ITT Tech accused of faking grades, enrollment Shareholders' lawsuit adds detail to federal and SEC investigations of private college system based in Carmel. — From The Indianapolis Star

Enrollment figures at ITT Educational Services Inc. were inflated by counting students who expressed an interest in taking classes, and students' grades and attendance were falsified or misrepresented, according to an amended shareholder lawsuit filed Thursday against the for-profit educator.

The suit also claims that staff at ITT Technical Institute campuses in California and Tennessee shredded documents or deleted files shortly before visits from government investigators…

For the full story, visit: http://www.indystar.com/articles/5/171809-6515-009.html 

From T.H.E Newsletter on September 1, 2004

More students go online for books Long lines, higher prices at traditional college textbook outlets drive trend — From The News & Observer

With the fall semester just getting started, there are likely to be long lines at Triangle university bookstores in the coming weeks.

But Brian Barr, a sophomore transfer student at UNC-Chapel Hill, has no plans to be among the masses.

The physics major did his textbook shopping online nearly a month ago. He went to half.com, an eBay company, and searched for used books in decent condition. He had them all in hand before his classes started.

"I got a $105 book for $20, and it was in good condition," Barr said… 

For the full story, visit:  http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1555844p-7744878c.html 

---

The Sibelius Educational Suite ( http://www.sibelius.com ) is further enhanced with the introduction of Compass, a unique program designed to help students learn how to compose. The program covers all of the topics associated with successful music composition including melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, texture and form. It leads students on to complete composition projects and allows them to write and play back their own pieces. Compass, which also includes extensive lessons, worksheets and 33 built-in quizzes, features a unique educational sequencer called Tracker, which boasts more than 1,200 built- in chord sequences, rhythms, scales and motifs to help students build up compositions. The Tracker also complements the Sibelius 3 music program, allowing users to transfer their compositions to Sibelius 3 to print out as music notation. The program is designed for secondary schools and universities, and fully supports QCA standards. It is suitable for all kinds of music from classical to jazz, rock and pop.

The Shining Star in the Beleaguered World of  For-Profit Educational Corporations
"Will Apollo Hold On to Medals, by Jesse Eisinger, The Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2004, Page C1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,long_and_short,00.html 
(Note that Among other schools, Apollo owns the University of Phoenix.)

Last week, Apollo Group saved the for-profit education sector. At least for the moment.

Other big companies in the group -- ITT Educational Services, Career Education and Corinthian Colleges -- have been battling lawsuits and dealing with various investigations into their recruitment and placement practices, sending their stocks plummeting. Apollo Group, which has skirted such problems thus far, has nevertheless skidded about 20% from a June high of $98.

But a week ago today, the company shined. It said online-enrollment growth for the fiscal year ending August 2005 would top 40%, relieving investors who had been worried the toll of the investigations and lawsuits were slowing growth across the sector.

The fight between the longs and the shorts in education stocks has been one of the market's fiercest, with some of the most influential and sophisticated investors taking opposing sides. Apollo hasn't been targeted by shorts as much -- until recently. Its short interest rose almost two million shares in the most recent month, but is still relatively low compared with other education stocks.

Apollo, which declined to make executives available to comment, has been a stunning success story. The stock is up 9,800% since December 1994 and now has just under a $14 billion market capitalization. It trades at a nosebleed 32.5 times next year's earnings estimate of $2.40 a share.

Apollo sells education at bricks-and-mortar campuses and online. To date, the company has mainly focused on thirty-somethings, most of whom already are earning salaries of around $55,000 to $60,000 a year. The compelling growth story is online, so enrollment figures are watched closely.

In giving its upbeat outlook last week, Apollo also completed the conversion of its online-division tracking stock, University of Phoenix Online, into parent company shares. The move, while welcome by good-governance types, could also obscure what the true growth rate for the University of Phoenix Online will be.

Apollo will report that UOP online had 118,000 students by the end of fiscal 2004, which ended yesterday, analysts forecast. The company, which often underpromises and overdelivers, said last week it expected "online degree enrollments to grow in excess of 40%" in fiscal 2005. At a 40% growth rate, the online enrollment would be 165,000 by the end of next August. However, that figure isn't only for UOP online. The company has launched a pilot effort to go after 18- to 21-year-olds through its Western International University online unit.

WIU online growth is included in that 40% growth figure, according to Credit Suisse analyst Greg Cappelli. Apollo declined to break out its expectations for WIU online enrollment.

Continued in the article

Bob Jensen' threads on the dark side of distance education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

I attended the following CPE Workshop at the AAA Meetings in Orlando

CPE Session 3: Saturday, August 7, 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM 
Value Measurement and Reporting—Moving toward Measuring and Reporting Value Creation Activities and Opportunities

Presenters: William J. L. Swirsky, Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants  
Paul Herring, AICPA Director Business Reporting Assurance and Advisory Service 

Description/Objectives: 
Content – Presentations and dialogue about measuring the activities and opportunities that drive an entity’s value and, once measured, reporting these value creation prospects, in financial or nonfinancial terms, in addition to current financial information. The session will include information about research by the Value Measurement and Reporting Collaborative (VMRC) that will provide the foundation for the development of a framework of market-driven principles that characterize value measurement and reporting on a global basis.

Objectives – To continue the dialogue on more transparent, consistent, and reliable reporting of an entity’s value; to provide participants with information about the research being undertaken by VMRC; to talk about disclosure; and to solicit feedback from the attendees about where they see gaps in the current practices on value measurement and reporting.

Plan – To (1) provide context for value measurement and reporting; (2) describe research to date; and (3) describe reporting initiatives.

The above workshop focused mainly upon the early stages of the Value Measurement and Reporting Collaborative that evolved into the Enhanced Business Reporting (EBR) Consortium)  for providing more structure, uniformity, and measurement of non-financial information reported to managers and other stakeholders --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/cpaltr/nov2002/supps/edu1.htm 
This initiative that began in 2002 with hope that a collaboration between the AICPA, the Canadian CICA, leading consulting firms, and others could initiate a new business reporting model as follows:

The Value Measurement and Reporting Collaborative, in which the AICPA is a participant, will play a crucial role in the new business reporting model. VMRC is a global effort of the accounting profession, along with corporate directors, businesses, business associations and organizations, institutional investors, investment analysts, software companies and academics. The key purpose of the collaborative is to help boards of directors and senior management make better strategic decisions using value measurement and reporting. It is anticipated that the current financial reporting model would, over time, migrate to this new model and would be used to communicate a more complete picture to stakeholders.

Also see Grant Thornton's summary in 2004
Grant Thornton in the US has posted a new publication of Directors Monthly, which focuses on "Business Reporting: New Initiative Will Guide Voluntary Enhancements." The publication discusses how non-financial information offers a better picture of corporate financial health. 
Double Entries, September 9, 2004 --- http://accountingeducation.com/news/news5395.html 

For years researchers and businesses have been attempting to find a better way to report on business performance beyond the traditional financial reporting effort.  Bob Jensen even wrote a 1976 book called Phantasmagoric Accounting --- See Volume 14 at http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/market/studar.htm 

Studies of reporting on non-financial business performance over the past 50 years have generally been disappointing.  Numbers attached to such things as cost of pollution and value of human capital were generally derived from overly-simplified models that really did not deal with externalities, interaction effects, nonstationarity, and important missing variables.  There is an immense need, especially by managers and lawmakers, for better business reporting that will help making tradeoffs between stakeholders.  At the Orlando workshop mentioned above, we heard a great deal about the need for a new business reporting model.  But when the presenters got down to what had been accomplished to date, I felt like the presentations lacked scholarship, especially in terms of the history of research on this topic over the past 50 years.  What was presented as "new" really had been hashed over many times in the past.  I left the Enhanced Business Reporting Consortium workshop feeling that this initiative is long on hype and short on hope.

But I do not want to give the impression that the EBR initiative is not important.  Little is gained by the traditional accounting research tradition, especially in academe, of ignoring huge and seemingly intractable problems that seem to defy all known research methodologies.  High on the list of intractable problems are problems of measuring intangibles and human/environmental performance.  If nothing else, the Value Measurement and Reporting Collaborative will help to keep researchers focused on the bigger problems rather than less relevant minutiae.  At a minimum some progress may be made toward standardization of non-financial reporting.  

You can track the progress of the Enhanced Business Reporting Consortium  at http://www.ebrconsortium.org/ 

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm 

Business and Industry Sites from the Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, September 2004, Page 21 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/sep2004/news_web.htm 

Plan for Change
www.boozallen.com

CPAs, CEOs and CFOs can visit this business strategy consulting company’s Web site and download the “Ten Guiding Principles of Change Management” for strategies and tips on managing change within an organization. Users also can read free articles such as “Reducing Overhead Costs Is Still the Top Priority for Chief Financial Officers” and get a free issue with a subscription to the online version of Booz Allen’s monthly magazine, Strategy+Business.

Resources for Women
www.women-21.gov

Female professionals who visit this e-stop will find helpful links to employment tax forms and tax tips from experts at the Department of Labor and the IRS, to name a couple. The site also features business development resources on expanding and financing a business, training and counseling.

Expert Advice
www.sales-masters-world.com

CPA firm owners looking to share advice about conferencing, Internet marketing and investment and financing matters with other practitioners can register for a free membership to this e-site. All visitors can find articles such as “Sarbanes-Oxley Requirements Remain a Wild Card for Outsourcers.”

Meet Ms. Sarbox
www.sox-online.com

In addition to links to the full text of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and corporate governance e-stops, CPAs who visit this light-hearted Web site can find a compliance checklist for nonprofits and charitable foundations, read cartoons and jokes and play the Jeopardy-style Sarbanes-Oxley game with categories including new disclosure and officer certification. Users can read articles from Ms. Sarbox’s private collection on related topics including accounting, auditing and legal concerns.

Are You Ready Yet?
www.ndsweb.com/spotlights/sarbox_overview.shtml

Compliance officers visiting this site can find an overview of Sarbanes-Oxley, definitions of related terms, a series of questions to assess clients’ compliance readiness and a best practices list. There also are white papers entitled, “Focus on Critical Business Processes to Drive Rapid Application Deployment” and “Uncovering Hidden Liabilities and Predicting Revenue Drag in Mergers and Acquisitions.”

Take a Tip
www.botinternational.com/sox.htm

CPAs interested in information on streamlining office processes and meeting risk-management requirements can visit this Web site to read white papers such as “Establishing a Continuous Improvement Culture to Improve Project Results” and “The Sayings of Confucius and the Art of Project Management Processes” as well as current and archived tips of the week back to 2002.

Get on a Roll
www.nationalpayrollweek.com

This e-stop reminds U.S. wage earners that National Payroll Week begins September 6 with special sections on how to mark the occasion at your office and links to video clips and print files of media coverage. Regular site features include Managing and Maximizing Your Paycheck, with information on using direct deposit and on personal finance. Other areas offer retirement planning and savings calculators.

Smooth Office Relations
Do you work for a monster of a boss or have to share a project with a mean-spirited coworker? If so, register for free at these two Web sites and shore up interpersonal skills:

www.workworries.com

With more than 1,200 links to articles such as “Being Cool When the Boss Is Not” and “20 Ways to Deal With Difficult People,” as well as human resources survey results from the Chubb Group of Insurance Cos., this stop offers a variety of information on handling problem personalities.

www.badbossology.com

This site has entire sections devoted to “bad boss behaviors”—bullying, incompetence, harassment and discrimination, inadequate compensation, disrespect of rights and privacy invasion—and general solutions and advice for dealing with them.

 

 

Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, November 2003, Page 29 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/nov2003/news_web.htm 

Research These Resources
www.brook.edu
The Brookings Institution’s spot on the Web includes links to articles, papers and transcripts on topics of interest to CPAs including business, domestic and global economics, education and governance. Users can read the articles “What’s Ahead After the GDP’s Big Surge” and “The Budget Outlook: Analysis and Implications,” to name a few.

Bob Jensen's helpers for small businesses are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#SmallBusiness 

A new program launched by the Institute of Management Accountants invites professional academics and industry practitioners to submit proposals for accounting and managerial finance research projects --- http://www.smartpros.com/x44943.xml 

September 1, 2004 message from danirob@optusnet.com.au 

Dear Bob

I would like to submit for your consideration an English language learning web site which I believe would be of interest to users of your bookmarks web page. (Category: 'Education Resources').

The English Maze www.englishmaze.com  is a web-based learning system for individuals and schools worldwide. It combines leading language learning theories with cutting edge technology to bring users a unique approach to learning English. With the English Maze, students can improve their pronunciation, speaking, reading, listening and writing skills. The site contains hundreds of hours of material, much of which is free.

Thanks in advance for your time in considering this link. We hope you find it useful and will be able to share it with your readers.

Daniel Robinson 
English Maze www.englishmaze.com 

I added this to my threads on distance education alternatives at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

Is the Verifier Approach science or art?

When the news of Rugg's breakthrough was published last winter, everyone missed the bigger story. Rugg cracked the Voynich not because he was smarter, but because he focused on what everyone else had missed. Then again, this came naturally to Rugg: He has made a career out of studying how experts acquire knowledge yet screw up nevertheless. In 1996, he and his colleagues developed a rigorous method for peering over the shoulders of experts - doctors, software engineers, pilots, physicists - watching how they work and think, testing their logic, and uncovering ways to help them solve problems.
Joseph D'Agnese (See Below)

"Scientific Method Man," by Joseph D'Agnese, Wired Magazine, September 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/rugg.html 

Two years ago, an Englishman named Gordon Rugg slipped back in time. Night after night he spread his papers on the kitchen table once his children had gone to bed. Working on faux parchment with a steel-nibbed calligraphic pen, he scribbled a strange, unidentifiable, vaguely medieval script. Transliterated into the Roman alphabet, some of the words read: "qopchedy qokedydy qokoloky qokeedy qokedy shedy." As he wrote, he struggled to get inside the mind of the person who had first scrawled this incomprehensible text some 400 years ago.

By day, Rugg, a 48-year-old psychologist, teaches in the computer science department of Keele University, near Manchester, England. By night, as an intellectual exercise, he has been researching one of the world's great oddities: the Voynich manuscript, a hand-lettered book written in an unknown code that has frustrated cryptographers since its discovery in an Italian villa in 1912. How impregnable is the Voynich? During World War II, US Army code breakers - the guys who blew away Nazi ciphers - grappled with the manuscript in their spare time and came up empty. Since then, decoding the book's contents has become an obsession for geeks and puzzle nuts everywhere.

Then came Rugg. In three months, he cooked up the most persuasive explanation yet for the 234-page text: Sorry, folks, there is no code - it's a hoax! Lifelong Voynichologists were impressed with his reasoning and proofs, even if they were a little chagrined. "The Voynich is such a challenge," says Rugg, "such a social activity. But then along comes someone who says 'Oh, it's just a lot of meaningless gibberish.' It's as if we're all surfers, and the sea has dried up."

When the news of Rugg's breakthrough was published last winter, everyone missed the bigger story. Rugg cracked the Voynich not because he was smarter, but because he focused on what everyone else had missed. Then again, this came naturally to Rugg: He has made a career out of studying how experts acquire knowledge yet screw up nevertheless. In 1996, he and his colleagues developed a rigorous method for peering over the shoulders of experts - doctors, software engineers, pilots, physicists - watching how they work and think, testing their logic, and uncovering ways to help them solve problems.

Rugg calls it the verifier approach, and the Voynich was its first major test. If Rugg gets his way, verifiers will revolutionize the scientific method and help solve other seemingly unsolvable mysteries, such as the origins of the universe or the cause of Alzheimer's disease.

The text's author was long-dead. Rugg couldn't watch him work, but he could get inside his head by trying to replicate his pen-and-ink technique. The precision paid off. Once, when the ink blotched, Rugg swore aloud and thought about discarding the table. Then it struck him that the author must have experienced the same thing. What was the best solution? Toss it out? No. Paper was expensive. A new grid? No, too much work. Better to leave the blotch and work around it. That helped him realize that some of the cells in the original grids must have been left blank - the resulting missing syllables yielded a variety of word lengths, giving the faked language even more verisimilitude.

Rugg's prime suspect for the hoax is con artist Edward Kelley, a hanger-on in the court of Elizabeth I. Kelley insinuated himself into the household of the queen's astrologer, John Dee, and acted as a medium for angels. Modern scholars think Kelley was a fraud; apparently Dee did not, even when the angels suggested the two men swap wives. (Researchers believe they took the heavenly advice.)

Rugg published his hoax theory earlier this year in the journal Cryptologia. It was bolstered by Laura Aylward, one of his students, who used software to replicate his work. She found that the Voynich's well-known statistical anomalies - its unnatural repetition of certain words, a sudden dropoff in the use of previously common syllables - can all be accounted for if one uses structured tables and grilles. Still, many Voynich scholars remain unconvinced. "I know how they feel," Rugg says. "The rational part of me says it's a hoax; another part says, yes, but what if 10 percent of it is cipher text, a real message mixed in with all the wattle and padding? It's a lovely problem."

Continued in the article

Question
How can you turn your PC into HD TV?

Answer
"HD PC: Cheaper Than High-Def TV," Wired News, September 4, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,64850,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html 

High-definition television can show the sweat beading on an athlete's brow, but the cost of all the necessary electronic equipment can get a shopper's own pulse racing.

Instead of dropping more than $1,000 for a new TV, set-top box and antenna to bring in the signals that dramatically improve TV picture quality, look not in the living room, but in the home office. A $200 upgrade can turn a personal computer into a "starter" high-definition television.

The new product from ATI Technologies puts high-definition versions of Law and Order, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and other hit TV shows within the budgets of far more households.

Indeed, the Markham, Ontario, company bills its HDTV Wonder as "the home's first HDTV device," able not only to show HD-video, but also to record scheduled programs onto a hard drive. Still, some experts say it may be better to start saving for the real thing.

"It's a tricycle with training wheels," said Gartner media analyst Laura Behrens. With the possible exception of college students and people living in cramped apartments, few households have any interest in watching television on a computer monitor, Behrens said. Moreover, a TV system designed for high-definition broadcasts would offer superior picture quality.

The ATI system uses the home PC's computing horsepower to process over-the-air high-definition signals and the monitor's high resolution to display them in vivid color. Although other cards have been available, ATI's offering puts nearly everything one needs into a single box and at a $200 price that reviewers say sets a new low bar.

The HDTV Wonder includes a remote control designed for use on a PC and an antenna to pick up the digital signals. By contrast, the MyHD from Korea's Macro Image Technology and the WinTV-HD from Hauppauge Computer Works cost $100 more and do not come with an antenna.

ATI says there are 1,129 digital television stations -- not all of them in high-definition -- sent over the airwaves in the United States, with at least one of those signals reaching almost every household.

All of the major networks are broadcasting much of their entire prime-time schedule in high-definition, Behrens said. On CBS, for instance, viewers can watch the Republican National Convention in all of its high-definition pomp or tune into an ultra-clear performance by Paulina Rubio on the Latin Grammy Awards in high-definition, for free. Many cable and satellite TV companies also offer additional HD programming, but at a monthly fee. Aside from HDTV, the ATI card can display regular cable television and record shows on hard drives. Consumer reaction to the product has been mixed. A review in PC World magazine said the device "severely taxed" a top-of-the-line computer that was decked out with a Pentium 4 microprocessor and a gigabyte of memory.

Another reviewer, on ExtremeTech, listed a 10-point wish list for the device -- including a simpler remote control and easier-to-use software -- but said prime-time TV and sports programming was "glorious to watch."

Loyd Case, ExtremeTech's technical director, said ATI's card and others like it may best serve the technologically savvy because, but may be too challenging for the novice user. The real advantage of choosing a PC card is the ability to turn a computer into a "media hub" for the home, holding music, pictures, movies, and television broadcasts, Case said.

"I think it's always going to be more of an enthusiast type of market," he said.

Bob Jensen's threads on gadgets are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob4.htm#Technology 

August 31, 2004 message from charon.benton@gleim.com 

Dr. Gleim has just released our Elementary Financial Accounting Tutorial (E.F.A.T.), which is the latest in our series of innovative Knowledge Transfer Systems. This online tutorial is designed to help your students understand the basic bookkeeping process and double-entry system while increasing the student's level of comprehension and efficiency while studying.

E.F.A.T. consists of the following 10 lessons:

1. The Environment of Accounting 2. The Accounting Process 3. The Basic and Expanded Accounting Equations 4. Debits and Credits 5. Recording Transactions 6. Posting Journal Entries to Ledger Accounts 7. Deferrals, Accruals, and Adjusting Entries 8. Preparing Financial Statements 9. Financial Accounting Error Analysis 10. Financial Analysis

E.F.A.T. should be used by students taking introductory financial accounting courses and anyone else who does not grasp the basics of financial accounting. Gleim guarantees that users completing the course will be proficient in the double-entry system, as well as understand the financial accounting process at analysis, synthesis, and evaluation levels.

To learn more about Gleim's new Elementary Financial Accounting Tutorial, please visit

www.gleim.com/accounting/efat/online/login.php?cb083104 

Here you will be able to create an account and complete Lesson 1 at no charge. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, or if I can be of further assistance. I look forward to working with you this semester!

Thank you and enjoy your day!

Charon Croft Benton 
Professor Relations Coordinator 

Gleim Publications, Inc. (800) 874-5346, ext. 138 
charon.benton@gleim.com 

 

Safe Shopping

Safe Shopping Network ---  http://www.safeshoppingnetwork.com/

 

Yahoo Consumer Information
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Electronic_Commerce/Consumer_Information/ 

 

From the Scout Report on August 25, 2004

Nostalgia Central

http://www.nostalgiacentral.com

Started by nostalgia-hound (and Brit) David Turner in 1998, the Nostalgia Central website has attracted thousands of persons seeking to garner a bit of the past online over the past six years. The site currently receives over a million and a half visits each month, and features topical and fun material on various fads, fashions, movies, and musical movements that were representative of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Appropriately enough, visitors to the site can peruse these very topics on the site, along with a year-by-year rundown as well. The year-by-year synopses feature calendars that offer highlights of each month, including various political and cultural moments, such as the initiation of the United States' ban on trade with Cuba and the birth of future heavy-metal rocker Axl Rose. If that weren't enough, the site also includes an online forum where members can ask questions about locating various items of nostalgia, whether they be old broadcasts of Hee-Haw or those lovable Cabbage Patch dolls that swept through our lives beginning in 1983.

 

The Hans Christian Andersen Exhibit .---  http://www.library.northwestern.edu/exhibits/hca/index.html

Legends of America --- http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ 

American History
Ghost Towns
Ghostly Legends
Historic People
Legendary Route 66
Old West Legends
Outlaw Legends
Treasure Tales
Photo Galleries

Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. --- http://www.asci.org 

UCLA Digital Library Sheet Music Project --- http://digital.library.ucla.edu/apam/ 

September 2, 2004 message from Mike Gasior [mike@afs-seminars.com] 

--In 1900 world life expectancy was 30 years old. Today it is 67 years.

--In 1970, 35% of the people living in developing countries were starving. By 1996 that number had shrunk to 18% and the United Nations forecasts that the figure will fall to 12% by the year 2010.

--Also according the United Nations, we have reduced global poverty more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500 years.

--Life expectancy in the U.S. has increased significantly in all socio-economic categories, with black men making the largest gain from 60 years old in 1970 to 68.2 years old in 2000.

--Despite all the publicity about the failure of public education in the U.S., Americans have never been better educated. In 1960 only 7.7% of the population held college degrees. Today, 25% of the populations over 25 years old have earned their degree.

--Partially due to more women entering the workforce, real household incomes rose dramatically between 1980 and 2000. Median income for white families rose 19% during that period, and 39% for black families.

