysis."
In a chapter titled "Feminine Boys," he
writes of counseling the parents of a boy who liked to wear bracelets and
perform a princess dance. The father, especially, wasn't sure how to take
this, telling Corbett that he wanted a son, not a daughter.
To show how boys can be difficult to
define, Corbett tells the story of Hans, a 5-year-old patient of Sigmund
Freud, who had a fear of being castrated by, of all things, a horse. Young
Hans also fantasizes about having a "widdler," as the boy puts it, as large
as his father's. Freud (typically) reads the kid's issues as primarily
sexual, and his desire to be more like his father as Oedipal. Corbett,
however, doesn't think Hans's interest in his penis is about sex, but rather
about becoming bigger, in developing beyond the half-finished sketch of
boyhood. "Wishing to be big is wishing to fill in the drawing," Corbett
writes.
Corbett disputes the idea that boys as a
group are in peril. They have troubles, sure, but so do other people.
Treating boys as problems to be solved, rather than subjects to be studied,
is a mistake, he says, and much of the writing on boys "doesn't illuminate
the experience of being a boy, but it does illuminate the space between a
boy and a parent."
The experience of being a boy is exactly
what Miles Groth wants to capture. Groth, a psychology professor at Wagner
College, is editor of Thymos: Journal of Boyhood Studies, founded in 2007.
An article he wrote in the inaugural issue of the journal, "Has Anyone Seen
the Boy?: the Fate of the Boy in Becoming a Man," is a sort of call to arms
for boyhood-studies scholars. For years, Groth says, academics didn't really
discuss boys. They might study a certain subset of boys, but boys per se
were off the table. "I think there was some hesitancy for scholars to take
up the topic, to show that they're paying attention to guys when we should
be paying attention to girls," says Groth. "Now I think there's less of that
worry. People don't see it as a reactionary movement."
Continued in article
Bernie's Dream --- 1,000 and Growing
Program to Fund and Otherwise Support Minority Business and Accounting Doctoral
Students
2008 Annual Report ---
http://www.kpmgfoundation.org/pdfs/080427_FoundAR08_POST2.pdf
VIDEO: Bernie Milano, President - The PhD Project & KPMG Foundation ---
Click Here
http://www.diversityinc.com/content/1757/article/3151/?VIDEO_Bernie_Milano_President__The_PhD_Project__KPMG_Foundation
The PhD Project ---
http://www.phdproject.org/
Since 1994, The PhD Project has more than tripled
the number of minority business school professors...from 294 to over 960.
These individuals are inspiring and encouraging a new generation of business
professionals. Click here to learn more about our fifteen years of
achievements, real insights on the journey to a PhD degree and the
professors who are making a big impact.
Are you ready to be the next role model? Currently,
The PhD Project has 400 minority doctoral student members pursuing their
dream. Like you, they were professionals or recent grads satisfying their
quest for a high level of achievement and answering the call to mentor. With
an expansive network of support, The PhD Project is now helping them prepare
for success in academia.
Whether you become involved as a doctoral student,
professor, participating university, or supporting organization...just
become involved. Learn more by visiting the links on the left.
Participation in The PhD Project is available to
anyone of African-American, Hispanic American and Native American descent
who is interested in business doctoral studies.
Jensen Comment
The PhD Project commenced in the KPMG Foundation under the guidance of Executive
Partner Bernie Milano who increasingly devoted more time, money, and sweat to
raise money from other accounting firms and from corporations. It has since
expanded beyond accounting doctoral programs into other business disciplines.
Above and beyond helping minority students get into selected doctoral
programs, Bernie has been dogged about trying every which way to see them to the
graduation day endings when a wide array colleges in literally every part of the
world are eager to hire them. These students have many more hurdles to cross
than most other doctoral students, and Bernie's Dream is to help them across the
biggest hurdles without making it any easier for them then all other doctoral
students.
Most importantly, the salting of these graduates around the world as role
models is increasingly vital to inspiring undergraduate and even K12 minority
students to aspire to become practicing professionals and/or doctoral students
themselves. These role models are living proof that Berne's Dream can become
their dream.
Thank you Bernie, KPMG, and the many other accounting firms and corporations
have made Bernie's Dream come true.
How doctoral programs can help minority candidates
Video on the PhD Completion Program ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWtUTZk1w4Q
Also read about the efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ---
Click Here
Added Jensen Rant
Often potential minority candidates for accounting doctoral programs are CPAs.
They are strong accounting candidates that are attracted to accounting and
turned off by the heavy mathematics, statistics, and econometrics years of study
in accountancy doctoral programs that have almost no accountancy. It would help
greatly if some of our leading doctoral programs would open up paths of study
other than "accountics."
Alternative study and research paths could include paths of case method and
field research. Those graduates may never publish in The Accounting Review
(which now publishes zero case and field research studies according to the
latest report of the TAR Editor), but there are research journals that will
publish case and field research studies.
My rants ad nauseum on the narrow mindedness of present accountics
doctoral programs are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
Question
What industry has the fastest growing mortgage default rates?
But all that discounting hasn't
stopped occupancy from dropping an average of 10 percent. The result? Hotel
loans have begun falling into delinquency faster than any other kind of
commercial real estate debt.
Yahoo News, November 28, 2009 ---
Click Here
Here are the unconfirmed claims about Cloud Computing (which is still
controversial)
"Accountant-Centric Cloud Computing It does a lot more. Costs a lot less,"
AccountingWeb,
Email Advertisement
The Accountant-Centric solutions from
AccountantsWorld do what no other cloud computing solution can - they
let you work collaboratively with your clients with you in full command. And
that capability lets you do some truly remarkable things for your practice.
You can: "AccountantsWorld has long been a
path-breaker in the world of online only software, and the software designed
specifically for accountants." Accounting Today, Sept. 2009
• Prevent clients from making a bookkeeping mess
and perform client accounting 30-50% faster
• Protect your most precious business asset - your
trusted client relationships
• Compete with your fiercest competitor and win
• Add payroll as a profit center by bringing the
capabilities of the larger service bureaus within your reach at a fraction
of the cost
• Create a client portal and your online presence
in minutes
• Access your documents from anywhere anytime; no
more lost documents
• Prevent data loss due to viruses and hard disk
crashes
• Customize the system for each client to match
their needs and abilities
• Get around the clock access to the application
from anywhere
• Service remote clients effectively
• Minimize data entry
• Get more time to enhance client satisfaction and
expand your practice And much more...
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Amidst all the hype about Cloud Computing, don't forget about some of the
wonderful WebLedger alternatives to Cloud Computing ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/webledger.htm
Do you really want to start your own blog?
A blog that is well done will take almost all your time.
The benefits lie firstly in how much you learn by doing
a blog, especially what you learn from other blogs you visit often. You also
learn from replies of other people to your blog. For example, today I naively
stated that Fusion 3 is great for running the Windows OS on a Mac but that it
probably would not run the new Windows 7. In less than an hour my good friend
Glenn Kroeger (geology professor at Trinity University and super geek) set me
straight that Fusion 3 works great on a high powered Mac.
Secondly, giving something back to a world, a
profession, and many friends you meet along the way is a tremendous intrinsic
reward. I discuss this under the term listserv at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm#ListServs
The problem with blogs is that there are now millions of
great blogs in the world and hundreds in the field of accountancy. It's
impossible to keep up with all of them.
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Accounting professor blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Questions
In science, what is value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data?
Is it common place to discard contradictory data that was not homgenised?
Leading Climate Scientist in the UK
“We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality
controlled and homogenised) data.”
My colleagues and I accept that some of the
published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a
result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use
colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues.
Phil Jones, Head ("scientist") of
the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, November 24, 2009
http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/nov/homepagenews/CRUupdate
Jensen Comment
"colloquialisms frequently used" = "only publish outcomes consistent with
funding and political goals"
Or in other words "accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don't
mess with Mr. Inbetween."
Climate Science Video ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk&feature=player_embedded
Leading British scientists at the University of East
Anglia, who were accused of manipulating climate change data - dubbed
Climategate - have agreed to publish their figures in full.The U-turn by the
university follows a week of controversy after the emergence of hundreds of
leaked emails, "stolen" by hackers and published online, triggered claims that
the academics had massaged statistics. In a statement welcomed by climate change
sceptics, the university said it would make all the data accessible as soon as
possible, once its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had negotiated its release from
a range of non-publication agreements.
Robert Mendick, "Climategate:
University of East Anglia U-turn in climate change row Leading British
scientists at the University of East Anglia, who were accused of manipulating
climate change data - dubbed Climategate - have agreed to publish their figures
in full," London Telegraph, November 28, 2009 ---
Click Here
Oops! Scratch the Above Tidbit:
This is beginning to sound more like ACORN and the Houston Office of Arther
Andersen.
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away
much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming
are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic
calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150
years....In a statement on its website, the CRU said:
“We do not hold the original raw data but only the
value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
Jonathan Leake, "Climate change data dumped," London Times, November 29, 2009
---
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
Jensen Comment
Phil Jones was not in charge in the 1980s when the raw data were discarded.
The Economist believes that global warming is
a serious threat, and that the world needs to take steps to try to avert it.
That is the job of the politicians. But we do not believe that climate change is
a certainty. There are no certainties in science. Prevailing theories must be
constantly tested against evidence, and refined, and more evidence collected,
and the theories tested again. That is the job of the scientists. When they stop
questioning orthodoxy, mankind will have given up the search for truth. The
skeptics should not be silenced.
"A Heated Debate," The Economist, November 25, 2009, Page
15 ---
Click Here
Noted University of Arizona Scientist Caught Up in the Scandal
"Global warming fraud uncovered," by Kathy G. Boatman, London Times,
November 27, 2009 ---
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/147725
The documents released make it clear that
this particular situation involved a notable University of Arizona climate
change scientist by the name of Jonathan Overpeck.
The university issued a press release
regarding Jonathan Overpeck in 2007 that seems to confirm his involvement,
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was one of the winners of the
2007 Nobel Peace Prize, and a professor at The University of Arizona was one
of only 33 lead authors on an IPCC assessment report released earlier this
year.”
Overpeck, director of the University of
Arizona’s Institute for the Study of Planet Earth and professor of
geosciences and atmospheric sciences, was a coordinating lead author of a
chapter on Paleoclimate, for the IPCC’s fourth assessment report.
“This is pretty awesome,” Overpeck was
quoted as saying in the news release. “So much work went into this on the
part of so many scientists. The recognition is a reflection of the impact
that climate science is having. It’s also a reflection that society is
moving from questioning climate change to realizing that it’s happening and
discuss what to do about it.”
The fourth assessment report, which
focused on the science of climate change, presented expert consensus on
greenhouse gas levels, global land and ocean temperatures, sea level rising,
changes in sea ice and predictions of future change.
However, it now appears that Overpeck and
others have manipulated the science and the consensus they claim to have.
Perhaps congressional hearings will help to determine Overpeck’s role in
this situation.
In addition to these problems, the
attempts to brainwash the public are evident. CRU apparently utilized a
public relations firm to communicate its climate change message. Most
notable is the statement, “Changing attitudes toward climate change is not
like selling a particular brand of soap, it’s like convincing someone to use
soap in the first place.” Another one of the PR rules is, “Everyone must use
a clear and consistent explanation of climate change.”
Before you take start purchasing carbon
credits, I suggest you peruse the documents and e-mails that were leaked and
are available in a searchable database at
www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/search.php
A new scientific scandal Alert: If a peer review fails in the
woods...,
A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number
of recent peer-reviewed climate papers. At least eight papers purporting to
reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited,
with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the
IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the
British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every
case, peer review failed to pick up the errors. At issue is the use of tree
rings as a temperature proxy, or dendrochronology.
Andrew Orlowski, "A new scientific
scandal Alert: Print If a peer review fails in the woods...," The
Register, September 29, 2009 ---
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/
Hackers are revealing the moral hazards of climate science
However, we do now have hundreds of emails that
give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by
leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to
silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths,
this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other
investigative bodies.
Scientists have long endured the criticism that many of them cheat in their
grant applications, experiments, and in their race to be the first to publish
findings that ultimately do not stand the test of more deliberative
replications. But the open-minded willingness of journals and editors to publish
contradictory findings has always been viewed as saving the credibility of
science. In the natural sciences replication or other confirmation is the name
of the game. In the social sciences replication and confirmation is more
problematic, but increasingly attempts are being made to improve the credibility
of social science experimentation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#Myths
This is why it is very disheartening to see the politics of climate-change
scientists destroying the credibility of their journals and their editors who
control the gates of publication of climate change research.
Since science funding in the United States has become largely a game of
gaming for grants, there are many other examples in virtually all branches of
science where scientists engage in fraud just for the money and the prestige.
Politicians have created enormous moral hazards in the world of science and
medicine.
How did academic accounting research become a
pseudo science?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
"Lab Experiments Are a Major Source of Knowledge in the Social Sciences,"
by Armin Falk and James J. Heckman, IZA Discussion Paper No. 4540, October
2009 ---
http://ftp.iza.org/dp4540.pdf
Laboratory experiments are a widely used
methodology for advancing causal knowledge in the physical and life
sciences. With the exception of psychology, the adoption of laboratory
experiments has been much slower in the social sciences, although during the
last two decades, the use of lab experiments has accelerated. Nonetheless,
there remains considerable resistance among social scientists who argue that
lab experiments lack “realism” and “generalizability”. In this article we
discuss the advantages and limitations of laboratory social science
experiments by comparing them to research based on nonexperimental data and
to field experiments. We argue that many recent objections against lab
experiments are misguided and that even more lab experiments should be
conducted.
Jensen Comment
It disappointed me that Falk and Heckman did not really discuss the issue of
replication and verifiability while claiming that "lab experiments are a major
source of knowledge in the social sciences." The might've given more examples
where studies were independently replicated, and there are such studies ---
especially lab experiments in psychology.
They do mention in passing that lab experiments might support or run counter
to empirical studies, but here again it would've helped to provide some
examples. I did a bit of searching and found one example that they might've used
for such purposes ---
http://www.jsecjournal.com/JSEC_Mesoudi_1-2.pdf
I suspect there are hundreds of similar examples.
The trade-offs between lab experiments versus field studies are discussed in
the following paper:
"Internal and External Validity in Economics Research: Tradeoffs between
Experiments, Field Experiments, Natural Experiments and Field Data," by Brian E.
Roe and David R. Just, 2009 Proceedings Issue, American Journal of
Agricultural Economics ---
http://aede.osu.edu/people/roe.30/Roe_Just_AJAE09.pdf
Abstract: In the realm of empirical research,
investigators are first and foremost concerned with the validity of their
results, but validity is a multi-dimensional ideal. In this article we
discuss two key dimensions of validity – internal and external validity –
and underscore the natural tension that arises in choosing a research
approach to maximize both types of validity. We propose that the most common
approaches to empirical research – the use of naturally-occurring
field/market data and the use of laboratory experiments – fall on the ends
of a spectrum of research approaches, and that the interior of this spectrum
includes intermediary approaches such as field experiments and natural
experiments. Furthermore, we argue that choosing between lab experiments and
field data usually requires a tradeoff between the pursuit of internal and
external validity. Movements toward the interior of the spectrum can often
ease the tension between internal and external validity but are also
accompanied by other important limitations, such as less control over
subject matter or topic areas and a reduced ability for others to replicate
research. Finally, we highlight recent attempts to modify and mix research
approaches in a way that eases the natural conflict between internal and
external validity and discuss if employing multiple methods leads to
economies of scope in research costs.
Lab experiments, but not field studies, are quite popular in some of the
leading accounting research journals and are most commonly conducted on student
volunteers. The problem is the behavioral lab experiments findings are
apparently not important enough to verify and replicate, although the hypotheses
may have been generated from anecdotal observations in the real world or even,
on occasion, by related empirical studies.
I've always contended that more experiments might be replicated if journal
editors encouraged replications by adopting policies of sending replication
submissions out for review with at least a chance of publication for studies
that corroborate findings as well as negate findings. The fact that behavioral
experiments published in TAR, JAR, and JAE are virtually never replicated sends
out signals that the findings are either too obvious or too unimportant or too
superficial to be of interest in and of themselves.
Unlike some leading social science journals, the leading accounting journals
tend not to publish case and field research studies even if these sometimes
indirectly support the lab experimental outcomes.
Experimental Economics: Rethinking the Rules by Nicholas
Bardsley and others (Princeton University Press; 2009, 375 pages; $55).
Discusses the use of experimental methods in economic research and examines
controversies over the growing field.
The English Language is Confusing: How do you interpret the
following headline:
New effort focuses on preventing unwanted pregnancies
at community colleges.
Inside Higher Ed, November 24, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/25/pregnancy
Jensen Comment
One interpretation would be a desire that women would go off campus to have an
unwanted pregnancy. But this is not what is really intended in the article. The
hope is that unwanted pregnancies will not prevent or greatly delay graduation.
