"Homeowners Should Know Tax Implications," AccountingWeb, June 17, 2005 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=101013

Homeowners enjoy generally favorable tax treatment when they sell their principal residence, thanks to a 1997 tax code change that eliminates taxes on capital gains. But experts say that not everyone wins under the law, and it pays to be savvy about all the tax implications associated with buying and selling. Now that some economists are warning of a possible cooling in housing prices, it's as important as ever to be aware of what the laws mean to you.

First, some statistics. According to the National Association of Realtors, the national median price for an existing home was $206,000 in April, which was up 15 percent from April 2004, when it was $179,000, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The top economist for mortgage giant Fannie Mae, David Berson, predicts housing prices rising by about 6.5 to 7 percent in 2005, but there is “a chance” of regional declines in homes sales in 2006, he said at a press briefing.

Now for the tax rules. Some tips from Tom Herman of the Wall Street Journal:

Generally, if you sell your primary residence, and you've lived there for at least two years, you don't have to pay taxes on up to $500,000 of gain if you're married and filing jointly. An example provided by the Journal: Suppose you and your spouse bought your first home in the mid-1990s, have lived in it ever since, and your cost basis is $100,000. This year, you sell it for $600,000. Because of the 1997 law, you typically wouldn't owe any capital-gains taxes because your profit didn't exceed the maximum exclusion of $500,000. (The maximum exclusion for single taxpayers is $250,000.)

Using the same home as an example, if you sell for $1.1 million, no capital-gains taxes would be owned on $500,000 of your $1 million gain, but the other $500,000 would be taxable.

Most people benefit from the 1997 rules, but some don't because they can no longer defer capital gains by buying another primary residence. The so-called “rollover” provision was eliminated when the 1997 rules were put in place.

If you are a single person who netted a gain of $400,000 in a house sale and bought a new home right away for more than that, say $600,000, you could have deferred capital gains under the old rules because the gains were “rolled over” into the new home. Current law says you would owe capital gains tax on $150,000 - the amount over the maximum $250,000 single-person exclusion.

Some tax planners urge clients who are looking at gains that are above the exclusion amount to consider also selling assets that have lost money. Martin Nissenbaum, national director of personal income-tax planning at Ernst & Young in New York, told the Journal that the losses can then be used to offset some or all of the gain on home sale.

Conferring with a tax professional is always a good idea, considering the huge range of tax incentives, credits and rules out there.

Bob Jensen's tax helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation

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Taxes for online purchases will soon be "unavoidable"
Online shoppers could be forgiven for overlooking a California court ruling last month that might end the tax-free joyride they've been enjoying on the information superhighway.The appeals court ruling said megabookstore Borders Inc. had to pay $167,000 in taxes that it owed based on Internet sales from 1998 and 1999. The reasons are complicated and experts disagree on the results. Looking at the big picture, however, it appears that somehow, sometime in the future, most people who buy things online will pay taxes.
Robert MacMillan, "An Unavoidable Tax," The Washington Post, June 20, 2005 --- http://snipurl.com/UnavoidableTax

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Online Pricing
University of Pennsylvania professor Joseph Turow calls this "the evolution of a culture of suspicion. From airlines to supermarkets, from banks to Web sites, American consumers increasingly believe they are being spied on and manipulated. But they continue to trade in the marketplace because they feel powerless to do anything about it." His article on the subject appeared in Sunday's Outlook section.
Joseph Turow, "Online Pricing," The Washington Post, June 20, 2005 --- http://snipurl.com/OnlinePricing

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Tax-friendly versus Tax-unfriendly states in  2005 --- http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/08/real_estate/tax_friendly/index.htm

Top honors go to the tax-friendly states of Alaska, New Hampshire and Delaware.

Most unfriendly? Maine, New York, D.C.

Every year, the Tax Foundation measures the total tax bill for each state, creating a list of the most – and least – tax-friendly states in the country. See the full list here. And see more state rankings based on income tax, sales tax, property tax and tax breaks for retirees. In creating its rankings, the Tax Foundation measures as a percentage of per capita income what residents pay in income, property, sales and other personal taxes levied at the state and local levels. It also factors in the portion of business taxes passed along to state residents through higher prices, lower wages or lower profits. The Tax Foundation is a nonpartisan, nonprofit policy research group that advocates, among other things, tax simplification.

 

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Academic Career Advice From Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution, June 20, 2005  --- http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/06/simple_career_a.html

Simple advice for academic publishing

Last week I gave a talk on career and publishing advice to a cross-disciplinary audience of graduate students.  Here were my major points:

1. You can improve your time management.  Do you want to or not?

2. Get something done every day.  Few academics fail from not getting enough done each day.  Many fail from living many days with zero output.