--Even with all the class warfare rhetoric in this years campaign, the fact is that 12.1% of American families are below the poverty line. In 1960 that number was 22.2%.

--Figures released by the FBI show the murder rate in the U.S. at 5.5 homicides per 100,000, down from a rate of 10.2 in 1980, almost a 50% decline in less than 25 years.

--Rates of teen suicide, teen pregnancy and youth violence have all shown steady decline during the past decade.

Overall, people are living longer, are safer, have more money to spend and having more fun then ever before.

So turn off the news and the politicians and go enjoy yourself. Life has never been better.

AN ECONOMIC BUMMER

On the heels of my upbeat assessment of life today, there seems there might be truth many of us already knew about the job market. That it might be more important who you know, than what you know.

My background and basis for looking at many things is economics, and I have been often dismissed when presenting positions or ideas that might suggest that markets are inefficient.

But someone much brighter than me is suggesting, that in the employment markets, efficiency may not rule the day. Former Stanford professor, and Nobel laureate, Kenneth J. Arrow is now suggesting precisely that.

If the job market were truly efficient, than workers of similar skill and experience would earn very close to the same amount. Casual observation by anyone knows that this is not the case.

Some things are obvious and measurable, such as education, age, experience and intelligence, but these things only explain about 50% of the discrepancy in paychecks claims Dr. Arrow. To explain the remaining amount, one must look at the social and professional connections of the individuals.

For example, reading a resume gives a very shallow and limited view of an applicant's abilities. However, if the applicant used to work with a current employee of ours, or knows the applicant through a social, religious or other setting, we might be better able to judge other personal traits that a resume does not convey. These personal things might be dependability, teamwork or a person's sense of humor and they may cause a company to more aggressively pursue the applicant and pay more than it might for an unknown person. So, simply stated, the more connections you have to more companies through acquaintances, the more you can theoretically expect to earn.

Dr. Arrow, along with former Stanford colleague Ron Borzekowki created a mathematical model that tries to estimate how much these company connections might mean to ones earning potential.

In their model, a person having only one corporate connection had an expected income of $19,570. A person having connections with five companies would be expected to earn $30,410.

While none of this information is probably striking you as "news", it once again demonstrates the constant attempt by economists, mathematicians and scientists to explain everyday phenomenon. What might be the important lesson of this latest research is how their findings might be able to help individuals better utilize resources when looking for a new job. And it might also help other governmental and social agencies better serve the people they seek to help.

ONE WARNING ON SOCIAL SECURITY

I've probably written too much about Social Security over the past five years, including just a few months ago, but now I find it back in the news thanks to Chairman Greenspan making comments out in Wyoming.

The fact of the matter is that neither presidential candidate, nor ANY of the people running for the House or Senate have made an earnest suggestion on how to fix the Social Security system. They are, by and large, an enormous group of cowards who are doing great harm to this important safety net by shirking responsibility they should be shouldering onto some future group of politicians who will be handed this gigantic bag of poop.

September 8, 2004 message from Don Mathis

Although the quiz is 10 years old, it is still interesting. I fall between Bill Clinton and Colin Powell. You will be surprised at your score. Perhaps our Political Science department can tell me if this has any validity. Take a few minutes – enjoy!

Click here: The Political Quiz Show

http://madrabbit.net/webrabbit/quizshow.html 

Old age and treachery beats youth and skill

Forwarded by The Happy Lady

Old Rooster

A farmer goes out one day and buys a brand new stud rooster for his chicken coop. 

The new rooster struts over to the old rooster and says, "OK old fart, time for you to retire." 

The old rooster replies, "Come on, surely you cannot handle ALL of these chickens. Look what it has done to me. Can't you just let me have the two old hens over in the corner?" 

The young rooster says, "Beat it! You are washed up and I am taking over." 

The old rooster says, "I tell you what, young stud. I will race you around the farmhouse. Whoever wins gets the exclusive domain over the entire chicken coop." 

The young rooster laughs, "You know you don't stand a chance old man, so just to be fair I will give you a head start." 

The old rooster takes off running. About 15 seconds later the young rooster takes off running after him. They round the front porch of the farmhouse and the young rooster has closed the gap. He is already about 5 inches behind the old rooster and gaining fast. 

The farmer, meanwhile, is sitting in his usual spot on the front porch when he sees the roosters running by. He grabs up his shotgun and BOOM! He blows the young rooster to bits. 

The farmer sadly shakes his head and says, "Dangit... third gay rooster I bought this month."

Old Age Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

Three old guys are out walking.

First one says, "Windy, isn't it?"

Second one says, "No, its Thursday!"

Third one says, "So am I. Lets go get a beer."

---------------------------------------------------------

A man was telling his neighbor, "I just bought a new hearing aid. It cost me four thousand dollars, but it's state of the art. It's perfect."

"Really," answered the neighbor. "What kind is it?"

"Twelve thirty."

---------------------------------------------------------

Morris, an 82 year-old man, went to the doctor to get a physical. A few days later the doctor saw Morris walking down the street with a gorgeous young lady on his arm.

A couple of days later the doctor spoke to Morris and said, "You're really doing great, aren't you?"

Morris replied, "Just doing what you said, Doc:

'Get a hot mamma and be cheerful.' "

The doctor said, "I didn't say that. I said, 'You got a heart murmur. Be careful.'"

---------------------------------------------------------

A little old man shuffled slowly into an ice cream parlor and pulled himself slowly, painfully, up onto a stool.

After catching his breath he ordered a banana split.

The waitress asked kindly, "Crushed nuts?"

No," he replied, "arthritis".

Oft Repeated  Groaners from Paula

1. Two antennas meet on a roof, fall in love and get married. The ceremony wasn't much, but the reception was excellent.

2. Two hydrogen atoms walk into a bar. One says, "I've lost my electron." The other says, "Are you sure?" The first replies, "Yes, I'm positive..."

3. A jumper cable walks into a bar. The bartender says, "I'll serve you, but don't start anything."

4. Two peanuts walk into a bar, and one was a salted.

4A. A sandwich walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Sorry we don't serve food in here."

5. A dyslexic man walks into a bra.

6. A man walks into a bar with a slab of asphalt under his arm and says: "A beer please, and one for the road."

7. Two cannibals are eating a clown. One says to the other: "Does this taste funny to you?"

8. "Doc, I can't stop singing 'The Green, Green! Grass of Home.'" "That sounds like Tom Jones Syndrome." "Is it common?" "It's Not Unusual."

9. Two cows standing next to each other in a field, Daisy says to Dolly, "I was artificially inseminated this morning." "I don't believe you," said Dolly. "It's true, no bull!" exclaimed Daisy.

10. An invisible man marries an invisible woman. The kids were nothing to look at either.

11. Deja Moo: The feeling that you've heard this bull before.

12 . I went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day but I couldn't find any.

13. I went to a seafood disco last week... and pulled a mussel.

14 . Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly; but when they lit a fire in the craft, it sank, proving that you can't have your kayak and heat it too.

15 . What do you call a fish with no eyes? A fsh.

16 . Two termites walk ! into a bar. One asks, "Is the bar tender here?"

Forwarded by Dick Haar

The blonde was attempting to clean and dust around her computer and while trying to figure out the maze of wires that were at different spots on the rear of her machine, referred constantly to the instruction book, seemingly without too much success.

Finally, in desparation, she phones the computer stores service department

Blonde:-"Hello-Service department? Can you please give me Jack's phone number? I can't find it anywhere in my manual".

Service Man: "Sorry, I don't quite understand....We have no Jack working here at this store".

Blonde: "I don't care where he is working, I just want his phone number".

Service Man: "Sorry lady, I Don't know any Jack! What are you talking about"?

Blonde: "On page 2, section 1 of the User's Guide it clearly states that I need to unplug the fax machine from the AC wall socket and telephone Jack before cleaning. Now, can you give me the phone number for Jack?'

Forwarded by Dr. B

Bubba Joe's first military assignment was to a military induction center, and, because he was a good talker, they assigned him the duty of advising new recruits about the government benefits, especially the GI insurance to which they were entitled. Before long the Captain in charge of the induction center began noticing that Bubba was getting a 99% sign up for the top GI insurance. This was odd, because it would cost these poor inductees nearly $30.00 per month more for their higher coverage than what the government was already granting.

The Captain decided that he would not ask Bubba Joe about his selling techniques but that he would sit in the back of the room and observe Bubba's sales pitch.

Bubba Joe stood up before his latest group of inductees and stated, "If you have the normal GI insurance and go to Iraq and are killed, the government pays your beneficiary $6,000."

"If you take out the supplemental GI insurance (which will cost you an additional $30.00 per month), the government pays your beneficiary $200,000."

"NOW," Bubba concluded, "which bunch do you think they're gonna send into battle first?"

Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Off, and Start All Over Again

• Brigham Young, Mormon leader, married 19 times.
• Prophet Muhammad, married 12 times, including to a nine year old.
• Joseph Smith, Mormon founder, married at least 12 times.
• Mickey Rooney, actor, married 9 times.
• Bonnie Lee Bakely, murdered wife of Robert Blake, married at least 9 times.
• Zsa Zsa Gabor, occupation uncertain, married 8 times.
• Elizabeth Taylor, actress, married 8 times.
• Larry King, talk show host, married 7 times.
• Stan Laurel, Laurel and Hardy, married 7 times.
• Lana Turner, actress, married 7 times.

Forwarded by Paula

A contestant on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" had reached the final plateau. If she answered the next question correctly, she would win $1,000,000 If she answered incorrectly, she would pocket only the $32,000 milestone money.

And as she suspected it would be, the million-dollar question was no pushover. It was, "Which of the following species of birds does not build its own nest, but instead lays its eggs in the nests of other birds?

Is it A) the condor; B) the buzzard; C) the cuckoo; or D) the vulture?"

The woman was on the spot. She did not know the answer. And she was Doubly on the spot because she had used up her 50/50 Lifeline and her Audience Poll Lifeline. All that remained was her Phone-a-Friend Lifeline, and the Woman had hoped against hope that she would not have to use it. Mainly Because the only friend that she knew would be home happened to be a blonde.

But the contestant had no alternative. She called her friend and gave Her the question and the four choices.

The blonde responded unhesitatingly: "That's easy. The answer is C: The cuckoo."

The contestant had to make a decision and make it fast. She considered employing a reverse strategy and giving Regis any answer except the One that her friend had given her. And considering that her friend was a Blonde, that would seem to be the logical thing to do.

On the other hand - the blonde had responded with such confidence, Such certitude, that the contestant could not help but be persuaded.

"I need an answer," said Regis.

Crossing her fingers, the contestant said, "C: The cuckoo."

"Is that your final answer?" asked Regis.

"Yes, that is my final answer."

Two minutes later, Regis said, "I regret to inform you that that Answer is... absolutely correct. You are now a millionaire!"

Three days later, the contestant hosted a party for her family and friends - including the blonde who had helped her win the million dollars.

"Jenny, I just do not know how to thank you," said the contestant. "Because of your knowing the answer to that final question, I am now a millionaire. And do you want to know something? It was the assuredness with which You answered the question that convinced me to go with your choice. By the way... how did you happen to know the right answer?"

"Oh, come on," said the blonde. "Everybody knows that cuckoos don't build nests. They live in clocks."

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

Here are some comments made by NBC sports commentators during the Summer Olympics that they would like to take back:

1. Weightlifting commentator: "This is Gregoriava from Bulgaria. I saw her snatch this morning during her warm up and it was amazing."

2. Dressage commentator: "This is really a lovely horse and I speak from personal experience since I once mounted her mother."

3. Paul Hamm, Gymnast: "I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father."

4. Boxing Analyst: "Sure there have been injuries, and even some deaths in boxing, but none of them really that serious."

5. Softball announcer: "If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again."

6. Basketball analyst: "He dribbles a lot and the opposition doesn't like it. In fact you can see it all over their faces."

7. At the rowing medal ceremony: "Ah, isn't that nice, the wife of the IOC president is hugging the cox of the British crew."

Forwarded by Team Carper

A highway patrolman pulled alongside a speeding car on the freeway. Glancing at the car, he was astounded to see that the blonde behind the wheel was knitting! Realizing that she was oblivious to his flashing lights and siren, the trooper cranked down his window, turned on his bullhorn and yelled, "PULL OVER!" 

"NO!" the blonde yelled back, "IT'S A SCARF!"

Forwarded by Dick Haar

A woman and her son were taking a cab in New York City. It was raining and all the hookers were standing under the awnings.

"Mom," said the little boy, "what are all those women doing?"

"They're waiting for their husbands to get off work," she replied.

The cabbie turns around and says, "Geez lady, why don't you tell him the truth? They 're hookers, boy! They have sex with men for money."

The little boy's eyes get wide and he says, "Is that true, Mom?"

His mother, still glaring hard at the cabbie, answers in the affirmative.

After a few minutes, the kid asks, "Mom, what happens to the babies those women have?"

"Most of them become cab drivers," she replied.

Forwarded by Dr. B

A man died and went to heaven.

As he stood in front of St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, he saw a huge wall of clocks behind him.

He asked, "What are all those clocks?"

St. Peter answered, "Those are Lie-Clocks. Everyone on Earth has a Lie-Clock. Every time you lie, the hands on your clock will move."

"Oh," said the man, "whose clock is that?"

"That's Mother Teresa's. The hands have never moved, indicating that she never told a lie."

"Incredible," said the man. "And whose clock is that one?"

St. Peter responded, "That's Abraham Lincoln's clock. The hands have moved twice, telling us that Abe told only two lies in his entire life."

"Where's Senator Kerry's clock?" asked the man.

"Kerry's clock is in Jesus' office. He's using it as a ceiling fan."

Forwarded by Paula

An old farmer owned a large farm with a large pond in the back. It was fixed up nicely with picnic tables, horseshoe courts, and some apple and peach trees.

One evening the old farmer decided to go down to the pond, as he hadn't been there for a while, and look it over.

He grabbed a five gallon bucket to bring back some fruit. As he neared the pond, he heard voices shouting and laughing with glee. As he came closer he saw it was a bunch of young women skinny dipping in his pond.

He made some noise so the women would be aware of his presence and they all went to the deep end of the pond.

One of the women shouted to him, "We're not coming out until you leave!"

The old man frowned, "I didn't come down here to watch you ladies swim naked or make you get out of the pond naked."

Holding the bucket up he said, "I'm here to feed the alligator."

Forwarded by Paula 

Warning: Political humor. This was sent to me by a cousin who lives in Australia!

George W.Bush is at the stadium and begins his speech to open the Olympic Games: "Ooooooo! Ooooooo! Ooooooo! Ooooooo! Ooooooo!"

An aide comes over and whispers: "Mr. President, those are the

Olympic rings, your speech is below!"

Forwarded by Paula --- http://www.suddenlysenior.com/myforgetter.html 

My forgetter's getting better,  To you that may seem funny But, to me, that is no joke

For when I'm "here" I'm wondering If I really should be "there" And, when I try to think it through, I haven't got a prayer!

Oft times I walk into a room, Say "what am I here for?" I wrack my brain, but all in vain! A zero, is my score.

At times I put something away Where it is safe, but, Gee! The person it is safest from Is, generally, me!

When shopping I may see someone, Say "Hi" and have a chat, Then, when the person walks away I ask myself, "who was that?"

Yes, my forgetter's getting better While! my rememberer is broke, And it's driving me plumb crazy And that isn't any joke.

Forwarded by Paula

Some "Senior" personal ads seen in Florida newspapers:
(Who says seniors don't have a sense of humor?)

FOXY LADY: Sexy, fashion-conscious blue-haired beauty, 80's, slim, 5'4"
(Used to be 5'6"), searching for sharp-looking, sharp-dressing companion.
Matching white shoes and belt a plus.

LONG-TERM COMMITMENT: Recent widow who has just buried fourth husband, and am looking for someone to round out a six-unit plot.  Dizziness, fainting, shortness of breath not a problem.

SERENITY NOW: I am into solitude, long walks, sunrises, the ocean, yoga and meditation.  If you are the silent type, let's get together, take our hearing aids out and enjoy quiet times.

WINNING SMILE: Active grandmother with original teeth seeking a dedicated flosser to share rare steaks, corn on the cob and caramel candy.

BEATLES OR STONES?  I still like to rock, still like to cruise in my Camaro on Saturday nights and still like to play the guitar.  If you were a groovy chick, or are now a groovy hen, let's get together and listen to my eight-track tapes.

MEMORIES: I can usually remember Monday through Thursday.  If you can remember Friday, Saturday and Sunday, let's put our two heads together.

MINT CONDITION: Male, 1932, high mileage, good condition, some hair, many new parts including hip, knee, cornea, valves.  Isn't in running condition, but walks well.

Forwarded by Team Carper

This was written by an 83-year-old...The last line says it all.

Dear Bertha,

I'm reading more and dusting less. I'm sitting in the yard and admiring the view without fussing about the weeds in the garden. I'm spending more time with my family and friends and less time working. Whenever possible, life should be a pattern of experiences to savor, not to endure. I'm trying to recognize these moments now and cherish them.

I'm not "saving" anything; we use our good china and crystal for every special event such as losing a pound, getting the sink unstopped, or the first Amaryllis blossom.

I wear my good blazer to the market. My theory is if I look prosperous, I can shell out $28.49 for one small bag of groceries..

I'm not saving my good perfume for special parties, but wearing it for clerks in the hardware store and tellers at the bank.

"Someday" and "one of these days" are losing their grip on my vocabulary; if it's worth seeing or hearing or doing, I want to see and hear and do it now

I'm not sure what others would've done had they known they wouldn't be here for the tomorrow that we all take for granted.

I think they would have called family members and a few close friends. They might have called a few former friends to apologize and mend fences for past squabbles.

I like to think they would have gone out for a Chinese dinner or for whatever their favorite food was.

I'm guessing; I'll never know.

It's those little things left undone that would make me angry if I knew my hours were limited. Angry because I hadn't written certain letters that I intended to write one of these days. Angry and sorry that I didn't tell my husband and parents often enough how much I truly love them. I'm trying very hard not to put off, hold back, or save anything that would add laughter and luster to our lives.

And every morning when I open my eyes, I tell myself that it is special. Every day, every minute, every breath truly is a gift from God.

If you received this, it is because someone cares for you.

If you're too busy to take the few minutes that it takes right now to forward this, would it be the first time you didn't do the little thing that would make a difference in your relationships? I can tell you it certainly won't be the last.

Take a few minutes to send this to a few people you care about, just to let them know that you're thinking of them.

"People say true friends must always hold hands, but true friends don't need to hold hands because they know the other hand will always be there."

I don't believe in miracles. I rely on them.

Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we are here we might as well dance. 

.And that's the way it was on September 15, 2004 with a little help from my friends.

Jesse's Wonderful Music for Romantics (You have to scroll down to the titles) --- http://www.jessiesweb.com/

I highly recommend TheFinanceProfessor (an absolutely fabulous and totally free newsletter from a very smart finance professor, Jim Mahar from St. Bonaventure University) --- www.FinanceProfessor.com 

 

Bob Jensen's bookmarks for accounting newsletters are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#News 

News Headlines for Accounting from TheCycles.com --- http://www.thecycles.com/business/accounting 
An unbelievable number of other news headlines categories in TheCycles.com are at http://www.thecycles.com/ 

 

Jack Anderson's Accounting Information Finder --- http://www.umsl.edu/~anderson/accsites.htm

 

Gerald Trite's great set of links --- http://www.zorba.ca/bookmark.htm 

 

Paul Pacter maintains the best international accounting standards and news Website at http://www.iasplus.com/

 

Walt Mossberg's many answers to questions in technology --- http://ptech.wsj.com/

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Household and Other Heloise-Style Hints --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm#Hints 

 

Bob Jensen's video helpers for MS Excel, MS Access, and other helper videos are at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/ 
Accompanying documentation can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/default1.htm and http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm 

 

Click on www.syllabus.com/radio/index.asp for a complete list of interviews with established leaders, creative thinkers and education technology experts in higher education from around the country.

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

 

September 1, 2004

Bob Jensen's New Bookmarks on September 1, 2004
Bob Jensen at Trinity University 

I am transitioning to the mountains of New Hampshire for an eight-month sabbatical leave.  Since this is a research leave, I'm not certain I will find the time to put out future editions of New Bookmarks until I return to teach at Trinity University in January 2005.

New:  Once again Trinity Receives a U.S. News Number 1 Ranking (for the 13th year in a row) http://www.trinity.edu/departments/public_relations/trinity_today/today.htm 

Year 2004 92 Spring Pictures from the White Mountains --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.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.
This search engine may get you some hits from other professors at Trinity University included with Bob Jensen's documents, but this may be to your benefit.

Quotes of the Week

By now many of you will have seen the announcement that Trinity was ranked No. 1 for the 13th Straight Year in U.S. News and World Report's "America's Best Colleges". Among other good things, this year's report singles out the Study Abroad program in "programs to look for" in the premium online edition.
Front portion of a message from  Nancy Ericksen nerickse@trinity.edu] 
The press release is at http://www.trinity.edu/departments/public_relations/trinity_today/today.htm 
The main links for the college rankings in general are at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php 

Manuel Llinas knew his career was at stake. The young scientist had just finished work on an eye-catching paper on the genome of a parasite that causes malaria. Now he and his lab director faced a critical decision: where to submit the article for publication. A prestigious journal such as Science would draw attention and help Llinas when he interviewed for faculty jobs at top research institutions. But Llinas and Joseph DeRisi, his mentor at the University of California at San Francisco, chose a once unthinkable journal. They submitted the paper to PLoS Biology, a free online journal that had yet to publish its first edition…
T.H.E Newsletter, August 25, 2004For the full story, visit: 
 http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/08/16/internet_publishing_attracting_academics/   

Opponents of class size reduction call the past as a witness. They remind us that as recently as the 1950s, thirty students in a high school class was typical and viewed as educationally practical. They assert that reductions in class size over the past forty years have not yielded proportional improvements in student performance. They also cite schools in Japan and other industrialized nations where classes are larger and test scores are higher than ours. ...
Mark Shapiro when introducing and essay on class size by Peter Berger at http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-08-24-04.htm 

It is not uncommon to meet thieves who sermonize against theft.
Miguel de Unamuno

But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.
Ronald Reagan.as quoted by Mark Shapiro --- http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-08-10-04.htm 

Crimes committed with automobiles are called accidents.
Eduardo Galeano

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a fraction of a second of reality.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

Bear downs 36 beers, passes out at campground When state Fish and Wildlife agents in found a black bear passed out on the lawn of Baker Lake Resort in Washington state, there were some clues scattered nearby - dozens of empty cans of beer. 
`http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5756809  (forwarded by Debbie)

Even the most cursory glance at the economics literature will yield a perplexing cacophony of opinions - and, more invidious, contradictory "facts." Consider one example. Proposition: Share prices are dependent over (a) a day, (b) a quarter, (c) three years, (d) an infinite span, or (e) none of the above. All these views have been presented as unassailable in countless articles reviewed by countless worthy peers, and supported by countless computer runs, probability tables, and analytical charts. Wassily Leontief, a Harvard economist and 1973 Nobel winner in economic sciences, once observed: "In no field of empirical enquiry has so massive and sophisticated a statistical machinery been used with such indifferent results."
Benoît Mandelbrot, the father of the fractal, writes an open letter to the wizards of Wall Street, Wired Magazine, August 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.08/view.html?pg=2 

Some investors and starry-eyed venture capitalists tout nanotech as the new biotech. Don't believe them. 
Michael S. Malone, "The Big Little Tease," Wired Magazine, August 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.08/start.html?pg=2 

With fewer people applying to MBA programs everywhere, students at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania knew they had to take action. Even their own class of 2006 saw a 21% dip in applications. So a few MBAs agreed to help Wharton's admissions office host several rounds of early-admissions events this summer in places like New York, London, Paris, Beijing, Shanghai, Mexico, and Moscow.
Business Week's MBA Express, August 18, 2004 --- http://snipurl.com/EarlyAdmission 

In “Truth and Transparency: The Federal Government’s Financial Condition and Fiscal Outlook” (Journal of Accountancy, Apr.04, page 26), David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, sounded an alarming wake-up call indeed. He correctly noted that not only is our federal government’s financial condition poor, but it is getting worse. Furthermore, he stated that budgetary trickery and inadequate reporting practices mask the true seriousness of the situation. Most striking was his statement of fact that the federal accumulated deficit totals more than $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.
Joseph Vap, Journal of Accountancy, August 2004, Page 11 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/aug2004/letters.htm#A 
Update from Bob Jensen:  In an August 10 plenary session at the American Accounting Association annual meetings in Orlando, David Walker claimed that on a net discounted present value basis, the amount of national debt for each U.S. man, woman, and child exceeds $330,000.  The overwhelming cause, far in excess of Social Security retirement costs, is the projected cause of Medicare and other health entitlements.  Promises (coming both major parties in the 2004 election campaigns) for increases to health care benefits are budgetary disasters.