Let's hope he makes it all the way
Mario Rocha, a freshman on a scholarship at George Washington University, is the
subject of a profile in
The Washington Post -- and this isn't
your standard "frosh adjusts to college" story. Rocha was wrongly convicted of
first degree murder and spent 10 years behind bars before his appeal won his
freedom and he was able to pursue a higher education.
Inside Higher Ed, November 24, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/25/qt#214198
A Video of Hope compared with a Video of Despair
Video 1
University of the Pacific President Pamela A. Eibeck addresses the campus
community and online viewers in a Fall Welcome address on September 10, 2009
---
http://www.vimeo.com/6534192
Jensen Comment
What impressed me is the enthusiasm of the University of the Pacific's new
president who selected to move to a community hardest hit by the subprime
mortgage scandals, economic crises of empty houses, very high unemployment, and
several years of really severe drought on the surrounding farms and ranches.
Stockton is largely an agricultural community.
Video 2
CBS Sixty Minutes featured how bad things became in Stockton's economy and its
fraudulent mortgage lenders..
The Sixty Minutes Module is entitled "House of Cards" ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=3756665n&tag=contentMain;contentBody
This is an example of a community and a university and new university
president that are not giving up as the "house of cards" collapses about them.
The fall was aided and abetted by the credit rating agencies like Moody's and
Standard & Poors.
As for Pamela Eibeck and her son, you might also read the November 22, 2009
tidbit in the Chronicle of Higher Education ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Moms-the-PresidentIm/49228/
Can thieves sit in parking lots and use "key grabbers" to steal the code
signal you used when using your key chain to lock your car?
Answer
Yes and No ---
http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/lockcode.asp
"Teaching With Twitter: Not for the Faint of Heart Students are
emboldened, but they can also hijack discussions," by Jeffrey R. Young,
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 22, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Teaching-With-Twitter-Not-for/49230/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on teaching with Twitter are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Mac OS versus Windows OS
I’d be
interested in hearing success stories about the Windows emulators on the Mac.
Increasingly with the greatly reduced prices of computers, most Mac users have a
Windows machine that will run software available only for the Windows OS.
Supposedly these
have gotten better for emulating Windows on a Mac.
Fusion 3 (not
free) is a popular add on ---
http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/
Unlike the Windows emulator available from Apple, Fusion 3 allows split screens
where one screen is Max OS and the other is Windows OS. However, it will also
run in a single-screen Windows view.
"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.
November 22, 2009 reply from Trinity University Geology Professor Glenn Kroeger
Bob:
Fusion 3 runs Win7 great! I have several virtual
machines, so that I can run WinXP, Win7 and Liniux to test software I
develop. I also use Fusion for several heavy duty processing packages for
GIS and seismic processing. Much prefer it to a real windows machine... if
Windows gets uppity, I can restart one virtual machine while my Mac and
other virtual machines just keep chugging along.
For best results, I suggest a faster CPU, larger
cache and as much RAM as possible. For examples, it works great on my
MacBook Pro with a 2.8G processor (with 6M cache) and 4 GB RAM.
Glenn
November 22, 2009 reply from Trinity University Chemistry Professor Nancy
Mills
Bob,
I used VMFusion when I transitioned from Windows to Mac with the idea that I
could use my PC programs and not buy new ones. It was awkward for me to have
to open VMFusion when I needed to draw chemical structures or make plots.
And, my PC programs began to work more erratically. But this did buy me time
to make the complete transition to Mac, which was good.
Nancy
November 22, 2009 reply from Trinity University instructional support expert
Robert Chapman
Hi Robert,
I use VirtualBox from Sun on my
Mac without issue. It supports all of the important features that are
required for running virtual machines simultaneously. There is a free open
source version available. The email included below has experiences/myths
that I would fine either peculiar or very circumstantial for the user. For a
"power user" they seemed like pretty rookie mistakes issues. I hope the Mac
experience goes better for you. If you have any questions about VirtualBox
let me know. Thanks.
http://www.virtualbox.org/
Instructional Support Manager
Robert Chapman
rchapman@trinity.edu
November 22, 2009 reply from Tax Professor Richard Sansing at Dartmouth
I have had success using "Parallels Desktop" on my
Mac to run Scientific Workplace and the Solver function on Excel.
Richard Sansing
Parallels Desktop ---
http://www.parallels.com/
November 22, 2009 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University
[fordhadr@JMU.EDU]
Due to the number of people requesting elaboration
on my comment about the "myths of the Mac", here are my experiences:
Let me preface these by saying I've been told these
myths over and over by Mac fans who enthusiastically tried for years to get
me to ditch my Windows machines for a Mac by using these arguments on me. I
don't say that all Mac users hold these beliefs, but enough of my Mac-fan
acquaintances claim they are true for me to label them "myths" rather than
simply a mistaken error coming from a single uninformed or naive Mac user.)
Myth 1: "The Mac isn't affected by viruses". False.
Even though I very, very rarely use my Mac on the Internet, my iMac
contracted a virus. I don't know where it came from, but our Tech Support
people found it while troubleshooting a problem it caused. And it was darned
hard for them to find me any Anti-virus software that really works on a Mac
without gumming up the works bigtime. They installed three different
Mac-based anti-virus programs before they got one that didn't make at least
one of my standard Mac apps stop working. If Macs aren't affected by
viruses, why are there anti-virus programs for Macs? My tech support people
reluctantly agreed that the myth is false when I asked them that question.
Myth 2: "The Mac OS-X doesn't crash." False. I've
had at least four crashes, none of which can be explained by anyone,
including our tech support people, who repeated the myth to me until they
sat in my office and watched it happen. Yes, the whole shebang, not just one
program (or app, as the Mac users calls them).
Myth 3: "Mac-based programs don't crash." False.
I've gotten used to saving my work every five minutes on the iMac (I usually
go 10-15 minutes on the Windows machines) because I'm tired of seeing the
little pop-up window: "Adobe Premiere Pro (or some other program) has
unexpectedly quit working. You have lost any data that was not recently
saved. You can try opening the program again." This happens regularly in my
Adobe Creative Suite 3 for Mac programs, as well as two native
iMac-'included' apps that came pre-loaded on the machine.
Myth 4: "The Mac doesn't just freeze-up suddenly
like Windows programs do from time to time." False. I've let Adobe
Photoshop, Premiere Pro, iDVD, Safari, and several other programs sit
overnight in a "hung" state before Tech Support comes over and unplugs the
machine -- unlike Windows machines, even holding the button on the back
doesn't seem to reboot a Mac when it's frozen.
Myth 5: "The Mac is a lot easier to learn." Maybe
True for some, but not for me. Then again, I was 53 years old when I started
learning the Mac, whereas I was only 33 when I learned Windows 3.0, which
was built upon the DOS which I learned when I was in my mid-20's, which was
similar to CP/M which I learned when ... so I'll chalk up my learning curve
to age and curmudgeonliness.
Myth 6: "Everything you can do on a Windows machine
you can do on a Mac by using a Windows emulator." False. I have at least
four programs which run fine on Windows which refuse to run at all on my
iMac... out of about a dozen I tried. This was the first myth that our Tech
Support people readily admitted was false without me having to demonstrate
it to them. They recommended de-installing the emulators (which I have,
eagerly) and sticking with running all Windows programs on Windows machines,
and using only Mac programs on the Mac. (Note that this does not solve the
problems I have with the Mac programs noted in the myths above.)
Myth 7: "You can run Windows programs on a Mac, but
they run a little slower than on a Windows machine." Maybe True for some
programs, but not all... Some of my programs were not a little slow, they
were agonizingly slow, taking MINUTES instead of seconds to respond. This
was the second myth that our Tech Support agreed was false without my having
to convince them. I now run Windows programs only on Windows machines.
Myth 8: "Mac's have no trouble with Firewire."
False. Every single time I try to capture video from my Canon ZR-960
videocam, it takes eight or ten plug-ins and unplugs before the machine
finally recognizes it. Once it recognizes it, however, everything is good
from there on out. The Adobe Premiere people say its the iMac, not their
program. The camera works fine on Windows machines. The problem is
indigenous to certain individual iMacs, not all. It works fine first time on
about half of the iMacs tech support tried, but failed on the other half.
The camera works fine first time every time on all Windows Vista machines,
including my Vista Home Edition at home, even using the exact same cable.
(My office WinXP doesn't have a firewire card so I haven't tried it on XP.)
Myth 9: "Mac's have no trouble with USB devices
like outboard disk drives." False. For some reason, my iMac will not
recognize one of my Western Digital outboard disk drives... ever, even
though it has the NTFS partition created on another identical iMac!. The
disk simply doesn't show up on the desktop when plugged in. Either
partition! The disk works perfectly on every Windows machine I've plugged it
into. Both partitions (NTFS and FAT32) show up on XP and Vista machines
without problem. My three other disk drives work okay on my Mac, and even my
thumb drives (FAT32 only!) work fine on the iMac. But this one doesn't. I've
never had a Windows machine that refused to recognize ANY outboard disk
drive. Yes, it's a USB 2.0 compliant disk drive, purchased in 2008. The disk
works on some of CIT's Macs, but not others, and no one can explain why.
Myth 10: "It's just your individual machine, not
Macs in general. You must have a bad machine." FALSE. I've used up a lot of
brownie points with our tech support and CIT people by taking my stuff over
to their iMacs and duplicating the problems on THEIR machines when they try
to tell me it's just my individual machine. In fact, in two instances, I've
succeeded in "stumping the chumps" by making their machine fail in front of
their eyes in new ways that MY machine has never done before. In one of
those two, the tech support guy was actually running the machine, not me. So
it's not just the way I'm holding my mouth or blinking my eyes or doing
covert things with the command keys.
Now in all fairness, I have to admit that I'm
something of a power user, meaning that I probably use about 15-20% of an
application's capabilities, compared to the average user who uses probably
5-10% of the capabilities. I exercise the programs and explore recesses and
features and use the intermediate capabilities (the textbooks call them
"advanced" features, but in reality, even I don't even begin to touch some
of the real advanced capabilities of most mature modern software
applications! So I may be bumping into some unexplored territory with my
attempts to get the real performance out of some of these programs. So I
won't criticize the average Mac user who claims these myths are true,
because his/her experience might never have led him/her into the situations
where I encounter the problems.
Most Mac tech support people will admit that these
myths are myths. The few who still don't admit they are myths seem to
believe I'm bringing bad karma into their offices and machines. If I am, it
is unintentional. But they may be right, given the large number of Mac users
who still insist the above statements are gospel truth.
SUMMARY: I'm not dissing the Macs in favor of
Windows machines. Macs do have a lot going for them. My iMac flies like
lightning compared to Windows when it comes to video editing, video
rendering, audio conversions, photo editing en masse, and other A/V
applications (on those occasions that it doesn't hang, crash, or
automatically reboot without me doing anything!). So I'm relatively happy
with the Mac for those applications. And I can't even complain too much
about the operation or learning curves of some of the Mac apps -- like
Safari, etc. But I don't find those apps any EASIER, however, especially
since the interface's logic is so different from what I'm used to on Windows
machines.
But I must say that I'm not yet convinced that the
Mac is in any way superior (or even comparable) to a Windows machine for any
of the office-related (lower-case o) applications like word-processing,
spreadsheets that I've tried on it, especially for the features that I use,
nor do I believe a Mac is anywhere near as safe and reliable as all of my
Mac-fan friends had led me to believe. In fact, I would dare say that my
iMac has actually been just as unreliable and prone to problems as any
Windows machine I've ever had. Not necessarily worse, but every bit as bad.
I know Mac users who will disagree, and I know
Windows users who will also disagree, believing that nothing can be as
problematic as Microsoft software. I'm going ONLY on my own personal
experience. As my doctor told me only 29 hours ago, as his test diagnosed me
with H1N1 with no symptoms whatsoever but a previously-unexplained fever,
"hey, everybody is different... everybody is different."
David Fordham James Madison University
Interchangeable Files on a Mac versus a PC
Mac Version of Quicken is Inferior and Incompatible
From Walter S. Mossberg's Mailbox on May 7, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124164628523093263.html
Q: I switched from PC to Mac a
year ago, but now I am thinking of adding a Windows laptop. If I do, what
kind of compatibility problem would I have? I would be using the laptop
mostly to write, to send/receive email and to Web browse.
A: In the old days, there were
compatibility problems, but most of those have gone away. Based on your
simple predicted usage, I'd say that you should be fine. For instance, both
Macs and PCs can interchangeably open and edit all of the major file types
-- JPG pictures, MP3 music, Microsoft Office documents, Adobe PDF files,
etc. Email and instant messages can, of course, be exchanged between the two
platforms, even if you are using different programs. And Macs understand
Windows file extensions. Also, you can use both platforms simultaneously on
the same home network to access the Internet.
In some cases, you might need different programs to
open the same files on the two platforms. But even that obstacle has greatly
diminished. For instance, programs like the Firefox and Safari Web browsers,
Adobe Reader, iTunes, Microsoft Office, Google Earth, Picasa, Photoshop and
many others come in native versions for both platforms that can handle the
same files. And, of course, Web-based programs like Gmail and Yahoo Mail
work on both. Sometimes, the same programs have different features and user
interfaces on Windows and Macs, but I haven't found these differences hard
to master.
The biggest problems for average users are
Quicken, whose Mac version is inferior and incompatible;
Internet Explorer, which is no longer made for the
Mac; and Microsoft Outlook, which is replaced on the Mac by a program called
Entourage that is similar but uses a different file format. And networking
can be tricky. In general, the Mac does a better job of seeing Windows PCs
on a network than Windows does of seeing Macs.
Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm
How does this compare with the value of your house?
"Detroit's Famous Pontiac Silverdome Sells For Just $583,000 (less than
1% of cost) ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/pontiac-silverdome-sells-for-a-paltry-583000-2009-11
"Pontiac Silverdome, Home of SBXVI, Sold for $583K"--headline,
Sports Illustrated Web site, Nov. 23, 2009
Detroit
Sold for Scrap"--headline,
Onion, April 5, 2006
How well does GM's Volt automobile test model work on a test track?
Very, very well ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/automobiles/autoreviews/22-chevy-volt.html?_r=1&hpw
The ultimate test will be battery life/cost and years/miles of full
warranty.
An unmentioned problem is the weight of the car that now requires specially
made tires. Driving this tank down the road on a gas-fed generator can hardly
get good mileage (my guess is less than five miles to the gallon). GM does not
like to talk about this problem. Also not mentioned is the cost of the
electricity needed to charge the battery when the car is in a garage. "You load
16 tons and what do you get?" Another 40 miles.
Harvard Study (with tongue in cheek) Predicts Wall Street and Dow Recovery
However, according to an only half-joking report
released last week, the low numbers of Harvard MBAs landing Wall Street jobs
could point to something else – an impending recovery. The “Harvard MBA
Indicator” is a market predictor designed by HBS alum Ray Soifer. According to
his somewhat facetious theory, the percentage of Harvard MBAs each year who take
market-sensitive jobs, generally those closely tied to investing, is inversely
related to the health of the stock market. In other words, the fewer HBS grads
that take jobs in banking, venture capital, leveraged buyouts, etc., the better
the Dow will do.
"Harvard MBA Indicator: Good Times Ahead for Finance Jobs?" by Geoff Gloeckler,
Business Week, November 11, 2009 ---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
I'm more inclined to attribute the rise in the Dow to the plunge in the value of
the U.S. dollar, which of course does not bode well for real economic recovery.
Menwhile the Fed continues to print free money for the big banks.
The Obamacare entitlement program may well add $40 trillion (anybody's guess
not mentioned in Congress) or more to unfunded entitlements obligations even if
politicians are claiming it will add much less than a ten-year trillion to the
booked U.S. National Debt standing above $12 trillion ---
- http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Here's the Doomsday Graphic being shown around the U.S. by David Walker
(former Chief Accountant of the United States)
The Real National Debt (booked + unbooked entitlements without Obamacare) 2008
Source ---
http://www.pgpf.org/about/nationaldebt/
IOUSA (the most frightening movie in American history)
---
(see a 30-minute version of the documentary at
www.iousathemovie.com )
More on David Walker’s warnings of impending entitlements
disasters ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/entitlements.htm
Hollywood Movies Featuring Accountants
From Jim Mahar's Blog on November 20, 2009 ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
YouTube - Other People's Money speech by Danny DeVito:
"Other People's Money speech by Danny DeVito"
If you want to feel old, mention this movie in class,
virtually no one has heard of it. Fortunately some of it is still online.
Here is
Jorgy's speech, and here is Danny Devito's ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfL7STmWZ1c
"Is It Possible To Invent An Investment Product (purely fake satire) Too
Stupid To Find Buyers?" by Jim Carney, Business Insider, November 19,
2009 ---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
And as academics we question how Wall Street could get away with gimmicks all
these years.
"There's a sucker born every minute second ."
Makes you sort of wonder if auditors with their SOX on are just wasting time
and money.
