Tidbits on March 30, 2010
Bob Jensen
March and April are dreary and cold up here.
Annually we huddle in our parkas each year at the Sunset Hill House Hotel
for Easter Sunrise Services. Around Easter the sun has already moved up
behind Mt. Washington or thereabouts.
The photos below were taken in the winter
when the sun was further south directly in front of my desk
I just cannot persuade Erika to get out of bed to appreciate these beautiful
sunrises
The bright spot below is the reflection of
my camera's flash on the window in front of my desk
There was a time decades ago when passenger
trains brought
hotel guests up to the four luxury resorts in Sugar Hill.
Now there are no passenger trains and the big resorts are torn down.
But in the summer we still have a steam
locomotive pushing up the cog railroad on Mt. Washington
People with bad backs should not take this jolting railroad to the top
The Sunset Hill House Hotel Golf Course
Clubhouse in the foliage season
The Green Mountains to our west can be seen in the far background
The picture below was taken before the Clubhouse was leveled and fixed up.
My barn is about ten yards to the right of the Clubhouse
But I never take time to golf (and I'm a lousy golfer)
I'm not a challenge to Tiger at either of his best games.
Auntie Bev and Paula forwarded most of the
pictures below
The first two show a septic tank honey wagons with a sense of humor
The guy below contemplates the entitlement
debt burden that our generation
did not pump off with the honey wagons above
The picture below was snapped while he was watching
The National Debt
Clock ---
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
These two are also saddled with the crap of
generations who've gone before
Heck, global warming ain't so bad after all
on the Beach of Nome
They both left the onions off their burgers
Some naive people think there's no
difference between male and female combat pilots
Some naive people claim there's no
difference between male and female gunners
Here's what happens if you don't teach your
kids to pinch pennies
I think she's on her way for a career in Congress
A Roma Journey ---
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/exhibition/roma_journey/eng/
Roma Slide Show ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Rome.pp
The "Burning Platform" of the United States Empire
Former Chief Accountant of the United States, David Walker, is spreading the
word as widely as possible in the United States about the looming threat of our
unbooked entitlements. Two videos that feature David Walker's warnings are as
follows:
David Walker claims the U.S. economy is on a "burning platform" but does not
go into specifics as to what will be left in the ashes.
The US government
is on a “burning platform” of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal
deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military
commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon.
David M. Walker,
Former Chief Accountant of the United States ---
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/quinn/2009/0218.html
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on March 30,
2010
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/TidbitsQuotations033010.htm
Tidbits on March 30, 2010
Bob Jensen
Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
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/
-
- I see from my house by the side of the road
- By the side of the highway of life,
- The men who press with the ardor of hope,
- The men who are faint with the strife,
- But I turn not away from their smiles and tears,
- Both parts of an infinite plan-
- Let me live in a house by the side of the road
- And be a friend to man.
Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911)
For earlier editions of Tidbits go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbitsdirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New
Bookmarks go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
March 24, 2010 message to the AECM
I think professors who do not open share extensively on the Web
miss the boat.
Selfishness has its own punishments, and generosity has its own rewards.
Scroll most of the way down in this message for an example from XXXXX
Will Yancey was a pioneer in open sharing on the Web ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Yancey.htm
Will made a very good living consulting and found that open sharing pays
back enormously, much better in his case than any kind of paid advertising.
But if you would’ve known Will you would’ve also discovered that he shared
openly out of the kindness of his big heart. I doubt that he even thought
about payback when he commenced to open share so generously.
I was also
an early-on open sharing professor and never once did so with the thought of
payback in mind. However, I am forwarding the message below to show that
once of the benefits of open sharing is payback ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Once again, however, I stress that I would open share if there
was not a penny of monetary payback. I open share because it makes me feel
good to make a difference in the academy of professors and students.
When you do open share technical content, potential clients find
your work using Google, Bing, and other Web crawlers.
I think professors who do not open share extensively miss the boat.
Selfishness has its own punishments, and generosity has its own rewards.
My threads on this type of problem are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/133swapvalue.htm
My excel workbook contains an “Effective” spreadsheet at in the
133ex05a.xls file at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/
I also provide a 133ex05a.wmv video at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5341/
How I made my money consulting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#ConsultingMoney
My Outstanding Educator Award Speech ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/AAAaward_files/AAAaward02.htm
Bob Jensen
From:
XXXXX
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2010 4:26 PM
To: Jensen, Robert
Subject: Interest Rate Swap Valuation?
Hi Bob,
I found you on the internet. We are doing a Dec 31 2009
audit and our client obtained a mortgage loan in 2009, and entered into a
fixed rate mortgage rate swap on the loans interest. I would like to get a
fair value quote for the swap at Dec. 31,2009. Would you be available to
consult with us on this valuation? Please advise interest and your fee?
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
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
- With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting
Review (TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
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
In an unusually candid rant, MSNBC libtalker Ed Schultz tells
radio listeners he believes the next "socialist" takeover by the government
should be on all the radio airwaves ---
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/03/25/msnbc_host_time_for_socialism_in_talk_radio.html
Red Skelton's Pledge of Allegiance ---
http://media.causes.com/604250?p_id=42563578
AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials
---
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews/
Watch the Video
Review: Hubble 3D Takes You on Beautiful, Brief Space Journey ---
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/03/review-hubble-3d/
Video: Ted Talk – Why we need to go back to Mars ---
http://www.ted.com/talks/joel_levine.html
A Roma Journey ---
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/exhibition/roma_journey/eng/
Roma Slide Show ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Rome.pp
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Wilbur "Buck" Clayton Collection (trumpet) ---
http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/cgi/i/image/image-idx?c=claytonic
Cool Facts About Israel Set to Music ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeVvMJdvEX8
Jerry Adler, Harmonica Virtuoso, Dies at 91 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/arts/music/22adler.html?hpw
Web outfits like
Pandora, Foneshow, Stitcher, and Slacker broadcast portable and mobile content
that makes Sirius look overpriced and stodgy ---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090327_877363.htm?link_position=link2
TheRadio (my favorite commercial-free
online music site) ---
http://www.theradio.com/
Slacker (my second-favorite commercial-free online music site) ---
http://www.slacker.com/
Gerald Trites likes this
international radio site ---
http://www.e-radio.gr/
Songza:
Search for a song or band and play the selection ---
http://songza.com/
Also try Jango ---
http://www.jango.com/?r=342376581
Sometimes this old guy prefers the jukebox era (just let it play through) ---
http://www.tropicalglen.com/
And I listen quite often to Soldiers Radio Live ---
http://www.army.mil/fieldband/pages/listening/bandstand.html
Also note U.S. Army Band recordings
---
http://bands.army.mil/music/default.asp
Bob Jensen listens to music free online (and no commercials)
---
http://www.slacker.com/
Photographs and Art
Photo Collage of New Wireless Gadgets ---
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/a-photo-collage-of-new-wireless-gadgets/?hpw
MilkyWay@home (Astronomy, 3-D) ---
http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway
Astronomy Media Player [iTunes] ---
http://www.jodcast.net/amp/
Watch the Video
Review: Hubble 3D Takes You on Beautiful, Brief Space Journey ---
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/03/review-hubble-3d/
U.S. National Park Service Photos & Multimedia ---
http://www.nps.gov/photosmultimedia
National Park Service: Dry Tortugas (near Key West) ---
http://www.nps.gov/drto/
A Roma Journey ---
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/exhibition/roma_journey/eng/
Roma Slide Show ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Rome.pp
Hawaii War Records Depository Photos ---
http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/hwrd/
2020 Whitney Biennial ---
http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial
Evanion Collection of Ephemera
(including catalogs, menus, etc.) ---
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/evancoll/
Pamphlet and Textual Ephemera Collection ---
http://content.lib.washington.edu/ptecweb/index.html
Florida broadsides and other ephemera,
1800-2000 ---
http://www.floridamemory.com/collections/broadsides/
The Civil War in America from The Illustrated
London News
http://beck.library.emory.edu/iln/index.html
The Portent: John Brown's Raid in American History (Civil War)
---
http://www.vahistorical.org/johnbrown/introduction.htm
The Becker College: Drawings of the American
Civil War Era
http://idesweb.bc.edu/becker/
Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in
Photographs ---
http://www.bl.uk/pointsofview/
America's Great Wilderness Spots
The U.S. has millions of acres of protected public lands. These are
among the most beautiful — and isolated.
http://travel.yahoo.com/p-interests-33121820
Bob Jensen's threads on history, literature and art ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various
types electronic literature available free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
The Portent: John Brown's Raid in American History (Civil War)
---
http://www.vahistorical.org/johnbrown/introduction.htm
Heritage Preservation ---
http://www.heritagepreservation.org/
Bible Geocoding ---
http://www.openbible.info/geo/
The following are not all free online, but they are worth
noting:
Great Mystery Writers (not accounting related usually)
Agatha Christie ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie
Ngaio Marsh ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngaio_Marsh z
Arthur Conan Doyle ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Arthur_Conan_Doyle
Dorothy Sayers ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_L._Sayers
Dashiell Hammett ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashiell_Hammett
Patricia Highsmith ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Highsmith
Elmore Leonard ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmore_Leonard
Stieg Larson ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stieg_Larsson
Other Mystery Writers ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mystery_writers
Accounting Novels ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNovels.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
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on March 30,
2010
To Accompany the March 30, 2010 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/TidbitsQuotations033010.htm
"Health Care Reform Insights From Harvard Business School Faculty," by
HBS Faculty Members, Harvard Business Review Blog, March 25, 2010 ---
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/health_care_reform_insights_fr.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE
In the wake of the passage of sweeping health care
reform legislation by the U.S. Congress, the political battle over the bill
seems destined to continue. But what do Harvard Business School faculty
experts, whose research applies a management lens to health care policy and
delivery, think about the bill's content? And what are the next steps for
improving patient care and containing costs?