Bankruptcy Isn't Cheap for MCI
Lawyers, advisers and accountants who worked for MCI as it went through the biggest Chapter 11 bankruptcy case in U.S. history are seeking approval to collect about $600 million in fees, according to filings with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The Ashburn, Va., telecommunications company, formerly known as WorldCom Inc., filed for bankruptcy-court protection in 2002 after an accounting fraud that ultimately totaled $11 billion. MCI emerged from Chapter 11 in April and the fees cover the entire period of the bankruptcy. Almost all the money has been paid, but the bills need final approval, according to a person familiar with the matter. MCI kept squads of lawyers from Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP and accountants from Deloitte & Touche LLP and KPMG LLP on duty as it hurried to emerge from bankruptcy protection as soon as possible. Company officials have said that they knew fees would run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2004 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109271165611793323,00.html?mod=technology%5Fmain%5Fwhats%5Fnews 

Several new services add a modern twist to the ancient art of rejection. People unable to say "no" personally to unwanted advances can now sign up for e-mails and phone messages that do the dirty work for them. 
Daniel Terdiman, "Rejection 2.0," Wired News, August 18, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64612,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html 

CONTROVERSIAL PUBLIC REMARKS BY JAMES E. COPELAND, JR. ON AUGUST 11, 2004 AT THE ANNUAL MEETINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACCOUNTING ASSOCIATION IN ORLANDO
Some of these are slightly paraphrased answers to questions in a Q&A session following Mr. Copeland's Plenary Session address.

Copeland Quote 1
It is ethical for a CPA to help a client do anything within the law to minimize taxes.  It is not ethical for a CPA to help a client do anything permitted under GAAP if the net result is not a "fair presentation" of financial performance and condition.
James E. Copland, Jr., Retired Managing Partner of Big Four CPA Firm Deloitte & Touche, August 11, 2004, AAA Annual Meetings in Orlando
Mr. Copeland sidestepped the question about the ethics of CPA firm and AICPA lobbying efforts to build in tax code loopholes for corporations and wealthy clients.  Indirectly he seemed to disapprove of many of the corporate tax loopholes that have made a sham out of the corporate taxation.

Copeland Quote 2
In my opinion the U.S. Corporate Income Tax Code should be abolished.  Of course my former partners at Deloitte do not like me saying this in public.
James E. Copland, Jr., Retired Managing Partner of Big Four CPA Firm Deloitte & Touche, August 11, 2004, AAA Annual Meetings in Orlando
Bob Jensen's threads on the dwindling importance of corporate tax revenues and the wild avoidance antics of corporations and accounting firms are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#TaxAvoidance 

Copeland Quote 3
In all the auditing scandals among the Big Five CPA firms, there have been too many instances of auditor negligence and incompetence.  But there are virtually no instances of auditor conspiracy to commit fraud.  In the past 100-year history of Deloitte, I only know of one partner who committed outright fraud.  When we discovered it, we turned him into the authorities. 
James E. Copland, Jr., Retired Managing Partner of Big Four CPA Firm Deloitte & Touche, August 11, 2004, AAA Annual Meetings in Orlando
Recall that David Duncan plead guilty to obstruction of justice but not to conspiracy to commit fraud on Enron creditors and investors.
Jim failed to mention the following:

When the Securities and Exchange Commission found evidence in e-mail messages that a senior partner at Andersen had participated in the fraud at Waste Management, Andersen did not fire him. Instead, it put him to work revising the firm's document-retention policy. Unsurprisingly, the new policy emphasized the need to destroy documents and did not specify that should stop if an S.E.C. investigation was threatened. It was that policy David Duncan, the Andersen partner in charge of Enron audits, claimed to be following when he shredded Andersen's reputation.

Floyd Norris, "Will Big Four Audit Firms Survive in a World of Unlimited Liability?," The New York Times, September 10, 2004 

Bob Jensen’s threads on the auditing scandals in the various large international CPA firms are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#others 

Copeland Quote 4
Among all the Big Five firms, auditing has always been a highly profitable (in aggregate) line of professional service even in the peak consulting years (1990s) when management consulting services sometimes had higher margins.  All Big Five accounting firms testified to this effect before the SEC.  I do not think that lack of audit profitability contributed significantly to alleged conflict of interest between audit versus consulting engagements.  
James E. Copland, Jr., Retired Managing Partner of Big Four CPA Firm Deloitte & Touche, August 11, 2004, AAA Annual Meetings in Orlando
He did not mention that some audit profitability may have been achieved by lowering the quality of audits by using risk-based procedures in place of substantive testing --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#RiskBasedAuditing
His remarks about the profitability of audit services run counter to the 1990s audit "commodity pricing" claims of Bob Elliott when he was an Executive Partner at KPMG and President of the AICPA --- http://www.trinity.edu/%7Erjensen/000start.htm#AssuranceServices 

Bob Jensen's July-September 2004 Updates on Frauds and the Accounting Scandals --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud093004.htm 

Bob Jensen's April-June 2004 Updates on Frauds and the Accounting Scandals --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud063004.htm 

Consumer Reports (Since 1936) --- http://www.consumerreports.org/main/home.jsp?bhfv=7&bhqs=1 

We may not be far away from this.
Forwarded by Auntie Bev
www.aclu.org/pizza/images/screen.swf 

August 18, 2004 reply from David R. Fordham [fordhadr@JMU.EDU] 

Bob, you are correct, we aren’t very far. Most people don’t know it, but (fortunately) we are already there in a lot of respects. And as the gopher said in Winnie the Pooh, I’m ding-dang glad of it. For example, about the first third of the movie is already available at your local library, the last third is available with a little bit more trouble. The medical stuff, though, is still behind wraps, but hey, maybe with time…

See “Programs Aim for Safer Travel and Shorter Lines: Tests use biometrics and smart cards for frequent travelers and transport workers”, on page 30 of the August 16-23 2004 issue of InformationWeek. It’s about time we started applying technology again to make our lives safer, more secure, and more convenient. Little by little, we are finally coming to our senses.

If you can’t tell, I disagree with the ACLU’s philosophy of letting people do as they please behind a curtain of secrecy. Secrecy is the nemesis of knowledge, and is generally the anti-thesis to “beneficial”. It is inarguable that fewer people would engage in detrimental (not only to themselves, but others) behavior if it could be widely known that they were engaging in the detrimental behavior. (Important note: it is the knowledge that becomes the governing device; no force or coercion or any other governmental power is necessary – people tend to govern themselves in a society where full and open knowledge is freely distributed! If we would eliminate the anti-civilization fools like the ACLU, and share knowledge (what academe is supposedly all about!), we could have a lot less physical government, the way the founding fathers originally intended. Less government is better government. People governing their own behavior is far superior to bigger police forces, more prisons, more laws, etc. I say, let’s open the gates of knowledge, and watch everyone start shaping up and doing what they already know is best for everybody.)

A study in Education Today provided evidence (which I’ve long suspected) that anonymity in large schools was the fundamental enabling agent in destructive behavior like vandalism, assaults, and the like. The low crime rate in small towns has long been attributed to lack of anonymity compared to the high crime rate in large cities.

As much as some (!) people object to me knowing that they eat pizza and subscribe to a gay magazine, I detest FAR more having to waste my employers’ time standing in lines, taking off my belt and emptying my pockets because those pizza-eaters and magazine subscribers are so paranoid that they object to society using a better technology to BETTER do what is ALREADY being done today with less-effective technology. I’m speaking of course about the current paper ID’s (drivers licenses, etc.) which everyone recognizes is flawed, but some (!) people are so “protective” of their “privacy” (hee,hee, I can’t help laughing) that they don’t want a better technology being used for exactly the same purpose. I put this ACLU film in the same category as the trash that Ned Ludd put out in 1779. (It is interesting that the dictionary today describes Ludd as “feebleminded”. Hmmmm. I can see the correlation…)

“Knowledge and openness are essential to the functioning of a society. … Withholding knowledge is a certain way to destroy civilization” – Thomas Jefferson, as quoted by E. C. Walls.

David R. Fordham
PBGH Faculty Fellow
James Madison University

August 18, 2004 reply from Dave Will [dwill@BOSTONCONFERENCING.COM] 

David, I agree with much of what you say. But I wanted to add a couple points:

- one key to privacy is whether or not you opted in to share your information. For example, most of us use a frequent shopper or flyer card - or a loyalty card as the industry calls it. Basically, all their doing is paying you for your data. You get $0.30 off a 1/2 gallon of OJ and they get your demographics and the knowledge of what brand condoms you prefer. Although some of this is purely to get you to buy more stuff, it is also helpful because they start marketing things that you're actually interested in.

- another rather random point is that there is a lot of demographic data being tallied that is not specific to any individual. Companies like Nielsen and IRI have been doing this in the supermarkets for years. Even if you pay cash, your buying habits are being recorded based on what store you shopped at and what products you bought and at what time of day. All the better for the marketers if you used a loyalty card.

- "Less government is better government." - Couldn't agree more, especially when it comes to personal data. I don't want to be nursed by the Government. I don't even know if I want government sponsored warnings. For example, in China (I think) when you get off the subway, the government alerts you to the weather outside and suggests that you may want to break out your umbrella... For some reason, that bothers me. It makes me feel like the gov't is babysitting me. It's a completely separate thing if a private organization does that, because I can choose to or not to use their services.

- A very interesting article on Radio Frequency Identification Tags (RFIDs) that Wal-Mart is pushing - http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.07/shoppers.html  There is an interesting debate over the issues on privacy.

Dave Will
Principal Boston Conferencing, Inc. web conferencing services
dwill@bostonconferencing.com     www.bostonconferencing.com 

Upcoming Changes in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 --- http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/logged_in/wanbar_sp2.html 
(Walter Mossberg has his doubts --- see below)

Bridget Thomas of Prairieville, Louisiana, lobbied for a way to block access to credit reports in her state after she was badly burned by identity theft that destroyed her credit status. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/99574 

The Latest Pump and Dump

"Investor Scam; Con Artists Snaring Victims Across the Country," AccountingWeb, August 20, 2004 --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=99658 

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this week issued an investor alert designed to warn Americans about a new scam sweeping the country-answering machine "wrong number" stock touts.

Voice mail messages are appearing on home answering machines from coast to coast saying that the stock price of certain small, thinly traded companies will soon shoot up. The breezy, intimate messages sound as if a female caller mistakenly believes she has dialed a girlfriend and is confiding inside information she has learned from "that hot stock exchange guy I'm dating."

Regulators believe these voice mails are part of a "pump and dump" stock manipulation scheme, whereby the people behind the messages intend to profit by driving up the price of their targeted stocks, then selling, and leaving victims with losses. The SEC has received hundreds of complaints from investors across the country about these misdirected voice mails in recent days.

"Investors should never buy stocks on the basis of ‘hot’ tips from strangers," said SEC Investor Education Director Susan Wyderko. "We are concerned because the stock prices of companies mentioned in these calls have gone up, presumably as people listen to the messages and buy. But in all 'pump and dump' schemes, as soon as the promoter stops touting a stock, the price plummets and other investors lose their money."

The SEC is asking investors who receive these kinds of calls to let them know the company being touted, the exact date and time the call was received, the number called, and the number from which the call was made, if available. E-mail the information to Enforcement@sec.gov, or call the SEC at 1-800-SEC-0330.

Yes. Someone has got to get paid somewhere along the line. If you don't Ponzi the scam, you won't be able to have references who can tell other investors, "Hey, this is great -- I got a check."
Eric Stein (see below)

"Confessions of a Scam Artist," By Glenn Ruffenach, The Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2004, Page R1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109173761463584169,00.html 

Eric Stein once bilked almost 1,800 investors out of $34 million in a Ponzi scheme. Now Mr. Stein is incarcerated at a federal prison, but says he is now "focused on trying to make a bad situation better." He agreed to discuss his scam and its mechanics: how it started, why it worked and how it collapsed -- and why the over-50 set is more vulnerable to financial fraud than ever before.

"Unreliable websites put patients at risk," by Helen Pilcher, Nature.com, August 2, 2004 --- http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040802/full/040802-3.html 

One in ten websites offering information on alternative cancer therapies give advice that could harm patients, a recent study suggests.

People need to be aware that such websites are not necessarily benign and they should seek out responsible, independent advice about complementary medicines, warns Edzard Ernst of the Peninsula Medical School, run by the universities of Exeter and Plymouth, who led the study.

Up to 55% of the Internet's 600 million users gather medical information from it. Patients with life-threatening diseases, such as cancer, often use the web to seek out alternative therapies, but with over half a million sites offering advice, the quality of that information varies greatly.

To investigate the likely consequences of patients relying on such websites, Ernst's team surveyed the 32 most popular sites offering advice on 'alternative' or 'complementary' medicine and cancer. Their results can be found in the Annals of Oncology1.

In total, the sites touted 118 cancer 'cures', such as shark cartilage and mistletoe, and 59 cancer 'preventions', including green tea and flaxseed, also known as linseed. But none of these treatments have been scientifically proven to work, says Ernst.

Shark cartilage was the most recommended alternative cancer 'cure'. A preliminary human study has suggested that Neovastat, a product derived from cartilage, can lengthen the lives of patients with a type of kidney cancer2. But the research needs to be repeated with larger numbers, and the only published clinical study of a shark cartilage treatment for cancer failed to find any positive effects3.

Because such preparations have not been scientifically tested, their benefits are questionable and it is possible that they might interact adversely with conventional treatments.

Worse still, three of the websites (HEALL, HealthWorld Online and worldwidehealthcenter.net) overtly discouraged patients from using conventional cancer care, such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy. One of the sites also dissuaded its readers from taking doctors' advice. "These websites are a risk to cancer patients," says Ernst.

Not all bad

Good websites do exist, and the majority of those tested provided useful and reliable information. Two sites, Quackwatch and Bandolier, stood out for the quality of the information they provide, says Ernst.

He hopes to raise public awareness about the usefulness of online information. He suggests that the major cancer organizations should investigate websites offering cancer-related information and issue a recognized 'seal of approval' to help patients sift good advice from bad.

In the meantime, Ernst stresses the need for patients to be vigilant, and to be aware that some websites may have a financial motive for promoting certain alternative therapies. "My basic advice is: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true."

"There is a confusing amount of information about 'alternative' cancer cures available on the Internet," says cancer expert Julie Sharp of Cancer Research UK. "Many of these have no clinical or scientific basis and so it is vitally important that patients seek advice from their doctors."

August 14 message from Dave Will [dwill@BOSTONCONFERENCING.COM] 

Although, I think it is helpful to have an "expert's" opinion of what information is valuable, there are organizations that do that already by industry and charge a lot of money for it. For example, Cancersource is a company that sells "qualified" data on cancer to hospitals so that the hospital can release it to their cancer patients under the their private label. Cancersource has an excellent reputation for their experts in the industry that qualify their data before it is released.

It's easy to find info on the internet, but many times, the info is bad. Hence the value in a company like Cancersource. www.cancersource.com 

Dave Will
Principal Boston Conferencing, Inc. web conferencing services
w: 781 834 2095 c: 781 985 9455 f: 501 639 8835 
dwill@bostonconferencing.com      www.bostonconferencing.com 

Bob Jensen's threads on medical and drug company frauds are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudreporting.htm#PhysiciansAndDrugCompanies 

"Google queries provide stolen credit cards," by Robert Lemos, CNET News,  August 3, 2004 --- http://news.com.com/Google+queries+provide+stolen+credit+cards/2100-1029_3-5295661.html?tag=nefd.lede 

Simple queries using the Google search engine can turn up a handful of sites that have posted credit card information to the Web, CNET News.com learned on Tuesday.

The lists of financial information include hundreds of card holders' names, addresses and phone numbers as well as their credit card data. Much of the credit card data that appears in the lists found by Google may no longer be valid, but News.com called several people listed and verified that the credit card numbers were authentic. The query, the latest example of "Google hacking," highlights increasing concern that knowledgeable Web surfers can turn up sensitive information by mining the world's best-known search engine.

"It seems like everyone has their own trick," said Chris Wysopal, vice president of research and development for digital security firm @Stake. "This is really searching for data that should be secret but has been exposed either through misconfiguration or by someone who has stolen it."

There is no shortage of ways to search Google to find such data. Whole sites spell out how to search for financial information and describe software vulnerabilities and vulnerable configurations on Internet machines. Google is the tool of choice because its powerful search options, such as the ability to search for a range of numbers--useful in finding credit card data--is not present in other companies' search engines.

Google would not comment, citing the quiet period before the company's initial public offering. However, a company source did say that the search firm has a tool for Web masters to remove pages from the archive, if they find that parts of their site violate laws or regulations. Moreover, the company has decided to allow anyone to request the removal from search results of any document that includes a Social Security or credit card number--a note to help@google.com  with a link to the page will suffice, the source said.

Continued in the article

Do-it-yourself phishing kits are freely available on the Internet, a security firm says, and they will lead to more scams sent to online consumers. "Until now, phishing attacks have been largely the work of organized crime gangs," says Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at U.K.-based security vendor Sophos.  "But the emergence of these 'build-your-own-phish' kits mean that any old Tom, Dick, or Harry can now mimic bona fide banking Web sites and convince customers to disclose sensitive information such as passwords, PIN numbers, and account details," he says.
Greg Keizer, Information Week, August 19, 2004 --- http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=29112029 

Bob Jensen's threads on phishing are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#Phishing 

Spam and Spyware Blocker Software
All-in-One- Secretmaker (Free) --- http://www.secretmaker.com/ 

All-in-One SECRETMAKER is designed for users who wish to:

● Keep their email box free of spam
● Avoid irritating pop-up and banner interruptions
● Protect their privacy and avoids profiling
● Use the Internet efficiently for private or business use

The Consumer Reports home page is at http://www.consumerreports.org/main/home.jsp?bhfv=7&bhqs=1 

Bob Jensen's threads on computer and network security are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection 

Finding Cheaper Prescription Drugs Without Fear of Fraud

Don't trust offers from cheap prescriptions that come via email.  Go the name of a trusted online pharmacy.

Time Magazine on August 30, 2004, Page 70 lists some good sites for Canadian, U.S., and various international sites.

Comparison shop at www.pillbox.com 

Comparison shop at www.pharmacychecker.com 

Various states have started comparison shopping sites for within-state pharmacies.

Bob Jensen's threads on medical and drug frauds are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudreporting.htm#PhysiciansAndDrugCompanies 

Evidence of Widespread Earnings Management Through Accounting Manipulation (many of the ploys are allowed under GAAP but are not necessarily in the spirit of fair presentation of earnings performance)

Double Congratulations to Mark, John, and Robin

Two very surprising announcements at the 2004 American Accounting Association Annual Meetings in Orlando were the announcements on separate days that a single paper had won both the 2004 Notable Contributions Award and the Wildman Award among highly qualified competitors for both awards.  I think this is the first time that a single paper ran away with both awards.

It's a good paper from both the standpoint of theory and practice.  It stands in the face of capital markets studies that could not find evidence of earnings management (read that manipulation) on the part of corporate managers.

"How Are Earnings Managed? Examples from Auditors," by Mark W. Nelson, John A. Elliott, and Robin L. Tarpley, Accounting Horizons, Quality of Earnings Supplement 2003 Issue May 20, 2003 --- http://aaahq.org/ic/browse.htm

This paper reports descriptive evidence about how managers attempt to manage earnings, based on a sample of 515 earnings-management attempts obtained from a survey of 253 experienced auditors (and also analyzed by Nelson et al. 2002). We classify attempts first according to primary approach: expense recognition, revenue recognition, issues unique to business combinations, and other issues. Then, within each of those broad categories, we subclassify attempts by the particular approach used in the attempt. For each specific approach, we report the accounts involved, the frequency with which the approach increased or decreased current-period income (and the frequency of adjustments required by the auditor), and provide descriptions by auditors of income-increasing and income-decreasing examples of the more frequent approaches. We also link our findings to recent SEC Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAERs) that illustrate extreme versions of the specific approaches identified by our participants. This experienced-based, example-rich framework and frequency data should assist investors, auditors, audit committees, and other participants in the financial reporting process who need to be vigilant for earnings-management approaches.

"The Relation between Incentives to Avoid Debt Covenant Default and Insider Trading," by Messod D. Beneish, Eric Press and Mark E. Vargus --- http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/finance/Mark_Vargus.pdf 

The paper uses a large sample of 488 firms that experience technical default between 1983 and 1997 to examine managers’ accrual strategies and their insider trading behavior in the period preceding the event of default. Our results are consistent with our conjecture that insider trading is informative about firms’ expected costs of default, and with our expectation that insider trading measures are related to both pre-default earnings management and post-default stock returns. We find that managers facing higher expected costs of default make income increasing accrual choices and that managers’ exercise of discretion is successful in staving-off default. We also find that although managers are ultimately unable to avoid default, by delaying both the violation and subsequent adverse stock-market response, managers benefit by selling their equitycontingent wealth at higher prices. To our knowledge, our paper is the first to show that upwardly managed accruals are successful in avoiding default, and to provide new evidence on how managers benefit from delaying default. Our results also suggest that investigating managers’ trading patterns is useful in determining the likelihood of pre-default earnings management.

Related to the above outcomes is the following module that I wrote in the May 10, 2004 edition of New Bookmarks ---  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book04q2.htm#050104 

Interest rate swap derivative instruments are widely used to manage interest rate risk, which is viewed as a perfectly legitimate use of these hedging instruments.  I stumbled on to a rather interesting doctoral dissertation which finds that firms, especially banks, use such swaps to manage earnings.  The dissertation from Michigan State University is by Chang Joon Song under Professor Thomas Linsmeier.

"Are Interest Rate Swaps Used to Manage Banks' Earnings," by Chang Joon Song, January 2004 --- http://accounting-net.actg.uic.edu/Department/Songpaper.pdf 

This dissertation is quite clever and very well written.  