November 21, 2009 reply from David Albrecht
[albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]
Other People's Money is my favorite business
movie. I've viewed it a dozen times or more. I think it is the best movie
for showing students what is involved with a proxy fight.
The Deal, starring Christian Slater, is my
recommendation for a movie focused on due diligence investigations.
The Devil Wears Prada is my recommendation
for a movie dealing with an ethical dilemma. Although The Contender
(Joan Allen), Dave, Working Girl (Melanie Griffith) aren't bad.
Only Devil will be familiar to today's
students. Doesn't mean they can't learn from an old movie.
Stranger Than Fiction might be the best
movie about an accountant. The Harold Crick character evolves through three
of the stereotypes discussed in Dimnik and Feldon.
Dave Albrecht
November 21, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Of course let's not forget Hollywood's Enron fraud documentary
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
And there's the best Enron movie in a sense that it's a home movie featuring
the real Enron bad guys ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/windowsmedia/enron3.wmv
Jeff Skilling plays himself when introducing
HFA --- Hypothetical Future Accounting
In Carnal Knowledge Jack Nicholson plays a deeply dysfunctional
CPA in this racy and depressing movie having zero accounting or business
education but some education about Ann Margaret's body.
And there's
Suze Orman's video The Laws of Money, The Lessons of Life (also a
2003 book)
Click on the category "Movies and TV" at Amazon.com and feed in the
search word "accounting."
It was at the above site that I stumbled on many non-Hollywood movies,
including
- Accountant with Jeff Gardner
- Enhanced April with Josie Lawrence, Miranda Richardson,
Alfred Molina, and Neville Phillips
- The Incredible Mr. Limpet with Don Knotts, Carole Cook, Jack
Weston, and Andrew Duggan
- The Producers with Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Christopher
Hewett, and William Hickey
- Midnight Run with Charles Grodin, Robert De Niro, Danielle
DuClos, and Dennis Farina
- Secretaries with Kelly Brown; Dale Rutter; Alana Evans
- Frontline: The Madoff Affair
- 1945 Financial Accounting & Bookkeeping Vocational Film DVD:
Accountant Career History
- Lean Accounting ($255 to buy so it's better to rent)
- Fair Value Accounting: A Critical New Skill for All CPAs
($379.95)
- Standard Deviants (multiple volume accounting education
modules)
- CBS News (multiple volumes somehow linked to accounting)
- Many others at Amazon under "accounting" Movies and DVDs
And of course there are Bob Jensen's exciting free accounting tutorials on
Excel, MS Access, Swap Valuations, XBRL. Camtasia, etc. ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/
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
Coach Bill Belichick's Lessons on Probability and Innovation
He took Robert Frost's path least taken near the end of a game on November 16,
2009
Interestingly, a rookie coach cannot get away with gambles like a veteran Super
Bowl coach can try
"What Innovators Can Learn from Bill Belichick," by Scott Anthony, Harvard
Business School, November 20, 2009 ---
Click Here
Even non-football fans probably heard about
Bill Belichick's "blunder" of a call on Sunday
night. Believe it or not, the call — and the firestorm that followed — has
important lessons for innovation managers.
A quick recap. The New England Patriots led the
Indianapolis Colts by six points with two minutes to go. It was fourth down,
the ball was on the New England 28 yard line, and the Patriots needed just
two yards for a first down that would almost certainly have sealed a
victory. Conventional wisdom called for a punt, but Coach Belichick decided
to go for it. After the Patriots fell just short of the first down, the
Colts marched into the end zone and won the game.
Reaction was swift and almost
universally negative.
But there's
statistical evidence that Belichick followed the
right approach, that his move marginally increased the odds that the
Patriots would win the game. Of course, the Patriots didn't win the game,
but had the situation played out hundreds of times, a coach using
Belichick's tactics would win more frequently than one who didn't.
What does this have to do with innovation?
First, the "Belichick incident" highlights the
challenges facing a leader who makes the hard, right choices.
If Belichick had punted and the Patriots
lost, no one would have complained. Following a seemingly
non-conventional approach opened Belichick up to criticism. Successful
innovation requires similar bravery. It isn't easy to go after non-existent
markets or follow non-obvious approaches when analysts and investors are
grilling you over minute-by-minute results. After all, naysayers tend not to
criticize risks you don't take.
The other important implication relates to rewards.
People moaned about Belichick's decision because the result was negative.
Just like companies reward people who hit their numbers and penalize those
who don't.
Getting world-class at innovation requires moving beyond rewarding results
to rewarding behaviors. Remember, the odds that an initial strategy
is right are very low. If a team learns quickly and cheaply that initial
assumptions won't pan out, they should be celebrated, not castigated. In the
long run, those behaviors will lead to more successes than failures.
No one said leading innovation was easy. Getting
uncommon results, however, sometimes requires following uncommon approaches.
Jensen Comment
I read somewhere that virtually all football teams punt way too often on fourth
down with less than two yards to go. Unfortunately I cannot recall the recent
reference to this. But often it's a bit like betting the farm --- our beloved
Bill Belichick with zero PR skills is Exhibit A.
Also see
"Bill Belichick and the Cleveland Browns," by John R. Wells, Travis Haglock,
Harvard Business School, August 10, 2005 ---
http://harvardbusiness.org/product/bill-belichick-and-the-cleveland-browns/an/706415-PDF-ENG
"Professors of the Year Are Celebrated for Innovative Teaching,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 19, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-of-the-Year-Are/49208/
Jensen Comment
Some of these remind me of the field trip experiments for basic accounting
instigated by Karen Pincus first at the University of Southern California and
later at the University of Arkansas. The field trips are great for motivation
but often detract from scope of coverage of basic concepts and consume time with
logistics.
Years ago I wrote the following at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm
I wrote this in the 1990s dot.com boom when accounting majors nationwide were
plummeting in favor of IT and finance.
The BAM case method approach is an alternative "field learning" way of adding
realism to learning without the logistical time hurdles of field trips ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
The BAM approach is probably too intense and difficult for a very basic
accounting course. It has been used successfully in intermediate accounting at
the University of Virginia, Villanova, and other universities.
Hi Yvonne ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm
For what it is worth, my advice to
new faculty is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm
One thing to remember is that the
employers of our students (especially the public accounting firms) are very
unhappy with our lecture/drill pedagogy at the introductory and intermediate
levels. They believe that such pedagogy turns away top students, especially
creative and conceptualizing students. Employers believe that lecture/drill
pedagogy attracts savant-like memorizers who can recite their lessons book
and verse but have few creative talents and poor prospects for becoming
leaders. The large accounting firms believed this so strongly that they
donated several million dollars to the American Accounting Association for
the purpose of motivating new pedagogy experimentation. This led to the
Accounting Change Commission (AECC) and the mixed-outcome experiments that
followed. See
http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/facdev/aecc.htm
The easiest pedagogy for faculty is
lecturing, and it is appealing to busy faculty who do not have time for
students outside the classroom. When lecturing to large classes it is even
easier because you don't have to get to know the students and have a great
excuse for using multiple choice examinations and graduate student teaching
assistants. I always remember an economics professor at Michigan State
University who said that when teaching basic economics it did not matter
whether he had a live class of 300 students or a televised class of 3,000
students. His full-time teaching load was three hours per week in front of a
TV camera. He was a very good lecturer and truly loved his three-hour per
week job!
Lecturing appeals to faculty
because it often leads to the highest teaching evaluations. Students love
faculty who spoon feed and make learning seem easy. It's much easier when
mom or dad spoon the pudding out of the jar than when you have to hold your
own spoon and/or find your own jar.
An opposite but very effective
pedagogy is the AECC (University of Virginia) BAM Pedagogy that entails live
classrooms with no lectures. BAM instructors think it is more important for
students to learn on their own instead of sitting through spoon-fed learning
lectures. I think it takes a special kind of teacher to pull off the
astoundingly successful BAM pedagogy. Interestingly, it is often some of our
best lecturers who decided to stop lecturing because they experimented with
the BAM and found it to be far more effective for long-term memory. The top
BAM enthusiasts are Tony Catanach at Villanova University and David Croll at
the University of Virginia. Note, however, that most BAM applications have
been at the intermediate accounting level. I have my doubts (and I think BAM
instructors will agree) that BAM will probably fail at the introductory
level. You can read about the BAM pedagogy at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
At the introductory level we have
what I like to call the Pincus (User Approach) Pedagogy. Karen Pincus is now
at the University of Arkansas, but at the time that her first learning
experiments were conducted, she taught basic accounting at the University of
Southern California. The Pincus Pedagogy is a little like both the BAM and
the case method pedagogies. However, instead of having prepared learning
cases, the Pincus Pedagogy sends students to on-site field visitations where
they observe on-site operations and are then assigned tasks to creatively
suggest ways of improving existing accounting, internal control, and
information systems. Like the BAM, the Pincus Pedagogy avoids lecturing and
classroom drill. Therein lies the controversy. Students and faculty in
subsequent courses often complain that the Pincus Pedagogy students do not
know the fundamental prerequisites of basic accounting needed for
intermediate and advanced-level accounting courses. Two possible links of
interest on the controversial Pincus Pedagogy are as follows:
Where the Pincus Pedagogy and the
BAM Pedagogy differ lies in subject matter itself and stress on creativity.
The BAM focuses on traditional subject matter that is found in such
textbooks as intermediate accounting textbooks. The BAM Pedagogy simply
requires that students learn any way they want to learn on their own since
students remember best what they learned by themselves. The Pincus Pedagogy
does not focus on much of the debit and credit "rules" found in most
traditional textbooks. Students are required to be more creative at the
expense of memorizing the "rules."
The Pincus Pedagogy is motivated by
the belief that traditional lecturing/drill pedagogy at the basic accounting
and tax levels discourages the best and more-creative students to pursue
careers in the accountancy profession. The BAM pedagogy is motivated more by
the belief that lecturing is a poor pedagogy for long-term memory of
technical details. What is interesting is that the leading proponents of
getting away from the lecture/drill pedagogy (i.e., Karen Pincus and Anthony
Catenach) were previously two of the very best lecturers in accountancy. If
you have ever heard either of them lecture, I think you would agree that you
wish all your lecturers had been only half as good. I am certain that both
of these exceptional teachers would agree that lecturing is easier than any
other alternatives. However, they do not feel that lecturing is the best
alternative for top students.
Between lecturing and the BAM
Pedagogy, we have case method teaching. Case method teaching is a little
like lecturing and a little like the BAM with some instructors providing
answers in case wrap ups versus some instructors forcing students to provide
all the answers. Master case teachers at Harvard University seldom provide
answers even in case wrap ups, and often the cases do not have any known
answer-book-type solutions. The best Harvard cases have alternative
solutions with success being based upon discovering and defending an
alternative solution. Students sometimes interactively discover solutions
that the case writers never envisioned. I generally find case teaching
difficult at the undergraduate level if students do not yet have the tools
and maturity to contribute to case discussions. Interestingly, it may be
somewhat easier to use the BAM at the undergraduate level than Harvard-type
cases. The reason is that BAM instructors are often dealing with more
rule-based subject matter such as intermediate accounting or tax rather than
conceptual subject matter such as strategic decision making, business
valuation, and financial risk analysis.
The hardest pedagogy today is
probably a Socratic pedagogy online with instant messaging communications
where an instructor who's on call about 60 hours per week from his or her
home. The online instructor monitors the chats and team communications
between students in the course at most any time of day or night. Amy Dunbar
can tell you about this tedious pedagogy since she's using it for tax
courses and will be providing a workshop that tells about how to do it and
how not to do it. The next scheduled workshop precedes the AAA Annual
Meetings on August 1, 2003 in Hawaii. You can also hear Dr. Dunbar and view
her PowerPoint show from a previous workshop at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm#2002
In conclusion, always remember that
there is no optimal pedagogy in all circumstances. All learning is
circumstantial based upon such key ingredients as student maturity, student
motivation, instructor talent, instructor dedication, instructor time,
library resources, technology resources, and many other factors that come to
bear at each moment in time. And do keep in mind that how you teach may
determine what students you keep as majors and what you turn away.
I tend to agree with the
accountancy firms that contend that traditional lecturing probably turns
away many of the top students who might otherwise major in accountancy.
At the same time, I tend to agree
with students who contend that they took accounting courses to learn
accounting rather than economics, computer engineering, and behavioral
science.
Bob Jensen
-----Original
Message-----
From: Lou&Bonnie
[mailto:gyp1@EARTHLINK.NET]
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 5:03 PM
I am a
beginning accounting instructor (part-time) at a local community
college. I am applying for a full-time faculty position, but am having
trouble with a question. Methodology in accounting--what works best for
a diversified group of individuals. Some students work with accounting,
but on a computer and have no understanding of what the information they
are entering really means to some individuals who have no accounting
experience whatsoever. What is the best methodology to use, lecture,
overhead, classroom participation? I am not sure and I would like your
feedback. Thank you in advance for your help.
Yvonne
Bob Jensen's threads on tools and tricks of the trade in teaching are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
"Determining which employees are disabled under the new ADA regulations,"
AccountingWeb, November 19, 2009 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/topic/cfo/determining-which-employees-are-disabled-under-new-ada-regulations
Wading into the depths of the Americans
with Disabilities Act of 1990 to determine who is disabled and who is not
has never been a simple task for employers or their employees. On January 1,
2009 amendments to the Act took effect but the new amendments left many
unanswered questions. Now, as instructed by Congress, the U.S. Equal
Employment Commission has proposed rules designed to bring some clarity to
both employers and employees.
Whether that actually occurs remains to be
seen, but it is imperative for companies to become familiar with the
proposed rules, which represent some significant departures from the past.
Why? Consider several scenarios and try to determine in which cases an
employee is considered disabled and must be offered a reasonable
accommodation:
A: An employee with post-traumatic stress
disorder; B: An employee with cancer who is currently in remission; C: An
employee with asthma that they treat with an inhaler; or D: An employee who
wears contact lenses.
According to the EEOC's proposed rules,
the answers are yes, yes, yes, and no. The rules are still being debated,
but employers must make sure they understand which impairments may qualify
as a disability, which may not and how to determine what falls into either
category.
The Revised ADA Regulations
When the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA)
took effect at the beginning of 2009, it brought some significant changes to
the way that disabilities could be interpreted, even though it made few
changes to the definition of a disability.
Under the ADAAA, a disability remains "an
impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a
record of such an impairment, or being regarded as having such an
impairment."
However, the new law made several
important changes, which have spurred the EEOC's proposed rules. Those
changes include:
Expanding the definition of major life
activities to include walking, reading, and many major bodily functions,
such as the immune system, normal cell growth, digestive, bowel, bladder,
neurological, brain, respiratory, circulatory, endocrine, and reproductive
functions. Ordering employers to not consider mitigating measures other than
regular eyeglasses or contact lenses when determining whether an individual
has a disability. Clarifying that an impairment that is episodic or in
remission is a disability if it would substantially limit a major life
activity when the impairment is active – that is, employees are disabled
even if they are not showing symptoms of their disease, if the disease would
qualify as a disability when the employee is experiencing symptoms.
The EEOC Weighs In
When the law was passed, the EEOC was
directed to evaluate how employers should interpret the changes in the ADAAA,
employees, and job applicants. In September, the commission did so when it
issued its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. According to the commission, the
proposed rules – like the amended ADA – are meant to offer broad coverage to
disabled individuals to the maximum extent allowed. The intent of the EEOC
seems clear – the issue should be less about whether an employee or job
applicant has a disability and more about whether discrimination has
occurred.
The EEOC has also included a specific
laundry list of impairments that "consistently meet" the definition of a
disability – a list that is far more extensive than in the past. There are
several other important aspects of the proposed rules, which are still being
debated. Those aspects include:
Along with the list of impairments that
consistently meet the definition of a disability, the proposed rules include
examples of impairments that require more analysis to determine whether they
are, in fact, disabilities, since these impairments may cause more
difficulties for some than others. Impairments that are episodic or in
remission, including epilepsy, cancer, and many kinds of psychiatric
impairments, are disabilities if they would "substantially limit" major life
activities when active. "Major life activities" include caring for oneself,
performing manual tasks, seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking,
standing, sitting, reaching, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing,
learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating, interacting with
others, and working.
Three of these – reaching, interacting
with others, and sitting – are seen for the first time in the proposed rules
and are not listed in the ADAAA. This is not an exhaustive list, according
to the commission.
The proposed rules also include a
specific, non-exhaustive list of major bodily functions that constitute
major life activities, including several – special sense organs and skin,
genitourinary, cardiovascular, hemic, lymphatic, and musculoskeletal – that
are new under the EEOC proposed rules.
· The proposed rules change the definition
of "substantially limits." Under the new regulations, a person is regarded
as disabled if an impairment substantially limits his or her ability to
perform a major life activity compared to what "most people in the general
population" could perform. This is a change from the old regulations, which
define a disability as one that substantially limits how a person can
perform a major life activity compared to "average person in the general
population" can perform an activity.