Richard Bohmer Physician and Professor of Management Practice at
Harvard Business School. Author of Designing Care: Aligning the
Nature and Management of Health Care.
Insurance reform is a necessary but not sufficient
component of U.S. health care reform. We need to think very hard as well
about the optimal way of caring for a particular type of patient and then
how to pay for that optimal way. For me, the optimal way is the function of
a science: What is possible in terms of drugs, technology, devices,
information technology, and personnel; then secondarily, consider the
current regulations in place and the payment models.
There is an important set of discussions to be had
around how we actually organize care, with all sorts of managerial and
strategic decisions to be made at a policy and national level. Yet at ground
zero, lots of interesting experiments are underway, with professionals
trying different ways of configuring and managing services. On that list I
include experiments with disease management programs, substituting nurse
practitioners for physicians in certain circumstances, the in-store clinic
model for treatment of simple diseases, and experiments with IT to enable
precise electronic communication between patients and doctors so that real
medical discussions can be had at a distance.
At the national level we don't hear much about
these innovations; yet they present an equally important set of issues. We
need to make a distinction between debating how it will be paid for and what
the "it" is that is paid for.
Several factors are pushing us to change how we
deliver care. Perhaps the most important of these is changing expectations.
Patients are used to good service from other industries, and they expect
higher performance than they see in the health care sector. They obviously
worry a lot about whether their insurance will cover the medical services
they need, but they are also concerned about the care they get — how
accurate, reliable, and fail-safe it is, as well as how responsive and
convenient. Employers expect better outcomes, and of course they and
patients want fewer errors and fewer patients harmed by care that was
intended to cure their disease. Finally, all health care's constituents
expect better value.
As for innovation, our prevailing model has been
that knowledge flows into medical and nursing practice from funded external
research. In this model it is the role of provider organizations to bring
knowledge published in the medical and nursing literatures to bear on
individual patients by selecting the right therapies and the right way of
implementing those therapies — a one-way flow of knowledge from the research
community to the delivery community to each individual patient.
However, routine practice is itself a fertile
source of innovations in care, in both what to do and how to do it. Medical
knowledge and how to operationalize it can be learned through taking care of
patients, and delivery organizations create knowledge for themselves. This
is knowledge flow not from bench-side-to-bedside, but from
bedside-to-bedside. New insights derived from practice can be brought to
bear for the benefit of each subsequent patient.
Given the increased expectations of performance, we
now need to design care by asking nitty-gritty design questions such as: How
is care going to be delivered? Who will do what, when, where, and how? How
will they hand over tasks and decision rights and accountability to the next
person who will do what, when, where, and how? And how does technology
support these decisions?
Hence, a lot of health care reform is a management
problem. It can't be solved by policymakers acting at a distance. That is
why we should help doctors understand the managerial issues related to their
clinical practice. My involvement with the MD/MBA program at Harvard
Business School is part of that belief. A not-for-profit institution
deserves to be as well managed as a for-profit institution. In terms of
health care delivery, the absence of a profit motive doesn't mean that
people should tolerate poorly designed processes and symptoms, especially
when organizational performance is a necessary component of realizing the
best clinical outcomes for individual patients.
Adapted from the 11/23/09 HBS Working Knowledge article,"Management's
Role in Reforming Health Care."
Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Do you know the speed traps in your hometown?
I might preface this by saying that I'm a law abiding driver who favors more and
more speed traps. Sadly, there is only one speed trap noted below within 30
miles in all directions from our cottage. But we have very little traffic in
these mountains. Our speed trap is at the south exit of Franconia Notch ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franconia_Notch
Drivers tend to put the pedal to the metal as they emerge from the mountain
pass. I might add that the same thing happens closer to where we live at the
north exit of the Notch. But that is not listed as a speed trap.
(Actually,
I found later that there are two other Notch speed traps further south around
the Lincoln exits.).
Do you know the speed traps in your hometown?
http://www.speedtrap.org/speedtraps/stetlist.asp
Jensen Comment
In our current discussion about priorities of
accounting standard setting, it struck me that accounting and auditing standards
should be like speed traps.
As I was writing
this speed trap tidbit, it dawned on me that writing financial accounting
standards is a bit like choosing where to locate speed traps. The goals should
be focused upon where public safety is most at risk. This is not always where
violations are most likely to take place. Rather safety should be focused on
where accidents are most likely to take place because of the violations.
Accounting standards should focus on where the worst abuses of
investor/creditor safety are likely to take place. As in the case of the speed
trap on the south end of Franconia Notch, I don't think this is where safety is
at stake. The south end of Franconia Notch is in the boon docks, and drivers
pushing it to 80 mph on the four-lane I-93 in the middle of nowhere are not
pushing safety to the limit like they are pushing safety to the limit backing
their cars out of parking places in our always-overcrowded Littleton Wal-Mart. I
fear more about cars hitting shopping carts and kids in this parking lot than
accidents up on either end of the Notch.
Incidentally, drivers tend to speed where the Notch exits change to double
lanes, because they've been bottled up for miles at 45-mph on a single lane
inside the Notch. It's like they blame the drivers ahead of them in the Notch
for going so slow and want to zoom around them when there's at long last a
passing lane. But the drivers ahead of them are also speeding up to at least 65
mph such that you have to now get around them you may have to accelerate to 80
mph. I notice this time and time again at each end of the Notch. After zooming
around at 80 mph, those same drivers generally slow down to less than 70 mph
when they come to their senses.
Such is not the case for Wall Street Bankers.
They will
maintain break-neck speeds for their commissions and bonuses.
Frank Partnoy and Lynn Turner contend that Wall Street
bank accounting is an exercise in writing fiction:
Watch the video! (a bit slow loading)
Lynn Turner is Partnoy's co-author of the white paper "Make Markets Be Markets"
"Bring Transparency to Off-Balance Sheet Accounting," by Frank Partnoy,
Roosevelt Institute, March 2010 ---
http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/policy-and-ideas/ideas-database/bring-transparency-balance-sheet-accounting
Watch the video!
SAT on Her Eggs:
There may be much debate over what SAT scores really
signify, but new research suggests that they yield women a lot of money if they
are willing to donate their eggs. The Boston Globe reported on a new study that
found -- analyzing the ads in student newspapers -- that an increase of 100
points in a woman's score resulted in an average increase of $2,350 in offers to
buy her eggs.
"The Reward of High SAT Scores," Inside Higher Ed, March 26, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/26/qt#223405
Jensen Comment
A computer science major paid her own way through Trinity University by selling
her eggs. Trinity is a private university that requires students to be full time
resident students. She was tall, beautiful, smart, blonde, and had a stellar SAT
score. Blonde jokes just did not apply in her case,
Males sometimes have to wait for top dollar on their sperm --- like after
they win the Nobel Prize, are admitted to the National Academy of Science, or
have otherwise achieved noteworthy recognitions. I don't know about professional
athletes, but I suspect there's also a sperm market for the top stars. Might be
an added bonus after voluntary or forced retirement from competition.
History of Greed : Financial Fraud from Tulip Mania to Bernie Madoff
---
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470601809.html
In his new book, History of Greed, noted financial
fraud expert David E. Y. Sarna posits that the major scandals that came to
light in 2008, like most of those in the last two hundred years are just the
superficial manifestations of a system that, at its core, is based on fraud,
greed and dishonesty. The root cause of the markets’ malaise, in one word,
is “greed.” In two words, it is “easy money.” The quest for easy money took
many forms, and each greedy person involved in the financial world found his
or her own lucrative niche.
Through anecdotal examples, History of Greed
provides an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the world of financial
fraud, large and small. Millions of dollars are made every day (mostly by
promoters and insiders) and lost every day (mostly by innocent but greedy
investors) in the markets for these smaller stocks. The market for smaller
stocks is a giant casino in which the dice are loaded and the cards are
marked. Unlike some of the more exotic greed strategies, like
hard-to-comprehend complex derivatives, this one is easy for everyone to
understand. Sarna looks at smaller cases of fraud and major financial panics
and fruads such as AIG, Goldman Sachs, Enron, and Twentieth Century Ponzi
schemes.
American History
of Fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Derivative
Financial Instruments History of Fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
European Business Schools in 2010: They're Soaring
Business Week ---
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/europe/special_reports/20100317european_b-schools_report.htm?link_position=link1
Question
What are the top 16 colleges recognized for fighting grade inflation?
"A" The Hard Way, 2010: GradeInflation.com's Sweet Sixteen of Tough
Graders
http://www.gradeinflation.com/sweet162010.html
[I did not quote the early parts of this article]
1. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Engineering and science
based schools dominate the Sweet Sixteen of Tough A's. Their workloads
are higher and their grades are lower than national averages. Rensselaer
fits right in with a high quality student body and an average GPA about
0.25 below typical private schools of its caliber.