Previous research has shown that loan loss provisions and security gains and losses are used to manage banks’ net income. However, these income components are reported below banks largest operating component, net interest income (NII). This study extends the literature by examining whether banks exploit the accounting permitted under past and current hedge accounting standards to manage NII by entering into interest rate swaps. Specifically, I investigate whether banks enter into receive-fixed/pay-variable swaps to increase earnings when unmanaged NII is below management’s target for NII. In addition, I investigate whether banks enter into receive-variable/pay-fixed swaps to decrease earnings when unmanaged NII is above management’s target for NII. Swaps-based earnings management is possible because past and current hedge accounting standards allow receive-fixed/pay-variable swaps (receivevariable/ pay-fixed) to have known positive (negative) income effects in the first period of the swap contract. However, entering into swaps for NII management is not costless, because such swaps change the interest rate risk position throughout the swap period. Thus, I also examine whether banks find it cost-beneficial to enter into offsetting swap positions in the next period to mitigate interest rate risk caused by entering into earnings management swaps in the current period. Using 546 bank-year observations from 1995 to 2002, I find that swaps are used to manage NII. However, I do not find evidence that banks immediately enter into offsetting swap positions in the next period. In sum, this research demonstrates that banks exploit the accounting provided under past and current hedge accounting rules to manage NII. This NII management opportunity will disappear if the FASB implements full fair value accounting for financial instruments, as foreshadowed by FAS No. 133.

What is especially interesting is how Song demonstrates that such earnings management took place before FAS 133 and is still taking place after FAS 133 required the booking of swaps and adjustment to fair value on each reporting date.  It is also interesting how earnings management comes at the price of added risk.  Other derivative positions can be used to reduce the risk, but risks arising from such earnings management cannot be eliminated.

Bob Jensen's threads on FAS 133 and IAS 39 are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/000index.htm 

WordCount  is an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words --- http://www.wordcount.org/index2.html 

You can slide along a slider beginning with the most frequent word (the) to the lowest frequent word (conquistador).

You can choose a word of interest to you and find its rank.

You may choose a rank number and find the word at that rank.

The Scout Report on August 19, 2004 states the following:

Words are used as invectives, toasts, and tirades, among other forms of human expression. As a type of artistic experiment, Jonathan Harris of Flaming Toast Productions decided to create this engaging website that documents the 86,000 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Nay-sayers beware: This is no simple listing of the words, contained within a mundane series of connected web pages. As visitors quickly realize, this articulated end-to-end listing of these 86,000 words features scaled versions of each word, giving a "visual barometer of relevance." As the site notes, "The goal is for the user to feel embedded in the language, sifting through words like an archaeologist through sand, awaiting the unexpected find." Interestingly enough, the word "God" is one word from "began" (which is at number 375), and six words from "war." Budding urbanologists will find it interesting that the word "Chicago" is at number 6,692 and that "Shanghai" makes into the list at 18,242.

New Tax Helper Sites from Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, August 2004, Page 25 --- 

Strategies for Savings
www.gofso.com/premium/ts/ts_menu.html
CPAs and personal financial planners can enter this Web site through the back door to read guidance for clients on maximizing tax deductions such as travel and entertainment expenses and charitable contributions. Users also can find financial calculators, information on topics including annuities and mutual fund taxation, and due dates for filing tax returns and reporting tax information.

Fact or Fiction?
www.incometaxstrategies.com
Tax advisers can look over the tax secrets and myths section of this e-stop on debunking falsehoods, such as the idea that not taking every possible deduction reduces a client’s chances for an audit, as well as learn about little-known strategies such as how to get an annual early tax refund. The site features links to more than 80 itemized deductions and a free monthly newsletter.

Resources and Tips
www.funwithtaxes.com
Tax specialist and author Gail Perry’s online compilation of her column “Fun With Taxes” includes links to articles from the New York Times such as “Beating the Tuition Blues and Earning Some Tax Breaks” and her own writings—such as the article “IRS Throws Foul Ball Into All American Pastime.” In addition, visitors can find daily tax tips from the IRS and the Tax Preparation Tool Box, which includes an IRA calculator to determine eligibility or compare Roth IRAs with traditional ones to see their worth at retirement.

For Filing and More
www.taxbrain.com
In addition to free registration, links to state and federal tax forms and electronic filing options, tax preparers who visit this Web stop can click on the Tax Center link at the bottom of the home page to find a tax glossary, the e-document “Seven Tax Return Mistakes to Avoid,” a W-4 calculator and a tax estimator.

Government Approved
www.homebusinesstaxsavings.com
Tax consultants and preparers with home-business-based clients can find tips here on tax breaks in compliance with congressional law, the tax code and tax court rulings such as “converting ‘commuting miles’ into tax-deductible business miles,” the benefits of obtaining an employer identification number and deductions for donations. Users also can sign up for a free subscription to the newsletter Tax Tips You Can Bank On.

Bob Jensen's taxation threads are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation 

August 27, 2004 message from Jerry Trites

I thought this was interesting. This is the first I've seen of the Blackberry being handed out to students, even though they are very heavily used in business and their latest product with strong e-mail and internet capabilities has really caught on. I wonder how many business schools make such technology available to the students?

http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040827.gtblackaug27/BNStory/Technology/  _____________________________________ 

Gerald Trites, FCA, CA·IT/CISA 
Website - http://www.zorba.ca  
The Trites E-Business Blog - http://www.zorba.ca/blog.html 

 

David Fordham Calls Americans Noise Polluters

I am currently in Antwerp, Belgium, with our study-abroad program. We are issuing to students very advanced GSM cell phones (GSM is not available in most of America) which also has built-in WAP and Bluetooth capabilities. The students can surf the web, as well as use bluetooth headsets, upload and download pictures, send text messages, paging, and all kinds of other neat-o stuff. These phones are "checked out" to the student at the beginning of the semester for a $25 deposit, with $40 of calltime already programmed in (in Europe, you program a little card that fits into your phone... you can 'recharge' the card and put more time on it at any ATM ... and you can take the card out and move it to a different phone and presto- that phone now has your number, your paid minutes, your settings and preferences, etc!) At the end of the semester, if the students turn in their phone, they get their deposit back. Otherwise they pay $125 for the missing phone.

I had heard that Europe was ahead of USA in personal technology, but I was skeptical. I'm skeptical no more. Just spending a few minutes in an electronics store (the Belgian equivalent of Circuit City) made a believer out of me. The integration here is far beyond the USA. The standarization and interoperability would make even an OfficeXP junkie jealous.

Best of all, everyone here is quiet. Everywhere you go, you think you are in a library. Everyone is talking in low, quiet voices! You step onto a bus with 30 people on it, it is quiet even though half a dozen people are on the phone! Or you step into a cafe with 40 people in it, all carrying on conversations either in person or on the phone, yet you can hear a pin drop at the other end of the room! Sitting in a booth, you don't hear a thing either party on either side of you says. It is very obvious when an American walks in, talking loudly, laughing, etc.

Europeans have their faults, but they are way ahead of us (that's U.S.) in civility, standardization, and integration when it comes to personal technology.

David Fordham 
James Madison University 
Semester in Antwerp program

!

Helpers for Women at Work

Institute for Women's Policy Research --- http://www.iwpr.org/ 

The Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) is a public policy research organization dedicated to informing and stimulating the debate on public policy issues of critical importance to women and their families. IWPR focuses on issues of poverty and welfare, employment and earnings, work and family issues, health and safety, and women's civic and political participation. The Institute works with policymakers, scholars, and public interest groups around the country to design, execute, and disseminate research that illuminates economics and social policy issues affecting women and families, and to build a network of individuals and organizations that conduct and use women-oriented policy research. IWPR, an independent, non-profit, research organization also works in affiliation with the graduate programs in public policy and women's studies at The George Washington University. IWPR's work is supported by foundation grants, government grants and contracts, donations from individuals, and contributions from organizations. Members and affiliates of IWPR's Information Network receive reports and information on a regular basis. IWPR is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization.

Program Areas Poverty and Welfare Welfare reform, low-wage workers, social security reform Family and Work Paid and unpaid family leave, child care, flexible work arrangements, changing family and work structures Employment and Earnings Pay equity, affirmative action, the wage gap, part-time and contingent work, women and unions, women in management, unemployment insurance Health & Safety Women's access to health insurance, costs and benefits of preventative health services for women, costs of domestic violence Democracy and Society Women's political participation, as activists, voters, candidates, and policy makers, the status of women in the states: and tax and budget policy What Makes IWPR Special? IWPR is special in several ways. First, the Institute specializes in the use of quantitative techniques and original research, interpreting the data through the lens of the special conditions of women's lives, paying close attention to gender and racial disparities. Second, IWPR works in partnership with women's advocacy groups and other public interest organizations to respond directly to the policy needs of their constituents by producing and disseminating research that supports specific policy initiatives. Research dissemination and citizen education are critical components of our work, ensuring that the results of our research are used effectively to promote economic justice and structural change. Our research dissemination and citizen education activities include: Briefing Congress and the Administration as well as women's and other public interest groups Convening conferences, lectures, and a brown-bag lunch series (the joint IWPR and GWU Friday Forums) on policy issues affecting women and their families Advising women's organizations and other public interest groups on specific policy issues Organizing public relations campaigns and media events.

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting careers for women are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#careers 

In a major setback for the music and movie industries, a federal appeals court upholds a lower court's decision in the infamous Grokster case, ruling peer-to-peer services Morpheus and Grokster are not liable for the copyright infringement of their users.
"P2P Services in the Clear," by Katie Dean, Wired News, August 19. 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,64640,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html 

Bob Jensen's threads on P2P file sharing are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

Upcoming Changes in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 --- http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/logged_in/wanbar_sp2.html 

On Friday, August 6, Microsoft announced the release of a significant update to the Windows XP operating system: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). This security-focused update includes numerous changes, many of them transparent to end users, which aim to reduce the operating system's exposure to attacks from the Internet and protect users from predatory software like adware, spyware, and malware. The Windows XP operating system is installed on nearly 50% of net-connected computers worldwide—almost 250 million PCs, according to the Flash Player survey Macromedia conducts quarterly through NPD.

While targeted at abusers of the current Windows security model, the changes in SP2 also peripherally affect many safe and useful technologies, including, in some instances, Macromedia software. Microsoft and Macromedia have worked closely throughout the development of SP2 to ensure the best possible experience for customers of Macromedia Flash Player.

In this article I'll talk about areas of the service pack that web designers and developers, website owners, IT and MIS personnel, and Flash Player users might be concerned about, with the goal of outlining the impact SP2 will have on the user experience and the development process.

To get the most comprehensive and detailed information about the service pack, visit the Microsoft website, which includes the following:

• Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) Support Center (all users)
• Changes to Functionality in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (all users)
• Windows XP Service Pack 2 Resources for IT Professionals (IT professionals)
• Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Developers (designers and developers)
• Fine-Tune Your Web Site for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (designers and developers)

What's New in Windows XP Service Pack 2

Microsoft Windows Service Pack 2 users will experience some changes in the way software behaves, including some minor changes when launching some Macromedia products. The most visible change is the presence of a new security warning dialog box, which asks users to confirm that they want to install or launch software.

Many of the new security dialog boxes appear if a particular piece of software does not have a digital signature. Digital signatures verify the authenticity of the software download. As software publishers get busy creating and filing their digital signatures, there will be a transitional period in which many reliable software applications will not yet have them. Even without a digital signature, users are able to click to confirm that they want to install their software and proceed with the installation. To find out more about the digital signatures, see the Enhanced Browser Security section of the Microsoft TechNet article, Changes to Functionality in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2.

From Syllabus News on August 24, 2004

Who’s On First: US News Computer Science Rankings Out

US News & World Report came out last week with its annual quality rankings of colleges and universities, with some of the usual suspects holding their own in the categories for top computer engineering departments. For schools offering doctorates in the field, the top three from US News are: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University. For schools offering only bachelor’s or master’s degree programs, the magazine put the top three departments at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Ind., Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo, Calif., and New York’s Cooper Union College.

The 2004 U.S. News College Rankings are at http://collegeapps.about.com/cs/rankings/a/blcontents.htm 

"Free Security Update To Windows XP Has Value but Falls Short," by Walter Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2004, Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,personal_technology,00.html 

Microsoft has paid so little attention to security over the years that consumers who use Windows have been forced to spend more and more of their time and money fending off viruses, hackers, spyware and spam. For this reason, the burden of using a Windows computer has grown immeasurably recently.

Now, under pressure from its customers and critics, the software giant is making a move toward undoing that damage. Over the next few weeks, Microsoft will be rolling out a major, free security update to Windows XP. It's called "Service Pack 2," or simply "SP2."

I've been testing SP2 on two Windows computers, and it seems to work fine. I recommend installing it, if only because of the under-the-hood security improvements Microsoft claims it contains.

But SP2 falls way short of what Microsoft could have done to fix the miserable state of security in Windows. While the update will make it harder for malicious software to enter your PC, SP2 doesn't detect or remove viruses or spyware or spam.

What's more, some of the key features of SP2 are inferior to those in third-party security software. In fact, even after you install SP2, you will still have to use add-on security programs, if you want to be reasonably safe.

Over the next month, SP2 will arrive at many PCs, unbidden, via the built-in Windows Update feature in Windows XP. It will also be available for downloading from Microsoft's Windows Update Web site. And Microsoft plans to mail it out, by request, on a free CD.

On my two test machines, an IBM laptop and a Dell desktop, installation went very smoothly. All my programs and data remained intact and functional. Microsoft concedes that SP2 does interfere with about 50 known programs. Most are corporate products, but the list also includes a few games and consumer utilities.

In addition to the under-the-hood changes, which are aimed at stopping several common intrusion techniques, SP2's main features are a new firewall, a new "Security Center" and new protections built into Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser. SP2 also turns on the automatic-update feature in Windows, which allows Microsoft to transmit and install future patches without user intervention.

The firewall, which is designed to shield your PC from attacks over the Internet, is now turned on by default. Formerly, it was off by default. (You can still turn it off manually, along with the automatic update feature.) And it has a few new features, including one that warns you if a program running on your PC is seeking to open a "port" -- a conduit to the Internet -- so it can receive incoming data.

But the new firewall lacks a crucial component present in some third-party firewalls, like ZoneAlarm. It doesn't prevent rogue programs already on your PC from using the Internet to make outbound data transfers, such as the secret reports that spyware programs make on your activities, or instructions that Trojan horse programs send out to attack other computers.

Also, Microsoft has made it easy for other software programs to turn off the new firewall. This was done so competing firewalls like ZoneAlarm could turn off the Windows firewall during installation, to avoid having duplicate firewalls running. But Microsoft concedes that hackers can use the technique to shut down the firewall as well. So I recommend buying, or sticking with, a superior third-party firewall.

The Security Center is where you can determine whether your firewall, your automatic-update settings and your antivirus program are on or off. It doesn't actually add a layer of protection to your PC. It's just an information device.

Even in that role, it falls short. In my tests, it couldn't tell whether Symantec's Norton AntiVirus program was on or off, and it warned me that my PC might not be protected against viruses, even though my antivirus protection was definitely on. This is apparently because Symantec needs to patch its product so it can talk to the Security Center. And the center made no effort to monitor my antispyware or antispam programs.

The changes to the Internet Explorer browser include a long-overdue pop-up ad blocker, which many other browsers now include, and additional warnings and controls on software downloads, so users will think twice about installing programs that might be malicious. An "Information Bar" at the top of the browser screen warns about downloads and notes that pop-ups have been blocked.

Microsoft still hasn't devised a quick, easy way to thoroughly erase your browsing tracks in Explorer or added an antispam feature to its Outlook Express e-mail program. The company says that SP2 was all about security, and these things weren't viewed as core security features. But it somehow still managed to use this security update to jam an unsolicited new "Favorites" link into the browser, one that points to a Microsoft site where it wants to sell you software and hardware.

Overall, SP2 is worth installing and will definitely improve Windows security. But it's limited. You'll still need to look beyond Microsoft to really secure your Windows PC.

Bob Jensen's threads on computer and network security are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection 

August 5, 2004 message from Walter Antoniotti [antonw@ix.netcom.com] 

Good day Bob!

I am a retired college teacher who builds internet libraries to help people learn. Please consider linking to my libraries.

• Accounting Internet Library 
• Economics Internet Library 
• Mathematics Internet Library 
• Statistics Internet Library 
• Student Internet Library

Thanks!

Walter Antoniotti 
21st Century Learning Products www.businessbookmall.com\ 

Bob Jensen's threads on online materials can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#Materials 

From Syllabus News on August 17, 2004

USC Launches Research Center on Studies of Digital Future

Jeffrey Cole, head of the Center for Communication Policy, formerly based at UCLA, will lead the newly established USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future, a policy and research center for the study of new communication technology and its impact on persons, communities, and societies around the globe.

The new USC-based Center will continue the same research projects undertaken at UCLA, including the next phase of the Internet Project, Surveying the Digital Future, a comprehensive longitudinal study of the impact of the Internet on America. The Center will release the newest report, "10 Years, 10 Trends," on September 13, 2004.

In addition to the Internet Project, Cole created the World Internet Project, which has tracked use of the Internet around the globe since 1999. Before coming to USC, Cole served on the faculty of the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management, where he directed the track on Entertainment, Media and Communication. Joining him at USC are colleagues from UCLA, including Phoebe Schramm, associate director, and Michael Suman, research director.

For more information visit: http://annenberg.usc.edu 

---

Vanderbuilt Installs “Visual Area Network” for Teaching Apps

Vanderbilt University installed a high performance data visualization system that enables researchers to drive multiple display devices simultaneously, each with its own dedicated large graphics pipeline. Vanderbuilt implemented the “visual area network,” based on Silicon Graphics Inc.’s Onyx4 visualization technology, for its Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education. The facility provides computing, storage, and visualization services campus-wide, and supports projects from the College of Arts and Science, Medical Center, and School of Engineering.

The Onyx4 system will be used in teaching and other presentation applications where, for example, an animation of a protein structure is being displayed in stereo to a room of students using a passive stereo projector, while at the same time there are two other CRT displays driving modeling applications in active stereo for one-to-one interaction with the system. Each application gets its own dedicated CPU and graphics pipe, all running from the same console controlled by a single operator.

 

Share Pictures With Your Friends

PHPQuickGallery --- http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/programs/program.php?program=PHPQuickGallery 

PHPQuickGallery is the solution for those who want to have a simple, easy to manage web gallery. Adding new photos or galleries is as simple as creating directories and copying in the files (You could keep them there, but you do have backups of your photos right?). PHPQuickGallery doesn't require the user to add the photos to a database, go through some web form, or have a script run to create new web pages. PHPQuickGallery will automatically detect and display anything new that is added.

Television Slide Shows of Your Digital Photographs

"Since Keeping Photos In Shoeboxes Is Passé, Try Making Slideshows," by Thomas E. Weber, The Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2004, Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,personal_technology,00.html 

Recently I tested nine programs capable of turning snapshots into video presentations. I found that some work especially well for beginners -- or anyone who wants to whip up a slideshow without investing a lot of time.

The basic steps for creating a slideshow are pretty much the same regardless of which program you use. You start by selecting a group of digital photos and placing them in the order in which you want them to appear. (A rule of thumb says to show each photo for about five seconds, so 30 photos will give you a slideshow 2½ minutes long.) Next, if you like, you can add a soundtrack -- most programs will incorporate any MP3 file you want. Finally, you burn the slideshow onto a DVD.

Some slideshow programs are included as part of broader video-editing packages designed to produce DVDs from home movies shot with a camcorder. Others, which cater mainly to still-image photographers, focus primarily on slideshows. Among the dedicated slideshow programs, I prefer ArcSoft's DVD SlideShow ($50, www.arcsoft.com ), which allowed me to put together a polished presentation in about 30 minutes.

DVD SlideShow's strength is its menus, which walk you through the process in clear, simple steps while still providing access to advanced options -- notably, "pan and zoom" tools that add motion to still images by zooming in on a portion of the image or moving it around the screen. Another worthwhile feature: the ability to archive the original digital-photo files on the DVD along with the slideshow. That makes each DVD a valuable backup copy of your images.

One downside to ArcSoft's program is its price. Considering that good video-editing packages don't cost a lot more, some consumers may not want to pay this much solely for slideshow production. And while DVD SlideShow's features help justify the price, they could go further. The program allows you to lighten or darken individual photos, for example, but it doesn't include a fix for redeye -- one of the most common snapshot problems.

If you plan on working with home videos as well as slideshows, it makes more sense to get a video-editing package. The good news here is that one of the most user-friendly editing programs includes a straightforward slideshow maker. It's called MyDVD 5.3 Deluxe from Sonic Solutions ($70, www.sonic.com).

Like DVD SlideShow, MyDVD has users follow a simple process, and the program will archive the original photos onto the DVD. However, MyDVD doesn't include pan-and-zoom features, and you'll need to lighten or darken poorly exposed images and fix red eye using another program, such as Adobe's Photoshop Elements, before importing them into MyDVD.

Those using an Apple computer won't need to agonize over which slideshow program to choose. Apple's excellent iLife package ($49; included with new Macs) is all they'll need. Users can construct slideshows in the package's easy-to-use iDVD program or move slideshows from iPhoto into iDVD for burning onto a disc. For more effects, the iMovie video-editing software can add panning and zooming motion.

No matter which software you try, there are tricks you can use to make better slideshows. The most important: When in doubt, go with an understated approach. Most programs offer a variety of exotic "transitions" that make the next photo in the sequence appear to explode out of the prior image or spin around the screen. Basic dissolve or fade-in/fade-out transitions show off photos best.

Similarly, pan-and-zoom tools -- dubbed "Ken Burns effects" by Apple because they evoke the documentary filmmaker's style -- can leave your audience dizzy unless applied judiciously. (Windows users who get serious about panning and zooming eventually may want to consider a $199 program called Imaginate from Canopus that gives you supreme control over these effects.)

One last tip: Keep the slideshow format in mind when you take pictures. Snap some images that help recall the details -- the sign outside a restaurant, for instance. They may not be worth printing, but they can help tell the story.

More in the article.

Blinkx finds links of possible interest to you based upon what you are reading.

Blinkx is free at http://www.blinkx.com/overview_us.php 

Whenever you browse a website, read a news story, check your e-mail or write a document, blinkx automatically delivers suggestions from the Web, news or your local files; which you can view by simply clicking the links or rolling over to get a summary of the information found. If you want to search, blinkx understands your question and presents you with links as you search.

In every case, blinkx provides an answer that is appropriate, faster than using a search engine and personalized just for you.

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 

"Carry Your Office in the Palm of Your Hand," by David M. Cheslak and Matt Van Winkle, Journal of Accountancy, August 2004, pp. 52-56 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/aug2004/cieslak.htm 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

WELCOME TO THE WORLD PDAs—personal digital assistants. These handheld devices can perform many of your computer tasks and some even do double-duty as cell phones. THE PDA MARKET IS DIVIDED INTO FIVE GROUPS: Palm, Pocket PC, Blackberry, smartphones and combination devices (which function both as PDAs and cell phones). IF YOU’RE CONSIDERING BUYING ONE of these devices, be aware of these advisories: Most Palms and Pocket PCs use a stylus on a touch-screen to input data, although a few models have keypads. However, typing on such a keypad can be awkward because you can use only your thumbs. Palms’ Graffiti software recognizes your handwriting or a unique shorthand alphabet style. It takes a bit of practice to learn, but once mastered, it’s faster than traditional handwriting. Pocket PCs use letter-recognition technology that allows users to write conventional letters and numbers on the screen. Rather than users’ having to train themselves to write a unique script, the Pocket PC must be trained to recognize individuals’ handwriting. Another option for Palms and Pocket PCs is a portable keyboard, which makes typing fast and easy. Blackberries come with attached miniature keypads, but users still must type with their thumbs. Smartphones allow users to input data via the phone key buttons—and therein lies a problem: Phone numbers are entered as they would be on a regular phone, but it’s harder to enter PDA data. Voice recognition technology, which is available for both Palm- and Pocket PC-based smartphones, may accelerate the widespread adoption of smartphones, however. HUNDREDS OF ADD-ON PRODUCTS FOR PDAs are available. They include full-size folding keyboards, small thumb keyboards, multimedia cards and microdrives for additional data storage. IT’S BEST TO FOCUS ON THE CORE FEATURES when shopping for a PDA. Begin by listing your needs; once you find the product that matches them, see what bells and whistles you would like to add.