According to the EEOC, an impairment
doesn't need to prevent or severely restrict an individual from performing a
major life activity. Those tests were too demanding, according to the
proposed rules. Now, employers should rely on a common-sense assessment,
based on how an employee's or applicant's ability to perform a major life
function compares with most people in the general population.
In good news for employers, the proposed
rules do say that temporary, non-chronic impairments that do not last long
and that leave little or no residual effects are usually not considered
disabilities. Prior factors for considering whether an impairment is
substantially limiting, such as the nature, severity and duration of the
impairment, as well as long-term and permanent effects, have been removed.
According to the EEOC, at most, an extra
one million workers may consider themselves to be disabled under the
proposed rules. While that may not seem like many to the commission,
businesses must prepare themselves.
Education and communication are the most
important steps employers can take to prevent discriminations lawsuits from
those claiming disabilities. Employers must educate themselves about the
proposed rules and how those may change when they are ultimately approved.
Employers must also educate their
employees about changes to the ADA and the EEOC's interpretation of the act.
Human resources personnel, managers, and supervisors should be trained to
respond to employees who seek a reasonable accommodation to their
impairment. Employees should receive training, so they know the correct
channels to go through if they believe an impairment qualifies as a
disability. Formalized training, with employee sign-offs, can help to
protect employers from discrimination claims.
They should be working with legal counsel
to update all of their training manuals and employee handbooks, in light of
the new regulations and proposed rules.
With the shift to a broader definition of
disability, employers must brace for the possibility of an increasing number
of claims. They must also work to ensure that they are not inadvertently
discriminating against anyone who now qualifies as disabled.
Bob Jensen's threads on unfunded entitlements ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/entitlements.htm
There is a way around
"passing the trash" (high risk
health insurance patients), but it's not being discussed
in Washington or in town hall meetings.
"Why Health Care Reform Is
Vulnerable to Smart Analytics," by Tom
Davenport, Harvard Business School Publishing, November 19, 2009 ---
Click Here
. . .
Increasingly, however, life and property & casualty
insurers have attempted to increase their profits by predicting just how
much risk a particular customer represents, and pricing the risk
accordingly. You'll pay more for life insurance, for example, if you're a
smoker or a private pilot. You'll pay more for automobile insurance in most
states if your credit score is low. (A low credit score has been found to
predict higher risk of dying or crashing your car.) Pooling the risk, it
seems, is no longer an attractive proposition for life and property
insurers.
It seems obvious that the same predictive
approaches to segmenting risk would eventually move into health insurance.
"But wait," you say. "Isn't information about my health confidential and
secure?" It's true that
HIPAA and other laws protect your medical history
data in doctors' offices and hospitals. But with predictive analytics, you
don't need to have access to anyone's medical records. All you need to know
is how much someone weighs, what kind of food he or she eats, how much
exercise they get, and so forth. Much of that information is publicly
available, can be bought, or can be legally requested in insurance
applications. One health insurance actuary told me that such "lifestyle"
data is a much better predictor than age of who is going to contract, say,
diabetes. Among 45-year olds, for example, there is an eightfold difference
in annual medical spending between the highest-risk lifestyle group and the
lowest.
Such predictions are already employed today by
health insurance firms, who use them to enroll certain customers in "disease
management" programs. In some cases, these programs recommend preventive
therapies to try to head off diseases before they happen, which is usually
good for both customer and insurer. However, it's a relatively short step to
using the predictions to refuse coverage, or to price coverage at a much
higher level.
Today most health insurance companies still
practice risk pooling, either because they insure large organizations with
group insurance coverage for many employees, or because their small group or
individual insurance is heavily regulated at the state level.
However, if we adopt universal coverage in the
United States with mandates to have insurance — as do most of the health
care reform plans under discussion — selection of the lowest-risk customers
may rise dramatically. Many more people will seek insurance as individuals,
rather than as members of groups. It will then be possible for insurance
firms to identify which customers will be profitable, and which will cost
them too much money to insure. They will seek the healthy (and those likely
to stay that way) and shun the sick (and those soon to become sick) as a
result. Since 15% of patients in the U.S. account for 75% of health care
costs, there will be plenty of financial incentives for insurers to do so.
Since some insurance companies will be better at
predicting health risk than others, and since everyone must be insured by
someone, this will lead to dramatic differences in performance between the
more and less analytical health insurers. Some will go out of business,
creating disruption for the entire industry and its consumers. If there is a
"public option" that takes consumers no one else wants, it will undoubtedly
get the citizens who are most likely to acquire expensive diseases.
Taxpayers will foot the bill, while the private health insurers who are good
at prediction will become much richer.
There is a way around this problem, but
it's not being discussed in Washington or in town hall meetings.
It's called "risk adjustment." Under such an approach, if one company (or
public insurance payer) takes on more risky customers and suffers losses as
a result, that company's losses would be paid for out of a risk adjustment
pool into which all insurers would pay — a sort of FDIC for health
insurance. That would dramatically reduce the incentive to select the least
likely customers to get sick.
Risk adjustment is already incorporated today into
Medicare Advantage — private plans that 10 million U.S. consumers use to
augment their basic Medicare coverage — which may be one reason why Medicare
Advantage is being criticized by some legislators as too costly.
The way to avoid all this complexity, of course, is
to have
a single-payer system. Then no insurance provider
can skim off the best customers. We generally say we prefer competition
between providers in this country, but that means we have to create
approaches to deal with the fact that some competitors are much more clever
than others.
To its credit, Newsweek includes this columnist's articles among what
is otherwise unfailing support for the House version of massive spending for
universal health care "reform."
"Obama's Malpractice: Why the health-care bill isn't reform," Robert J.
Samuelson (economist), Newsweek Magazine, November 23, 2009 ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/570fd14ba7
Bob Jensen's threads on the health care debate are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
The Greatest Swindle in the History of the World
Paulson and Geithner Lied Big Time
"The Ugly AIG Post-Mortem: The TARP Inspector General's report has a
lot more to say about the rating agencies than it does about Goldman Sachs,"
by Holman Jenkins, The Wall Street Journal, November 24m 2009 ---
Click Here
A year later, the myrmidons of the media
have gotten around to the question of why, after the government took over
AIG, it paid 100 cents on the dollar to honor the collateral demands of
AIG's subprime insurance counterparties.
By all means, read TARP Inspector General
Neil Barofsky's report on the AIG bailout—but read it honestly.
It does not say AIG's bailout was a
"backdoor bailout" of Goldman Sachs. It does not say the Fed was remiss in
failing to require Goldman and other counterparties to settle AIG claims for
pennies on the dollar.
It does not for a moment doubt the
veracity of officials who say their concern was to stem a systemic panic
that might have done lasting damage to the U.S. standard of living.
To be sure, Mr. Barofsky has some
criticisms to offer, but the biggest floats inchoate between the lines of a
widely overlooked section headed "lessons learned," which focuses on the
credit rating agencies. The section notes not only the role of the rating
agencies, with their "inherently conflicted business model," in authoring
the subprime mess in the first place—but also the role of their credit
downgrades in tipping AIG into a liquidity crisis, in undermining the Fed's
first attempt at an AIG rescue, and in the decision of government officials
"not to pursue a more aggressive negotiating policy to seek concessions
from" AIG's counterparties.
Though not quite spelling it out, Mr.
Barofsky here brushes close to the last great unanswered question about the
AIG bailout. Namely: With the government now standing behind AIG, why not
just tell Goldman et al. to waive their collateral demands since they now
had the world's best IOU—Uncle Sam's?
Congress might not technically have put
its full faith and credit behind AIG, but if banks agreed to accept this
argument, and Treasury and Fed insisted on it, and the SEC upheld it, the
rating agencies would likely have gone along. No cash would have had to
change hands at all.
This didn't happen, let's guess, because
the officials—Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke—were reluctant to
invent legal and policy authority out of whole cloth to overrule the ratings
agencies—lo, the same considerations that also figured in their reluctance
to dictate unilateral haircuts to holders of AIG subprime insurance.
Of course, the thinking now is that these
officials, in bailing out AIG, woulda, shoulda, coulda used their political
clout to force such haircuts, but quailed when the banks, evil Goldman most
of all, insisted on 100 cents on the dollar.
This story, in its gross simplification,
is certainly wrong. Goldman and others weren't in the business of
voluntarily relinquishing valuable claims. But the reality is, in the heat
of the crisis, they would have acceded to any terms the government dictated.
Washington's game at the time, however, wasn't to nickel-and-dime the
visible cash transfers to AIG. It was playing for bigger stakes—stopping a
panic by asserting the government's bottomless resources to uphold the IOUs
of financial institutions.
What's more, if successful, these efforts
were certain to cause the AIG-guaranteed securities to rebound in value—as
they have. Money has already flowed back to AIG and the Fed (which bought
some of the subprime securities to dissolve the AIG insurance agreements)
and is likely to continue to do so for the simple reason that the underlying
payment streams are intact.
Never mind: The preoccupation with the
Goldman payments amounts to a misguided kind of cash literalism. For the
taxpayer has assumed much huger liabilities to keep homeowners in their
homes, to keep mortgage payments flowing to investors, to fatten the
earnings of financial firms, etc., etc. These liabilities dwarf the AIG
collateral calls, inevitably benefit Goldman and other firms, and represent
the real cost of our failure to create a financial system in which investors
(a category that includes a lot more than just Goldman) live and die by the
risks they voluntarily take without taxpayers standing behind them.
No, Moody's and S&P are not the cause of
this policy failure—yet Mr. Barofsky's half-articulated choice to focus on
them is profound. For the role the agencies have come to play in our
financial system amounts to a direct, if feckless and weak, attempt to
contain the incentives that flow from the government's guaranteeing of so
many kinds of private liabilities, from the pension system and bank deposits
to housing loans and student loans.
The rating agencies' role as gatekeepers
to these guarantees is, and was, corrupting, but the solution surely is to
pare back the guarantees themselves. Overreliance on rating agencies, with
their "inherently conflicted business model," was ultimately a product of
too much government interference in the allocation of credit in the first
place.
The Mother of Future Lawsuits Directly Against Credit Rating Agencies and
Indirectly Against Auditing Firms
It has been shown how Moody's and some other credit rating agencies sold AAA
ratings for securities and tranches that did not deserve such ratings ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#CreditRatingAgencies
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze
My friend Larry sent me the following link indicating that a lawsuit in Ohio
may shake up the credit rating fraudsters.
Will 49 other states and thousands of pension funds follow suit?
Already facing a spate of private lawsuits, the
legal troubles of the country’s largest credit rating agencies deepened on
Friday when the attorney general of Ohio sued
Moody’s Investors Service,
Standard & Poor’s and
Fitch, claiming that they had cost state
retirement and pension funds some $457 million by approving high-risk Wall
Street securities that went bust in the financial collapse.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/business/21ratings.html?em
Jensen Comment
The credit raters will rely heavily on the claim that they relied on the
external auditors who, in turn, are being sued for playing along with fraudulent
banks that grossly underestimated loan loss reserves on poisoned subprime loan
portfolios and poisoned tranches sold to investors ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#AuditFirms
Bad things happen in court where three or more parties start blaming each other
for billions of dollars of losses that in many cases led to total bank failures
and the wiping out of all the shareholders in those banks, including the pension
funds that invested in those banks. A real test is the massive lawsuit against
Deloitte's auditors in the huge Washington Mutual (WaMu) shareholder lawsuit.
"Ohio Sues Rating Firms for Losses in Funds," by David Segal, The New York
Times, November 20m 2009 ---
Click Here
Already
facing a spate of private lawsuits, the legal troubles of the country’s largest
credit rating agencies deepened on Friday when the attorney general of Ohio sued
Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, claiming that they had
cost state retirement and pension funds some $457 million by approving high-risk
Wall Street securities that went bust in the financial collapse.
Already
facing a spate of private lawsuits, the legal troubles of the country’s largest
credit rating agencies deepened on Friday when the attorney general of Ohio sued
Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, claiming that they had
cost state retirement and pension funds some $457 million by approving high-risk
Wall Street securities that went bust in the financial collapse.
The case
could test whether the agencies’ ratings are constitutionally protected as a
form of free speech.
The
lawsuit asserts that Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch were in league with
the banks and other issuers, helping to create an assortment of exotic financial
instruments that led to a disastrous bubble in the housing market.
“We
believe that the credit rating agencies, in exchange for fees, departed from
their objective, neutral role as arbiters,” the attorney general, Richard
Cordray, said at a news conference. “At minimum, they were aiding and abetting
misconduct by issuers.”
He
accused the companies of selling their integrity to the highest bidder.
Steven
Weiss, a spokesman for McGraw-Hill, which owns S.& P., said that the lawsuit had
no merit and that the company would vigorously defend itself.
“A
recent Securities and Exchange Commission examination of our business practices
found no evidence that decisions about rating methodologies or models were based
on attracting market share,” he said.
Michael
Adler, a spokesman for Moody’s, also disputed the claims. “It is unfortunate
that the state attorney general, rather than engaging in an objective review and
constructive dialogue regarding credit ratings, instead appears to be seeking
new scapegoats for investment losses incurred during an unprecedented global
market disruption,” he said.
A
spokesman for Fitch said the company would not comment because it had not seen
the lawsuit.
The
litigation adds to a growing stack of lawsuits against the three largest credit
rating agencies, which together command an 85 percent share of the market. Since
the credit crisis began last year, dozens of investors have sought to recover
billions of dollars from worthless or nearly worthless bonds on which the rating
agencies had conferred their highest grades.
One of
those groups is largest pension fund in the country, the California Public
Employees Retirement System, which filed a lawsuit in state court in California
in July, claiming that “wildly inaccurate ratings” had led to roughly $1 billion
in losses.
And more
litigation is likely. As part of a broader financial reform, Congress is
considering provisions that make it easier for plaintiffs to sue rating
agencies. And the Ohio attorney general’s action raises the possibility of
similar filings from other states. California’s attorney general, Jerry Brown,
said in September that his office was investigating the rating agencies, with an
eye toward determining “how these agencies could get it so wrong and whether
they violated California law in the process.”
As a
group, the attorneys general have proved formidable opponents, most notably in
the landmark litigation and multibillion-dollar settlement against tobacco
makers in 1998.
To date,
however, the rating agencies are undefeated in court, and aside from one modest
settlement in a case 10 years ago, no one has forced them to hand over any
money. Moody’s, S.& P. and Fitch have successfully argued that their ratings are
essentially opinions about the future, and therefore subject to First Amendment
protections identical to those of journalists.
But that
was before billions of dollars in triple-A rated bonds went bad in the financial
crisis that started last year, and before Congress extracted a number of
internal e-mail messages from the companies, suggesting that employees were
aware they were giving their blessing to bonds that were all but doomed. In one
of those messages, an S.& P. analyst said that a deal “could be structured by
cows and we’d rate it.”
Recent
cases, like the suit filed Friday, are founded on the premise that the companies
were aware that investments they said were sturdy were dangerously unsafe. And
if analysts knew that they were overstating the quality of the products they
rated, and did so because it was a path to profits, the ratings could forfeit
First Amendment protections, legal experts say.
“If they
hold themselves out to the marketplace as objective when in fact they are
influenced by the fees they are receiving, then they are perpetrating a
falsehood on the marketplace,” said Rodney A. Smolla, dean of the Washington and
Lee University School of Law. “The First Amendment doesn’t extend to the
deliberate manipulation of financial markets.”
The
73-page complaint, filed on behalf of Ohio Police and Fire Pension Fund, the
Ohio Public Employees Retirement System and other groups, claims that in recent
years the rating agencies abandoned their role as impartial referees as they
began binging on fees from deals involving mortgage-backed securities.
At the
root of the problem, according to the complaint, is the business model of rating
agencies, which are paid by the issuers of the securities they are paid to
appraise. The lawsuit, and many critics of the companies, have described that
arrangement as a glaring conflict of interest.
“Given
that the rating agencies did not receive their full fees for a deal unless the
deal was completed and the requested rating was provided,” the attorney
general’s suit maintains, “they had an acute financial incentive to relax their
stated standards of ‘integrity’ and ‘objectivity’ to placate their clients.”
To
complicate problems in the system of incentives, the lawsuit states, the
methodologies used by the rating agencies were outdated and flawed. By the time
those flaws were obvious, nearly half a billion dollars in pension and
retirement funds had evaporated in Ohio, revealing the bonds to be “high-risk
securities that both issuers and rating agencies knew to be little more than a
house of cards,” the complaint states.
"Rating agencies lose free-speech claim," by Jonathon Stempel,
Reuters, September 3, 2009 ---
http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-CreditCrisis/idUSTRE5824KN20090903
There are two superpowers in the world today in
my opinion. There’s the United States and there’s Moody’s Bond Rating Service.