2. Princeton University. The Tigers are a newcomer to the tough
A. Leadership here has worked hard over the last few years to make sure
that excellence is accorded only to those that truly deserve it.
Princeton may be new to reversing grade inflation, but in this year's
tourney, they may go all the way.
3. Boston University. BU's student body complains mightily about
grades and how hard it is to get an A. At a lot of schools such
complaints defy reality. But at BU, getting a B average puts you right
in the middle of pack. Graduating with a 3.5 makes you a star.
4. MIT. The Beavers likely deserve a higher seed, but their
leadership is very, very tight lipped about their grades. When MIT last
slipped and published some data several years ago, the average GPA was
less than 3.2. At schools with comparable talent like Harvard and Yale,
GPA's are 0.2 to 0.4 higher.
1. Virginia Commonwealth University. Public schools in urban
settings can be very tough places to earn an A. At VCU, even getting a B
can be an achievement. Its average GPA is 2.6, far below national
averages.
2. Hampden-Sydney College. H-SC is a very small school tucked
away in the South. It's had modest problems with grade inflation over
the last decade, but H-SC's grades are still so low relative to other
liberal arts colleges that it fully merits a number 2 seed in the very
tough Southern region.
3. Roanoke College. Liberal arts colleges tend to be easy A
heaven. That's not so at Roanoke where B is still the most common grade
and A's are earned less than 30 percent of the time.
4. Auburn University. Another Tiger in this year's Sweet Sixteen.
Eat your hearts out 'Bama; Auburn is just a tougher place to earn an A.
1. Purdue University. Getting an A is hard for the Boilermakers
with an average GPA that has hovered around 2.8 for over 30 years.
Purdue doesn't even seem to know that grade inflation exists in America.
In that regard, ignorance is bliss.
2. University of Houston. The Midwest is our weakest division and
to make up for it, we've shipped some schools from the South to here.
Like VCU, Houston is a tough urban public school to earn an A with a GPA
that has held at a steady 2.6 for 15 years.
3. Southern Polytechnic State. Another hard-nosed science and
engineering school. Its state rival Georgia Tech is no piece of cake
either, but SPSU gets the nod for a Sweet Sixteen seed this year.
4. Florida International University. A's are far harder to come
by at FIU than they are at Florida's flagship school in Gainesville.
Earn a 3.4 GPA at FIU and you're well ahead of the pack. Maybe next year
the Midwest will toughen up and be able to compete with the Southern
schools that we've shipped into the land of the wind chill factor.
1. Reed College. If you go to Reed, you know in advance that A's
are earned. There's a reason why this school places so many students in
Ph.D. programs and medical schools.
2. CSU-Fullerton. Resources are tight in the CSU system and
Fullerton has its share of real problems. But grade inflation is not an
issue here. Grades are about the same as they were in 1978 and the
average GPA is 2.7.
3. Harvey Mudd College. This small science and engineering school
outside of LA has, to our mind, one of the funniest names for a school
in America (OK, Chico State is even funnier). But the name is where all
jokes end. Harvey Mudd's average GPA is in the 3.2 range, which might
seem high at face value. But these students are some of the best in the
country. If they took classes with their liberal arts college neighbors
across the way (Harvey Mudd is part of a consortium of colleges), they'd
be getting A's ten to thirty percent more frequently.
4. Simon Fraser University. Unlike the NCAA, GradeInflation.com
is not restricted to seeding only American schools. Just across the
Washington state border in beautiful British Columbia, SFU has avoided
grade inflation as successfully as Celine Dion has avoided Tim Hortons
(you might have to be Canadian to get that one). They are stingy with
their A's, giving them only about 25 percent of the time.
That's it for our Sweet Sixteen this year. If you feel your school has
been slighted by omission, send us a verifiable record of their grading
history. They just might make the Sweet Sixteen in 2011!
Compare with the grade inflation of many other selected colleges and
universities ---
http://www.gradeinflation.com/
Why I think grade inflation is the number one scandal in higher education
and its primary cause ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
Designing a Website
How to
design an academic Website
Somebody
recently asked me for advice on designing a
Website. Mine is totally out of control, so
I may not be the best person to ask. I hope
some others on the AECM will comment on this
theme of what constitutes great academic
Website design.
In any case,
my reply may be of interest to some of you.
Keep in mind
that frequency of visits is a lousy test of
the value added of an academic site. As I
indicated previously, professors can get
millions of hits just by linking to nude
photos of Britney Spears and Madonna.
Frequency of hits should not be a goal.
There are a
million commercial firms that design
Websites. However, virtually all of these
are biased toward business firm sites that
are usually a turn off to academics. Here's
one site with some helpful advice ---
http://medcentertoday.com/print_article.php?id=71&chapter_id=15
My theory is
that, for academics, 99.9% of the value
added is content relative to bandwidth hogs
of animations, graphics, and multimedia not
connected to value-added content. Included
in "content" I'm including the navigation
aids that the site provides too its content.
This is very difficult, but use of tables
and graphic can be a great help to
navigation as long as a customized Google
search box for your site.
Most users
of Websites find our site pages via search
crawlers like Google and Bing. And these
crawlers find your site because of the
content that they crawl over.
Promotion of
your site will help some --- Francine is
pretty good at this when she reacts to AECM
messaging with mention of links where she's
previously written about topics. I also do
the same thing.
If your time
is limited, you might try to narrow down
your site themes and not have such wide
coverage in GAAP and teaching. For example,
Joe Hoyle limits his theme to teaching
financial accounting without going deep into
financial accounting itself. Rick Lillie
mostly focuses on emerging teaching
technologies.
You might
look at Rick Lillie's home page at
http://www.drlillie.com/
Then follow
it up with inspections of other sites of
professors, including David Fordham, Amy
Dunbar, and others that we know on the AECM.
What I think
teachers find of greatest values in a site
are helpers they can use in their courses
(e.g., cases, spreadsheets, PowerPoint
modules, book reviews, journal article
reviews, and links and links and links to
helper materials).
One of my
own helper pages is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
A broader
helper page is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
March 20, 2010 reply from James R. Martin/University of South Florida
[jmartin@MAAW.INFO]
Some thoughts on developing a web site. First, you
need to ask yourself some questions. Why do I want to develop a website?
What will be the purpose of the web site? Will I be happy with a few
intrinsic rewards, (If you think you're going to make money, forget it). If
you already have a full life, you might want to think again. A web site can,
and probably will, consume all, or most of your time. But, if you really
want to develop a web site, define the purpose, the hoped for audience (the
web is a very competitive place), and then draw the thing on a piece of
paper indicating the links from the home page to the various parts of the
site. After you think you know what you want to do you need to learn how to
use a program like FrontPage (fairly easy) or Dreamweaver (more difficult)
and get on with it. I have been developing the MAAW site (http://maaw.info/)
for about 12 years and I really enjoy working on it on a daily basis.
However, I am retired and I have the time it takes to develop and maintain
something useful, at least a few of MAAW's visitors say that it is useful.
Most don't say anything. Expect about one or two pats on the back for every
200,000 page views. If you can be satisfied with that, go for it.
March 21, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Here's another pat on the back Jim. You've got one
of the best content sites in the accounting academy. And your site (MAAW)
sets a pretty good standard for navigation aids. My site is more difficult
to navigate in part because I tend to have so many more long quotations from
the current media (WSJ, NYT, and my favorite blogs). I have to rely more on
word search of some Web "pages" that are themselves several thousand pages
in length.
As you know, word searching navigation is
troublesome because the English language has so many synonyms. Indexing for
better searches is difficult when you are cutting and pasting 40 articles a
day into hundreds of Web pages. Such is life in the imperfect world that has
evolved on the Web. Google is a marvel because that giant search engine is
so tolerant of misspellings (but not complete synonyms). If I'm uncertain of
a spelling, I often plug in my best guess into Google, copy the correct
spelling, and then paste the correct spelling into more particular sites
like Wikipedia (that's not tolerant about spelling mistakes).
The unsolved question about a Website is whether to
run deep and narrow or wide and shallow. I try to run wide and deep, but
it's a tremendous effort in terms of time. It consumes my retirement days,
and I would not do it if I did not feel so compelled, like you, to make a
difference in the academy. I also love the debates and the occasional back
slaps (special thanks to Paul Williams since he so often does not agree with
me but seems to find value added in my posts).
In any case, keep up the good work Jim. You and I
both are trying to prove that there's a special kind of value in old bones.
Bob Jensen
March 21, 2010 reply from James R. Martin/University of South Florida
[jmartin@MAAW.INFO]
Thanks to Bob Jensen and a few more thoughts on
building a web site:
Thanks Bob, these old bones appreciate your pat on
the back. I expect your back is continuously sore from all the pats you get
for your legendary site.