DAVID M. CIESLAK, CPA/CITP, GSEC (GIAC security essentials certified), is principal of Information Technology Group Inc., Simi Valley, California. His e-mail address is dcieslak@itgusa.com. MATT VAN WINKLE is programming director at Information Technology Group. His e-mail address is mvanwinkle@itgusa.com.

August 16, 2004 message from Glen Gray [glen.gray@CSUN.EDU] 

"Turning Jukeboxes Into Teaching Aids" News Observer (NC) (08/11/04); Cox, Jonathan B. Tracy Futhey, Duke University CIO and information technology VP, explains that the distribution of Apple iPod digital music players to freshmen this year is part of an experiment to see if IT can augment education. The iPod is particularly appealing for a number of reasons: It is already likely to be highly popular among students, it can function as both an audio player and a massive drive, and its storage capacity is formidable. Futhey says that the iPods will be preloaded with general campus information and content, and a Duke-specific iTunes Web site will be set up where students will be able to download additional material. Among the educational applications she foresees for the iPods is their use in language courses where students learn by listening to exercises, or songs in native dialects. Futhey reports that the iPod experiment will be evaluated on a course-by-course basis, and in general considers technology to be another weapon in the educator's arsenal rather than an all-in-one solution. "Technology is not going to take a mediocre teacher and make them a good teacher," she reflects. Futhey is not too worried about whether the iPod distribution could spur a rash of music piracy, because the device offers students a legal alternative to ripping off songs, and the administration makes it very clear to students that they are expected to use the iPods responsibly. The Duke CIO says her department is formally asking faculty what kind of projects involving the iPod they would like to do, and these proposals will be subjected to formal assessments. Click Here to View Full Article --- http://www.newsobserver.com/print/wednesday/connect/story/1517578p-7687552c.html 

Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA
Dept. of Accounting & Information Systems
College of Business & Economics
California State University, Northridge
Northridge, CA 91330-8372

http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f 

Bob Jensen's threads on gadgets are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob4.htm#Technology 

Educational Competency Assessment (ECA) Web Site --- http://www.aicpa-eca.org/
The AICPA recently won a National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Excellence Award for Educational Programming for developing this ECA site to help accounting educators integrate the skill-based competencies needed by entry-level accounting professionals.

The AICPA provides this resource to help educators integrate the skills-based competencies needed by entry-level accounting professionals. These competencies, defined within the AICPA Core Competency Framework Project, have been derived from academic and professional competency models and have been widely endorsed within the academic community. Created by educators for educators, the evaluation and educational strategies resources on this site are offered for your use and adaptation.

The ECA site contains a LIBRARY that, in addition to the Core Competency Database and Education Strategies, provides information and guidance on Evaluating Competency Coverage and Assessing Student Performance.

To assist you as you assess student performance and evaluate competency coverage in your courses and programs, the ECA ORGANIZERS guide you through the process of gathering, compiling and analyzing evidence and data so that you may document your activities and progress in addressing the AICPA Core Competencies.

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment in general are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm 

August 16, 2004 message from Roger Debreceny [roger@DEBRECENY.COM] 

I am wondering if anyone is using or has installed Office Solution Accelerator for Sarbanes-Oxley (http://www.microsoft.com/office/solutions/accelerators/sarbanes/default.msp x)? I am planning to use this for a class exercise later in the semester and communicating with another faculty who has used is or is planning to use this tool would be helpful. Good news: the tool is free and seems pretty functional. Bad news: InfoPath, Outlook, SQL Server, 1Tb RAID and 700mFlops Supercomputer are required to run (only a slight overstatement).

Roger Debreceny
School of Accountancy 
University of Hawai'i at Manoa 
Roger Debreceny [roger@DEBRECENY.COM] 
www.debreceny.com
 

 

Congratulations to Tony Catanach and Noel Barsky from Villanova University

Tony and Noel were awarded the 2004 American Accounting Association Innovation in Accounting Education Award in Orlando on August 11, 2004.  The award is for their development of a simulation model for teaching management accounting.  The model is called the Business Planning Model and is available with the textbook Management Accounting , A Business Planning Approach (Houghton Mifflin) --- http://snipurl.com/CatanachBPM 

Designed for use in introductory or graduate-level managerial accounting courses, this text applies an objective-based approach to managerial accounting topics. Unlike traditional cost-accounting texts, Management Accounting emphasizes the critical role that information plays in decision making, strategy execution, and overall enhancement of a firm's value. This text meets the growing demand for an integrated, "survey of business" approach to managerial accounting.

Through problem-based learning and the business planning model (BPM), Management Accounting develops in students those competencies expected of today's business professionals. This innovative pedagogical approach stresses the understanding and application of the basic business process; risk assessment and its relation to business strategy; critical thinking, reasoning, and analysis; oral and written communication skills; and techniques for team building. Real-world business problems and simulations place students in the role of business consultant.

• Each chapter includes mini-cases, exercises, and problems built around the challenges faced by managers today. An integrated text-long continuing example of a fictitious service business, C&F Enterprises, simulates the actual strategic planning process, as well as resource management and performance measurement activities commonly found in business practice.
• Business Beacons boxed features provide a bridge from chapter concepts to contemporary business examples by highlighting actual companies and linking managerial accounting topics to real-world examples.
• Net Gains sections at the end of each chapter direct students to Internet resources that enrich chapter material. Students can use after-class time to link to tools that perform many common accounting computations, while spending more in-class time on discussion and development of analytical skills.
• Each chapter concludes with a Business Planning Application, an optional module that allows students to engage in a semester-long business planning simulation.
• A detailed and flexible teaching guide offers instructors additional resources, tips, and tools for implementing the innovative Management Accounting approach.
• A comprehensive appendix--Preparing and Presenting the Business Plan--integrates and expands upon the business planning applications and concepts from the text. It provides students with a detailed guide on how to prepare and present a business plan through exercises and additional resources.

The authors presented a CPE workshop on the BPM in Orlando --- http://aaahq.org/AM2004/cpe/cpe27.htm 

The Business Planning Model is an innovative extension of the Business Activity Model approach to teaching Intermediate Accounting without lectures (the students must learn on their own).  I wrote a paper about the BAM model at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm#UVA000 
The BAM pedagogy was developed at the University of Virginia (when Tony was on the faculty at Virginia) as one of the Accounting Education Change Commission funded projects.

In both the BAM and the BPM pedadogy, the students take responsibility for their own learning and learn deeper due to metacognition that comes from deeper learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm 

August 17, 2005 reply from Paul Polinski [pwp3@CASE.EDU] 

Tony and Noah also gave a CPE session Sunday afternoon about their management accounting course, and distributed class materials to those attending. I believe they make invited presentations (check with them) at schools interested in pilot testing the course.

"Link (Dynamically) a Word Document to Excel," by Stanley Zarowin, Journal of Accountancy, August 2004, Page 92 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/aug2004/tech_qa.htm#Q1 

Question
I often make presentations based on last-minute sales data. It gets really wild when I have to copy last-minute numbers from the spreadsheet and quickly drop them into a Word document for the presentation. I sure hope there’s a better way.

Answer
There is, and it’s fast and simple. I’ll show you how to dynamically link the Excel spreadsheet to your Word document so that when you make any change in the spreadsheet it instantly and automatically will appear in the document. Caveat: Both the spreadsheet and the document must be in the same folder (subdivision).

Go to the article for the remainder of the answer!

Bob Jensen's Excel tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm#Excel 

"Stop Word from Turning Every URL and E-mail Address into a Hyperlink," by Stanley Zarowin, Journal of Accountancy, August 2004, Page 95 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/aug2004/tech_qa.htm#Q2 

Question
I know somewhere deep in Windows there’s a place where I can command Word to stop automatically turning every e-mail address and URL into a hyperlink, but I can’t find it. While on occasion I’d like to be able to make some addresses and URLs hyperlinks so I can easily access them, I alone want to make that decision; I don’t want Word to second-guess me. 

Answer
There is such a place, and it’s right at your fingertips.

Go to the article for the answer.

Sign of the Times?

Just 34 percent of the 35,000 financial industry professionals who took the first section of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam this spring passed, which represents the highest failure rate since the test began in 1963. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/99597 

Center on Reinventing Public Education --- http://www.crpe.org/ 

Center for Higher Education Policy Studies --- http://www.utwente.nl/cheps/ 

CHEPS produces and disseminates knowledge with respect to higher education policy, especially at the system and institutional levels. CHEPS contributes to the advancement of the study of higher education as well as to the development of theory grounded in the disciplines as a means of increasing our understanding of institutional, national and international issues that bear upon higher education. CHEPS meets this objective by conducting research, both fundamental and applied, and by undertaking activities in education, training and consultancy that meets the needs of those concerned with the development of higher education.

CHEPS has a five year research programme, which guides its activities. The research programme for the period 2000 – 2005 carries the title “Higher education and the Stakeholders Society”. It evolves around the notion that present day higher education institutions are forced to be in constant dialogue with their stakeholders in society.

CHEPS strives to be relevant to societal needs and issues in its research and consulting activities. We contribute to the advancement of the study of higher education as well as the development of theory grounded in the disciplines. In doing so we help increase the understanding of institutional, national and international issues which are generated by higher education.

CHEPS combines practical advice with fundamental research, addressing key problems within the continuously changing world of higher education policy making, The following characteristics best describe the CHEPS approach:

· Inter-disciplinary perspectives

· Multi-level approaches to higher education

· Broad and comparative research interests

· Integrating research with education, training and consultancy

· International networks

Bob Jensen's education bookmarks are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm 

August 9, 2004 message from Jonathan West [webmaster@the-science-lab.com] 

We are creating a Science Directory - www.the-science-lab.com  - and we would like to include your website to our Anomalies and Alternative Science category - http://www.the-science-lab.com/Anomalies-and-Alternative-Science . Please submit your site's information here: http://www.the-science-lab.com/Anomalies-and-Alternative-Science/form.html .

A reciprocal link from your site would be appreciated. This is our linking code : <a href="http://www.the-science-lab.comAnomalies-and-Alternative-Science/">Anomalies and Alternative Science resources</a> - directory of Anomalies and Alternative Science related websites.

Thank you, 

Jonathan West, webmaster@the-science-lab.com .

 

Now there are two Paint Shop Pros to choose from It's not easy pleasing all of the people all of the time but we're trying. Last year, we polled Paint Shop Pro users and asked them what they wanted in future versions --- http://www.jasc.com/default.asp 

National Biological Information Infrastructure: Botany --- http://www.nbii.gov/disciplines/botany/ 

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service: Birds, Birds, Birds --- http://birds.fws.gov/ 

Museums Online http://www.museumstuff.com/ 
Note that there are three main classifications:  Art, Science, and History.

Gardens of Japan

Zen Gardens --- http://academic.bowdoin.edu/zen/index.shtml?overview 

"Poetry: American Pastoral," by Stephen Burt, The New York Times, August 15, 2004 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/books/review/15BURTL.html 

Poets have long used imagined rural worlds as refuges from, and symbols for, our own: simplified, purposely unrealistic shepherds, gardeners and fishermen let writers from Theocritus to Milton weave pastorals whose forests, fields and brooks encode claims about politics, religion, dead friends, living rivals or difficult loves. Modern poets have made their own versions of pastoral: for some, it includes any poem about a way of life or a setting remote from poet and readers, any fictive site or imagined retreat older and simpler than the way we live now.

To the hills and gardens where earlier poets found calm, Brigit Pegeen Kelly's third collection, THE ORCHARD (Boa Editions, paper, $14.95), brings a shocked, shocking and unfamiliar ferocity. Kelly's visions and elegies portray her as the only live human being in a sanguinary landscape of dogs, deer, mythical monsters, cracked statuary and children's graves: ''I lost the power,'' the title poem says, ''to tell the figures / In my dreams from those we call real.'' Among those figures are ''a flock of dead birds,'' ''a headless goat man'' and a ''lion with four heads, who looks this morning / As he rises from the shadows, like the creature / Who carries on his back the flat and shining earth.'' For Kelly, fertility and loyalty are inseparable from predation and death, as when ''the dead sparrow's / Brother sticks its head in the mouth of the lion.'' At times the whole book seems to mourn, and to gain its power by mourning, the same dead child: relentless lines pray and shout, demanding answers, but find ''waterstained stone cupids'' and ''the black black earth'' instead.

Kelly locates her stags, satyrs and statues far from their European origins, in her own vividly invented place. Emily Fragos's LITTLE SAVAGE (Grove, paper, $13) instead pursues art and music -- and the grief they may embody -- to sources in artists' real lives. ''Il Maestro del Violino'' speaks for the terminally ill children who once played music in a Venetian cloister: ''Those of us still pretty enough / to leave give concerts / in the open air.'' Fragos's characters confine themselves to schematic, limited worlds -- a recital room, a museum, an insane asylum. Her prodigies, madmen and performers (Maria Callas, Emily Dickinson, Glenn Gould) choose art as a shelter, with melancholy results. Though these chilly poems can sound too much like their sources (Sylvia Plath, Louise Gluck), at its best Fragos's trepidation, her self-defeating withdrawal, is just what her ''spare melodies of the slender bone flute'' describe.

Much of John Taggart's beautiful PASTORELLES (Flood Editions, paper, $13.95) sketches his slice of rural Pennsylvania and its ''old stage coach route,'' stone walls and ''young copper beeches''; with understated, photographic accuracy he even shows us stream beds and swales ''in a time of drought.'' The flat repetitions on which his verse depends can mimic dryness and frustration (his own and that of the stunted leaves) or turn more hopeful poems into catchy, jazz-inflected, quasi-mystical chants.

As in the work of George Oppen (one of his likely models), Taggart's poetic symbols are always ''also fact.'' His terse poems frame, and therefore make resonant, things simply seen -- an Amish girl rollerskating, a ''broken garlic clove,'' a museum of antique cars, ''shadows of lindens on the surface'' of water. Because he often sounds so reportorial, so unembellished, Taggart can get away with unironic high style when he chooses. His pastoral even includes a magical beloved who presides over a ''grove or green place'' -- ''surely you are the lady and dame of valor / who saved me.''

Pastoral long ago begat antipastoral, down-to-earth poems that show how difficult farming and herding really are. Paul Hunter's BREAKING GROUND (Silverfish Review Press, paper, $12) makes a detail-filled and trustworthy, if often unsurprising, contribution to that sturdy genre. Hunter shows his command of a speech-based free verse learned from William Carlos Williams, using its accents in gritty accounts of determination and endurance, as shown by rural people and the animals they tend. A superb pagelong one-sentence poem (''Because for Once There Was Too Much'') puts a bountiful harvest in stoical perspective. Longer poems explain how to dig a well, spread manure or bring hogs to market, stressing the virtues such work promotes: a mismatched team of geldings, for example, labors ''as one / to back out of a tight spot.''

State Fair Recipes (Food)  http://www.statefairrecipes.com 

FitnessOnline.com --- http://www.fitnessonline.com/ 

Smithsonian Institution-National Museum of Natural History: North American Mammals ---  http://web4.si.edu/mna/ 

Journey Through the Galaxy --- http://home.cwru.edu/~sjr16/advanced/index.html 

Lewis Carroll Scrapbook (history, literature) --- http://international.loc.gov/intldl/carrollhtml/lchome.html 

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

Memories

A little house with three bedrooms and one car on the street, 
A mower that you had to push to make the grass look neat.

In the kitchen on the wall we only had one phone, 
And no need for recording things, someone was always home.

We only had a living room where we would congregate, |
Unless it was at mealtime in the kitchen where we ate.

We had no need for family rooms or extra rooms to dine, 
When meeting as a family those two rooms would work out fine.

We only had one TV set, and channels maybe two, 
But always there was one of them with something worth the view.

For snacks we had potato chips that tasted like a chip, 
And if you wanted flavor there was Lipton's onion dip.

Store-bought snacks were rare because my mother liked to cook, 
And nothing can compare to snacks in Betty Crocker's book.

The snacks were even healthy with the best ingredients, 
No labels with a hundred things that make not a bit of sense.

Weekends were for family trips or staying home to play, 
We all did things together -- even go to church to pray.

When we did our weekend trips depending on the weather, 
No one stayed at home because we liked to be together.

Sometimes we would separate to do things on our own, 
But we knew where the others were without our own cell phone.

Then there were the movies with your favorite movie star, 
And nothing can compare to watching movies in your car.

Then there were the picnics at the peak of summer season, 
Pack a lunch and find some trees and never need a reason.

Get a baseball game together with all the friends you know, 
Have real action playing ball -- and no game video.

Remember when the doctor used to be the family friend, 
And didn't need insurance or a lawyer to defend?

The way that he took care of you or what he had to do, 
Because he took an oath and strived to do the best for you.

Remember going to the store and shopping casually, 
And when you went to pay for it you used your own money?

Nothing that you had to swipe or punch in some amount, 
Remember when the cashier person had to really count?

Remember when we breathed the air; it smelled so fresh and clean, 
And chemicals were not used on the grass to keep it green.

The milkman used to go from door to door, 
And it was just a few cents more than going to the store.

There was a time when mailed letters came right to your door, 
Without a lot of junk mail ads sent out by every store.

The mailman knew each house by name and knew where it was sent; 
There were not loads of mail addressed to "present occupant."

Remember when the words "I do" meant that you really did, 
And not just temporarily 'til someone blows their lid.

T'was no such thing as "no one's fault; we just made a mistake," 
There was a time when married life was built on give and take.

There was a time when just one glance was all that it would take, 
And you would know the kind of car, the model and the make.

They didn't look like turtles trying to squeeze out every mile; 
They were streamlined, white walls, fins, and really had some style.

One time the music that you played whenever you would jive, 
Was from a vinyl, big-holed record called a forty-five.

The record player had a post to keep them all in line, 
And then the records would drop down and play one at a time.

Oh sure, we had our problems then, just like we do today, 
And always we were striving, trying for a better way.

And every year that passed us by brought new and greater things, 
We now can even program phones with music or with rings.

Oh, the simple life we lived still seems like so much fun, 
How can you explain a game, just kick the can and run?

And why would boys put baseball cards between bicycle spokes, 
And for a nickel red machines had little bottled Cokes?

This life seemed so much easier and slower in some ways, 
I love the new technology but I sure miss those days.

So time moves on and so do we, and nothing stays the same, 
But I sure love to reminisce and walk down memory lane.

True or False?

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

In George Washington's days, there were no cameras. One's image was either sculpted or painted. Some paintings of George Washington showed him standing behind a desk with one arm behind his back while others showed both legs and both arms. Prices charged by painters were not based on how many people were to be painted, but by how many limbs were to be painted. Arms and legs are "limbs", therefore painting them would cost the buyer more. Hence the expression. "Okay, but it'll cost you an arm and a leg."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As incredible as it sounds, men and women took baths only twice a year! (May and October) Women kept their hair covered, while men shaved their heads (because of lice and bugs) and wore wigs. Wealthy men could afford good wigs made from wool. The wigs couldn't be washed, so to clean them they could carve out a loaf of bread, put the wig in the shell, and bake it for 30 minutes. The heat would make the wig big and fluffy, hence the term "big wig". Today we often use the term "here comes the Big Wig" because someone appears to be or is powerful and wealthy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the late 1700s, many houses consisted of a large room with only one chair. Commonly, a long wide board was folded down from the wall and used for dining. The "head of the household" always sat in the chair while everyone else ate sitting on the floor. Once in a while, a guest (who was almost always a man) would be invited to sit in this chair during a meal. To sit in the chair meant you were important and in charge. Sitting in the chair, one was called the "chair man". Today in business we use the expression or title "Chairman or Chairman of the Board".

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Needless to say, personal hygiene left much room for improvement. As a result, many women and men had developed acne scars by adulthood. The women would spread bee's wax over their facial skin to smooth out their complexions. When they were speaking to each other, if a woman began to stare at another woman's face she was told "mind your own bee's wax." Should the woman smile, the wax would crack, hence the term "crack a smile". Also, when they sat too close to the fire, the wax would melt and therefore the expression "losing face".

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ladies wore corsets that were laced up in the front. A tightly tied lace was worn by a proper and dignified lady as in "straight laced."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Common entertainment included playing cards. However, there was a tax levied when purchasing playing cards but only applicable to the "ace of Spades". To avoid paying the tax, people would purchase 51 cards instead. Yet, since most games require 52 cards, these people were thought to be stupid or dumb because they weren't "playing with a full deck."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Early politicians required feedback from the public to determine what was considered important to the people. Since there were no telephones, TV's or radios, the politicians sent their assistants to local taverns, pubs, And bars, who were told to "go sip some ale" and listen to people's conversations and political concerns. Many assistants were dispatched at different times. "You go sip here" and "You go sip there". The two words "go sip" were eventually combined when referring to the local opinion and, thus we have the term "gossip".

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At local taverns, pubs, and bars, people drank from pint and quart-sized containers. A bar maid's job was to keep an eye on the customers and keep the drinks coming. She had to pay close attention and remember who was drinking in "pints" and who was drinking in "quarts", hence the term "minding your "P's and Q's".

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Also, bet you didn't know this!!!! In the heyday of sailing ships, all war ships and many freighters carried iron cannons Those cannons fired round iron cannon balls. It was necessary to keep a good supply near the cannon, but how to prevent them from rolling about the deck?

The best storage method devised was a square based pyramid with one ball on top, resting on four resting on nine, which rested on sixteen. Thus, a supply of 30 cannon balls could be stacked in a small area right next to the cannon. There was only one problem...how to prevent the bottom layer from sliding or rolling from under the others.

The solution was a metal plate called a "Monkey" with 16 round indentations. But, if this plate were made of iron, the iron balls would quickly rust to it. The solution to the rusting problem was to make "Brass Monkeys." Few landlubbers realize that brass contracts much more and much faster than iron when chilled. Consequently, when the temperature dropped too far, the brass indentations would shrink so much that the iron cannon balls would come right off the monkey. Thus, it was quite literally, "Cold enough to freeze the balls off a Brass monkey". (And all this time, you thought that was an improper expression, didn't you?)

You must send this fabulous bit of historic knowledge to at least ten unsuspecting friends. If you don't, your floppy is going to fall off your hard drive and kill your mouse.

Louise Browning
PO Box 178 Philo, CA 95466

Forwarded by Team Carper

Are you tired of all those sissy "friendship" poems that always sound good, but never actually come close to reality? Well, here is a series of promises that really speaks to true friendship:

1. When you are sad - I will help get you drunk and plot revenge against the sorry bastard who made you sad.

2. When you are blue - I will try to dislodge whatever is choking you.

3 When you smile - I will know you finally got ____.

4. When you are scared - I will rag on you about it every chance I get.

5. When you are worried - I will tell you horrible stories about how much worse it could be and to quit whining.

6. When you are confused - I will use little words.

7. When you are sick - Stay the hell away from me until you are well again. I don't want whatever you have.

8. When you fall - I will point and laugh at your clumsy ass.

This is my oath. I pledge it till the end. Why?, you may ask. Because you are my friend.

And remember:

A good friend will help you move.

A really good friend will help you move a body.

Let me know if I ever need to bring a shovel.

Have a Blessed Day,

Forwarded by Auntie Bev (who lives in the deep south)

The South

The North has coffee houses, The South has Waffle Houses

The North has dating services, The South has family reunions.

The North has double last names, The South has double first names.

The North has Cream of Wheat, The South has grits.

The North has green salads, The South has collard greens

The North has lobsters, The South has crawdads.

Forwarded by Dick Haar

Farmer John lived on a quiet rural highway. But, as time went by, the traffic slowly built up at an alarming rate. The traffic was so heavy
and so fast that his chickens were being run over at a rate of three to six a day.