The United States can destroy you by dropping bombs, and Moody’s can destroy you
by down grading your bonds. And believe me, it’s not clear sometimes who’s more
powerful. The most that we can safely assert about the evolutionary process
underlying market equilibrium is that harmful heuristics, like harmful mutations
in nature, will die out.
Martin Miller, Debt and Taxes as quoted by Frank Partnoy, "The Siskel and Ebert
of Financial Matters: Two Thumbs Down for Credit Reporting Agencies,"
Washington University Law Quarterly, Volume 77, No. 3, 1999 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudCongressPartnoyWULawReview.htm
Credit rating agencies gave AAA ratings to
mortgage-backed securities that didn't deserve them. "These ratings not only
gave false comfort to investors, but also skewed the computer risk models and
regulatory capital computations," Cox said in written testimony.
SEC Chairman Christopher Cox as quoted on October 23, 2008 at
http://www.nytimes.com/external/idg/2008/10/23/23idg-Greenspan-Bad.html
"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
Paulson and Geithner Lied Big Time:
The Greatest
Swindle in the History of the World
What was their real motive in the greatest fraud conspiracy in the history of
the world?
Bombshell: In 2008 and early 2009, Treasury Secretary leaders
Paulson
and
Geithner
told the media and Congress that
AIG needed a
global bailout due to not having cash reserves to meet credit default swap
(systematic risk) obligations and insurance policy payoffs. On November 19, 2009
in Congressional testimony Geithner now admits that all this was a pack of lies.
However, he refuses to resign as requested by some Senators.
"AIG and Systemic Risk Geithner says credit-default swaps weren't the
problem, after all," Editors of The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2009 ---
Click Here
TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky keeps
committing flagrant acts of political transparency, which if nothing else
ought to inform the debate going forward over financial reform. In his
latest bombshell, the IG discloses that the New York Federal Reserve did not
believe that AIG's credit-default swap (CDS) counterparties posed a systemic
financial risk.
Hello?
For the last year, the entire Beltway theory of the
financial panic has been based on the claim that the "opaque," unregulated
CDS market had forced the Fed to take over AIG and pay off its
counterparties, lest the system collapse. Yet we now learn from Mr. Barofsky
that saving the counterparties was not the reason for the bailout.
In the fall of 2008 the New York Fed drove a
baby-soft bargain with AIG's credit-default-swap counterparties. The Fed's
taxpayer-funded vehicle, Maiden Lane III, bought out the counterparties'
mortgage-backed securities at 100 cents on the dollar, effectively canceling
out the CDS contracts. This was miles above what those assets could have
fetched in the market at that time, if they could have been sold at all.
The New York Fed president at the time was none
other than Timothy Geithner, the current Treasury Secretary, and Mr.
Geithner now tells Mr. Barofsky that in deciding to make the counterparties
whole, "the financial condition of the counterparties was not a relevant
factor."
This is startling. In April we noted in these
columns that Goldman Sachs, a major AIG counterparty, would certainly have
suffered from an AIG failure. And in his latest report, Mr. Barofsky comes
to the same conclusion. But if Mr. Geithner now says the AIG bailout wasn't
driven by a need to rescue CDS counterparties, then what was the point? Why
pay Goldman and even foreign banks like Societe Generale billions of tax
dollars to make them whole?
Both Treasury and the Fed say they think it would
have been inappropriate for the government to muscle counterparties to
accept haircuts, though the New York Fed tried to persuade them to accept
less than par. Regulators say that having taxpayers buy out the
counterparties improved AIG's liquidity position, but why was it important
to keep AIG liquid if not to protect some class of creditors?
Yesterday, Mr. Geithner introduced a new
explanation, which is that AIG might not have been able to pay claims to its
insurance policy holders: "AIG was providing a range of insurance products
to households across the country. And if AIG had defaulted, you would have
seen a downgrade leading to the liquidation and failure of a set of
insurance contracts that touched Americans across this country and, of
course, savers around the world."
Yet, if there is one thing that all observers
seemed to agree on last year, it was that AIG's money to pay policyholders
was segregated and safe inside the regulated insurance subsidiaries. If the
real systemic danger was the condition of these highly regulated
subsidiaries—where there was no CDS trading—then the Beltway narrative
implodes.
Interestingly, in Treasury's official response to
the Barofsky report, Assistant Secretary Herbert Allison explains why the
department acted to prevent an AIG bankruptcy. He mentions the "global scope
of AIG, its importance to the American retirement system, and its presence
in the commercial paper and other financial markets." He does not mention
CDS.
All of this would seem to be relevant to the
financial reform that Treasury wants to plow through Congress. For example,
if AIG's CDS contracts were not the systemic risk, then what is the argument
for restructuring the derivatives market? After Lehman's failure, CDS
contracts were quickly settled according to the industry protocol. Despite
fears of systemic risk, none of the large banks, either acting as a
counterparty to Lehman or as a buyer of CDS on Lehman itself, turned out to
have major exposure.
More broadly, lawmakers now have an opportunity to
dig deeper into the nature of moral hazard and the restoration of a healthy
financial system. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are pushing to give regulators
"resolution authority" for struggling firms. Under both of their bills, this
would mean unlimited ability to spend unlimited taxpayer sums to prevent an
unlimited universe of firms from failing.
Americans know that's not the answer, but what is
the best solution to the too-big-to-fail problem? And how exactly does one
measure systemic risk? To answer these questions, it's essential that we
first learn the lessons of 2008. This is where reports like Mr. Barofsky's
are valuable, telling us things that the government doesn't want us to know.
In remarks Tuesday that were interpreted as a
veiled response to Mr. Barofsky's report, Mr. Geithner said, "It's a great
strength of our country, that you're going to have the chance for a range of
people to look back at every decision made in every stage in this crisis,
and look at the quality of judgments made and evaluate them with the benefit
of hindsight." He added, "Now, you're going to see a lot of conviction in
this, a lot of strong views—a lot of it untainted by experience."
Mr. Geithner has a point about Monday-morning
quarterbacking. He and others had to make difficult choices in the autumn of
2008 with incomplete information and often with little time to think, much
less to reflect. But that was last year. The task now is to learn the
lessons of that crisis and minimize the moral hazard so we can reduce the
chances that the panic and bailout happen again.
This means a more complete explanation from Mr.
Geithner of what really drove his decisions last year, how he now defines
systemic risk, and why he wants unlimited power to bail out creditors—before
Congress grants the executive branch unlimited resolution authority that
could lead to bailouts ad infinitum.
Jensen Comment
One of the first teller of lies was the highly respected Gretchen Morgenson of
The New York Times who was repeating the lies told to her and Congress by
the Treasury and the Fed. This was when I first believed that the problem at AIG
was failing to have capital reserves to meet CDS obligations. I really believed
Morgenson's lies in 2008 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/business/21gret.html
Here's what I wrote in 2008 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout
Credit Default Swap (CDS)
This is an insurance policy that essentially "guarantees" that if a CDO goes bad
due to having turds mixed in with the chocolates, the "counterparty" who
purchased the CDO will recover the value fraudulently invested in turds. On
September 30, 2008 Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times aptly
explained that the huge CDO underwriter of CDOs was the insurance firm called
AIG. She also explained that the first $85 billion given in bailout money by
Hank Paulson to AIG was to pay the counterparties to CDS swaps. She also
explained that, unlike its casualty insurance operations, AIG had no capital
reserves for paying the counterparties for the the turds they purchased from
Wall Street investment banks.
"Your Money at Work, Fixing Others’ Mistakes," by Gretchen Morgenson, The
New York Times, September 20, 2008 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/business/21gret.html
Also see "A.I.G., Where Taxpayers’ Dollars Go to Die," The New York Times,
March 7, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/business/08gret.html
What Ms. Morgenson failed to explain, when Paulson eventually gave over $100
billion for AIG's obligations to counterparties in CDS contracts, was who were
the counterparties who received those bailout funds. It turns out that most of
them were wealthy Arabs and some Asians who we were getting bailed out while
Paulson was telling shareholders of WaMu, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch to
eat their turds.
You tube had a lot of videos about a CDS. Go to YouTube and read in the
phrase "credit default swap" ---
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Credit+Default+Swaps&search_type=&aq=f
In particular note this video by Paddy Hirsch ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaui9e_4vXU
Paddy has some other YouTube videos about the financial crisis.
Bob Jensen’s
threads on accounting for credit default swaps are under the C-Terms at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/133glosf.htm#C-Terms
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
Bob Jensen's threads on why the infamous "Bailout" won't work ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#BailoutStupidity
Bob Jensen's "Rotten to the Core" threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
Defining Higher Education Accountability
"Defining Accountability, by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, November
18, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/18/aei
Given the sprawling terrain
covered by the American Enterprise Institute's forum here on
"Increasing
Accountability in American Higher Education"
Tuesday, it was probably inevitable that the conversation would touch on so
many topics as to be almost incoherent.
Accreditation.
Finance.
Scholarly research productivity. College rankings.
Governance. Tenure. Standardized tests. With
papers and presentations on those topics and more, the daylong discussion
was, not surprisingly, all over the map. But if a major theme emerged from
the assembled speakers, most of whom fall clearly into the
pro-accountability camp, it was that as policy makers turn up the pressure
on colleges to perform, they should do so in ways that reinforce the
behaviors they want to see -- and avoid the kinds of perverse incentives
that are so evident in many policies today.
This is especially true,
several speakers argued, on the thorniest of higher education accountability
questions -- those related to improving student outcomes. While the event
looked at times like a reunion of Margaret Spellings' Commission on the
Future of Higher Education, with an agenda that featured not just its former
chairman but several advisers to the panel, it unfolded very much focused on
President Obama's call for increasing the proportion of Americans with a
postsecondary credential.
Many of the speakers framed
their remarks around changes that they saw as essential to helping the
country ratchet up the number of young people and adults who not only enter
higher education but emerge with what they need to enter the work force.
(Oh, and one or two people actually talked about how nice it would be if
policy makers still envisioned college as a place where people learn about
citizenship or just become educated for education's sake.)
Peter Ewell, vice president
of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, focused
his formal presentation on the growing network of
state-based data systems that, in his eyes, present the best chance of
producing good information on how students are faring in postsecondary
education and beyond. Ewell has long been a leading advocate of such data
systems, which will be most effective, he argued, if they are linked to
databases of employment records and then stitched together to create
regional networks.
But better data systems
(which he acknowledged will take years to develop in this way, and are
opposed in some quarters of higher education) will help only if the
information they seek to collect is intelligently framed, which the most
widely used current measure -- graduation rates -- is not, Ewell and others
agreed. Ewell called for the development of a set of measures of "milestone
events" in a student's academic path -- things like a "basic skills
conversion rate" (capturing those who get to credit-worthy work after
developmental courses), definitions of "transfer ready" and "work force
ready" (to describe those who get meaningful academic or career skills but
leave a community college short of an associate degree), etc.
And he said higher
education leaders and state policy makers could make a shorter-term change
that could start to alter the incentives for, and ultimately the behavior
of, institutions: shifting state funding formulas so that colleges receive
money based on how many students are still enrolled by the end of academic
terms, rather than at the beginning.
"We have a performance
funding scheme now -- it's called 'pay to enroll,' " he said. "One of the
simplest things we can do is to reimburse for courses completed rather than
courses attempted" by their students, he said. Added Stan Jones, former
commissioner of higher education in Indiana and now president of the
National Consortium on College Completion: "If we could make that change,
counting courses at the end of the semester rather than the beginning, that
would have powerful implications. Everybody would drag out their [list of]
courses and say, 'Where are we having problems?' " (It was acknowledged that
such an approach could create perverse incentives of its own, by
discouraging institutions from enrolling academically underprepared students
who might be unlikely to succeed -- a potential risk of the entire emphasis
on "completion" that is increasingly in vogue.)
Many of the other speakers
presented time-honored (read: familiar) approaches to what AEI called "the
multifaceted accountability equation in higher education." Naomi Schaefer
Riley, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's Taste page and
author of God on the Quad, argued for
reining in tenure for
groups of professors who she argued no longer warrant it -- including
instructors in vocational fields who don't need the protection of academic
freedom, gender and race studies professors with openly political agendas,
and scientists who, she said, have forfeited their right to academic freedom
by entering into corporate research arrangements that limit their ability to
publish.
"Obviously we can‟t revoke
the contracts of these professors now, but going forward, there is no
justification for continuing to offer lifetime contracts to people in these
fields." Riley said. "Whether because they have a political agenda or their
subjects do not necessitate the freedom to ask big questions or because they
seem happy to voluntarily give up their right to ask big questions for the
right price, these professors do not need their academic freedom protected.
And they don't need tenure.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen has several threads on these topics at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
This Harvard article suggests that I "de-learn and de-graduate."
But it provides no examples of what I should de-learn.
Can you think of what I should be de-learning?
O.K. I should "shut up!" Can you think of other examples for me?
"When Was the Last Time You De-learned?" by Nayeet Nayer, Harvard Business
School Publishing, November 19, 2009 ---
Click Here
Students all over the world are hard at work in
school at this time of year. There's a buzz on every campus as young women
and men learn the rules of life, challenge them, and try to develop their
own ideas, values, and principles.
For people in business, especially those who
graduated a long time ago, it's time they went back to school in order to,
for want of a better phrase, de-learn and un-graduate. That's the only way
we will learn to challenge all that we have so far accepted as time-tested
truths.
Although it isn't easy, executives should shed
their fear of the unknown and display childlike enthusiasm for radical
ideas. They need to ask tough questions even if there are no answers to them
— yet. In business, unlearning entails changing the manner in which markets
are defined and the way companies are run. It also involves rethinking
perceptions about competition and collaboration.
As it is, executives tend to gravitate toward their
zones of comfort as they grow older — and then wonder why the magic has
disappeared from work.
Revisit your youth and ask yourself: Was I looking
for simple and practical solutions then? Or did I ask tough questions that
challenged people's assumptions, beliefs, and values? History suggests that
people who challenge the status quo — like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein
— often come up with great inventions.
Most important, executives have to change their
approach to business and society. They usually believe they have all the
answers and that their ways of doing things are the best. However, leaders
must accept the fact that they don't have all the answers and re-program
themselves for a world of infinite possibilities.
Great leaders are often lonely thinkers who ask
uncomfortable questions, walk tough paths, and challenge popular
perceptions. Only in retrospect are Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela — who
faced criticism for most of their lives — regarded as great leaders who
fought for the right causes. They loom large even now not because they had
the answers, but because they dared to question. And by doing so, they
achieved results whose value can't be questioned.
When was the last time you dared question the
status quo?
Jensen Example
Here's one that should be re-learned or de-learned depending upon when you
graduated.
If you graduated with an accounting, finance, or business degree before 1970
you were probably weaned on Benjamin Graham's proposition that investors like
Warren Buffet can do in-depth fundamentals analysis and use their superior
knowledge and take other investor's inferior knowledge. By the way Warren Buffet
was a student of Professor Graham at Columbia and also worked for Graham ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Graham
Between 1970 and 2008, Professors Fama and French at the University of
Chicago and Dartmouth taught us that the market is efficient. Professor Fama
even had the audacity to recently scream "I won." ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#EMH
After 2008, mathematician Janet Tavakoli in the tremendous book Dear Mr.
Buffett explains that Professor Fama and his Chicago and Wharton School
disciples got it wrong and explains why the Warren Buffet beat Wall Street's hot
shot model builders out of billions of dollars.
Hence students graduating after 1970 have to de-learn efficient market theory
and the worship of models that do not work well with missing variables and
unrealistic assumptions of stationarity. Students graduating before 1970 have to
relearn Graham.
"The Computer Stole My Homework -- and Sold It Through an Essay Mill,"
by Ben Terris, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2009 ---
Click Here
Without her knowing it, a paper that Melinda
Riebolt co-wrote while getting her M.B.A. was stolen and put up for sale.
And, according to an article that USA Today reported last week, that same
scenario has played out many times before.
The article discusses how some essay mills -- Web
sites that provide written works for students -- surreptitiously steal work
and then sell it for others to pass off as their own.
For the first time, however, those who find
unauthorized postings of their work online may have a way to seek legal
retribution. The article says a class-action lawsuit filed in 2006 is making
its way through the courts, and one judge in Illinois has found a provider
liable on six counts, including fraud and copyright infringement. That site
is called RC2C Inc. and hosts at least nine sites that sell term papers.
Essay mills often provide their own written works.
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism and cheating are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
Question
If Google's Chrome is only available on some lightweight computers at the
moment, why might you want to buy such a computer?
Answer
You may want a cheap computer to first explore the Web much more securely and
download links or files that you might want for your heavier weight Windows
machine. For the time being at least, Chrome is much more immune from malware
viruses. Hackers will hate the Chrome plating, at least until they invent a way
to corrode Chrome. As I recall from my 1955 Olds convertible, chrome is much
more corrosion proof than the rest of the metal on my Olds.
One drawback is that you must be connected to the Internet to run Chrome.