I am not an expert on web site development, but I
have a few more comments to anyone thinking of building a web site. Unless
you're going to develop your site at a university (not recommended) you will
need a web server and a domain name. There must be hundreds of web servers
to choose from so I can only tell you about the one I use. MAAW has been on
the FatCow Web Hosting server (http://www.fatcow.com/) for several years and
I have found it to be more than adequate for my needs. They are currently
offering a discount on more space than you could possibly use and a free
domain name (currently $22 per year). They also have a section on the server
called Domain Central where you can select a domain name and then check to
see if it's available with the extension you want. The possible extensions
are .biz, .co.uk, .com, .info, .mobi, .net, and .org. I chose .info to
indicate that MAAW is mainly an information site. The other MAAWs are
related to marketing (maaw.com and maaw.org are Marketing Agencies
Association Worldwide) and Siamese cats (maaw.net). I don't get the
connection, but that's what they call it. One additional recommendation. If
you are a faculty member or student at a university, you can probably buy
web development software at your bookstore at a really big discount. Check
that out before you buy anything
March 21, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
If you're currently a faculty/staff member of a college or retired
faculty/staff, the first places to check for Web hosting are your college's
Web servers. Large universities typically have servers for the various
divisions or departments within a university. Smaller institutions may only
have a single Web server. Most of my files are hosted by the main Trinity
University Web Server, but my largest multimedia files are served up by my
very good friends in the Computer Science Department. Computer Science
Departments typically have server space that is virtually unlimited.
I've never bothered to check on copyright issues, but I assume I fully
own the files served up the TU Web servers. I never intend to sell anything
that I've already served up for free from TU. I've never bothered to check,
but I've always assumed that TU does not want to serve up any files for
which the author(s) are paid for the file usage. Many faculty and staff
serve up a few personal files such as family photographs, but I think the
university would only become upset if we served up hours and hours of home
movies serving no particular purpose to educators and students on or off
campus.
I suspect that Trinity has a policy of not allowing faculty or staff to
be paid for advertisements on files served up by Trinity. Faculty might,
however, provide links to commercial sites where their textbooks, software,
etc. are sold. Such links might even appear on a resume.
There's a gray zone when faculty or staff might serve up
commercially-related files on a college server. Some textbook authors might
share selected chapters of a book for free even though the full book must be
purchased from commercial servers. In these instances the authors generally
own the copyrights even if the book is sold commercially. Many faculty
members might serve up lots of free helper materials that, in turn, trigger
some consulting opportunities. This has certainly happened to me on many
occasions, but I can honestly say that I never serve up helper materials for
the purpose of advertising my areas of expertise for consulting.
If the college is itself serving up course materials for a fee-based
distance education course, chances are that the main course materials are
being served up on something other than a Web server, most likely a
password-controlled Blackboard server or its equivalent.
Another thing to consider when choosing a college's Web server is how
long it will keep on going after you depart from the college. Trinity
University never shuts down a faculty/staff Website unless requested to do
so by the "owner" of the site. Many Web sites are still active for TU
faculty who've been deceased for years. Trinity still hosts Web sites for
faculty who've taken jobs at other universities. I don't know that Trinity
allows former faculty employed elsewhere to continually update their TU Web
files, but I've never had a need to check on that. Certainly retirees like
me can continue to update while we're still living. I suspect that spouses
might even carry on some updating that serves a legitimate academic purpose.
And when I die, I'm not really going away in terms of what is already posted
to my TU Web servers. I hope I will even continue updating, but I seriously
doubt it.
I'm a genuine hog when it comes to space taken up on TU Web servers. But
there was never a time that Trinity suggested that I was taking up too much
space on a server. One time, years ago, the director of the computer center
asked me to split some very large files into smaller components. He said
that people downloading my huge files were slowing down the Web server.
Of course other colleges might be more restrictive on Web server space
and longevity. If these colleges are still serving up Web files for deceased
or otherwise departed faculty, it may still be best to ask about policy in
that regard. I think most colleges feel that if Web materials of former
faculty and staff are serving a laudable academic service to the public,
then the those Websites are enhancing the reputation of the college as well.
Obviously the college needs a policy on the number and size of enormous
multimedia files that it will serve up to the public. Some universities,
including very prestigious universities, have put video lectures of their
faculty on free YouTube server space ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Whereas most individuals are limited to 10 minutes for each video on
YouTube, colleges can negotiate for YouTube file space to serve up full
lectures, including 75-minute or 90-minute lectures.
March 21, 2010 reply from James R. Martin/University of South Florida
[jmartin@MAAW.INFO]
I recommend against developing
a full blown non-teaching web site on a university server. There are several
reasons for my view on this. A few of these are sketched out below.
1. Web space is cheap. For
$120-$130 per year you can do your own thing with no outside restrictions.
2. If you develop your site
inside your university's larger site it will probably be harder to find
because it might be buried in a sub-web or sub-sub-web. Bob Jensen's site is
not buried, but many faculty sites are.
For example, the URL for my
old site was in the fifth level basement:
http://www.coba.usf.edu/departments/accounting/faculty/martin/index.html.
Perhaps the Google spiders can
find anything these days, but it seems logical that your ranking with search
engines would improve if your site is not buried within a larger site.
3. Your current faculty
administration might support you now, but the next batch of administrators
might change the rules. University budgets are being squeezed, so I would
not assume anything about future faculty perks.
4. You might want to place
things on your site that are not appropriate on a university site, such as
pay per click ads (e.g., Google AdSense) Amazon, or Barnes & Noble book
links, other referrals, Google Gadgets, Flash illustrations, avatars, links
to sites university administrators might find questionable, and who knows
what else.
5. You might want to use a
program that analyzes your log files to track your traffic. Web servers like
FatCow provide traffic information, and with a little work you can get a
tremendous amount of additional traffic information from programs like
Google Analytics. I don't know if these programs even work on a sub-web
buried within a large university site.
6. You might be interested in
your site's Google ranking, but if it is buried within a larger site you're
might not get an accurate measurement.
7. You might want to pass your
site on to one of your children, some other relative, or a friend. I don't
think a university would go along with that. I have a few people in mind for
my site, but they don't know it yet.
8. Someday your site might
become so popular and famous that some big firm will want to sponsor it or
even buy it from you. Now, you can move a site, or copy a site (my site has
been copied and translated into several other languages without my
permission), but that just adds unnecessary work.
Okay, selling your site is
pretty far fetched, but you never know, and you can't sell a university
site... and even if you could, you couldn't keep the money.
Ah, the innocence of youth.
What really happened in the poisonous CDO markets?
I previously mentioned three CBS Sixty Minutes videos that are must-views for
understanding what happened in the CDO scandals. Two of those videos centered on
muckraker Michael Lewis. My friend, the Unknown Professor, who runs the
Financial Rounds Blog, recommended that readers examine the Senior Thesis of a
Harvard student.
"Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short’? Read the Harvard Thesis Instead," by Peter
Lattman, The Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2010 ---
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2010/03/15/michael-lewiss-the-big-short-read-the-harvard-thesis-instead/tab/article/
Deal Journal has yet to
read “The Big Short,” Michael Lewis’s yarn on the financial crisis that hit
stores today. We did, however, read his acknowledgments, where Lewis praises
“A.K. Barnett-Hart, a Harvard undergraduate who had just written a thesis about
the market for subprime mortgage-backed CDOs that remains more interesting than
any single piece of Wall Street research on the subject.”
While unsure if we can
stomach yet another book on the crisis, a killer thesis on the topic? Now that
piqued our curiosity. We tracked down Barnett-Hart, a 24-year-old financial
analyst at a large New York investment bank. She met us for coffee last week to
discuss her thesis, “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical
Analysis.” Handed in a year ago this week at the depths of the market collapse,
the paper was awarded summa cum laude and won virtually every thesis honor,
including the Harvard Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly work.
Last October,
Barnett-Hart, already pulling all-nighters at the bank (we agreed to not name
her employer), received a call from Lewis, who had heard about her thesis from a
Harvard doctoral student. Lewis was blown away.
“It was a classic example
of the innocent going to Wall Street and asking the right questions,” said Mr.
Lewis, who in his 20s wrote “Liar’s Poker,” considered a defining book on Wall
Street culture. “Her thesis shows there were ways to discover things that
everyone should have wanted to know. That it took a 22-year-old Harvard student
to find them out is just outrageous.”
Barnett-Hart says she
wasn’t the most obvious candidate to produce such scholarship. She grew up in
Boulder, Colo., the daughter of a physics professor and full-time homemaker. A
gifted violinist, Barnett-Hart deferred admission at Harvard to attend
Juilliard, where she was accepted into a program studying the violin under
Itzhak Perlman. After a year, she headed to Cambridge, Mass., for a broader
education. There, with vague designs on being pre-Med, she randomly took “Ec
10,” the legendary introductory economics course taught by Martin Feldstein.
“I thought maybe this
would help me, like, learn to manage my money or something,” said Barnett-Hart,
digging into a granola parfait at Le Pain Quotidien. She enjoyed how the subject
mixed current events with history, got an A (natch) and declared economics her
concentration.
Barnett-Hart’s interest
in CDOs stemmed from a summer job at an investment bank in the summer of 2008
between junior and senior years. During a rotation on the mortgage
securitization desk, she noticed everyone was in a complete panic. “These CDOs
had contaminated everything,” she said. “The stock market was collapsing and
these securities were affecting the broader economy. At that moment I became
obsessed and decided I wanted to write about the financial crisis.” ,
Back at Harvard, against
the backdrop of the financial system’s near-total collapse, Barnett-Hart
approached professors with an idea of writing a thesis about CDOs and their role
in the crisis. “Everyone discouraged me because they said I’d never be able to
find the data,” she said. “I was urged to do something more narrow, more
focused, more knowable. That made me more determined.”