So one day Farmer John called the sheriff's office and said, "You've got to do something about all of these people driving so fast and
killing all of my chickens."

"What do you want me to do?" asked the sheriff.

"I don't care, just do something about those crazy drivers!"

So the next day he had the county workers go out and erected a sign that said: "SLOW: SCHOOL CROSSING".

Three days later Farmer John called the sheriff and said, "You've got to do something about these drivers. The 'school crossing' sign seems
to make them go even faster."

So, again, the sheriff sends out the county workers and they put up a new sign: "SLOW: CHILDREN AT PLAY".

That really sped them up. So Farmer John called and called and called every day for three weeks. Finally, he asked the sheriff, "Your signs
are doing no good. Can I put up my own sign?"

The sheriff told him, "Sure thing, put up your own sign. He was going to let the Farmer John do just about anything in order to get him to
stop calling everyday to complain.

Three weeks later, curiosity got the best of the sheriff and he decided to give Farmer John a call. "How's the problem with those drivers.
Did you put up your sign?"

"Oh, I sure did. And not one chicken has been killed since then. I've got to go. I'm very busy." He hung up the phone. The sheriff was really curious
now and he thought to himself, "I'd better go out there and take a look at that sign... it might be something that WE could use to slow down drivers..."

So the sheriff drove out to Farmer John's house, and his jaw dropped the moment he saw the sign. It was spray-painted on a sheet of wood:

"NUDIST COLONY ".

Forwarded by Maria

YOU KNOW YOU'RE IN WISCONSIN WHEN ___________

1. .If you consider it a sport to gather your food by drilling through 38 inches of ice and sitting there all day hoping that the food will swim by, you might live in Wisconsin.  

2. .If you're proud that your region makes the national news 96 nights each year because Park Falls is the coldest spot in the nation, you might live in Wisconsin. (Mom, he wrote this one for you! I wanted to change it to Medford, but decided to leave it as Jeff Foxworthy wrote it)  

3. If you have ever refused to buy something because it's "too spendy", you might live in Wisconsin.  

4. If your local Dairy Queen is closed from November through March, you might live in Wisconsin.  

5. If you instinctively walk like a penguin for five months out of the year, you might live in Wisconsin.  

6. If someone in a store offers you assistance, and they don't work there, you might live in Wisconsin.  

7. If your dad's suntan stops at a line curving around the middle of his forehead, you might live in Wisconsin.  

8. If you may not have actually eaten it, but you have heard of Head Cheese, you might live in Wisconsin.  

9. If you have worn shorts and a parka at the same time, you might live in Wisconsin.  

10. If you have either a pet or a child named "Brett", you might live in Wisconsin.  

11. If your town has an equal number of bars and churches, you might live in Wisconsin.  

12. If you have had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed a wrong number, you might live in Wisconsin.  

13. If you know how to say Oconomowoc, Waukesha, Menomonie & Manitowoc, you might live in Wisconsin.  

14. If you think that ketchup is a little too spicy, you might live in   Wisconsin. (What???????)  

15. If every time you see moonlight on a lake, you think of a dancing bear, and you sing gently, "From the land of sky-blue waters, you might live in Wisconsin.   ===============================================================   Series II. YOU KNOW YOU ARE A TRUE WISCONSINITE WHEN: .....................  

1. Your idea of a traffic jam is ten cars waiting to pass a tractor on the highway.  

2. "Vacation" means going up north past Hwy 8 for the weekend.  

3. You measure distance in hours.  

4. You know several people who have hit deer more than once.  

5. You often switch from "heat" to "A/C" in the same day and back again.  

6. Your whole family wears Packer Green to church on Sunday.  

7. You can drive 65 mph through 2 feet of snow during a raging blizzard, without flinching.  

8. You see people wearing camouflage at social events. (Including weddings and funerals  

9. You install security lights on your house and garage and leave both unlocked.  

10. You think of the major food groups as beer, fish, and venison.    

11. You carry jumper cables in your car and your wife or girlfriend knows how to use them.  

12. There are 7 empty cars running in the parking lot at Mill's Fleet Farm at any given time.  

13. You design your kid's Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit.  

14. Driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled  with snow.  

15. You refer to the Packers as "we."  

16. You know all 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter and  road construction.  

17. You can identify a southern or eastern accent.  

18. You have no problem pronouncing Lac Du Flambeau.  

19. You consider Minneapolis exotic.  

20. You know how to polka.  

21. Your idea of creative landscaping is a statue of a deer next to  your blue spruce.  

22. You were unaware that there is a legal drinking age.  

23. Down South to you means Illinois.  

24. A brat is something you eat.  

25. Your neighbor throws a party to celebrate his new pole shed.  

26. You go out to fish fry every Friday  

27. Your 4th of July picnic was moved indoors due to frost.  

28. You have more miles on your snow blower than your car.  

29. You find minus twenty degrees "a little chilly."  

30. You actually understand these jokes, and you forward them to all  your Wisconsin friends.      

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

We work like a horse. 
We eat like a pig. 
We like to play chicken. 
You can get someone's goat. 
We can be as slippery as a snake. 
We get dog tired. 
We can be as quiet as a mouse. 
We can be as quick as a cat. 
Some of us are as strong as an ox. 
People try to buffalo others. 
Some are as ugly as a toad. 
We can be as gentle as a lamb. 
Sometimes we are as happy as a lark. 
Some of us drink like a fish. 
We can be as proud as a peacock. 
A few of us are as hairy as a gorilla. 
You can get a frog in your throat. 
We can be a lone wolf. 
But we're having a whale of a time!

Forwarded by Paula

REDNECK CHURCH

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

the finance committee refuses to provide funds for the purchase of a chandelier because none of the members knows how to play one.

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

people ask, when they learn that Jesus fed the 5000, whether the two fish were bass or catfish, and what bait was used to catch 'em.

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

when the pastor says, "I'd like to ask Bubba to help take up the offering," five guys and two women stand up.

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

opening day of deer season is recognized as an official church holiday.

You Know Your Church Is  A Redneck Church if...

a member of the church requests to be buried in his 4-wheel-drive truck because "It ain't never been in a hole it couldn't get out of."

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

in a congregation of 352 members, there are only seven last names in the church directory.

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

high notes on the organ set the dogs on the floor to howling.

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

people think "rapture is what you get when you lift something too heavy.

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

the baptismal pool is a  # 2 galvanized washtub.

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

the choir robes were donated by (and embroidered with the logo from) Billy Bob's Barbecue.

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

the collection plates are really hub caps from a '56 Chevy.

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

instead of a bell, you are called to service by a duck call.

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

the minister and his wife drive matching pickup trucks.

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

the communion wine is Boone's Farm "Tickled Pink".

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

"Thou shalt not covet" applies to hunting dogs, too.

You Know Your Church Is A Redneck Church if...

the final words of the benediction are, "Y'all come back now!! Ya Hear!"

Forwarded by Paula

A photographer from a well-known national magazine was assigned to cover Southern California's wildfires. The magazine wanted pictures of the heroic work the firefighters were doing as they battled the blazes.

When the photographer arrived on the scene he realized that the smoke was so thick that it would seriously impede, or even make impossible, his obtaining good photographs from ground-level.

He requested permission from his boss to rent a plane and take photos from the air. His request was approved, and via a cell phone call to the local county airport, necessary arrangements were made. He was told a single-engine plane would be waiting for him at the airport.

He arrived at the airfield and spotted a plane warming up outside a hangar. He jumped in with his bag, slammed the door shut, and shouted, "Let's go!"

The pilot taxied out, swung the plane into the wind, and roared down the runway. Within just a minute or two of his arrival they were in the air.

The photographer requested the pilot to, "Fly over the valley and make two or three low passes so I can take some pictures of the fires on the hillsides."

"Why?" asked the pilot.

"Because I'm a photographer for a national magazine," he responded, "and I need to get some close-up shots."

The pilot was strangely silent for a moment; finally he stammered, "So, you're telling me you're not the flight instructor?"

Forwarded by Paula

Yesterday I decided to go to my first aerobics class. I bent and twisted, pushed and pulled, thrust my pelvis in and out, raised my arms and legs up and down, gyrated and contorted myself into all kinds of strange positions and exhausted myself jumping up and down for nearly an hour.

But by the time I got my leotard on, the class was over.

Forwarded by Dick Haar

A young boy had just gotten his driving permit. He asked his father, who was a minister, if they could discuss his use of the family car.

His father took him into his study and said, "I'll make a deal with you. You bring your grades up, study your Bible a little, get your hair cut and then we'll talk about it."

After about a month, the boy came back and again asked his father if they could discuss his use of the car. They again went into the father's study where the father said - "Son, I've been very proud of you. You have brought your grades up, you've studied the Bible diligently, but you didn't get your hair cut."

The young man waited a moment and then replied, "You know Dad, I've been thinking about that. You know Samson had long hair, Moses had long hair, Noah had long hair, and even Jesus had long hair." The minister said, "Yes, and everywhere they went, they walked."

Will Rogers, who died in a plane crash with Wylie Post in 1935, was probably the greatest political sage this country has ever known.  Enjoy the following:

                  1.  Never slap a man who's chewing tobacco.

                2.  Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.

                3.  There are 2 theories to arguing with a woman...neither works.

                4.  Never miss a good chance to shut up.

                  5.  Always drink upstream from the herd.

                  6.  If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

                  7.  The quickest way to double your money is to fold it and put it back in your pocket.

                  8.  There are three kinds of men: The ones that learn by reading.  The few who learn by observation.  The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence and find out for themselves.

                  9.  Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

                  10.  If you're riding' ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there.

                  11.  Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier'n puttin' it back.

                  12.  After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring.  He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.  The moral:
                  When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.

                  ABOUT GROWING OLDER...

                  First ~ Eventually you will reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.

                  Second ~ The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.

                  Third ~ Some people try to turn back their odometers.  Not me, I want people to know "why" I look this way.  I've traveled a long way and some of the roads weren't paved.

                  Fourth ~ When you are dissatisfied and would like to go back to youth, think of Algebra.

                  Fifth ~ You know you are getting old when everything either dries up or leaks.

                Sixth ~ I don't know how I got over the hill without getting to the top.

                 Seventh ~ One of the many things no one tells you about aging is that it is such a nice change from being young.

                  Eighth ~ One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.

                  Ninth ~ Being young is beautiful, but being old is comfortable.

                  Tenth ~ Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft.  Today it's called golf.

                  And finally ~ If you don't learn to laugh at trouble, you won't have anything to laugh at when you are old.

From the pulpit of Reverend Tom Golden, Sugar Hill Community Church, August 15, 2004

An atheist was hunting deep in the Northwest mountains when he stumbled upon Big Foot.  When the atheist's gun jammed, the enraged beast raced in snarling fury toward the helpless man.

"Oh God!  Save me," prayed the atheist.

God stopped the beast in its tracks and said to the atheist:  "Until today you never believed in me."

"Until today I also did not believe in Big Foot," answered the hunter.

You can read about the legend of Big Foot at http://www.rense.com/ufo3/bigfootinbc.htm

And that's the way it was on September 1, 2004 with a little help from my friends.

Jesse's Wonderful Music for Romantics (You have to scroll down to the titles) --- http://www.jessiesweb.com/

I highly recommend TheFinanceProfessor (an absolutely fabulous and totally free newsletter from a very smart finance professor) --- www.FinanceProfessor.com 

 

Bob Jensen's bookmarks for accounting newsletters are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#News 

News Headlines for Accounting from TheCycles.com --- http://www.thecycles.com/business/accounting 
An unbelievable number of other news headlines categories in TheCycles.com are at http://www.thecycles.com/ 

 

Jack Anderson's Accounting Information Finder --- http://www.umsl.edu/~anderson/accsites.htm

 

Gerald Trite's great set of links --- http://www.zorba.ca/bookmark.htm 

 

Paul Pacter maintains the best international accounting standards and news Website at http://www.iasplus.com/

 

The Finance Professor --- http://www.financeprofessor.com/about/aboutFP.html 

 

Walt Mossberg's many answers to questions in technology --- http://ptech.wsj.com/

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Household and Other Heloise-Style Hints --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm#Hints 

 

Bob Jensen's video helpers for MS Excel, MS Access, and other helper videos are at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/ 
Accompanying documentation can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/default1.htm and http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm 

 

Click on www.syllabus.com/radio/index.asp for a complete list of interviews with established leaders, creative thinkers and education technology experts in higher education from around the country.

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

 

August 14, 2004

Bob Jensen's New Bookmarks on August 14, 2004
Bob Jensen at Trinity University 

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.
This search engine may get you some hits from other professors at Trinity University included with Bob Jensen's documents, but this may be to your benefit.

Although he does not cite sources for some of the statistics provided in his letter, Ray does have first-hand experience.  His letter reads as follows:

A letter from Ray Reynolds, a medic in the Iowa Army National Guard, serving in Iraq. 

As I head off to Baghdad for the final weeks of my stay in Iraq, I wanted to say thanks to all of you who did not believe the media. They have done a very poor job of covering everything that has happened. I am sorry that I have not been able to visit all of you during my two week leave back home. And just so you can rest at night knowing something is happening in Iraq that is noteworthy, I thought I would pass this on to you. This is the list of things that has happened in Iraq recently: (Please share it with your friends and compare it to the version that your paper is producing.)  * Over 400,000 kids have up-to-date immunizations. * School attendance is up 80% from levels before the war. * Over 1,500 schools have been renovated and rid of the weapons stored there so education can occur. * The port of Uhm Qasar was renovated so grain can be off-loaded from ships faster. * The country had its first 2 billion barrel export of oil in August. * Over 4.5 million people have clean drinking water for the first time ever in Iraq. * The country now receives 2 times the electrical power it did before the war. * 100% of the hospitals are open and fully staffed, compared to 35% before the war. * Elections are taking place in every major city, and city councils are in place. * Sewer and water lines are installed in every major city. * Over 60,000 police are patrolling the streets. * Over 100,000 Iraqi civil defense police are securing the country. * Over 80,000 Iraqi soldiers are patrolling the streets side by side with US soldiers. * Over 400! ,000 people have telephones for the first time ever * Students are taught field sanitation and hand washing techniques to prevent the spread of germs. * An interim constitution has been signed. * Girls are allowed to attend school. * Textbooks that don't mention Saddam are in the schools for the first time in 30 years.   Don't believe for one second that these people do not want us there. I have met many, many people from Iraq that want us there, and in a bad way. They say they will never see the freedoms we talk about but they hope their children will! . We are doing a good job in Iraq and I challenge anyone, anywhere to dispute me on these facts. If you are like me and very disgusted with how this period of rebuilding has been portrayed, email this to a friend and let them know there are good things happening.  Ray Reynolds, SFC Iowa Army National Guard 234th Signal Battalion

Quotes of the Week

That some bankers have ended up in prison is not a matter of scandal, but what is outrageous is the fact that all the others are free.
Honoré de Balzac

You don't translate what the author wrote, but what he meant to say, this is why computers will never be able to translate.
Author unknown

One section of the (Sarbanes-Oxley) act also provides federal protection to would-be whistleblowers. As a result, warnings about accounting problems are reaching boardrooms at an unprecedented rate.
"Accounting Leads Rise, Making Boards Edgy," SmartPros, July 30, 2004 --- http://www.smartpros.com/x44556.xml 
Bob Jensen's threads on whistle blowing are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudconclusion.htm 

Dentists in Canada discover they have to pay fees to Canadian music publishers for the right to play copyright music in their offices. U.S. dentists may be surprised to find out that similar rules apply in their country.
Katie Dean, Wired News, August 2, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,64397,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html 
Bob Jensen's threads on the DMCA are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright 

American Express CEO Ken Chenault is about to launch a huge credit-card war. Backed by an antitrust ruling, he's gunning for Visa and MasterCard. Let the fight begin.
BusinessWeek Online's Insider [BW_Insider@newsletters.businessweek.com] July 30, 2004

Create a free service on the Internet, and you can be sure someone will find a way to exploit it financially. Porn peddlers are using Blogspot to increase page ranks on Google.
"Porn Blogs Manipulate Google," Danel Terdiman, Wired News, August 3, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,64422,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html 

The U.S. will announce plans to purchase 20,000 high-tech educational toys called LeapPads to educate rural Afghan women about health maintenance.
Queena Sook Kim, The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2004, Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109149503340581281,00.html?mod=gadgets%5Fprimary%5Fhs%5Flt 
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

Computer and Networking Aids for Solving Cold Cases:  Finding Justice
Twenty years after he found the Tent Girl, Riddle told his story to a teenager named Todd Matthews. And Matthews, driven by tragedies of his own, would become compelled to connect a life to her death. By figuring out who she was - and it's not giving the end away to say that he did - Matthews sparked a movement that is redefining how Does (unkinow murder victims) are identified. The methods are painstaking but simple: By trawling idiosyncratic combinations of Google, Yahoo! Groups, and personal as well as official Web sites, online sleuths have helped crack more than 20 long-unsolved cases. Their success has changed the way law enforcement and desperate families come to grips with these mysteries.
"Raising the Dead," by Noah Shachtman, Wired Magazine, August 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.08/matthews.html 

But for What Reasons?
Have accountants finally shed their dry bean-counter image? Can accounting be viewed as a "sexy" career choice? Maybe so, if the number of new accounting majors among college freshmen is any indication. Academics say the seemingly never-ending series of corporate scandals over the last few years has piqued the interest of today's students.
"Corporate Scandals Attract Students to Accounting," AccounitngWeb, August 2, 2004 --- 
 http://www.accountingweb.com/item/99558 

Bob Jensen's July-September 2004 Updates on Frauds and the Accounting Scandals --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud093004.htm 

Bob Jensen's April-June 2004 Updates on Frauds and the Accounting Scandals --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud063004.htm 

Without naming the organizations in question, the IRS's chief counsel has put credit-counseling agencies on notice saying most of them don't meet tax-exempt organization requirements. Currently, the IRS is auditing 50 credit-counseling agencies that account for nearly half the revenue within the $1 billion industry. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/99614 

There are many books banned in some schools and libraries (e.g., Huck Finn is the most widely banned book).    See http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/List%20of%20banned%20books 

And I suspect there are banned porn books that are illegal to publish and sell.  Some books banned at one time or another in the U.S. are listed at http://www.adlerbooks.com/banned.html 

A New Banned Book (well not entirely)
Only the author is not allowed to sell the book.
A federal appeals court has ruled that a well-known tax protester cannot sell his book, "The Federal Mafia," because it encourages people to commit fraud. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/99613

A federal appeals court has ruled that a well-known tax protester cannot sell his book, The Federal Mafia, because it encourages people to commit fraud.

Irwin Schiff, 76, of Las Vegas, who authored the book and owns a book store, may be able to sell a new version of the book if he removes the parts that push his tax evasion products and services, the New York Times reported Tuesday. Anyone but Schiff and two of his associates can sell the $38 book, the court ruled.

Schiff has gone to federal prison twice for tax crimes. He was indicted in March for helping more than 3,600 people try to avoid $56 million in taxes by reporting zero income on tax returns. Schiff calls the strategy a legal way to escape taxes, but the courts have rejected that claim, the Times reported.

Under law, the government is allowed to ban commercial speech if it encourages people to commit crimes. The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco contended that the book was a central part of Schiff’s marketing of tax-evasion schemes, therefore making it commercial in nature.

"The defendants have been selling products that help their customers engage in illegal activity," the decision said.

Chapter 1 is online at http://paynoincometax.com/chapter1.htm 

Used properly, credit cards offer significant safety and convenience benefits. But mistakes with credit can cost dearly; in time and money and in terms of credit rating. To help consumers avoid costly credit card errors, this article highlights the most common credit card mistakes and explains how to avoid them.
"The 10 Worst Credit Mistakes You Can Make," AccountingWeb, July 28, 2004 ---  http://www.accountingweb.com/item/99544 

Used properly, credit cards offer significant safety and convenience benefits. But mistakes with credit can cost dearly -- in time and money and in terms of credit rating. To help consumers avoid costly credit card errors, the Texas Society of Certified Public Accountants highlights the most common credit card mistakes and explains how to avoid them.

Mistake 1: Not shopping around for the best interest rate.

Credit card rates and terms vary greatly. Financial publications and the Internet are good sources to find the best credit card options. If you already have a major credit card, discuss rates with your card issuer. Customers in good standing can often negotiate lower rates.

Mistake 2: Choosing a card for the wrong reasons.

Some credit card holders choose a card to earn free airline miles or cash rebates -- without regard to the card's annual fee or interest rate. In the end, they may end up paying more in fees and interest than the value of the benefits they receive. Mileage and rebate cards might make sense for those who pay their balance in full each month, but if you don't, there's a good chance you're better off with a no-fee, low interest rate card.

Mistake 3: Being misled by introductory rates.

Watch out for credit cards with low initial "teaser" rates that increase significantly after a few months. Be aware, too, that sometimes the low initial rate applies only to balances you transfer from an existing card -- and not to new purchases.

Mistake 4: Not reading the small print.

Before you sign up, be sure you know the card's interest rate and how it is calculated, the grace period, fee schedule, and other terms. Once your card is activated, your credit card company is obligated to notify you of any changes in the terms of your account. Be sure to carefully read this information. If you don't like the terms, look for a new lender.

Mistake 5: Paying just the minimum payment due.

When you pay just the minimum due on your credit card, you're stretching out the repayment period and adding to your overall interest cost. Each month, you should allocate as much as you possibly can to more quickly pay down your credit card debt.

Mistake 6: Taking cash advances.

Plan ahead and avoid using your credit card for quick cash at a cash machine. Cash advances often come with high service fees and higher interest rates. To make matters worse, your payments may be applied first to your lower-interest balance.

Mistake 7: Being late with payments.

Credit card companies charge a late fee -- which could be as high as $30 - even if you're just one day late. To be sure your payment arrives on time, mail it at least 10 days in advance. Some issuers allow you to make last-minute credit card payments by phone or via overnight delivery service. You'll pay a fee, but it's likely to be considerably less than a late payment fee.

Mistake 8: Having too many credit cards.

There's little reason to have more than two national credit cards. If you have credit cards you no longer use, contact the issuer and arrange to close the account. Too many open credit cards -- even if they have zero balances - may cause a lender evaluating your mortgage or other loan application to question what would happen if you ran up balances on all of them.

Mistake 9: Not checking your monthly statement.

If you spot a problem, immediately notify your card issuer by phone and follow up with written correspondence. Be sure to send your note to the address for billing complaints, which may be different from the address to which you send your payments.

Mistake 10: Not valuing your credit.

A good credit rating is essential, and Texas CPAs say you should make every effort to keep your credit record clean.

Bob Jensen's threads on consumer and credit card fraud are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudreporting.htm#ConsumerFraud 

When a collection agency is involved, consumers should demand proof that a debt exists. The agency must note the dispute in any report to a credit bureau and must also establish the validity of the debt before continuing collection efforts.

Although Mr. Graham said he thought he had resolved the issue with AT&T, the debt was referred to a collection agency. After he sent proof that AT&T had accepted his final check, he thought the issue had been settled.

But in March, when Mr. Graham applied for a mortgage, he said he found that his credit score - a figure derived from credit accounts and bill-paying history, aimed at identifying who is most likely to repay debt - had dropped and he could not get the rate he wanted. This time, he sued NCO.

(Brian Callahan, a spokesman for NCO, said it did not comment on specific cases. He defended the company's practices, however, saying disputes were handled as required under federal law.)

"How to Mend a Credit Report That's Not Really Broken," by Barbara Whitaker, The New York Times, August 1, 2004 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/business/yourmoney/01credit.html?pagewanted=2 

BRIAN GRAHAM prides himself on paying his bills on time. So after he applied for a mortgage earlier this year, it came as a surprise that he was unable to qualify for a low adjustable rate.