"Google's Chrome OS to be ready for 2010 holidays," The Washington Post,
November 19, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/23993/?nlid=2540
Google expects lightweight computers powered by its
new operating system to be on sale in time for next year's holiday season.
The Internet search leader set the target date
Thursday during the first preview of the operating system since Google
announced its plans for the product in July.
The free operating system, named after Google's
Chrome Web browser, is being designed for "netbooks." Those are inexpensive,
stripped-down laptop computers that are becoming increasingly popular among
consumers.
Google is positioning Chrome OS as a faster, more
secure alternative to rival Microsoft Corp.'s Windows, the operating system
that runs most of the world's computers.
Unlike Windows computers, Chrome OS machines will
require Web access to run applications.
Jensen Comment
Of course Mac users are also much more immune to malware, but the learning curve
to become a Mac user purportedly has a much more steep incline.
November 21, 2009 reply from Roger Debreceny
[roger@DEBRECENY.COM]
While operating a Chrome OS netbook without a
connection the Internet would not make a great deal of sense, you will be
able to run at least some applications locally and a Chrome netbook will
boot up OK without a connection to the Internet .. Google Docs run locally
quite nicely using the Google Gears technology. I use Google Docs
extensively with my research colleagues and on occasion will edit a Google
docs document on my laptop when not connected to the Internet. Google syncs
the document when it next connects.
Bob Jensen's threads on computer and network security are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection
You maybe did not buy a GM or Chrysler car in 2009,
but you're going to pay for a big chunk of somebody else's new car.
According to the report, every American taxpayer has put up $12,200 for
every General Motors car sold through the beginning of 2011 and $7,600 for every
Chrysler sold.
"Study: Every GM Vehicle Sold Costs Taxpayers $12,200," National
Taxpayers Union, November 18, 2009 ---
http://www.ntu.org/main/press.php?PressID=1133&org_name=NTU
The American taxpayer has put up $12,200 for every
General Motors vehicle sold through the beginning of 2011, and $7,600 for
every Chrysler vehicle sold as well, according to a new report issued by the
362,000-member National Taxpayers Union (NTU).
The report, The Auto Bailout – A Taxpayer
Quagmire, authored by NTU Adjunct Scholar Thomas D. Hopkins, Professor
of Economics at the Rochester Institute of Technology, does the math on what
the government bailout of the auto industry – including General Motors,
Chrysler, and GMAC – actually means to American taxpayers, including how
much each taxpayer has contributed to the auto industry since December 2008
and how much each vehicle is costing us.
Every time someone in your neighborhood drives home
in a shiny new Chevy Silverado, remember that it cost American taxpayers
more than $12,000,” said Pete Sepp, NTU Vice President for Policy and
Communications. “Between this and GM's plan to payback their bailout debt
with other taxpayer funds, I wonder if all those Americans without work
right now could think of any better ways to spend that money. This is a play
out of the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme playbook, and would be the equivalent
of paying your Master Card bill with your Visa.”
The study found that the average American taxpaying
family has invested roughly $800 in the auto bailouts so far. Moreover, the
study found, the government support poured into General Motors, Chrysler,
and GMAC – the financing subsidiary that supports sales at both – now stands
at a towering $78.9 billion. Given that figure, and an estimate of how many
vehicles GM and Chrysler will sell through the end of 2010, the study finds
that each vehicle one of the bailed-out companies sells costs taxpayers
$10,700.
Finally, breaking down the costs by company, the
study reports that every Chrysler vehicle sold costs taxpayers $7,600, and
every GM vehicle sold costs taxpayers $12,200.
The research is based upon a November study
released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), entitled
Continued
Stewardship Needed as Treasury Develops Strategies for Monitoring and
Divesting Financial Interests in Chrysler and GM, ”
a follow-up report on the “Troubled Asset Relief
Program,” as well as statements and reports released from the U.S. Treasury.
Additional Findings Include:
GMAC receives government guarantees not
available to most private firms. Coincidentally, these are the same
private firms that are forced to compete with GMAC taxpayer-assisted
bank, Ally Bank. These guarantees save GMAC about $500 million annually
in interest costs.
During the first ten months of 2009, GM and
Chrysler sales fell further than other major auto producers, down 33.4
percent and 38.9 percent, respectively.
While the prospect of repayment of GM and
Chrysler loans might be expected, after bankruptcy the vast majority of
the bailout funds are no longer legal obligations of the
newly-structured GM and Chrysler.
If Americans are to believe public officials’
claims that the government will eventually reprivatize the auto
industry, the necessity of a thoughtful exit plan is essential. However,
at this time no such plan exists, making it likely that the Treasury
will not recover its investment.
“[T]he bailout has created moral hazard problems,
inadvertently handicapping the progress of stronger, non-subsidized
producers,” Professor Hopkins concluded. “The problems extend beyond just
the auto industry, as favored status for one financial company and its bank
necessarily complicates prospects for non-subsidized rivals. The time has
come to stop such bailouts, and in an orderly way, to seek at least some
recovery for taxpayers.”
Note: To view the complete issue brief, The Auto
Bailout – A Taxpayer Quagmire,
click here.
About the Author
Thomas D. Hopkins is Professor of Economics at
Rochester Institute of Technology. He served as Dean of the College of
Business 1998-2005 and as President, U.S. Business School in Prague, Czech
Republic, an RIT MBA program where he taught 1992-98. He was the Arthur J.
Gosnell Professor of Economics in RIT's College of Liberal Arts, 1988-98.
Hopkins held senior management positions in two White House agencies during
the Ford, Carter and Reagan Administrations; in 1979 President Carter
appointed him a charter member of the federal government’s Senior Executive
Service. In the early 1980s, he served as Deputy Administrator, Office of
Information & Regulatory Affairs, in the Office of Management & Budget. His
research on business burdens of government regulation has been sponsored by
the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) in Paris and
the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) in Washington. He has testified
on regulatory policy issues before committees of the U.S. Senate and House,
and Canada’s House of Commons. He co-authored a 2001 SBA report, “The Impact
of Regulatory Costs on Small Firms,” as well as National Research Council
reports on marine transportation, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and
trucking/rail/barge transportation. He previously was on the faculty of
American University, University of Maryland, and Bowdoin College.
Background
The Auto Bailout – A Taxpayer Quagmire is based on
data obtained from the Government Accountability Office and Treasury reports
on the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The study was sponsored by the
National Taxpayers Union (NTU), a nonpartisan, nonprofit citizen
organization founded in 1969 to work for lower taxes, smaller government,
accountability from public officials, and economic freedom at all levels.
For further information, visit
www.ntu.org .
Jensen Comment
Some of the money spent on GM and Chrysler to date might be returned, but
then again more might be lost. Certainly if the GM and Chrysler experiments
fail, the government will be paying the pension costs of tens of thousands of
retirees.
The government is also guaranteeing the warranty coverage of both GM and
Chrysler cars. In the case of Chrysler this includes the ridiculous lifetime
warranty on power trains such that if a twenty year old kid buys a Chrysler, the
power train is fully guaranteed for 80 or more years. How dumb can you get?
Bob Jensen's threads on the disastrous bailout are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
"Barnes & Noble Says Nook Reader Is Not Ideal for E-Textbooks," by
Jeffrey Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 24, 2009 ---
Click Here
Barnes & Noble says its Nook e-book device, to be
released by the end of the month, was not built with college students in
mind.
"Nook is not designed to be a textbook reader,"
said Jade Roth, the company's vice president of books. "Nook is really
designed to be an e-reader for pleasure, for relaxation on the go -- not
really for the educational space."
Amazon said the same thing about its
first-generation Kindle, but a few months ago it unveiled a larger model
that it says works well for e-textbooks. Amazon is running pilot projects at
seven universities this semester to see how students and professors respond
to the devices.
For now Barnes & Noble has no plans for similar
classroom tests. It will, however, sell Nooks in 17 of the 624 college
bookstores that the company operates, as an experiment to see how well they
sell there, said Ms. Roth.
The company's college bookstores already sell
electronic textbooks that students can read on their laptops or desktops.
Is the company planning a larger Nook to compete
with Amazon's Kindle DX?
"This is an enormously evolving marketplace," said
Ms. Roth. "Where it's going in the next few years will be more formats, more
features, and more functions.
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm
According to the Attorney General of New York
"Homeless Organization Is Called a Fraud (with poor accounting)," by
Nicholas Confessore, The New York Times, November 24, 2009 ---
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/homeless-organization-called-fraud/?partner=rss&emc=rss
They are a familiar sight on street corners across
the five boroughs: Men and women standing behind folding card tables, urging
passers-by to throw a little change into the empty plastic water jug marked
“U.H.O.”
But an investigation by Attorney General Andrew M.
Cuomo appears to have confirmed what many New Yorkers secretly (if somewhat
guiltily) suspected all along: The United Homeless Organization, supposedly
a nonprofit group set up to help feed and house the homeless, was actually
an elaborate fraud.
According to a complaint filed by Mr. Cuomo [pdf]
on Tuesday morning, U.H.O. does not operate a single shelter, soup kitchen
or food pantry. It does not provide food or clothing to the homeless. It
does not even donate money to other charities that do.
Most of those coins and bills, Mr. Cuomo contended,
end up in the pockets of those working the donation tables, who paid a daily
fee to the group’s founder and president, Stephen Riley, and its director,
Myra Walker, for the right to use the U.H.O. tables, jugs and aprons. The
rest of the money is kept by Mr. Riley and Ms. Walker, and has been used for
a variety of expenses not related to U.H.O. business, including expenses at
Weightwatchers.com fees, Toys ‘R’ Us, PC Richards, Bed, Bath & Beyond, as
well as premium cable and electricity bills at their homes.
Those papers that U.H.O.’s workers display on their
card tables? Nothing more than copies of the group’s certification of
incorporation, according to Mr. Cuomo, used to mislead the public into
believing they are permits. Incorporation does not give any special right to
solicit on the streets, the lawsuit notes.
“U.H.O. exploits the good intentions of people who
thought that their charitable donations were helping to fund services for
the homeless,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. “Instead, their donations go
directly to U.H.O.’s principals and workers, who abused the organization’s
tax-exempt status to line their own pockets.”
Mr. Cuomo charged that U.H.O. had failed to
maintain any records of donations or expenditures, including at least half
of the cash withdrawn from the group’s bank account in 2007 and 2008. Mr.
Riley and Ms. Walker also violated state law by operating U.H.O. without any
board or independent oversight and the organization has not held an election
for directors since its incorporation in 1993, according to Mr. Cuomo.
It’s been long known that the money in U.H.O. is
pocketed by the people at the table. The New York Times wrote about it in
2001, when a program director said the best advocates for the homeless are
the homeless themselves. The New York Post likewise wrote about the pocketed
money in 2008.
However, the lawsuit is charging improper use of
the collected feeds, poor accounting, and false claims of how the money
would be used.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
This is a very personal message that Will Yancey allowed me to forward.
My tribute to him is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Yancey.htm
I did not request that he write the message below. He felt compelled on his
own to do so.
Knowledge Transfer by Will Yancey
Hello Bob and John,
I am very pleased I was able to spend time visiting
in person with Bob in October and John in November. I consider both of you
outstanding accounting educators with years of service that can never be
fully appreciated by outsiders. Thanks for sharing your time and talent.
When I was a university business school professor
in 1992-1998, I recall faculty evaluations could be based on five
categories: research publications, teaching, service, advising, and
consulting. Every university has different weighting criteria. In my opinion
these five categories are a reasonable way to evaluate how faculties
contribute to the mission of knowledge transfer. I know some faculty will be
better in some areas than others.
My concern is that the business schools as a whole
are not delivering on all five categories at a high level. In the past 11
years since I left full-time academe, I have thought a lot about these five
categories. Without venting too much I will say that many of the full-time
business school faculty have become too inwardly directed. They compare
themselves to other business schools in their same category without serious
consideration of alternative suppliers in the knowledge transfer industries.
To what extent are the business school faculty
regularly investigating the “competitors” such as community colleges,
for-profits such as University of Phoenix, CPE providers, in-house training
programs, web sites, and consulting firms? Not much. Instead too many
faculty are inwardly focused on their university salaries, benefits, and
teaching loads. Instead of trying to maintain universities “as they were”,
consider that our society is undergoing fundamental change. Society cannot
support as many full-time faculty doing what they have been doing.
In my humble opinion, universities are losing
market share in the knowledge transfer world. There is no doubt that
tenure-track faculty will become a smaller share of the knowledge transfer
industry. A few faculty and deans will rise to the challenges of this new
world and some will not. Some universities will thrive and some will not.
Many bright young people are rationally choosing not to enter PhD programs
and the trail to tenure. The process from entering a PhD program to
receiving tenure takes 9 to 20 years and that is not what young people want.
If business schools cannot attract a lot of bright young people, they will
seek other outlets for their talents.
Allow me to share a few observations on my own
practice. Since June 2000 I have been a full-time self-employed consultant
working from my office in my home. I have almost no W-2 income, and live
entirely on projects that range from a few hours to several years. I teach
in many venues: for-profit and not-for-profit CPE providers, in-house
training classes, and sometimes as a university guest lecturer. I do
presentations before judges, attorneys, and accountants. I do publish in
practitioner journals, maintain my website links, and have developed some
new methods in applying statistical sampling to accounting data. I do advise
young people and other professionals on the skills they need to advance
their careers. As a nice side benefit my financial income is much higher
than I could achieve as a full-time university professor. I also can chose
when I want to work from my homes in Dallas or Maine or from a hotel
anywhere in the world. My success was built from 40 years of education and
consulting experience beginning when I was in high school and the Boy
Scouts.
You are welcome to forward this email to others. If anyone would like to
continue this dialogue, please email me at
will@willyancey.com or
will-yancey@sbcglobal.net
Will
My tribute to him is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Yancey.htm
Is this fraud in the name of good?
A win (Bankers) - Win (Homeowners) - Lose (Taxpayers) New Gimmick on Wall
Street?
If government wants to help the homeowners, why not cut out the middlemen
bankers?
"Wall St. Finds Profits Again, Now by Reducing Mortgages," by Louise Story,
The New York Times, November 21, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/business/22loans.html?hp
As millions of Americans struggle to hold on to
their homes, Wall Street has found a way to make money from the mortgage
mess.
Investment funds are buying billions of dollars’
worth of home loans, discounted from the loans’ original value. Then, in
what might seem an act of charity, the funds are helping homeowners by
reducing the size of the loans.
But as part of these deals, the mortgages are being
refinanced through lenders that work with government agencies like the
Federal Housing Administration. This enables the funds to pocket sizable
profits by reselling new, government-insured loans to other federal
agencies, which then bundle the mortgages into securities for sale to
investors.
While homeowners save money, the arrangement shifts
nearly all the risk for the loans to the federal government — and,
ultimately, taxpayers — at a time when Americans are falling behind on their
mortgage payments in record numbers.
For instance, a fund might offer to pay $40 million
for a $100 million block of mortgages from a bank in distress. Then the fund
could arrange to have some of those loans refinanced into mortgages backed
by an agency like the F.H.A. and then sold to an agency like Ginnie Mae. The
trick is to persuade the homeowners to refinance those mortgages, by
offering to reduce the amounts the homeowners owe.
The profit comes when the refinancings reach more
than the $40 million that the fund paid for the block of loans.
The strategy has created an unusual alliance
between Wall Street funds that specialize in troubled investments — the
industry calls them “vulture” funds — and American homeowners.
But the transactions also add to the potential
burden on government agencies, particularly the F.H.A., which has lately
taken on an outsize role in the housing market and, some fear, may
eventually need to be bailed out at taxpayer expense.
These new mortgage investors thrive in the shadows.
Typically, the funds employ intermediaries to contact homeowners and arrange
for mortgages to be refinanced.
Homeowners often have no idea who their Wall Street
benefactors are. Federal housing officials, too, are in the dark.
Policymakers have encouraged investors and banks to
put more consumers into government-backed loans. The total value of these
transactions from hedge funds is small compared with the overall housing
market.
Housing experts warn that the financial players
involved — the investment funds, their intermediaries and certain F.H.A.
approved lenders — have a financial incentive to put as many loans as
possible into the government’s hands.
“From the borrower’s point of view, landing in a
hedge fund or private equity fund that’s willing to write down principal is
a gift,” said Howard Glaser, a financial industry consultant and former
official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
He went on: “From the systemic point of view, there
is something disturbing about investors that had substantial short-term
profit in backing toxic loans now swooping down to make another profit on
cleaning up that mess.”
Steven and Marisela Alva say they do not know who
helped them with their mortgage. All they know is that they feel blessed.
Last December, the couple got a letter saying that
a firm had purchased the mortgage on their home in Pico Rivera, Calif., from
Chase Home Finance for less than its original value. “We want to share this
discount with you,” the letter said.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Alva, a
62-year-old janitor and father of three. “I kept thinking to myself,
‘Something is wrong, something is wrong. This sounds too good.’ ”
But it was true. The balance on the Alvas’ mortgage
was ultimately reduced to $314,000 from $440,000.