She emailed scores of
Harvard alumni. One pointed her toward LehmanLive, a comprehensive database on
CDOs. She received scores of other data leads. She began putting together charts
and visuals, holding off on analysis until she began to see patterns–how Merrill
Lynch and Citigroup were the top originators, how collateral became heavily
concentrated in subprime mortgages and other CDOs, how the credit ratings
procedures were flawed, etc.
“If you just randomly
start regressing everything, you can end up doing an unlimited amount of
regressions,” she said, rolling her eyes. She says nearly all the work was in
the research; once completed, she jammed out the paper in a couple of weeks.
“It’s an incredibly
impressive piece of work,” said Jeremy Stein, a Harvard economics professor who
included the thesis on a reading list for a course he’s teaching this semester
on the financial crisis. “She pulled together an enormous amount of information
in a way that’s both intelligent and accessible.”
Barnett-Hart’s thesis is
highly critical of Wall Street and “their irresponsible underwriting practices.”
So how is it that she can work for the very institutions that helped create the
notorious CDOs she wrote about?
“After writing my thesis,
it became clear to me that the culture at these investment banks needed to
change and that incentives needed to be realigned to reward more than just
short-term profit seeking,” she wrote in an email. “And how would Wall Street
ever change, I thought, if the people that work there do not change? What these
banks needed is for outsiders to come in with a fresh perspective, question the
way business was done, and bring a new appreciation for the true purpose of an
investment bank - providing necessary financial services, not creating
unnecessary products to bolster their own profits.”
Ah, the innocence of
youth.
The Senior Thesis
"The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis," by Anna
Katherine Barnett-Hart, Harvard University, March 19, 2010 ---
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/m-rcbg/students/dunlop/2009-CDOmeltdown.pdf
A former colleague and finance professor at Trinity
University recommends following up this Harvard student’s senior thesis with the
following:
Rene M. Stulz. 2010. Credit default swaps and the
credit crisis. J of Economic Perspectives, 24(1): 73-92 (not free) ---
http://www.aeaweb.org/jep/index.php
Absolutely Must-See CBS Sixty Minutes Videos
You, your students, and the world in general really should repeatedly study the
following videos until they become perfectly clear!
Two of them are best watched after a bit of homework.
Video 1
CBS Sixty Minutes featured how bad things became when poison was added to loan
portfolios. This older Sixty Minutes Module is entitled "House of Cards" ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=3756665n&tag=contentMain;contentBody
This segment can be understood without much preparation except that it would
help for viewers to first read about Mervene and how the mortgage lenders
brokering the mortgages got their commissions for poisoned mortgages passed
along to the government (Freddie Mack and Fannie Mae) and Wall Street banks. On
some occasions the lenders like Washington Mutual also naively kept some of the
poison planted by some of their own greedy brokers.
The cause of this fraud was separating the compensation for brokering mortgages
from the responsibility for collecting the payments until the final payoff
dates.
First Read About Mervene ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze
Then Watch Video 1 at
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=3756665n&tag=contentMain;contentBody
Videos 2 and 3
Inside the Wall Street Collapse (Parts 1 and 2) first shown on March 14,
2010
Video 2 (Greatest Swindle in the History of the World) ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6298154n&tag=contentMain;contentAux
Video 3 (Swindler's Compensation Scandals) ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6298084n&tag=contentMain;contentAux
My wife and I watched Videos 2 and 3 on March 14. Both videos feature one of
my favorite authors of all time, Michael Lewis, who hhs been writing (humorously
with tongue in cheek) about Wall Street scandals since he was a bond salesman on
Wall Street in the 1980s. The other person featured on in these videos is a
one-eyed physician with Asperger Syndrome who made hundreds of millions of
dollars anticipating the collapse of the CDO markets while the shareholders of
companies like Merrill Lynch, AIG, Lehman Bros., and Bear Stearns got left
holding the empty bags.
The major lessons of videos 2 and 3 went over the head of my wife. I think
that viewers need to do a bit of homework in order to fully appreciate those
videos. Here's what I recommend before viewing Videos 2 and 3 if you've not been
following details of the 2008 Wall Street collapse closely:
This is not necessary to Videos 2
and 3, but to really appreciate what suckered the Wall Street Banks into
spreading the poison, you should read about how they all used the same risk
diversification mathematical function --- David Li's Gaussian Copula Function:
Can the
2008 investment banking failure
be traced to a math error?
Recipe for Disaster: The
Formula That Killed Wall Street ---
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all
Link forwarded by Jim Mahar ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/recipe-for-disaster-formula-that-killed.html
Some highlights:
"For five years, Li's
formula, known as a
Gaussian copula function, looked like an
unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that
allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever
before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it
possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding
financial markets to unimaginable levels.
His method was adopted
by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and
regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much
money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.
Then the model fell apart." The
article goes on to show that correlations are at the heart of the problem.
"The reason that
ratings agencies and investors felt so safe with the triple-A tranches was that
they believed there was no way hundreds of homeowners would all default on their
loans at the same time. One person might lose his job, another might fall ill.
But those are individual calamities that don't affect the mortgage pool much as
a whole: Everybody else is still making their payments on time.
But not all calamities
are individual, and tranching still hadn't solved all the problems of
mortgage-pool risk. Some things, like falling house prices, affect a large
number of people at once. If home values in your neighborhood decline and you
lose some of your equity, there's a good chance your neighbors will lose theirs
as well. If, as a result, you default on your mortgage, there's a higher
probability they will default, too. That's called correlation—the degree to
which one variable moves in line with another—and measuring it is an important
part of determining how risky mortgage bonds are."
I would highly recommend reading the
entire thing that gets much more involved with the
actual formula etc.
The “math error” might truly be have
been an error or it might have simply been a gamble with what was perceived as
miniscule odds of total market failure. Something similar happened in the case
of the trillion-dollar disastrous 1993 collapse of Long Term Capital Management
formed by Nobel Prize winning economists and their doctoral students who took
similar gambles that ignored the “miniscule odds” of world market collapse -- -
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#LTCM
The rhetorical question is whether the failure is
ignorance in model building or risk taking using the model?
It probably comes as no surprise that I'm not a big fan
of Bill Moyers' anti-capitalism. But this 28-minute PBS video tells it like it
is in terms of robbing banks by owning them ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz1b__MdtHY
Question
Why did the accounting checks and balances fail?
Answer
The checkers and balancers reported to the CEO, including the external auditors
who knew they were certifying fiction.
Jensen Comment
The majority of derivatives were not fraudulent. But the ones that were
fraudulent were really, really fraudulent! Also many of the "liar's loans" were
instigated by Congressional pressure (read that Barney Frank) on Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mack to buy up those "liar's loans." The CDO scandals would never have
taken place if the banks that loaned the money had to bear the loan default
losses. But the bankers and the government conspired to make the lenders not
responsible for the loan losses. Wall Street merely compounded the fraud by
repackaging the poison by in fraudulent "AAA" CDO bonds that were really junk.
CPA audit firms certified the fiction called bank financial statements.
Bob Jensen’s threads on the CDO and CDS scandals ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze
"The Costs of Cheating," Inside Higher Ed, March 19, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/19/qt#222885
Physics students who copy their classmates’ work
learn less than students who don’t plagiarize, researchers at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a
study released yesterday. The researchers created
algorithms to determine when answers submitted by MIT physics students
through a popular
online homework and e-tutoring program had been
copied, then tracked how the serial plagiarists did on their final exams.
Students who copied answers on problems that required the use of algebra
scored two letter grades worse than non-copiers on such problems in the
final, while students who copied more concept-based homework problems did
not fare any worse than their more honest peers. Those who copied 30 percent
of homework problems were three times more likely than the others to fail.
The study recommends several measures that can reduce academically dishonest
behavior, including getting away from lecture-based courses and toward more
interactive teaching methods.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
As quoted from The Wall Street
Journal, March 20, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704094104575143892679740872.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t
From Joseph Epstein's "Snobbery: The American Version" (2002):
I can recall meeting parents of roughly my own age
who, when the time came to discuss children, would ask if my (then)
nineteen- or twenty-year-old son was in college. When I replied yes, at
Stanford, I felt I was holding a strong card. (I always wanted to say, "Yes,
we have a son at Tufts and a daughter at Taffeta," but somehow restrained
myself.) During such discussions, I felt I was in a card game,
college-snobbery bridge, in which not suits but schools were bid: Brown,
Duke, Princeton, Yale, Balliol College, the Sorbonne, Ecole Normale
Superieure. Clearly, one didn't want to get into this game with a kid at
Alabama A&M ("Our daughter is interested in performance studies, and it
turns out they've got a really strong department there"), let alone at a
junior or community college. To have to make such a confession—concession is
more like it—is to cause one's table mates to wonder where you went wrong in
raising this once precious but now hopeless child, and, by extension, what,
exactly, is wrong with you.
"Supplication
Process: A tale of five high-school students and their high-anxiety routes
to college,"
by Gabriella Stern, The Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2010
---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703625304575116073253702954.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t
We can wring our hands about the arduous
college-application ritual that ambitious young people endure during their
high-school years. Or we can salute the intense competition because it means
we live in a country with lots of stellar schools and countless highly
qualified students scrambling to attend them. Karen Stabiner's novel
"Getting In" falls into the pity-the-kids camp, which makes it a lively and
entertaining if fundamentally predictable tale.