The culprit was a $72 bill for a cellphone service cancellation fee - one he had disputed with AT&T Wireless. Mr. Graham said he thought the matter had been resolved, but it had instead been placed on his credit report.

"Brian, this isn't good," Mr. Graham recalled the mortgage agent telling him. "I would do something about it if you can." He tried, but after months of letters and phone calls, he has hired a lawyer and filed a lawsuit to try to clear his name.

Mr. Graham, 41, who lives in Oxford, Mich., and owns a business making foot and ankle braces, learned how hard it can be to clean up one's credit history, even when it is soiled in error.

Sometimes the dispute is over a small sum. Other cases may involve identity theft or something as ludicrous as being listed as dead. (It happens.) But once bad information is on file, removing it can be difficult.

"What we have is an industry that has completely run amok and is continuing to publish inaccurate information that harms consumers and does so without giving consumers an adequate remedy," said Ian Lyngklip, a lawyer in Detroit who is representing Mr. Graham. "Every one of these cases is like taking a little day excursion into the twilight zone."

Lawyers and consumer advocates say the system is overwhelmed. Rather than truly investigating complaints, they say, the big credit bureaus make only cursory checks.

Norm Magnuson, a spokesman for the Consumer Data Industry Association, which represents the major reporting agencies, defended the system, saying it handles huge volumes of information and processes complaints efficiently. The industry is required to resolve disputes in 30 days, he said, but in 80 percent of cases it does so in 10 days.

In June, U.S. PIRG, the Washington lobbying office for state Public Interest Research Groups, released a survey showing that 80 percent of credit reports had mistakes; one in four had errors serious enough that credit could be denied.

Complicating matters, lawyers say, collection agencies increasingly place even questionable debts on credit reports.

Richard J. Rubin, a lawyer in Santa Fe, N.M., who has worked extensively in the area, said, "They use the pressure of the negative report to the credit bureau, that's the pressure point, to make people pay the disputed debt."

Rozanne Andersen, general counsel with the American Collectors Association International, said members of her trade group were well informed of their duties on debt reporting and handling disputes. "I strongly disagree with the statement that debt collectors, when acting as data furnishers, avoid their responsibilities to update those credit reports,'' she said.

She said, however, that debt collectors had been frustrated because credit reports were not being updated quickly enough after errors were reported to the credit bureaus.

What can consumers do? First, they should know their rights and keep a watch on their credit reports. Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at U.S. PIRG, recommends that consumers check their report months before applying for a car loan or mortgage. By law, the big three national reporting bureaus - TransUnion, Experian and Equifax - must provide consumers a report once a year for $9, and consumers will soon be able to get one free report annually upon request.

Six states, including New Jersey, already require free reports. The new requirement is being phased in by region for the rest - the West Coast in December, the Midwest in March 2005, the South in June 2005 and the East Coast in September 2005. The changes in the disclosure requirements were part of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act, which passed Congress in November.

But consumers still face a big challenge in fixing errors.

The place to start, lawyers say, is the credit reporting bureau. Under an older law, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the bureaus must initiate an investigation after being notified by the consumer of a disputed entry. It is a good idea to notify the creditor, too. If the investigation does not resolve the dispute, consumers may ask the credit reporting agency to include a statement of the dispute in their files and in future reports.

But if the creditor says a debt should stay on a report, "the bureaus believe they are entitled to keep it on regardless of what the consumer says or provides," said Leonard Bennett, a lawyer in Newport News, Va., specializing in such cases.

Ultimately, the only recourse for consumers may be to sue the creditor or credit bureau for damages for not conducting a reasonable investigation.

When a collection agency is involved, consumers should demand proof that a debt exists. The agency must note the dispute in any report to a credit bureau and must also establish the validity of the debt before continuing collection efforts.

Although Mr. Graham said he thought he had resolved the issue with AT&T, the debt was referred to a collection agency. After he sent proof that AT&T had accepted his final check, he thought the issue had been settled.

But in March, when Mr. Graham applied for a mortgage, he said he found that his credit score - a figure derived from credit accounts and bill-paying history, aimed at identifying who is most likely to repay debt - had dropped and he could not get the rate he wanted. This time, he sued NCO.

(Brian Callahan, a spokesman for NCO, said it did not comment on specific cases. He defended the company's practices, however, saying disputes were handled as required under federal law.)

Denise Gohman, 54, of Clear Lake, Minn., had a similar experience when, in November 2002, she was denied credit to buy a wedding dress for her daughter because her credit report said she was dead. Wells Fargo, which had given Mrs. Gohman a loan to pay college tuition for another daughter, had erroneously listed her as dead after that daughter's death in 1998. Armed with documentation, Mrs. Gohman notified the bank's student loan division of the mistake and believed the matter to have been resolved.

BUT in August 2003, when she went to buy a truck, she was not only denied credit - Wells Fargo still listed her as dead - but, she said, she was taken into a back room of the dealership and accused of identity theft.

It was not until she hired a lawyer and filed a lawsuit that her report was corrected.

Continued in the article

Bob Jensen's threads on identity theft are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudreporting.htm#IdentityTheft 

From the AACSB:  Comparison of U.S. versus Canada MBA Enrollments --- http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/enewsline/Vol-3/Issue7/dd-MBAenrollment.asp 

Note that only only 2.2% of U.S. MBA students are enrolled in full-time distance learning MBA programs verus 15.5% in Canada.  Bob Jensen's threads on MBA and Masters of Accounting distance learning programs are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

The Gay MBA

"Schools Gain a Lavender Tinge," Business Week, August 14, 2004 --- http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/aug2004/bs2004085_7225_bs001.htm?c=bwmbaaug11&n=link1&t=email 

With gay and lesbian students increasingly assertive, B-schools are working to be more inclusive and boost opportunities for them When Kenneth Sormani joined Lehman Brothers as an analyst in 1982, he was often guarded when he talked to co-workers about his personal life. That's because he didn't want to disclose that he was gay. "When I started...most people weren't really 'out' on Wall Street," he says. However, 22 years have gone by, and Sormani now talks openly about his weekends and personal life at conferences and work. A senior vice-president of fixed income, Sormani is also one of about 80 New York members of the two-year-old Lehman Brothers Gay and Lesbian Network.

Times have changed -- for the better -- for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) professionals. The 90s introduced improved diversity policies at many corporations, allowing gay employees to be more open about their sexual orientation. Corporate America has welcomed several openly gay leaders, including E*trade's (ET ) former president, Kathy Levinson, and Allan Gilmour, Ford's (F ) vice-chair.

BENEFITS ALL AROUND. 

Taking a cue from the business world and, increasingly, from students, lifestyle policies at B-schools are starting to change, too. Gay professionals are now more assertive at B-schools, encouraging schools to take their diversity needs more seriously. GLBT clubs have a more visible presence on more campuses, and members urge schools to reach out to more gay MBA hopefuls. There's better access to networking with gay MBAs at other schools, and some schools help fund trips to national gay conferences. In the classroom, students are also pressing for more business case studies to feature prominent gay issues, like whether a major network can air a talk show hosted by someone who's against gay rights.

 

This is fascinating with all sorts of implications for research and future communication!

"Animated face helps deaf with phone chat," by Will Knight, NewScientist.com, August 4, 2004 --- http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996228 

Software that creates an animated face to match someone talking on the other end of a phone line can help people with hearing difficulties converse, suggests a new study.

The animated face provides a realistic impersonation of a person speaking, enabling lip-readers to follow the conversation visually as well as audibly.

The prototype system, called Synface, helped 84 percent of participants to recognise words and chat normally over the telephone in recently completed trials by the UK's Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID).

The RNID trials involved hard-of-hearing volunteers trying to decipher preset sentences and also taking part in real conversations.

Synface takes around 200 milliseconds - one fifth of a second - to generate the animated annunciations. But the system incorporates a fractional delay, so that the face is perfectly synchronised with the voice on the end of the line.

Regional dialects

Synface runs on an ordinary laptop and can be connected to any type of phone, including a cell phone. It uses a neural network to match voice to mouth movements. This mimics the way neurons operate inside the brain and can be trained to recognise patterns.

The neural network used by Synface identifies particular sounds, or "phonemes", rather than entire words. This has been shown to be a particularly fast way of matching words to animation. By concentrating on sounds the system can also represent words that it has not encountered previously.

The technology is not meant to assist people who are profoundly deaf, but rather those who have some hearing difficulties. Around one in seven people in western countries fall into this category. So far, Synface has been trained to work in English, Swedish and Dutch. It could also be fine-tuned to recognise different regional dialects.

"The accuracy still needs to be improved," admits Neil Thomas, head of product development at the RNID. But he says it could eventually make life easier for many people who have trouble hearing.

"There are a lot of people who struggle with using the telephone," Thomas told New Scientist. "It really gives them an added level of confidence."

The system was developed by researchers at Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, Sweden, University College London, UK as well as Dutch software company Viataal and Belgian voice analysis firm Babletech.

Bob Jensen's threads on text reading are at http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#Text2 

Bob Jensen's threads on technology aids for the handicapped and learning challenged are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped 

Bob Jensen's threads on multivariate faces are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm#faces 

Double Congratulations to Mark, John, and Robin

Two very surprising announcements at the 2004 American Accounting Association Annual Meetings in Orlando were the announcements on separate days that a single paper had won both the 2004 Notable Contributions Award and the Wildman Award among highly qualified competitors for both awards.  I think this is the first time that a single paper ran away with both awards.

It's a good paper from both the standpoint of theory and practice.  It stands in the face of capital markets studies that could not find evidence of earnings management (read that manipulation) on the part of corporate managers.

"How Are Earnings Managed? Examples from Auditors," by Mark W. Nelson, John A. Elliott, and Robin L. Tarpley, Accounting Horizons, Quality of Earnings Supplement 2003 Issue May 20, 2003 --- http://aaahq.org/ic/browse.htm 

This paper reports descriptive evidence about how managers attempt to manage earnings, based on a sample of 515 earnings-management attempts obtained from a survey of 253 experienced auditors (and also analyzed by Nelson et al. 2002). We classify attempts first according to primary approach: expense recognition, revenue recognition, issues unique to business combinations, and other issues. Then, within each of those broad categories, we subclassify attempts by the particular approach used in the attempt. For each specific approach, we report the accounts involved, the frequency with which the approach increased or decreased current-period income (and the frequency of adjustments required by the auditor), and provide descriptions by auditors of income-increasing and income-decreasing examples of the more frequent approaches. We also link our findings to recent SEC Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAERs) that illustrate extreme versions of the specific approaches identified by our participants. This experienced-based, example-rich framework and frequency data should assist investors, auditors, audit committees, and other participants in the financial reporting process who need to be vigilant for earnings-management approaches.

Question
What is phishing?

Answer
Phishing is a term standing for password harvesting fishing.

"Phishing Scams Just Keep Coming," by Greg Keizer, Information Week, August 3, 2004 --- http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=26805648 

Phishing attacks were back up in June, the Anti-Phishing Working Group said Tuesday, as the scams that continue to plague users and steal millions from financial institutions climbed to all-time records. The group, an association of more than 250 companies, tracked 1,422 new unique phishing attacks in June, an increase of 19% over May's 1,197, and more than 25% higher than the previous month's record.

The average number of attacks per day was up even more: 47.4 in June versus 38.6 a day in May. In an earlier report this summer, the group noted that while May's first few weeks were thick with phishing scams, schemers seemed to take a vacation around Memorial Day. That vacation, obviously, is over. For the year so far, phishing has been growing about 52% per month. No wonder the scams are getting the attention of users and the financial organizations victimized by the attacks.

The solution, said the group, lies in sender authentication, a scheme in which E-mail essentially "proves" to the recipient that it came from where it said it came from. "As phishing attacks continue to increase at a rate of more than 50%, enterprises must turn to authentication-based technologies," said Jeff Smith, CEO of Tumbleweed, the founding firm of the Anti-Phishing Working Group.

The Internet Engineering Task Force is meeting in San Diego this week and is expected to approve the Sender ID standard, a blending of Microsoft's Caller ID and the Sender Policy Framework protocol by Friday.

Shutting down address spoofing may be the best way to stop phishing, said the anti-phishing group's report, since 92% of all phishing E-mails use bogus addresses.

In other analysis of phishing figures, the APWG noted that the average "life span" for a phishing site is a mere 2.25 days, an indication of how fast scammers cut and run--and thus how difficult it is to track them down. And for the first time, the group also did an in-depth analysis of a single phishing attack.

Over a 12-day run during late June and early July, two banks were hit with identical attacks from a series of bogus sites hosted in multiple countries--including the United States, Uruguay, and South Korea--with the sites shifted daily during four of the days of the attack.

"This indicates the participation of at least one well-orchestrated, systematic criminal organization in the phishing world," the anti-phishing group's report concluded. The analysis backs up claims by state and federal law enforcement that phishing is linked to organized crime based in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The top phishing targets didn't change in June. Citibank again had the dubious honor of being the most hijacked brand, accounting for 36% of all attacks, while eBay, US Bank, PayPal, and Fleet retained their May spots as two through five, respectively.

Continued in the article

Bob Jensen's threads on computer and network security are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection 

Question 
What is a PSM Masters Degree in Business?

Answer

"Science Master's For Business Draws Critics," by Nishad H. MaJmudar, The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2004, Page B1 

Twyla Tiongson Pohar expected her bachelor's degree in molecular biology to help launch her career.

But employers told her she needed either a doctorate, requiring years of research, or business experience, which she didn't have, to land her ideal job as a biological information analyst.

She turned instead to a newly available alternative: a degree that combines science and business. In 2002, Ms. Tiongson Pohar earned a professional science master's, or PSM, in computational biology from New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. She parlayed it into a $55,000-a-year job managing the development of software for researchers at Ohio State University's cancer center.

"I feel I've been given a tremendous opportunity," says the 26-year-old New York native.

Unknown as recently as seven years ago, the professional science master's degree has expanded rapidly. About 900 students are currently pursuing PSMs at 45 colleges and universities in 17 states, in fields including bioinformatics, biotechnology, financial mathematics and environmental sciences.

Unlike traditional graduate science programs, which concentrate on academics and research, the PSM programs have a strong real-world component. PSM students typically take many of the same courses as in traditional programs but instead of conducting research for a dissertation, as they would in a doctoral program, they embark on industry internships, learn business and patent law, and work with other students on business-oriented projects in the classroom.

PSM-granting schools say the programs will increase the number of students in the sciences, promote greater science literacy in business and government, and reduce the outsourcing of higher-skilled U.S. jobs abroad. But critics, particularly in the Ivy League and other top colleges, say the degree waters down standards in graduate science courses and accentuates textbook learning over independent thought.

Traditionally, top graduate programs in the sciences have enrolled only students who are capable of the independent research needed to receive a doctoral degree. At elite schools, would-be doctoral candidates who don't win that top degree usually end up with a master's of science degree as a consolation prize.

          Continued in the article

August 2, 2004 message from Ethical Performance [list_admin@ethicalperformance.com] 

Ford Motor Company's 2003-04 Corporate Citizenship Report - which covers a wide range of topics from the Escape Hybrid sports utility vehicle to human rights and HIV/AIDS prevention - is now available.

Organized once again around Ford's seven Business Principles, the new report provides data and a review of performance in each area.

A special section, entitled Feature Articles, examines areas where Ford believes it has made significant progress or faces particular challenges, including the Company's expanding investment in China and a look at the potential of hydrogen fuels and advanced technologies.

The report also has commentary from people inside and outside Ford on important issues such as climate change, vehicle safety and community engagement.

The full report and an opportunity for you to provide direct feedback can be viewed at http://www.ford.com/go/globalcitizenship. 

Printed hard copies of the report can be requested from mailto:corpcit@ford.com.

About 40% of workers now travel for business, and that figure will rise to two-thirds by the end of 2006, by some estimates. As the roster of road warriors grows, so will the demand for new gadgets to keep business running smoothly. Here are 10 technologies that companies are using to keep their mobile workers connected and productive.

"On the Road Again," The Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2004 --- http://online.wsj.com/page/0,,2_1097,00.html?mod=home_in_depth_reports 

Wi-Fi + VOIP = ?  http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109051080284071051,00.html?mod=2%5F1097%5F2   The ability to make wireless calls over the Internet is coming. But the combination of wireless calls and the Internet may unleash a whole new set of unpredictable changes in the telecommunications industry.   Getting Old Photos Onto Your PC  http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109059952883672336,00.html?mod=2%5F1097%5F2  The next time you have a few weeks with nothing to do, here's a project guaranteed to kill the time: Grab that old shoebox full of snapshots and scan them into your computer.   H-P Gets a Makeover http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109052778547671386,00.html?mod=2%5F1097%5F2   Hewlett-Packard has long been known as one of Silicon Valley's old gray ladies, famous for dull products such as financial calculators and heavy-duty printers. But the company hopes a new design initiative can turn around its dull image.   Expanding Cells  http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109059481168772289,00.html?mod=2%5F1097%5F2  What will your cellphone be able to do in the future? South Korea -- where residents already use their phones to watch movies, activate home appliances and post photos on Web sites -- offers some clues.   1-800-USELESS  http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109059641035272309,00.html?mod=2%5F1097%5F2  For consumers, call centers are often a descent into voice-mail hell. Maybe they don't have to be. Companies are starting to spend money on technology to revolutionize the way call centers operate, for a more efficient and friendly experience for customers.   Lost in Traffic  http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109052982818971448,00.html?mod=2%5F1097%5F2  As the e-commerce boom snowballs, big retailers have begun piling into comparison sites -- and making life a lot tougher for their small competitors. Here's how the little guy can survive.   Videophones: The New Generation  http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109051654537871156,00.html?mod=2%5F1097%5F2  Videophones have been promised as an everyday device for decades. But now, broadband connections are breathing new life into a technology that has never lived up to its potential.   Photo Ops  http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109052470765771301,00.html?mod=2%5F1097%5F2  The problem: What do you do with all those pictures you can now take on your cellphone? The solution: moblogs.   Business Solutions: Protecting Your Network  http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109059703283972319,00.html?mod=2%5F1097%5F2  Software makers try to stay ahead of attacks by issuing a steady stream of patches installed manually on each desktop. Now, better ways to manage patches are emerging -- and they promise to make the protection process faster and more efficient.   Web Watch  http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109051200985071085,00.html?mod=2%5F1097%5F2  From golf equipment to garden art -- see what's hot on the Web.

Bob Jensen's threads on technology gadgets are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob4.htm 

UTOPIA  --- http://utopia.utexas.edu/ 

What if every Texan had access to the University of Texas’ vast reservoir of knowledge and cultural assets at the touch of a button? What if we said this was an achievable goal? The University of Texas at Austin has launched UTOPIA, an ambitious new initiative designed to open the University’s doors of knowledge, research, and information to the public. In the words of UT President Larry R. Faulkner, “We will provide access for every citizen, via a personalized Internet window, into the resources of our libraries, collections, museums, and much more. The University is a dynamo, now with the power to bring light into every home and business in Texas, and we mean to realize that potential.”

July 31, 2004 reply from Peter Kenyon [pbk1@HUMBOLDT.EDU] 

Some library resources (computer databases) are acquired under vendor contracts that include access restrictions to only "regular" university users.

We know that many business databases are provided to our libraries at reduced rates by vendors hoping to build future demand for full-fare business users.

Does anyone else see a problem here?

Peter Kenyon 
Humboldt State

 

Children's Books Online ---  http://www.childrensbooksonline.org/ 

Safe Sites for Kids --- http://www.iste.org/standards/ 

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 

American Family: Journey of Dreams (History) --- http://www.pbs.org/americanfamily/ 

QUANTITATIVE FINANCE AND RISK MANAGEMENT A Physicist's Approach
by Jan W Dash

This book is designed for scientists and engineers desiring to learn quantitative finance, and for quantitative analysts and finance graduate students. Parts will be of interest to research academics --- http://www.worldscientific.com/books/economics/5436.html 

804pp	Pub. date: Jul 2004
ISBN 981-238-712-9	US$98 / £73

Contents:

• Introduction, Overview, and Exercise
• Risk Lab (Nuts and Bolts of Risk Management)
• Exotics, Deals, and Case Studies
• Quantitative Risk Management
• Path Integrals, Green Functions, and Options
• The Macro-Micro Model (A Research Topic)

Bob Jensen's links to tutorials on hedging and hedge accounting are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/133glosf.htm#Tutorials 

From Syllabus News on August 3, 2004

Product News Flash: Here Comes the Multimedia Blue Book

Testing and assessment software provider Questionmark has joined with Macromedia, creator of all things “Flash,” to release a software tool that enables authors of quizzes, tests, exams and surveys to incorporate Flash movies within questions.

The companies said that the Questionmark Perception Flash Connector works together with Macromedia’s Flash to provide “a high level of context within which a question can be answered.” For example, detecting a hazardous situation such as a chemical spill or an ignition source within the setting of a Flash movie can measure someone's sensitivity to hazards better than a multiple choice question. Now authors can use sound and videos and place measurable interactions within that context. Perception Flash Connector, which supports Flash 5, Flash MX and Flash MX 2004, makes it possible to evaluate and score an interaction and pass the information on to Perception for collation and reporting.

Bob Jensen's threads on resources are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm#Resources 

ADVANCES IN QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF FINANCE AND ACCOUNTING New Series edited by Cheng-Few Lee (Rutgers University, USA) http://www.worldscientific.com/books/economics/5405.html 

Advances in Quantitative Analysis of Finance and Accounting, New Series (AQAFANS) is a continuation (with new features) of the similarly titled book series that was previously published by JAI Press from 1991. AQAFANS is an annual publication designed to disseminate developments in the quantitative analysis of finance and accounting. It is a forum for statistical and quantitative analyses of issues in finance and accounting, as well as applications of quantitative methods to problems in financial management, financial accounting, and business management. The objective is to promote interaction between academic research in finance and accounting, applied research in the financial community, and the accounting profession.
Contents:

• An Analysis of the Difficulty in Correctly Identifying Discretionary Accruals (T Yaekura & D A Ziebart)
• Cash Settlement and Futures Price Volatility: Evidence from Options Data (L Chan & D Lien)
• Reinterpretation of Market-to-Book Equity (W Paek & H Sami)
• The Time-Series Properties of Financial Statement Line Items (T A Carnes)
• Investigating Bid-Ask Spread Components Between the NYSE and the CBOE (M-H Chiang & Y Lin)
• The Usefulness of Cash Flows from Operations in Executive Cash Compensation (S S M Yang & Q J Yin)
• Bank Size, Diversification, and Nonsystematic Risk: Evidence from Australian Banks (C-T Lin & C-C Ho)
• Firm Characteristics and Accounting Policy Choice for Environmental Liabilities (B Bae & H Sami)
• and other papers

JOURNAL OF RESTRUCTURING FINANCE ** (New!)

