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

 




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]

The East
 


 

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.
 


 

The South
 


 

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.
 


 

The Midwest
 


 

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.
 


 

The West
 


 

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

 

 




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

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