As she tells the intertwined stories of five
high-school students in Southern California—three at an expensive private
school, two at a local public school—Ms. Stabiner takes the not inaccurate
position that the college-admissions process can be both arbitrary and
vulnerable to crass manipulation. It is unwise, then, to view admission
decisions as a reflection of a student's self-worth and identity. But try
telling that to some of her characters.
In Ms. Stabiner's fictional world, a good kid
(Lauren) can get wait-listed by the school of her dreams despite being the
type of open-hearted, inquisitive person that an excellent school would fall
over itself to admit—if its admissions office bothered to read her
application with care. Meanwhile, a grade-grubbing, self-centered rat of a
teenager (Katie) can win early admission to an elite liberal-arts college
thanks to a by-the-numbers application and spend her senior year of high
school lording it over her peers—while obsessively cutting herself in
private. Falling somewhere in between, there is also the laid-back,
mischievous Chloe, the daughter of divorced parents, who cynically pretends
to be of Native American descent to win admission to a slew of decent
colleges, none of which she plans to attend.
And then there is Brad, a member of a wealthy,
four-generation Harvard family whose male offspring are meant to practice
law. Brad dearly wants to go to some other school and study architecture.
But his domineering father—in cahoots with an Ivy League-obsessed
high-school college counselor—succeeds in getting his way, even if it's not
what's best for his son.
The reluctant, trapped Brad emerges as the most
poignant of the novel's student-portraits, which otherwise tend to be thinly
drawn stereotypes. Thinnest of all is the depiction of Liz Chang, the
daughter of Korean immigrants who aims to reward her parents' sacrifices by
achieving perfect grades and test scores and getting into Harvard—only to
land (gasp!) at Yale instead.
The parents of these children are also a
hodgepodge of caricatures, some more memorable than others. Liz's father,
Steve, worked as an engineer in his native Korea and now channels his
intellect and energy into memorizing the Los Angeles street map in order to
be the best-possible taxi driver. The awful Katie is the daughter of a
remote, Botox-dispensing dermatologist mother and a social-climbing lawyer
father. Her parents insist on eating together as a family three times a week
because they have read articles linking family meals to higher SAT scores.
Why three times a week and not every night? Because her parents have also
read articles by "critics who with equal fervor debunked the claims, and
they had decided to split the difference, just in case."
As one might expect, the estimable Lauren's
parents are good eggs—baker Nora and journalist Joel—who do all the right
things in supporting their daughter through an agonizing senior year. By
contrast, Chloe's hapless, feuding parents, Deena and Dave, terrified that
she will actually want to attend one of the pricey private colleges that
have accepted her, eagerly reward her with a Toyota Prius when she decides
instead to go to the inexpensive state school that she had wanted to attend
all along.
As Ms. Stabiner tidies up plot threads amid
high-school prom plans and graduation ceremonies, the satire wanes and the
parental whining grates. Even when things work out fine for the wait-listed
Lauren, her mother laments that it was "wrong to care so much." And: "Now
that we have exactly what we want, my question is, does anybody actually
enjoy this by the time they get to the end of it all? Because I'm feeling
less than elated about her dream come true."
Yes, Lauren ends up in the university of her
choice— "Getting In" wants to be biting, but ultimately it offers a
happily-ever-after ending for almost everyone involved. Which, of course,
makes the novel likely to gain early acceptance from parents who have kids
in high school—and who will ransack it for information that might give them
a leg up on the competition.
Ms. Stern is Dow Jones Newswires' senior editor for global news
coverage. She is based in New York.
Jensen Comment
The big change in getting into a prestigious university is that the huge half
million dollar investment has less payoff at the end. Wall Street opportunities
are gone with the wind. Corporations are laying off rather than hiring college
graduates. It's easier to get into medical school, but medical graduates are now
government workers in terms of income regulation. Lawyers are a dime a dozen
with overstuffed law schools. MBA graduates are living with their parents and
flipping patties at Burger King.
This begs the question as to whether "getting in" was all
that worth it. The myth is that the prestigious schools have the best teachers,
but teaching is not the highest priority in prestigious schools
Where the Highest Ranked Colleges Don't Excel ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DoNotExcel
The best opportunities are now government jobs, but the
opportunities are often highest for minorities due to government affirmative
action programs. White Harvard Graduates may be at a disadvantage when competing
with Florida A&M graduates.
"The Government Pay Boom America's most privileged class are public union
workers," The Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575003101210295246.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t
It turns out there really is growing inequality in America. It's the 45%
premium in pay and benefits that government workers receive over the poor
saps who create wealth in the private economy.
And the gap is growing. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS),
from 1998 to 2008 public employee compensation grew by 28.6%, compared with
19.3% for private workers. In the recession year of 2009, with almost no
inflation and record budget deficits, more than half the states awarded pay
raises to their employees. Even as deficits in state capitals widen and are
forcing cuts in ...
Let's walk through the math.
In 2008 almost half of all state and local government expenditures, or an
estimated $1.1 trillion, went toward the pay and benefits of public workers.
According to the BLS, in 2009 the average state or local public employee
received $39.66 in total compensation per hour versus $27.42 for private
workers. This means that for every $1 in pay and benefits a private employee
earned, a state or local government worker received $1.45.
The BLS study breaks down
where that 45% premium comes from. It turns out that public employees earn
salaries that are about one-third higher on average than what is provided to
private workers per hour worked. But the real windfall for government
workers is in benefits. Those are 70% higher than what standard private
employers offer, as shown in the nearby table. Government health benefits
are twice as generous as what workers employed by private employees earn. By
the way, nearly this entire benefits gap is accounted for by unionized
public employees. Nonunion public employees are paid roughly what private
workers receive.
What if government workers
earned the average of what private workers earn? States and localities would
save $339 billion a year from their more than $2.1 trillion budgets. These
savings are larger than the combined estimated deficits for 2010 and 2011 of
every state in America.
In a separate survey, the
federal Bureau of Economic Analysis compares the compensation of public
versus private workers in each of the 50 states. Perhaps not coincidentally,
the pay gap is widest in states that have the biggest budget deficits, such
as New Jersey, Nevada and Hawaii. Of the 40 states that have a budget
deficit so far this year, 28 would have a balanced budget were it not for
the windfall to government workers.
But these current fiscal
problems are a picnic compared to the long-term benefit commitments that
state and local politicians have made to public retirees. A 2009 study by
economists Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh, published in the Journal of
Economic Perspectives, estimated that these government pensions are
underfunded by $3.2 trillion, or $27,000 for every American household.
The Orange County Register
reports that California has 3,000 retired teachers and school
administrators, who stopped working as early as age 55, collecting at least
$100,000 a year in pensions for the rest of their lives.
Illinois's pension
obligations are so costly the state had to issue $3.5 billion of bonds
merely to meet its mandatory contribution to the worker retirement program,
which faces $85 billion, or three years of state tax revenues, in unfunded
liabilities. Near-bankrupt New Jersey would have to pay $7 billion a year if
it properly accounted for its pension and health benefits.
California, Nevada New
Jersey and Ohio all allow double dipping, which lets government workers
retire in their 50s and then work another full-time job while collecting
retirement checks. In Ohio, police, firefighters and teachers can retire
after 30 years on the job, collect a full benefit each year and go back to
work full-time doing the same job. This is called retire and rehire.
As the Columbus Dispatch
reported last year: "Across the state, Ohio's State Teachers Retirement
System paid out more than $741 million in pension benefits last school year
to 15,857 faculty and staff members who were still working for school
systems and building up a second retirement plan." Some teachers can earn
nearly $200,000 a year in pensions and salaries.
The union response is that
government workers deserve all this because they are more educated and
highly skilled. That may account for some of the pay differential but not
the blowout benefits. The unions also neglect one of the greatest perks of
government employment: job security. Short of shooting up a Post Office,
government workers rarely get fired or laid off.
If government workers were
underpaid, we'd expect high attrition rates, as they pursued better private
opportunities. The reality is the opposite. Cato Institute economist Chris
Edwards has analyzed Department of Labor statistics and found that private
workers are three times more likely to quit their jobs than are government
workers.
So if your state is broke,
this is a major reason. Eventually, governors, state legislators and city
council members are going to have to decide whether protecting America's
privileged class of government workers is a higher priority than funding
such core functions of government as public safety. Something has to give.
It's time to close the biggest pay gap in America.
What is the world is going to happen to private sector versus
public sector auditing?
The big difference between private sector auditors versus
government auditors is that we can sue the private sector auditors over and over
and over until they make serious efforts to get it right. Virtually nothing is
being done to make the government’s auditors get it right.
What my
inside contacts in the large firms are telling me is that more than ever efforts
are now being made to make their auditors independent to a point where they will
stand up to their largest and most lucrative clients and demand that there be
better GAAP and GAAS conformance ---
Advancing Quality through
Transparency Deloitte LLP Inaugural Report ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeloitteTransparency Report.pdf
I think the PCAOB audit reviews have contributed in a small but
marked way to improve audits. But there’s a long way, miles and miles, to go
before we sleep ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm
It’s
Market Versus the Government!
The question is what’s the alternative? Those that want a
Government’s Central Planning Board to allocate resources in the economy (in
place of markets) are aiming the world economy for disaster, confusion, and
disruption. And who keeps the government honest? At the moment the GAO declares
that it’s impossible to audit our largest government agencies like the Pentagon,
the IRS, etc. Government accountability, accounting, and auditing are in much
worse shape than our far less-than-perfect private sector accountability,
accounting, and auditing.