The firm behind the reduction remains a mystery.
The Alvas’ new loan, backed by the F.H.A., was made by Primary Residential
Mortgage, a lender based in Utah. But the letter came from a company called
MCM Capital Partners.
In the letter, MCM said the couple’s loan was owned
by something called MCMCap Homeowners’ Advantage Trust III. But MCM’s
co-founders said in an interview that MCM does not own any mortgages. They
would not reveal the investor that owned the Alvas’ loan because they had
agreed to keep that client’s identity confidential.
Michael Niccolini, an MCM founder, said, “We are
changing people’s lives.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's Rotten to the Core threads are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
A Fundamentals Approach to Valuing a Business
In the great book Dear Mr. Buffett, Janet Tavakoli shows how Warren
Buffet learned value (fundamentals) investing while taking Benjamin Graham's
value investing course while earning a masters degree in economics from Columbia
University. Buffet also worked for Professor Graham.
The following book supposedly takes the Graham approach to a new level
(although I've not yet read the book). Certainly the book will be controversial
among the efficient markets proponents like Professors Fama and French.
Purportedly a Great, Great Book on Value Investing
From Simoleon Sense, November 16, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/
OMG Did I Die & Go To heaven?
Just Read, Applied Value Investing, My Favorite Book of the Past 5
Years!!
Listen To This Interview!
I have a confession, I might have read the best
value investing book published in the past 5 years!
The book is called
Applied Value Investing By Joseph Calandro Jr. In
the book Mr. Calandro applies the tenets of value investing via (real) case
studies. Buffett, was once asked how he would teach a class on security
analysis, he replied, “case studies”. Unlike other books which are
theoretical this book provides you with the actual steps for valuing
businesses.
Without a doubt, this book ranks amongst the best
value investing books (with SA, Margin of Safety, Buffett’s letters to
corporate America, and Greenwald’s book) & you dont have to take my word for
it. Seth Klarman, Mario Gabelli and many top investors have given the book a
plug!
Here is an interview with the author of the book, Applied Value Investing
( I recommend listening to this). Who knows perhaps
yours truly will interview him soon.
Miguel
P.S.
A fellow blogger and friend will soon post a review
of this book (hint: Street Capitalist!).
Bob Jensen's threads on valuation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/roi.htm
40% Down: The Terrible Job Market for New Grads --- Do you
want fries with that order?
The job market for new college graduates has fallen by
as much as 40 percent in the past year, according to
new data from the Michigan State University
Collegiate Employment Research Institute. The Michigan State study is based on
surveys of 2,500 companies and other hiring entities. Last year, the survey
projected an 8 to 10 percent drop in hiring, but the final figures are closer to
40, and an additional 2 percent drop is anticipated on top of that.
Inside Higher Ed, November 18, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/17/qt#213475
Bob Jensen's threads on careers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#careers
TIAA-CREF Goes Political: Is it spending on political causes without
informing its own members?
Message from my friend Larry
I ran across this entry in the
Center for Public Integrity's investigation of the
climate lobby. I fail to see why TIAA-CREF should be using participant's
retirement funds to lobby Congress on climate change? Course,
TIAA-CREF's CEO Roger Ferguson is on Obama's economic advisory committee.
Maybe it's a payback?
Larry
Jensen Comment
Cap and Trade will create high costs and profit losses to many companies. Is
this good for the CREF portfolio value in your lifetime?
TIAA-CREF offers "socially responsible" portfolio investing as an option, but
this is entirely a different matter than spending member money on lobbying for
political causes.
Nowhere in the TIAA-CREF Website could I find where your funds were being
spent for the climate lobby.
From Stanford University
Don't Invest in Crime-Ridden Russia Says Investor Who Once Made a Fortune in
Russia
Hermitage Capital Management went from $25 million to
$4 billion by investing in undervalued Russian companies. Today, its founder,
Bill Browder, Stanford MBA '89, says anyone investing in Russia long term "is
out of their mind." . . . Today, Browder says it is Hermitage that has become a
victim of the criminal activity and official corruption that still pervade
Russia's economy. He has gone public with accusations that Russian fraud artists
and high-level government officials colluded to steal companies owned by
Hermitage, intimidate or jail Hermitage lawyers, and rob the Russian treasury of
at least $230 million. Hermitage's saga is a cautionary tale of the risks of
investing in Russia today, according to a video, posted on YouTube, that Browder
showed the Stanford audience. "Anyone who would make a long-term investment in
Russia right now, almost at any valuation, is completely out of their mind,"
declared Browder. "My situation is not unusual. For every me, there are 100
others suffering in silence."
"Don’t Invest in Russia Today, Warns Bill Browder," Stanford GSB News
from Stanford University, November 2009 ---
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/browder09.html
Jensen Comment
Also many Russian Websites are lethal and send out computer/network destroying
viruses and malware. The most dangerous sites are the so-called security sites
that might send you a fake email that a virus has been found on your computer
--- the virus will indeed find its way to your computer if you follow the link
to the Web site or open an attachment. An overwhelming proportion of the porn
sites are Russian, and these are often lethal to computers and networks. The
same can be said for gambling sites. Even the so-called legitimate sites such as
those run by native Americans in Canada frequently cheat according to an
eye-opening module on CBS Sixty Minutes this year.
Organization and Development of Russian Business: A Firm-Level
Analysis edited by Tatiana Dolgopyatova, Ichiro Iwasaki, and Andrei A.
Yakovlev (Palgrave Macmillan; 326 pages; $95). Research that draws on data on
joint-stock companies collected in a survey throughout Russia.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/browder09.html
Bob Jensen's Rotten to the Core threads are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
"File-sharing software ban sought in House," by Paul Kane, The
Washington Post, November 18, 2009 ---
Click Here
Weeks after an embarrassing security breach
revealed details of dozens of ethics investigations (by House members
themselves), a House committee chairman introduced
legislation Tuesday that would forbid federal employees to use popular
file-sharing technology that was involved in the leak.
Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), who chairs the House
Oversight and Government Reform Committee, aims to outlaw federal workers
from using networks such as LimeWire, through which network members can
share computer and music files.
The Washington Post reported last month on the
inner workings of the House Ethics Committee and the Office of Congressional
Ethics. The information came from a committee document that a junior staffer
had exposed on her home computer, which was using peer-to-peer technology. A
non-congressional source with no connection to the committee accessed the
document and gave a copy to The Post.
"We can no longer ignore the threat to sensitive
government information that insecure peer-to-peer networks pose," Towns said
in a statement. "Voluntary self-regulations have failed, so now is the time
for Congress to act."
Other peer-to-peer security breaches in the last
year have involved documents about the president's helicopter, financial
information belonging to Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, and the
location of a Secret Service safe house for the first family.
Jensen Comment
This is a bit like banning insider trading. Bureaucrat Bob will violate Federal
law by file sharing anything, but Bureaucrat Bob's sister-in-law's second
cousin's distant acquaintance John Smith can file share anything Bureaucrat Bob
wants shared with the somebody in the outside world. Of course in the case of
insider trading, the SEC does monitor who makes enormous profits such that the
John Smith best not get too greedy.
What's next? Banning the sale and distribution of file sharing software
entirely? Wave goodbye to YouTube lectures and other open knowledge sharing?
Question
Do you want Comcast programming or Comcast pipe?
Note that if advertisers continue to pay billions for eyeballs, it probably
does not matter that TV Networks produce the shows that they often buy on the
market in the first place.
"The Economics of Jay Leno: Television is the next form of content
everyone will demand for free," Editors of the Wall Street Journal, November
18, 2009 ---
Click Here
If Comcast takes over NBC Universal, will Jay Leno
return to 11:35 pm?
That unimportant question is emblematic of the
pending sale by GE of a controlling stake in its media properties to the
cable giant. Mr. Leno was moved to 10 p.m. as a cost-saving gesture: Since
his show is so cheap, GE can make money even after chasing away much of its
audience for the high-end scripted shows that used to appear at that hour.
As Mr. Leno explained in a candid interview with
trade bible Broadcasting & Cable: "If you are making buggy whips and no one
is buying buggies anymore, do you keep making buggy whips? I don't know.
This is an economic decision."
In Jack Welch's day, an employee perhaps would not
have expounded so freely. Otherwise, however, GE is behaving like what it's
always been, an unsentimental owner of a business that it no longer likes
and doesn't know how to fix.
Yet, truth be told, Comcast's shareholders don't
want the job of fixing NBC either. Only the controlling Roberts family
does—and then because the alternative may be having no great future as a
prominent American business family. Ergo, a deal merging "content" and
"distribution" seems inevitable, even though the track record of such deals
is unpropitious.
This would be a merger, after all, of two
businesses that seem headed toward some combination of the fates of
newspapers, music CDs and the old wireline telephone business. Customers
want the product for free. Comcast's lifeblood, the $100-a-month cable bill
and the $50-a-month broadband bill, increasingly look like duplicative
expenses. And so on.
True, the number of households that have actually
dropped their cable subscriptions in favor of subsisting on TV streamed or
downloaded from the Internet is not yet large. But for the Roberts family
and its Comcast property, their worst fears lurk just around the
corner—being reduced to a "dumb pipe," subject to commodity pricing while
somebody else (Google) makes all the money.
Yet an escape route is vexingly hard to envision.
Time Warner and Comcast have been talking up plans to make their respective
cable lineups available by computer—as long as you keep paying your cable
bill. This is a stopgap, especially appealing to anyone who owns two homes
but wants to pay only one cable bill. Never mind, too, that hundreds of
shows are already available online for free, via Web sites operated by none
other than Comcast and the TV networks themselves.
Yes, there's talk of dropping a tollgate next year
to encourage customers to keep paying for traditional TV. Good luck with
that—if the goal is still to discourage viewers from patronizing illegal
file sharing.
No wonder Comcast shareholders say they wish the
company would just Leno-ize its cable business—i.e., slash costs and extract
cash from it. If there's a miracle out there, it probably resides in that
unlikely and humble appliance, the set-top box, which also happens to be an
untapped cornucopia of information about what you watch and when, recording
every click of your remote.
Set-top data, when married with demographic
information and purchasing histories, has long been touted as the foundation
of a new kind and a better kind of advertising—personalized, less annoying,
capable of commanding higher rates from marketers who lament that half their
ad budgets are wasted (i.e., selling cat food to dog lovers), but they don't
know which half.
For Comcast and other signal deliverers, then, the
long-term trick may be inveigling households into keeping the set-top box at
the center of their entertainment lives. Maybe the box will be offered free
in the future with your broadband subscription. Maybe it will be offered
free regardless of who supplies your broadband. The set-top box will morph
into your personal "media computer," a gift from a programming aggregator,
as long as you agree to surrender large amounts of personal data about your
viewing, surfing and purchasing habits.
Of course, Google and others are already trying to
create this business model on the open Internet, without proprietary
hardware in your house. If that weren't enough, there's also regulatory
risk. Control of popular NBC cable networks such as CNBC and The Weather
Channel might seem to Comcast a good source of leverage to keep viewers
wedded to Comcast's box—but this is exactly the sort of leverage regulators
will be keen to take away as their pound of flesh for approving the deal.
Washington's bias, since the Internet went commercial in the 1990s, has been
to use every such opportunity to impose on carriers the dumb pipe scenario
that carriers are trying to avoid. Just ask the late-great AOL Time Warner.
Bottom line, since a deal seems nearly certain to
happen: Would a savvy media investor wish the Roberts family luck in their
gamble? Absolutely. Would such an investor care to come along for the ride?
Maybe not so much.
"Is American Education Neglecting Gifted Children?" by David Nagel,
T.H.E. Journal, November 16, 2009 ---
http://thejournal.com/articles/2009/11/16/is-american-education-neglecting-gifted-children.aspx
America's 3 million gifted and talented students are getting the shaft in
the vast majority of K-12 schools, according to a new report from the
National Association for
Gifted Children and the Council of State Directors of Programs
for the Gifted. The report found that gifted students are being neglected at
all levels in the United States, from weak or non-existent policies at the
state level to uneven funding at the district level to a lack of teacher
preparation at the classroom level.
The report,
"2008-2009
State of the States in Gifted Education,"
pointed to several failures on the part of U.S. education, from a a severe
lack of commitment on a national level to spotty services and little or no
support to get teachers trained to deal with gifted students.
Some of the findings included:
·
A full fourth of states provided zero funding for programs and resources for
gifted students last year;
·
In states that did provide funding, there was little consistency, with
per-pupil expenditures ranging from $2 to $750 last year;
·
Only five states require professional development for teachers who work in
gifted programs;
·
Only five require any kind preparation for these teachers;
·
Gifted students spend most of their time in general classrooms and receive
little specialized instruction;
·
Key policies are handled at the district level, when there are policies in
place at all, rather than at the state level, creating "the potential for
fractured approaches and limits on funding";
·
There is no coherent national strategy for dealing with gifted students.
Most of those interviewed for the report cited NCLB as a factor that has
contributed to a decline in support and resources for gifted students.
Participants pointed to a number of reasons for this, including a shift in
focus away from academic excellence toward "bringing up lower-performing
students and maintaining adequate yearly progress" and a shift in staffing
away from gifted programs.
"At a time when other nations are redoubling their commitment to their
highest potential students, the United States continues to neglect the needs
of this student population, a policy failure that will cost us dearly in the
years to come," said NAGC President Ann Robinson in a prepared statement.
Robinson is also director of the
Center for Gifted
Education at the
University of Arkansas
at Little Rock. "The solution to this problem must be a
comprehensive national gifted and talented education policy in which
federal, state, and local districts work together to ensure all gifted
students are identified and served by properly trained teachers using
appropriate curriculum."
The impact of this neglect is being felt now, according to the report, with
"continued underperformance on international benchmarks, particularly in
math, science, and engineering, and in the shortage of qualified workers
able to enter professions that require advanced skills."
Jensen Comment
Accordingly this impacts on higher education in many areas, including the
shortage of women in mathematics and science. To make matters worse,
universities like the University of Texas are dropping their Merit Scholar
programs that fund gifted students.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
From the Scout Report on November 20, 2009
WordPress 2.8.6 ---
http://wordpress.org/
WordPress is perhaps best known for blogging, but
its highly customizable format makes it ideal for creating personal websites
as well. The content management system is easy to use and visitors will find
that there's plenty of support via their online forums. This version makes
adding extensions and plug-ins a bit simpler, and these devices can be used
to transform WordPress into an online store or an art gallery. This version
is compatible with computers running Windows 95 or newer.
FeedDemon 3.0.44 ---
http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/feeddemon/default.aspx
FeedDemon has embarked on some new changes in this
latest release, and those who have enjoyed the application in the past will
be most pleased. The application has been a popular RSS and Atom feed
catcher for several years, and this version syncs up nicely with Google
Reader to bring users the latest news from thousands of sources. In this
version, users will also note that Twitter feed reading has been seamlessly
added, and it's also easy to add tags and tag clouds. This version is
compatible with computers running Windows XP and newer.
40 years later, an apology for the Lost Innocents Australian Leader
Apologies for Child Migrants [Free registration may be required]
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/world/asia/17migrants.html
Painful memories surface during apology
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/16/2744456.htm
It's a sorry state of affairs when forgiveness is not the main objective
---
Click Here
House of Commons: The Welfare of Former British Child Migrants
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm199798/cmselect/cmhealth/755/75504.htm
Alliance for Forgotten Australians ---
http://www.forgottenaustralians.org.au/index.html
Home of the Forgotten Australians
http://www.forgottenaustralians.com.au
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Genetics Selection Evolution ---
http://www.gsejournal.org/
Animal Science Image Gallery ---
http://anscigallery.nal.usda.gov/
Horse Genome Project ---
http://www.uky.edu/Ag/Horsemap/
The Swingle Plant Anatomy Reference Collection ---
http://swingle.miami.edu/
Dartmouth Flood Observatory ---
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~floods/index.html
UC Davis: Institute of Transportation Studies ---
http://www.its.ucdavis.edu/index.php
University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute ---
http://www.umtri.umich.edu
"Hacked Emails Reveal: "Scientists" Faking Data to Establish Global
Warming They Know Isn't There,"
by Ed Morrissey, Hot Air, November 20, 2009 ---
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/11/20/do-hacked-e-mails-show-global-warming-fraud/
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
"A SURVEY OF BEHAVIORAL FINANCE," by Nicholas Barberis (Yale) and Richard
Thaler (University of Chicago) ---
http://badger.som.yale.edu/faculty/ncb25/ch18_6.pdf
Other works of Professor Nicholas
Barberis ---
http://badger.som.yale.edu/faculty/ncb25/
This Week in the History of Psychology [iTunes] ---
http://www.yorku.ca/christo/podcasts/
The Economic Crisis and its Humanitarian Impact on
Europe ---
http://www.ifrc.org/Docs/Reports/Economic_crisis.pdf
The Supreme Court Database ---
http://scdb.wustl.edu/index.php
American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/americanstories/
Women's Parliamentary Radio ---
http://www.wpradio.co.uk/
Women of Our Time
http://www.npg.si.edu/cexh/woot/index.htm
The Historical Society of Pennsylvania
(American History) ---
http://www.hsp.org/index.html
Caribbean Art and Visual Culture ---
http://scholar.library.miami.edu/caribbeanvisual/
UC Davis: Institute of Transportation Studies ---
http://www.its.ucdavis.edu/index.php
University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute ---
http://www.umtri.umich.edu
World Atlas of Panoramic Aerial Images ---
http://geogdata.csun.edu/world_atlas/
UW Student Newspapers Archive ---
http://content.lib.washington.edu/dailyweb/index.html
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers ---
http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/home.html
Newseum: Today's Front Pages (of over 600 newspapers around
the world) ---
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default.asp
Jensen Comment
This site is both useful and frustrating. It is useful because of the
large number of newspapers covered in the daily free service. It is
frustrating since the front pages shown are pictures such that
selection, copying, and pasting text quotations as text is not possible.