Inaugural issue out!!! View Free Online --- http://www.worldscinet.com/jrf.html 

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: A Global Industry in the Making

Articles

A Theory of Debt Disorganization
Keiichiro Kobayashi

HIPC Debt Sustainability Thresholds: Revisiting the Case for a Uniform Formula for Debt Relief
Peter Hjertholm

Default Costs, Willingness to Pay, and Sovereign Debt Buybacks
Jonathan P. Thomas

Bailing-In
Matthew R. Mcbrady and Mark S. Seasholes

Default Without Disruption: Simulation of a Sovereign Debt Restructuring
Adam Lerrick and Sanjay Srivastava

The Problem of Sovereign Debt Restructuring: Holdout Problem and Exit Consents
Kentaro Tamura

Subnational Debt Restructuring and the Rule of Law
Steven L. Schwarcz

Precedents in Sovereign Bond Default and Restructuring
Luisa Palacios

The Reform of the Sovereign Debt Restructuring Process: Problems, Proposed Solutions, and the Argentine Episode
Nouriel Roubini and Brad Setser

Turning Loans into Bonds: Lessons for East Asia from the Latin American Brady Plan
Ross P. Buckley

Tools for the Analysis of Debt Problems
Federico Sturzenegger

Industry Perspective

Who Are Those Guys? Answers from a Survey of the Turnaround Profession
Harlan D. Platt and Marjorie B. Platt

Book Review

Book Review: "Restructuring Sovereign Debt: The Case for Ad Hoc Machinery"
Lex Rieffel

 

But for What Reasons?
Have accountants finally shed their dry bean-counter image? Can accounting be viewed as a "sexy" career choice? Maybe so, if the number of new accounting majors among college freshmen is any indication. Academics say the seemingly never-ending series of corporate scandals over the last few years has piqued the interest of today's students.
"Corporate Scandals Attract Students to Accounting," AccounitngWeb, August 2, 2004 --- 
 http://www.accountingweb.com/item/99558 

"Accounting Grads See Starting Salary Increase," SmartPros, July 27, 2004 --- http://www.smartpros.com/x44487.xml 

Average starting salary offers to college graduates are on the rise, according to the Summer 2004 Salary Survey, which was recently published by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Accounting graduates continue to see their average starting salary increase; they've posted gains in each of the 2004 Salary Survey reports. Currently, they are averaging $41,110, a 1.4 percent gain over last year at this time.

Similarly, graduates in economics/finance and marketing/marketing management saw their offers increase. The average starting salary for economics/finance graduates rose 2.1 percent to $40,906. Marketing/marketing management grads saw their average starting salary rise to $35,321, a 2 percent increase over last year.

Overall, almost all of the business disciplines continue to show increases in their average starting salaries. For example, business administration graduates saw their average starting salaries increase to $38,188, a 2.9 percent jump from last year at this time.

"There have been definite signs of improvement to average starting salary offers for the Class of 2004," said Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director. "For instance, at the bachelor's degree level, two-thirds of the disciplines that reported a percentage change in salary over last year reported increases."

Management information systems (MIS) graduates are now averaging $42,098, up 2.9 percent over last year at this time.

The survey is a quarterly report of starting salary offers to new college graduates in 70 disciplines at the bachelor's degree level. The survey compiles data from college and university career services offices nationwide.

"New BLS Guide Outlines Accounting Trends and Job Outlook," SmartPros, April 21, 2004 --- http://www.smartpros.com/x43328.xml 

Bob Jensen's threads on accountancy careers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#careers 

Deciding Not to Decide

August 2, 2004 message from Glen Gray [glen.gray@CSUN.EDU] 

Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 1:34 PM 
Subject: No decision is a decision

I'm sure somebody on this list has a good answer to my question.

I frequently tell students that making no decision is decision. Am I quoting somebody when I say that? If yes, who? If I'm not quoting somebody, can you recommend a quote that makes a similar point?

Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA 
Dept. of Accounting & Information Systems 
College of Business & Economics 
California State University, 
Northridge Northridge, CA 91330-8372 
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f 

August 2 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Glen,

There is a complicating issue of “not making a decision” among competing alternatives versus a decision to exclude all decision alternatives and criteria.  For example, an alcoholic’s decision not to become a bartender or be in situations where liquor is available is not the same as deciding not to consume any alcohol while tending bar.  (Actually, many bartenders are former alcoholics, including my friend at the inn down the road from where I live).

Decisions to avoid alternatives for “making a decision” go back to the earliest recorded history where all competing temptations are deliberately avoided   You should easily find ancient quotes on this.  Economists have been notorious in this regard.

It seems to me that the context of your quotation is much like agnosticism.  You're contending that the choice of not making a judgment is a decision among competing alternatives that include not deciding.  Some would argue that we face three choices:   1) choose to believe 2) choose to not believe or 3)choose to not make a judgment about the existence of a God.   But we also face a choice of not thinking about the alternatives one way or the other.

You would argue that an agnostic has made a decision of not making any judgment.  But others might argue that the agnostic has simply avoided competing alternatives.  This is especially the case for individuals to simply decide not to think about belief in God one way or the other.  My point is that rationally deciding to be an agnostic is not the same as avoidance of considering any alternatives of belief.  The happy idiots and animals other than humans never think any deep thoughts about which to cast judgments.

It seems to me that many examples can be found where “not making a decision” can be attributed to avoidance of alternatives rather than “deciding not to decide.”

Recall the highly emotional scene in Our Town by Thornton Wilder.  The spirit Emily breaks down into sobs, "I can't, I can't go on. It  goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another." Finding  the scene too painful, she wants to leave. She asks the Stage Manager to take her back "up the hill to my grave." As she bids farewell to Grover's Corners, she exclaims, "Oh earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize. . .Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?" --- http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmOurTown24.asp

My point is that making choices not “to realize” is not the same is making choices to avoid that which is realized.  Is Emily making a decision not to decide or is Emily making a decision not to be confronted with any alternatives in life?

Something similar takes over in real life when we choose on the basis of a mathematically optimal solution in any model that has excluded many variables.  The decision to accept the model’s outcome is also a decision to not attempt to “realize” all of the implications of the missing variables in the model.  This is not the same as having one of the model’s choices be to postpone making a decision because there are too many important missing variables.  The latter choice is difficult to build into a model of the missing variables are important to that choice.

As another example, I recently sent out a message from a U.D. Department of Defense Auditor attempting to blow the whistle on defense contracting fraud using negative inventories and his alleged poor audit decision by PwC.  Some of you may have read Richard’s letter to me an then “made a decision” not to decide whether this is fraud or not.  Others will simply have not opened the message thereby avoiding thinking about the issue one way or the another.  This is a different type of decision not to decide.

The bottom line here is that “deciding not to decide” can be much more complicated that it appears at first blush.

Bob Jensen

August 2, 2004 reply from David Fordham

Glen, the Sci-Fi writer Isaac Asimov has provided a plethora of good quotes from the dialogs between the characters in his many books. One of them that I remember vividly is "If you've decided not to decide, then you've already decided", but I can't recall which book it is from. I'm pretty sure it is a line in one of the Foundation series, however. (Asimov did the first three Foundation books, later did a fourth by popular demand, and the Asimov foundation commissioned three more by other writers after his death. I'm pretty sure the quote is from one of the first three.)

David R. Fordham

August 2, 2004 reply from Randy Elder [rjelder@SYR.EDU] 

My response will not have quite the intellectual depth of the others you have received. A line from the song Freewill by the Canadian rock group Rush includes: "If you choose not to decide You still have made a choice"

Randy

July 30, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu] 

VIDEO ON COPYRIGHT ISSUES

"The Copyright Court," produced by the ResearchChannel at the University of Washington, is an entertaining new video on copyright issues relevant to university faculty and staff. This 13-minute video may be useful for anyone who is interested in the issue or who needs resources for educating faculty and staff. The copyright video can be viewed by going to http://researchchannel.org/inside/participation/production.asp and scrolling to the bottom of the screen. Several streaming options are available, including Windows Media and QuickTime.

ResearchChannel is a non-profit organization founded in 1996 by a consortium of leading research universities, institutions, and corporate research centers dedicated to creating a widely accessible voice for research through video and Internet channels.

More Accounting Professors Needed

"Accounting in College Lures More Students," by Diya Gullappalli, The Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2004, Page C1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109104541327776698,00.html

Poor Publicity Makes Field Seem Necessary, Perhaps Even Sexy; 

More Professors Needed

Here are some numbers that don't appear to add up. Even as the accounting profession has endured a torrent of negative publicity, more college students are enrolling in accounting programs.

The enrollments are so strong that some universities face a problem: a shortage of professors to teach these young bean-counters.

Some schools nationwide report record numbers of accounting applicants for the fall semester, on top of strong gains over the past year. Most of the students know all about the accounting blowups spanning the globe, from Enron Corp. in Houston to Parmalat SpA in Italy .

"What this tells us is there's no such thing as bad publicity," says Ira Solomon, head of the department of accountancy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "All the focus on accounting created a perception to students that accounting matters and is perhaps even sexy."

College professors cite the Sarbanes-Oxley securities-reform act of 2002 as a factor: It has created new jobs in the industry by extending auditors' duties at many companies. In an uncertain economy, many students see an accounting job as one of the surest bets for employment upon graduation. The pay is relatively good, even as banking and consulting jobs have been tougher to come by.

However, the comeback of the accounting career occurs as the number of business doctorates produced is at a 17-year low and universities struggle to recruit new accounting professors. That leaves many wondering who will be left to teach all the new rules and regulations to the growing student pool. While many academic fields are suffering from professor shortages, the issue is more acute in accounting because of the pull toward high-paying public-accounting jobs.

The number of accounting degrees awarded nationwide in 2003 jumped 11% from the year before, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. The University of Illinois , one of the nation's biggest producers of accountants, saw a 66% increase in undergraduate accounting majors from 2001 to 2004, to 379 students, and a surge to 93 graduate students, up from 11 in 2001. At Florida International University in Miami , which the AICPA says has the nation's largest accounting program, incoming student enrollment jumped 43% between 2000 and 2003. The University of Michigan , another big school, reports a 76% increase in accounting master's students over the past three years.

Academics say the accounting scandals piqued people's interest. They believe that Enron, for example, allowed accountants to shake their dry bean-counter stereotype and rise up as potential heroes.

"I don't want to go as far as comparing this to the FBI during the Depression, but students definitely now see an Eliot Ness-like quality to accounting," says J.B. Bird, director of communications at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, referring to the 1930s Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who nabbed Chicago crime boss Al Capone. The school runs the nation's second-largest accounting program.

Still, the nearly 50,000 accounting degrees awarded by all schools in spring 2003 is short of the peak of more than 60,000 for the 1994-95 academic year, the AICPA's figures show. Even before the most recent spate of accounting debacles, enrollment was slipping, as many potential auditors trained instead for finance jobs on Wall Street or in the technology sector. "I don't feel like we can just step back and say it's gotten better," says Brent Inman, partner in charge of recruiting at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. "We as a profession still have work to do."

And some students say that the post-Enron jitters haven't gone away. "Accountants are more behind the scenes and the only credit they do get is when something bad happens," says Elizabeth Murphy, who finished a master's in accounting this May from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . She "wavered back and forth on" entering the program. "I knew I had to think through putting my foot into this problem." She will be joining the international tax division of Big Four accounting firm KPMG LLP this fall.

But as accounting departments draw more students, consider the woes of San Diego State University 's School of Accountancy . While the school enjoyed a 27% increase in accounting enrollment between 2001 and this year, to 594 students, five of its 15 accounting professors are expected to retire in the next five years.

School officials say state budget cuts of 12% in each of the past two years have forced them to cancel two candidate searches since 2002. Last month, a state accounting organization, CalCPA, investigated the matter in an article entitled "Dude, Where's my Teacher?" The article lamented the difficulties California faces attracting professors, for reasons including its high costs. "The market is very thin in terms of entry-level Ph.D. candidates," says Andy Barnett, chair of the SDSU School of Accountancy.

Only 110 accounting Ph.D.s were awarded nationwide in 2002, down 4% from the previous year, according to the AICPA. As a result, the number of faculty openings is now more than twice the number of submitted resumes, the American Accounting Association says.

To combat the decreases, some schools have upped entry-level accounting-professor salaries to as much as $140,000, ranking them up there with many medical-school professors. The hope is to make accounting professorships competitive with positions at medium-size accounting firms, which on average offer $45,000 annual base salaries for entry-level employees and $135,000 for partners. (By contrast, liberal-arts professors earn as little as $30,000 at some public schools, even with tenure.)

Dick Dietrich, chair of the Department of Accounting and Management Information Systems at the Ohio State University , says the program's 30% international student population finds it easy to obtain visas and teach right away due to the shortages, and the university also recently hired a former Arthur Andersen partner, among other practicing professionals .

Educators remain hopeful that the shortages won't slow down the growing interest in accounting. "People are now going in understanding that this is a high-risk profession that requires a lot of integrity and courage, but is an important part of the economy," says David Wright, head of the masters in accounting program at the University of Michigan, where master's enrollment has jumped to 60 from 34 students since 2001. "We are finding people who are truly passionate about accounting."

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting careers are at --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#careers 

Accounting Roundup from Deloitte and Touche --- http://www.iasplus.com/usa/04jul28.pdf 

July 30, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu] 

NEW BOOK OF ONLINE EDUCATION CASE STUDIES

ELEMENTS OF QUALITY ONLINE EDUCATION: INTO THE MAINSTREAM, edited by John Bourne and Janet C. Moore, is the fifth and latest volume in the annual Sloan-C series of case studies on quality education online. Essays cover topics in the following areas: student satisfaction and student success, learning effectiveness, blended environments, and assessment. To order a copy of the book go to http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/volume5.asp. You can download a free 28-page summary of the book from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/vol5summary.pdf.

The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information, see http://www.sloan-c.org/.

---

COMBATING CHEATING IN ONLINE STUDENT ASSESSMENT

In "Cheating in Online Student Assessment: Beyond Plagiarism" (ONLINE JOURNAL OF DISTANCE LEARNING ADMINISTRATION, vol. VII, no. II, Summer

2004) Neil C. Rowe identifies "three of the most serious problems involving cheating in online assessment that have not been sufficiently considered previously" and suggests countermeasures to combat them. The problems Rowe discusses are:

-- Getting assessment answers in advance

It is hard to ensure that all students will take an online test simultaneously, enabling students to supply questions and answers to those who take the test later.

-- Unfair retaking of assessments

While course management system servers can be configured to prevent taking a test multiple times, there can be ways to work around prevention measures.

-- Unauthorized help during the assessment

It may not be possible to confirm the identity of the person actually taking the online test.

You can read the entire article, including Rowe's suggestions to counteract the problems, at http://www.westga.edu/%7Edistance/ojdla/summer72/rowe72.html.

The Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration is a free, peer-reviewed quarterly published by the Distance and Distributed Education Center, The State University of West Georgia, 1600 Maple Street, Carrollton, GA 30118 USA; Web: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/jmain11.html.

---

SOCIAL INTERACTION IN ONLINE LEARNING

Among the reasons Rowe cites (in the aforementioned paper) for cheating on online tests is that "students often have less commitment to the integrity of distance-learning programs than traditional programs." This lack of commitment may be the result of the isolation inherent in distance education. In "Online Learning: Social Interaction and the Creation of a Sense of Community" (EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY, vol. 7, no. 3, July 2004, pp. 73-81), Joanne M. McInnerney and Tim S. Roberts, Central Queensland University, argue that an online learner's feeling a sense of isolation can affect the outcome of his or her learning experience. The authors recommend three protocols to aid social interaction and alleviate isolation among online learners:

1. The use of synchronous communication

"Chat-rooms and other such forums are an excellent way for students to socialize, to assist each other with study, or to learn as part of collaborative teams."

2. The introduction of a forming stage

"Discussion on almost any topics (the latest movies, sporting results,

etc.) can be utilized by the educator as a prelude to the building of trust and community that is essential to any successful online experience."

3. The adherence to effective communication guidelines "Foremost among these guidelines is the need for unambiguous instructions and communications from the educator to the students involved in the course. To this end instructions regarding both course requirements and communication protocols should be placed on the course web site."

The complete article is online at http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/7_3/8.html.

Educational Technology & Society [ISSN 1436-4522] is a peer-reviewed quarterly online journal published by the International Forum of Educational Technology & Society and the IEEE Computer Society Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). It is available in HTML and PDF formats at no cost at http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/.

The International Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS) is a subgroup of the IEEE Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). IFETS encourages discussions on the issues affecting the educational system developer (including AI) and education communities. For more information, link to http://ifets.ieee.org/.

......................................................................

ONLINE COURSES: COSTS AND CAPS

Two articles in the July/August 2005 issue of SYLLABUS address the often-asked questions on delivering online instruction: "How much will it cost?" and "How many students can we have in a class?"

In "Online Course Development: What Does It Cost?" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12, July/August 2004, pp. 27-30) Judith V. Boettcher looks at where the costs of online course development have shifted in the past ten years. While the costs of course development are still significant, estimating them is not an exact science. Boettcher, however, does provide some rules of thumb that program planners can use to get more accurate estimates. The article is available online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9676.

 

In "Online Course Caps: A Survey" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12, July/August 2004, pp. 43-4) Boris Vilic reports on a survey of 101 institutions to determine their average course cap for online courses. The survey also tried to determine what influences differences in setting caps: Does the delivery method used make a difference? Are there differences if the course is taught by full-time faculty or by adjuncts? Or if given by experienced versus inexperienced providers? Or by the level (undergraduate or graduate) of the course? The article is available online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9679.

Syllabus [ISSN 1089-5914] is published monthly by 101communications, LLC, 9121 Oakdale Avenue, Suite 101, Chatsworth, CA 91311 USA; tel: 650-941-1765; fax: 650-941-1785; email: info@syllabus.com; Web: http://www.syllabus.com/. Annual subscriptions are free to individuals who work in colleges, universities, and high schools in the U.S.; go to http://subscribe.101com.com/syllabus/ for more information.

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education in general are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of distance education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

Modern Language Association Language map ---  http://www.mla.org/resources/census_main 

Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America (History) http://www.alexanderhamiltonexhibition.org/index.html 

Bob Jensen's threads on history are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#History 

July 30, 2004 message from finance_news@worldscientific.com 

FROM ADAM SMITH TO MICHAEL PORTER

Evolution of Competitiveness Theory

by Dong-Sung Cho & Hwy-Chang Moon (Seoul National University) http://www.worldscientific.com/books/economics/4531.html

GOLFONOMICS

by Stephen Shmanske (California State University, Hayward, USA) http://www.worldscientific.com/books/economics/5411.html

=== Online Sample Chapters Avaliable! ===

SOUTHEAST ASIA

The Long Road Ahead

(Second Edition)

by Lim Chong Yah (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) http://www.worldscientific.com/books/economics/5446.html

=== Online Sample Chapters Avaliable! ===

 

July 30, 2004 message from David R. Fordham [fordhadr@JMU.EDU] 

It continues to astound me that seemingly-intelligent people can be so superstitious and paranoid as to have no objections to being given a name, having their photo on their drivers license, or having their fingerprints taken, (by a “government”, no less), but yet those same people can act so childish and immature when it comes to other, more practical and far more precise, more authenticable, less forgable, ways of achieving the exact same purpose with even fewer potential drawbacks and disadvantages. I’ll bet that a lot of cult worshippers of that purveyor of entertainment George Orwell will shed tears over the following article because of their paranoic fear of … well, I honestly don’t know what, but these same people would also scream and holler if the vastly-superior way of meeting the fundamental security need (e.g., biometrics) were to be introduced as an alternative.

“The problem with stupid people is that they are always the ones opposing change. Hello? Anybody see anything wrong with this picture?” – Louie Anderson

PS: You don’t need a subscription to read the article below.

David R. Fordham
PBGH Faculty Fellow
James Madison University

-----Original Message----- 
From: IMA Strategic Technotes [mailto:imacommunications@imanet.org]  
Sent: Friday, July 30, 2004 10:56 AM 
To: David R. Fordham Subject: Strategic TechNotes Vol 6 No 14

Greetings IMA TechNotes Readers,

Are you ready to trade the ID card that gets you in the building every day for a small chip that can be implanted in your arm? Some workers are not being given a choice. Law enforcement employees at the new anti-crime information center in Mexico City have been “chipped,” and there are Americans who are also being implanted with tiny radio devices that carry an identification number. You can read Wireless Humans by visiting http://www.imanet.org/ima/technotes/default.htm .

Best wishes, 
Michael Castelluccio 
Technology Editor Strategic Finance

Update on Electronic Books

The U.S. will announce plans to purchase 20,000 high-tech educational toys called LeapPads to educate rural Afghan women about health maintenance.
Queena Sook Kim, The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2004, Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109149503340581281,00.html?mod=gadgets%5Fprimary%5Fhs%5Flt

When Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson visited Afghanistan at the end of 2002, he found not just wrecked hospitals and a scarcity of health-care workers.

He also found a pressing need for health education among Afghan women. But in a country where 80% of women are illiterate, the agency couldn't rely on the educational pamphlets commonly used elsewhere in the world.

So Mr. Thompson turned to an unlikely solution: the educational toy LeapPad, a product of LeapFrog Enterprises Inc. of Emeryville, Calif. The electronic book sells for around $40 and is a mainstay in suburban U.S. homes; it is designed to teach reading, and recites out loud to kids when they touch the words on the page.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services plans to announce today that it is purchasing 20,000 LeapPads. Rather than featuring the likes of Dr. Seuss, these modified LeapPads will educate rural Afghan women about the benefits of immunization, the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases and the perils of some homespun remedies, such as rubbing dirt into cuts to heal them. The special LeapPads talk in either Pashto or Dari, Afghanistan's two most common languages.

Mr. Thompson says such education is sorely needed in a country where diarrhea or acute respiratory infections kills nearly 40% of all children, and where 1,600 out of every 100,000 women die in childbirth. (The U.S. rate is 7.5.) "If this works, we can make this a tool across the world," says Mr. Thompson. "We can use it for AIDS in Africa and for health care in Iraq."

The $1.25 million deal could also give a much-needed boost to LeapFrog, one of the country's top toy makers. Launched in 1995 as a technology-based education company, LeapFrog made its first big splash with the 1999 introduction of LeapPad. Such electronic learning toys are now one of the fastest-growing categories in the industry; from 1999 to 2003, LeapFrog's overall revenue jumped from $71.8 million to $680 million.

But lately, both the toy industry and LeapFrog have seen sales dip. In LeapFrog's case, analysts said the company shipped too much product last Christmas, resulting in soft demand after the holidays. Those inventory problems helped push the company's share price down to below $20 from a high last year of $47.30.

Continued in the article

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

Multinational corporations may be looking at a big increase in reported liabilities and a deep cut to profits if a change in deferred-tax accounting is adopted by the Financial Accounting Standards Board. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/99541 

From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Educators' Review on Junly 30, 2004

TITLE: FASB May Bite Into Overseas Profits 
REPORTER: Lingling Wei 
DATE: Jul 28, 2004 
PAGE: C3 
LINK: Print Only 
TOPICS: Financial Accounting, Financial Accounting Standards Board, International Accounting Standards Board

SUMMARY: The FASB has voted 4-3 to instruct the staff to examine "whether it is practical to require companies to book a liability for taxes they potentially owe on profits earned and held overseas."

QUESTIONS: 
1.) What was the vote undertaken at the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)? Did this vote actually establish a new accounting requirement? Explain, commenting on the FASB's process for establishing a new accounting standard.

2.) Why did the FASB undertake this step with respect to deferred taxes? How does it fit in with other work being undertaken in concert with the International Accounting Standards Board?

3.) FASB member Michael Crooch comments that "there is a fair amount of opposition to the change" proposed by the FASB. Do you think such opposition is unusual or common for FASB proposals? Support your answer.

4.) Define the term "deferred taxes". When must deferred taxes be recorded? Why do we bother to record them? That is, how does the process of reporting deferred taxes help to improve reporting in the balance sheet and income statement?

5.) What taxes currently are recorded on foreign earnings? Why do companies currently not calculate deferred taxes for profits on foreign earnings? Why then would any change in this area result in "a major hit to earnings"?

6.) Why do you think that companies might reconsider repatriating foreign earnings if they must begin to record deferred taxes on those amounts? What does your answer imply in regards to the economic consequences of accounting policies?

Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island 
Reviewed By: Benson Wier, Virginia Commonwealth University 
Reviewed By: Kimberly Dunn, Florida Atlantic University

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory.htm 

Forwarded by Debbie