The Sad State of Government Accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
The Sad State of Private Sector Accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm
No Resource Allocation System Can Exist Without Accountability,
Accounting, and Auditing
Accountability, accounting, and auditing are necessary under any type of
resource stewardship and resource allocation system. At one extreme we have
markets, investors, and creditors who rely upon audits and stewardship
accounting of the private sector market participants. The FASB and the IASB do
indeed, in my viewpoint, focus on the information needs of those investors and
creditors. The auditing firms, however, are faced with what Tom Selling calls a
“broken model” where those being audited choose their auditors and negotiate the
audit fees. This is certainly problematic if not completely broken.
The Government’s resource allocation system brought us the Jack
Murtha Airport with its full security system, air controller system, six flights
a day to only one destination, and less than 50 passengers a day. It’s a cash
flow black hole.
At the other extreme we have the government auditors who cannot
get any type of handle on how to audit the enormous agencies to a point with
the auditors have just given up on total system audits. Nobody audits the
Pentagon after the GAO declared it “unauditable.”
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
The world is not perfect, and certainly financial and commodities
markets were manipulated by Enron, Lehman, Merrill, etc. Andersen’s audits were
among the worst in the history of the world, and Andersen got its just dessert
for not enforcing quality control of its audits. Government is the land of
corrupt resource allocation that usually leads to even less efficient resource
allocations than the market-based resource allocations.
I think auditing of banks has been a sham by virtually all the
auditing firms, and these firms will soon pay a heavy price in court for
certifying fiction of bank accounting for the thousands of banks that recently
went “bank”rupt. Unless the large auditing firms overcome their sham audits of
banks, they too will bite the dust.
The
question is whether the professionalism/independence recovery efforts of all the
large auditing firms can save them is still open to question. After all these
years since Andersen imploded, I think the Wall Street bank audits indicate that
the big auditing firms, in Art Wyatt’s wording, “still didn’t get it.” Art Wyatt
was the lead executive research partner for Andersen. After Andersen imploded,
Art observed the lack of professionalism in the surviving auditing firms and
concluded that “They Still Don’t Get It” ---
http://aaahq.org/AM2003/WyattSpeech.pdf
But the
real problem in my viewpoint is not the mixing of consulting and auditing nearly
as much as it is the "too big to lose" clients (read that as auditing firms
being unwilling to quit the audit after spending so much time and money gearing
up for the big-client audit).
Can you hear us now?
The question is whether the auditing firms are in the wake of the banking
collapse and bailout are more seriously listening and, more importantly, finally
doing the right thing. Investors are amazingly tolerant of the cycles of scandal
and promised reforms in the capital markets. The Dow remained amazingly
high during all the recent Wall Street scandals and bailouts. And investors and
creditors will have their day in court when they bring the bankers and their
auditors to the dock ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#AuditFirms
But nobody is bringing the broken government accounting and
auditing system to the dock. You can’t usually sue the government. Many of the
recent frauds could’ve been prevented or mitigated by the SEC, but the SEC is
not being held accountable for its huge failures, especially under an
incompetent political hack named Chris Cox.
Question
What’s the big difference between Soviet Union Accounting in 1960
and accounting in the U.K. and the U.S. in 2010?
Answer
In the Soviet Union the public could not haul the sham auditors into court.
Accounting in the Soviet Union really was fiction writing at all levels of
enterprise. In the Soviet Union there could never be a Prem Sikka, an Abe
Brilloff, a Frank Partnoy, a Mark Lewis, a Lynn Turner, or a CBS Sixty
Minutes. Why does Prem Sikka now want to destroy our market system and model
us after the Soviet Union? Perhaps I’m being unfair to Prem. He tears at the
foundations of markets without ever suggesting what he thinks should take their
place for an economy’s resource allocation system. Others like Brilloff, Partnoy,
Lewis, and Turner want to “make markets be markets” with better accountability
and auditing”
"Make Markets Be Markets"
"Bring Transparency to Off-Balance Sheet Accounting," by Frank Partnoy,
Roosevelt Institute, March 2010 ---
http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/policy-and-ideas/ideas-database/bring-transparency-balance-sheet-accounting
Watch the video!
Why aren’t we hauling the GAO and the SEC and government
watchdogs in general into court and demanding that they make at least as much
effort at reform as the private sector accountants and auditors?
The big difference between private sector auditors versus
government auditors is that we can sue the private sector auditors over and over
and over until they make serious efforts to get it right. Virtually nothing is
being done to make the government’s auditors get it right.
"In Court, a University and Publishers Spar Over 'Fair Use' of Course
Materials," by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, March
14, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/In-Court-a-University-and/64616/
Maybe you're a professor who wants to use a chunk
of copyrighted material in your course this spring. Or perhaps you're a
librarian or an academic publisher. If so, the much-followed Google Book
Search settlement is not the only legal case you need to be watching. A
federal case involving publishers and a state-university system, Cambridge
University Press et al. v. Patton et al., should produce a ruling soon, and
its stakes are high.
First, a little history. In the spring of 2008,
three academic publishers, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University
Press, and SAGE Publications, brought a lawsuit against several top
administrators at Georgia State University. The plaintiffs claimed that the
university was encouraging the unauthorized digital copying and distribution
of too much copyrighted material, particularly through its ERes and uLearn
systems. ERes allows students to access digital copies of course material
via a password-protected Web page; uLearn is a program professors can use to
distribute syllabi and reading material.
The three publishers alleged that the unauthorized
copying was "pervasive, flagrant, and ongoing." In February 2009, Georgia
State put in place a revised copyright policy, including a checklist for
faculty members to help them decide whether the amount of material they
wanted to copy exceeded fair use.
Almost two years and many depositions later, both
sides have filed briefs asking for a summary judgment in the case.
Legal briefs are a dry genre, but these tussle over
some of the central questions of fair use in an academic context: How much
is too much when it comes to copying rights-protected content without
permission? To what extent is it the institution's job to shepherd its
professors and students through the thorny complexities of copyright?
Unfair Use The publishers' filing attacks what it
calls the university's "blanket presumption of 'fair use'" in a
higher-education context. The filing goes after the university's new
fair-use checklist and copyright policy, saying that it "delegates the
responsibility for ensuring copyright compliance entirely to faculty
unschooled in copyright law."
The plaintiffs quote from the depositions of
several Georgia State professors who acknowledge that they are not always
clear on the copyright issues at stake. ("This is outside of my area of
expertise," one is quoted as saying.) The publishers want the university to
use the Copyright Clearance Center's licensing system or something like it
for course materials.
The defendants take a strict we-didn't-do-it view.
Their brief argues that "any alleged unlawful reproduction, distribution, or
improper use was actually done by instructors, professors, students, or
library employees."
Georgia State's filing also argues that the new
copyright policy has drastically reduced the use of the plaintiffs'
copyrighted material. It agrees with the plaintiffs that the defendants have
no budget for permissions fees and that "faculty members would decline to
use works like those at issue if there was an obligation to pay permissions
fees."
So on one side you have a set of major academic
publishers understandably eager to protect revenue, and on the other side
you have a university that says it doesn't promote copyright infringement
and doesn't have the money to pay a lot of permissions fees. One implication
(threat?) one could draw is that if professors can't use what they need at
no charge, they will probably use something else.
Complexities of Copyrights I asked Kevin L. Smith,
the scholarly-communications officer at Duke University, for his reaction.
Mr. Smith helps scholars sort out copyright complexities—a function that is
becoming ever more essential in university life, as this case makes very
clear—and he has written about the GSU case on his blog, Scholarly
Communications
For the moment, publishers appear unwilling to go
after individual professors. "These faculty members are the same people who
provide the content that university presses publish, so it would be really
self-defeating," Duke's copyright maven, Mr. Smith, explained. "It would
also be an endless game of 'whack-a-mole.' They would prefer a broad
judgment against a university."
In any case, the Duke expert said, a fair-use case
like this deserves more than a summary judgment. This case cuts to the heart
of how many professors choose course material now and how students use it.
Summary judgment or not, Duke's Mr. Smith said, "I think faculty and
administrators should be very concerned."
Bob Jensen's threads on the dreaded DMCA are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright
From the Scout Report on March 19, 2010
Sharp World Clock 4.55 ---
http://www.programming.de/
What time is it in Nairobi? Or Iowa City? And who
can forget St. Petersburg? All of these pesky timekeeping problems become a
thing of the past with the help of the Sharp World Clock application. The
program allows users to set up any number of digital or analog clocks in a
row or grid, and visitors can also customize the clocks to show different
national flags and backgrounds. The program also gives users the ability to
show sunrise and sunset times, lunar phases, and day or night indicators.
This version is compatible with computers running Windows 98 and newer. The
program offers a free 15-day trial version, and then visitors can elect to
purchase the program.
Opera 10.50 ---
http://www.opera.com/
Opera has been around for a few years, but this
latest iteration offers a few helpful additions. Perhaps the most compelling
feature in this addition is its new JavaScript engine, which makes loading
times quicker and more efficient. The browser is also completely compatible
with Windows 7 and the newly redesigned browser contains translucent window
frames.