It is possible to use graphics capturing software such as Paintshop Pro
or SnagIt, but pasting pictures of text adds greatly to file size and is
not searchable when embedded among a lot of other text such as the text
of a blog.
Globalization and Emerging Societies: Development and Inequality
edited by Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Boike Rehbein (Palgrave Macmillan; 2009,
254 pages; $85). Focuses on China, India, and Brazil.
Interpreting Islamic Political Parties edited by M.A.
Mohamed Salih (Palgrave Macmillan; 2009, 302 pages; $90). Presents case studies
of parties in Algeria, Egypt, Eritrea, Indonesia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, the
Maldives, Mauritius, Somalia, South Africa, and Sudan.
Combating Transnational Terrorism: Searching for a New Paradigm
edited by Steve Tsang (Praeger Publishers; 2009/ 169 pages; $49.95). Writings
that advocate, among other things, a concerted campaign to win the hearts and
minds of nonextremist Muslims.
Methodologies of Comparative Philosophy: The Pragmatist and Process
Traditions by Robert W. Smid (State University of New York Press; 2009,
288 pages; $80). Evaluates the methodologies of William Ernest Hocking, F.S.C.
Northrop, Robert Cummings Neville, and David L. Hall in collaboration with Roger
T. Ames.
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
The Supreme Court Database ---
http://scdb.wustl.edu/index.php
UC Davis: Institute of Transportation Studies ---
http://www.its.ucdavis.edu/index.php
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
The Supreme Court Database ---
http://scdb.wustl.edu/index.php
OSU Multimedia History of History (especially
American History) ---
eHistory at OSU: Multimedia
Histories [Real Player]
http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/
Amicus (Civil Rights History) ---
http://harvardcrcl.org/amicus/
Centre for Overseas History: E-cyclopaedia of Portuguese Expansion
http://www.cham.fcsh.unl.pt/eve/index.php?lang=en
History of Multiple Topics From War to Cooking
Virginia Tech: Special Collections' Digitized Manuscripts ---
http://spec.lib.vt.edu/mss/pdf/index.html
World Atlas of Panoramic Aerial Images ---
http://geogdata.csun.edu/world_atlas/
The Erie Railroad Glass Plate Negative Collection
http://libwww.syr.edu/information/spcollections/digital/erierr/
American History
DuBoisopedia ---
http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/duboisopedia/doku.php
Women's Parliamentary Radio ---
http://www.wpradio.co.uk/
Women of Our Time
http://www.npg.si.edu/cexh/woot/index.htm
The Historical Society of Pennsylvania
(American History) ---
http://www.hsp.org/index.html
UW Student Newspapers Archive ---
http://content.lib.washington.edu/dailyweb/index.html
This Week in the History of Psychology [iTunes] ---
http://www.yorku.ca/christo/podcasts/
An Unlikely African-American Music Historian (Polk Miller) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120398673
Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America
by Lee Alan Dugatkin (University of Chicago Press; 2009, 166 pages; $26).
Examines how the moose figured in Thomas Jefferson's efforts to refute European
disparagements of American flora and fauna.
Interpreting Islamic Political Parties edited by M.A.
Mohamed Salih (Palgrave Macmillan; 2009, 302 pages; $90). Presents case studies
of parties in Algeria, Egypt, Eritrea, Indonesia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, the
Maldives, Mauritius, Somalia, South Africa, and Sudan.
Combating Transnational Terrorism: Searching for a New Paradigm
edited by Steve Tsang (Praeger Publishers; 2009/ 169 pages; $49.95). Writings
that advocate, among other things, a concerted campaign to win the hearts and
minds of nonextremist Muslims.
Methodologies of Comparative Philosophy: The Pragmatist and Process
Traditions by Robert W. Smid (State University of New York Press; 2009,
288 pages; $80). Evaluates the methodologies of William Ernest Hocking, F.S.C.
Northrop, Robert Cummings Neville, and David L. Hall in collaboration with Roger
T. Ames.
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
World Wide Words ---
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/lfsh.htm
101 Best Websites for Writers
---
http://www.writersdigest.com/101sites/2005_index.asp
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
An Unlikely African-American Music Historian (Polk Miller) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120398673
Reading Musical Interpretation: Case Studies in Solo Piano
Performance by Julian Hellaby (Ashgate Publishing Company; 2009, 199
pages; $99.95). Develops an analytic model termed an "interpretive tower" and
applies it to performances of keyboard works by Bach, Brahms, and Messiaen.
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Music
Writing Tutorials
"Medium Of Exchange Revisiting the quaint
custom of writing letters and having something to say," by Charles Peterson,
The Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2009 ---
Click Here \
Letters are a biographer's best friend—and worst
enemy. They are a vivid way of tracking a subject's day-to-day thoughts and
activities, but they can also have an up-staging effect. William Faulkner,
in a letter to his parents, wrote about a ride on a New York subway: "The
experiment showed me that we are not descended from monkeys, as some say,
but from lice." No mere biographer's narrative, however conscientious, can
compete with such personal confidences.
Thomas Mallon, a novelist and literary historian,
does not shrink from this challenge and has instead made first-person
writing the center of his critical attention. A quarter-century ago, with "A
Book of One's Own," he took on that other great "frenemy" of biographers,
the diary. Now, with "Yours Ever," his prose aims to illuminate not the
juicy self-revelations of diarists but the best that the epistolary genre
has to offer. Lord Byron, for instance, on his latest masterpiece: "It may
be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have
written it who has not lived in the world?—and fooled in a post-chaise? in a
hackney-coach? in a gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a
vis-à-vis? on a table? and under it?"
Or Colette, on her preferred style of living: "I
have very often deprived myself of the necessities of life, but I have never
consented to give up a luxury." And on her idea of luxury: "All I want to do
is go on with the unbridled life I lead here: barefoot, my faded bathing
suit, an old jacket, lots of garlic, and swimming at all hours of the day."
Reading through "Yours Ever," one can't help
compiling one's own best-of list. Best Reply, H.L. Mencken, on receipt of a
Christmas letter: "Christmas be damned." Best Disappointed Love Letter,
George Bernard Shaw: "Infamous, vile, heartless, frivolous, wicked woman!
Liar! lying lips, lying eyes, lying hands, promise breaker, cheat,
confidence-trickster!" Best Valediction, Marcel Proust: "I was your truly
sincere friend." Best Postscript, Theodore Roosevelt: "P.S.—I have just
killed a bear." Beat that!
It is to Mr. Mallon's credit that he doesn't try to
and presents his book as no more than a "long cover letter" to the
"cornucopia" of collected-letters editions listed at the back. For younger
readers, for whom putting pen to paper is a quaint and vague notion, "Yours
Ever" may also serve as a letter of introduction to the joys of letter
writing. Today, Mr. Mallon complains, we rarely see "the kind of considered
exchange to which e-mail is . . . doing such chatty, hurry-up violence."
True enough, though it's not hard to imagine many
versions of the examples quoted above showing up in email—or, echoing Byron,
in instant messages or blog comments, where so much bombast and bragging can
now be found. Indeed, one comfort of "Yours Ever" comes from seeing a few of
the hallmarks of the electronic age in earlier correspondence. No less a
writer than the poet Philip Larkin, it turns out, was a master of all caps,
a technique that today's twenty-somethings may have thought they had
invented. "The US edition of ["High Windows"] is out, with a photograph of
me that cries out for the caption 'FAITH HEALER OR HEARTLESS FRAUD?' "
Old love letters, as Mr. Mallon notes, inevitably
leave something to be desired. "Whenever the lovers do manage to get
together," he writes, "the letters stop dead." By contrast, a collection of
contemporary lovers' correspondence would likely overflow with daily emails
and text messages, even if the beloved were a mere five minutes away by cab.
This is where Mr. Mallon's argument about the death of "considered"
communication finds its greatest force. A young woman sends a sweet photo of
herself by cellphone and her boyfriend taps out a quick note to thank her;
Héloïse, locked up in a nunnery in the 12th century, looks at her lonely
portrait of Abelard and writes: "If a picture, which is but a mute
representation of an object, can give such pleasure, what cannot letters
inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all that force
which expresses the transports of the heart."
As Mr. Mallon notes, "the small hardships of letter
writing—having to think a moment longer before completing utterance;
remaining in suspense while awaiting reply; having one's urgent letters
cross in the mail—are the things that enrich it, emotionally and
rhetorically." If the Internet age has seen the renewal of the written
word—email, blog post, text message, "tweet"—it remains true that none of
these forms naturally supports the soulful writing of Héloïse or, to take
another example, of Keats, whose entire philosophy of life we find in his
letters. "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pain and troubles is to
school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?" Together with the many
amusements of "Yours Ever"—Keats also wrote: "I never intend hereafter to
spend any time with Ladies unless they are handsome"—Mr. Mallon's fine book
shows how important it is that we take pains to continue writing soulful
letters today, whether on paper or in pixels.
Mr. Petersen, an editor for n+1 magazine, lives in Montana.
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
November 18,
2009
November 19,
2009
November 20,
2009
November 21,
2009
November 23,
2009
Love and Envy Linked by Same Hormone, Oxytocin
A new study carried out at the University of Haifa has
found that the hormone oxytocin, the 'love hormone,' which affects behaviors
such as trust, empathy and generosity, also affects opposite behaviors, such as
jealousy and gloating.
Science Daily, November 13, 2009 ---
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091112095038.htm
"Stanford's Robert Sapolsky: 'Depression is like the worst disease you can
get'," Stanford Report, November 10, 2009 ---
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/november9/sapolsky-depression-lecture-101009.html
We've all felt a little blue, down in the dumps, or just plain sad. But
when a serious depression sets in, it could be weeks, months or even years
before the feeling lifts.
During a recent workshop presented by Stanford's Faculty and Staff Help
Center, biologist Robert Sapolsky talked about the biological and
psychological causes of depression, how to recognize its symptoms and how to
handle the disease.
Depression is the world's fourth leading cause of disability and is on
track to be second only to obesity-related disorders by 2025, Sapolsky said.
"Depression is incredibly pervasive and thus important to talk about," he
said. "Depression is like the worst disease you can get. It's devastating."
Watch the Video ---
Click Here
"Potential Treatment for Down Syndrome: Enhancing specific chemical
signaling in the brain could help treat the disorder," by Emily Singer,
MIT's Technology Review, November 19, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23979/?nlid=2536
"Cybercrime Capitalizes on Swine-Flu Fears," by Marisa Taylor, The
Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2009 ---
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/11/18/cybercrime-capitalizes-on-swine-flu-fears/?mod=
Cybercriminals are capitalizing on swine-flu fears
by pitching sales of fake Tamiflu, security firm Sophos said.
Networks of fraudsters use spam and malware to
direct Web traffic to phony pharmaceutical sites,
wrote Graham Cluley, a technology consultant for
Sophos.
“Although unwitting buyers do often receive some
kind of drug as result of the transactional exchange, at best the drug
doesn’t work and at worse it can pose serious health risks,” he added.
Cybercriminals are “putting their customers’ health, personal information
and credit card details at risk” with these counterfeit versions of Tamiflu.
Many of these fraudulent pharmaceutical sites
originate in Russia, Sophos’s Dmitry Samosseiko noted in a
paper on the topic. One network called GlavMed,
for example, has more than 120,000 online pharmacy sites selling generic
drugs under the name of Canadian Pharmacy. Each GlavMed spammer uses
e-commerce software to create new domains or direct traffic to colleagues’
domains, and charge a 40% commission on each sale.
A log file of purchases made on Canadian Pharmacy
showed about 200 drug purchases per day per site, meaning a domain owner can
earn up to an estimated $16,000 in a day, Mr. Samosseiko wrote. The top five
countries that have been purchasing Tamiflu and other drugs from so-called
Canadian Pharmacy sites are the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom,
Canada and France.
The Federal Trade Commission
said earlier
this week that it issued warnings to 10 Web sites
making questionable claims that their products could be used to treat swine
flu. The FTC said that these remedies, which included homeopathic remedies
and air-filtration systems, were violating federal law unless they can back
up their claims with scientific proof.
The agency conducted a sweep in late September
targeting Web operators who take advantage of natural disasters or financial
crises. “As consumers grow increasingly anxious about obtaining the H1N1
vaccine for their children and other vulnerable family members, scam artists
take advantage by selling them bogus remedies online,” said David Vladeck,
director of the FTC’s bureau of consumer protection, in a statement.
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Comedy: American Style by Jessie Redmon Fauset, edited by
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson (Rutgers University Press; 2009, 270 pages; $72
hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Edition of the Harlem Renaissance writer's fourth
and final novel, which was originally published in 1933.
Funny and Sexy Toyota Commercial ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOkKCeZPw0g
Video: German Coast Guard Trainee ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR0lWICH3rY
Forwarded by Paula
DIFFERENT WAYS OF LOOKING AT THINGS
Two guys were
discussing popular family trends on sex, marriage, and family
values.
Stu said, 'I didn't sleep with my wife before we got married, did
you?'
Leroy replied, 'I'm not sure, what was her
maiden name?'
|
A little boy went up to
his father and asked: 'Dad, where did my intelligence come from?'
The father replied. 'Well, son, you must have got it from your
mother, cause I still have mine.'
---------------------------------------------------------
The Divorce Court
'Mr. Clark, I have reviewed this case very carefully,'
Judge said, 'And I've decided to give your wife $775 a week,'
'That's very fair, your honor,' the husband said.
'And every now and then
I'll try to send her a few bucks myself.'
---------------------------------------------------------
A doctor examining a
woman who had been
rushed to the Emergency Room, took
the husband aside, and said, 'I don't like the looks of your wife at
all.'
'Me neither doc,' said the husband.
'But she's a great cook and really good with the kids.'
-----------------------------------------------------------
An old man goes to
the Wizard to ask him if
he can remove a curse he has been living with for the
last 40 years.
The
Wizard
says, 'Maybe, but you will have to tell me the exact words that
were used to put the curse on you.'
The old man says without hesitation, 'I now pronounce you man and
wife.'
----------------------------------------------------------
Two
Reasons Why It's So Hard
To Solve A
Redneck Murder:
1. The DNA all matches.
2. There are no dental records.
----------------------------------------------------------
A blonde calls Delta
Airlines and asks,
'Can you tell me how long it'll take
to fly from
San Francisco to
New York City?'
The agent replies, 'Just a minute.'
'Thank you,' the blonde says, and hangs up.
----------------------------------------------------------
Two Mexican
detectives were investigating the murder of
Juan Gonzalez.
'How was he killed?' asked one detective.
'With a golf gun,' the other detective replied.
'A golf gun! What is a golf gun?'
'I don't know. But it sure made a hole in Juan.'
-----------------------------------------------------------
Moe: 'My wife got
me to believe in religion.'
Joe: 'Really?'
Moe: 'Yeah. Until I married her I didn't
believe in Hell.'
----------------------------------------------------------
A man is recovering
from surgery when the
Surgical Nurse
appears and asks
him how he is feeling.
'I'm OK but I didn't like the four letter-words the doctor used in
surgery,' he answered.
'What did he say,' asked the nurse.
'Oops!'
------------------------------------------------------------
While shopping for
vacation clothes, my
husband and I passed a
display of bathing suits. It had been at least ten years and
twentypounds since I had even considered buying a bathing suit, so
sought my husband's advice. 'What do you think?' I asked. 'Should
I get a bikini or an all-in-one?'
'Better get a bikini,' he replied. 'You'd never get it all in
one.'
He's still in intensive care.
..........................................................................
The graveside service just
barely finished, when there was massive clap of thunder, followed by
a tremendous bolt of lightning, accompanied by even
more thunder rumbling in
the distance.
The little old man looked at the pastor and calmly said, 'Well,
she's there.' |
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
Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social
Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.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
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
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
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