Japan's whaling policy and practices receive close scrutiny Not whaling
but drowning
http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15663372
The fight over whaling
http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2010/03/whales_their_intelligence_and_japans_treatment_them
Japanese media express frustration at NZ activist
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10632168
Abduction of Aboriginal Whaling Rights
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8545073.stm
International Whaling Commission [pdf]
http://www.iwcoffice.org/
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
MilkyWay@home (Axtronomy, 3-D) ---
http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway /
Astronomy Media Player [iTunes] ---
http://www.jodcast.net/amp/
Teach. Genetics: Epigenetics [RealPlayer] ---
http://teach.genetics.utah.edu/content/epigenetics/
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
Center for International Security and Cooperation ---
http://cisac.stanford.edu/
Connecting the Dots (on international crime and terror) ---
http://www.demos.co.uk/files/Connecting_the_dots_-_web-2.pdf?1259947418
Strategic Studies Institute: United States Army War College ---
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/
Power, Voice and Rights: A Turning Point for Gender Equality in Asia and the
Pacific ---
http://www2.undprcc.lk/ext/pvr/
Center for Gender and Refugee Studies ---
http://cgrs.uchastings.edu/
StoryCorps: Recording The Lives of Everyday Americans ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4516989
Bible Geocoding ---
http://www.openbible.info/geo/
In an unusually candid rant, MSNBC libtalker Ed Schultz tells radio listeners
he believes the next "socialist" takeover by the government should be on all the
radio airwaves (Watch the Video) ---
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/03/25/msnbc_host_time_for_socialism_in_talk_radio.html
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Law and Legal Studies
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials ---
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews/
Heritage Preservation ---
http://www.heritagepreservation.org/
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Propaganda ---
http://www.ushmm.org/propaganda/
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Auschwitz Through the Lens of
the SS ---
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/ssalbum/
A Roma Journey ---
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/exhibition/roma_journey/eng/
Roma Slide Show ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Rome.pp
Hawaii War Records Depository Photos ---
http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/hwrd/
Evanion Collection of Ephemera (including catalogs, menus, etc.) ---
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/evancoll/
Pamphlet and Textual Ephemera Collection ---
http://content.lib.washington.edu/ptecweb/index.html
Florida broadsides and other ephemera,
1800-2000 ---
http://www.floridamemory.com/collections/broadsides/
The Civil War in America from The Illustrated
London News
http://beck.library.emory.edu/iln/index.html
The Portent: John Brown's Raid in American History (Civil War) ---
http://www.vahistorical.org/johnbrown/introduction.htm
The Becker College: Drawings of the American
Civil War Era
http://idesweb.bc.edu/becker/
Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in
Photographs ---
http://www.bl.uk/pointsofview/
StoryCorps: Recording The Lives of Everyday Americans ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4516989
Bible Geocoding ---
http://www.openbible.info/geo/
America's Great Wilderness Spots
The U.S. has millions of acres of protected public lands. These are among the
most beautiful — and isolated.
http://travel.yahoo.com/p-interests-33121820
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
Wilbur "Buck" Clayton Collection (trumpet) ---
http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/cgi/i/image/image-idx?c=claytonic
Leading Female Musicians from Around the World
FEMLINK: The International Video Collage
http://www.femlink.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Music
Writing Tutorials
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
March 18, 2010
March 19, 2010
March 20, 2010
March 22, 2010
March 23, 2010
March 24, 2010
March 25, 2010
March 26, 2010
March 27, 2010
March 29, 2010
Drug and Product Watch
"Diabetes raises risk of death in cancer surgery patients," PhysOrg,
March 29, 2010 ---
http://www.physorg.com/news189059597.html
Forwarded by David
How is marriage like getting a PhD?
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1296
Forwarded by Auntie Bev
OLD PEOPLE'S MEMORY TEST
This is not a pushover
test. There are 20 questions. Average score is 12. This one will be very
difficult for the younger set. Have fun, but no peeking! When you
forward this to your friends/family,
put your score in the
subject line and
let them know your score. Don't forget to forward it to me, as well.
Good luck youngsters!!
1.
What builds strong bodies 12 ways?
A. Flintstones vitamins
B. The Buttmaster
C. Spaghetti
D. Wonder Bread
E. Orange Juice
F. Milk
G. Cod Liver Oil
2.
Before he was Muhammed Ali, he was....
A. Sugar Ray Robinson
B. Roy Orbison
C. Gene Autry
D. Rudolph Valentino
E. Fabian
F. Mickey Mantle
G. Cassius Clay
3.
Pogo, the comic strip character said, 'We have met the
enemy and...
A. It's you
B. He is us
C. It's the Grinch
D. He wasn't home
E. He's really me an
F. We quit
G. He surrendered
4.
Good night David.
A. Good night Chet
B. Sleep well
C. Good night Irene
D. Good night Gracie
E. See you later alligator
F. Until tomorrow
G. Good night Steve
5.
You'll wonder where the yellow went....
A. When you use Tide
B. When you lose your crayons
C. When you clean your tub
D. If you paint the room blue
E. If you buy a soft water tank
F. When you use Lady Clairol
G. When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent
6.
Before he was the Skipper's Little Buddy, Bob Denver was
Dobie's friend...
A. Stuart Whitman
B. Randolph Scott
C. Steve Reeves
D. Maynard G Krebbs
E. Corky B. Dork
F. Dave the Whale
G. Zippy Zoo
7.
Liar, liar..
A. You're a liar
B. Your nose is growing
C. Pants on fire
D. Join the choir
E. Jump up higher
F. On the wire
G. I'm telling Mom
8.
Meanwhile, back in Metropolis, Superman fights a never
ending battle for truth, justice and...
A. Wheaties
B. Lois Lane
C. TV ratings
D. World peace
E. Red tights
F. The American way
G. News headlines
9.
Hey kids! What time is it?
A. It's time for Yogi
Bear
B. It's time to do your homework
C. It's Howdy Doody Time
D. It's Time for Romper Room
E. It's bedtime
F. The Mighty Mouse Hour
G. Scoopy Doo Time
10. Lions and tigers and
bears...
A. Yikes
B. Oh no
C. Gee whiz
D. I'm scared
E. Oh my
F. Help! Help!
G. Let's run
11.
Bob Dylan advised us never to trust anyone...
A. Over 40
B. Wearing a uniform
C. Carrying a briefcase
D. Over 30
E. You don't know
F. Who says, 'Trust me'
G. Who eats tofu
12.
NFL quarterback who appeared in a television commercial
wearing women's stockings...
A. Troy Aikman
B. Kenny Stabler
C. Joe Namath
D. Roger Stauback
E. Joe Montana
F. Steve Young
G. John Elway
13.
Brylcream.
A. Smear it on
B. You'll smell great
C. Tame that cowlick
D. Grease ball heaven
E. It's a dream
F. We're your team
G. A little dab'll do ya
14.
I found my thrill...
A. In Blueberry muffins
B. With my man, Bill
C. Down at the mill
D. Over the windowsill
E. With thyme and dill
F. Too late to enjoy
G. On Blueberry Hill
15.
Before Robin Williams, Peter Pan was played by...
A. Clark Gable
B. Mary Martin
C. Doris Day
D. Errol Flynn
E. Sally Fields
F. Jim Carey
G. Jay Leno
16.
Name the Beatles....
A. John, Steve, George,
Ringo
B. John, Paul, George, Roscoe
C. John, Paul, Stacey, Ringo
D. Jay, Paul, George, Ringo
E. Lewis, Peter, George, Ringo
F. Jason, Betty, Skipper, Hazel
G. John, Paul, George, Ringo
17.
I wonder, wonder, who..
A. Who ate the
leftovers?
B. Who did the laundry?
C. Was it you?
D. Who wrote the book of love?
E. Who I am?
F. Passed the test?
G. Knocked on the door?
18.
I'm strong to the finish....
A. Cause I eats my
broccoli
B. Cause I eats me spinach
C. Cause I lift weights
D. Cause I'm the hero
E. And don't you forget it
F. Cause Olive Oyl loves me
G. To outlast Bruto
19.
When it's least expected, you're elected, you're the star
today...
A. Smile, you're on
Candid Camera
B. Smile, you're on Star Search
C. Smile, you won the lottery
D. Smile, we're watching you
E. Smile, the world sees you
F. Smile, you're a hit
G. Smile, you're on TV
20.
What do M&M's do?
A. Make your tummy happy
B. Melt in your mouth, not in your pocket
C. Make you fat
D.. Melt your heart
E. Make you popular
F. Melt in your mouth, not in your hand
G. Come in colors
|
Below are
the right answers:
1. D -
Wonder Bread
2. G - Cassius Clay
3. B - He Is Us
4. A - Good night,
Chet
5. G - When you brush
your teeth with
Pepsodent
6. D - Maynard G.
Krebbs
7. C - Pants On Fire
8. F - The American
Way
9. C - It's Howdy Doody
Time
10. E - Oh My
11. D - Over 30
12. C - Joe Namath
13. G - A little dab'll
do ya
14. G - On Blueberry
Hill
15. B - Mary Martin
16. G - John, Paul,
George, Ringo
17. D - Who wrote the
book of Love
18. B - Cause I eats me
spinach
19. A - Smile, you're on
Candid Camera
20. F - Melt In Your
Mouth Not In Your Hand
|
|
|
|
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|
|
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/
Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and
Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
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.
Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
CPA Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
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
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
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
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
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