3. Figure out what is your core required achievement at this point in time -- writing, building a data set, whatever -- and do it first thing in the day no matter what.  I am not the kind of cultural relativist who thinks that many people work best late at night.

4. Buy a book of stamps and use it.  You would be amazed how many people write pieces but never submit and thus never learn how to publish. 

5. The returns to quality are higher than you think, and they are rising rapidly.  Lower-tier journals and presses are becoming worth less and less.  Often it is the author certifying the lower-tier journal, rather than vice versa.

6. If you get careless, sloppy, or downright outrageous referee reports, it is probably your fault.  You didn't give the editor or referees enough incentive to care about your piece.  So respond to such reports constructively with a plan for self-improvement, don't blame the messenger, even when the messenger stinks.  Your piece probably stinks too.

7. Start now.  Recall the tombstone epitaph "It is later than you think."  Darth Sidious got this one right.

8. Care about what you are doing.  This is ultimately your best ally.

Here is a good article on academic book publishing and how it is changing.

Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 19, 2005 at 06:36 AM in Education | Permalink

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From Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution comes this brief piece on getting published in the academic sense. A key need for the scholarship of Extension. Although it is aimed at grad students, it is sound advice for everyone. I just need to follow it more [Read More]

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A new illustration of "satisficing" (a term phrased by early researchers of decision theory at Carnegie Mellon University)

"So-So Results With Technology," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, June 17, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/06/17/tech

College administrators love to boast about how their institutions are national leaders in all kinds of ways. But when it comes to technology systems used for colleges’ many business operations, very few people claim to be leaders. Most, in fact, seem to think their systems aren’t so great.

That is the chief finding of a survey of college chief information officials, released Thursday by Educause.

The CIOs were asked, in a series of business categories, whether the systems they had in place put their institutions at risk, were adequate, satisfactory, make their colleges leaders, or made the colleges exemplars. Generally, “adequate” and “satisfactory” were the most common answers, with relatively few institutions seeming to feel that their systems were at a point of crisis, and even fewer feeling that their systems were anything to rave about.

For instance, in the category of “developing budgets,” 61.6 percent of those responding said that their systems were adequate, while 9.7 percent said that they were at risk. Only 1.4 percent thought that their institutions had systems that were exemplars. Similarly, in the category of “tracking budgets and expenditures,” only 1.4 percent saw their institutions as exemplars while 11.3 percent saw their institutions as being at risk.

The study organizes business functions into various categories. In the area of human resources, functional areas that received relatively high “at risk” ratings included managing positions (18.2 percent), recording time and attendance (16.7 percent), managing compensation (14.1 percent) and recruiting employees (12.9 percent). An area with atypically strong satisfaction is payroll, where only 1.3 percent saw their institutions at risk and 8.4 percent saw their institutions as leaders.

In student services, areas with high “at risk” responses included auditing degree completion (20.6 percent) and managing events (20.2 percent). Maintaining grades was a function with high satisfaction, with only 0.7 percent seeing their institutions at risk, and 15.9 percent seeing their institutions as leaders.

Grants management is a category causing consistently high worry among CIOs. More than 20 percent considered their systems “at risk” in the areas of tracking proposals, preparing proposals and reporting time spent on grants management.

So why are so many colleges less than thrilled with the technology that they pay so much to buy, license and maintain? The Educause report attributes this to concept of “satisficing,” which holds that decision makers in certain situations will decide to stick with technology is “good enough” because the costs of getting optimal performance are too high.

Continued in article

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Evaluating Faculty at the University of Tennessee
Jan R. Williams, "Faculty Evaluation: Lessons Learned," AACSB eNewsline --- http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/enewsline/Vol-4/Issue-6/dc-janwilliams.asp

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From The Scout Report on June 23, 2005

Adium X 0.82 http://www.adiumx.com/ 

For better or worse, more people enjoy copious amounts of online messaging while at work, at play, or just out at the beach. Adium X 0.82 is one such device that enables this particular form of social communication. It happens to function as a multiple protocol instant-messaging client, and it includes support for AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Trepia, and Napster. With the program, users can manage multiple conversations and also maintain a presence on multiple services simultaneously. This version of Adium is compatible with Mac OS X 10.2.7 or later.

Bob Jensen's threads on resources are http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm#Resources

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From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review, June 24, 2005

TITLE: SEC Weighs a 'Big Three' World
REPORTERS: Deborah Solomon and Diya Gullapalli
DATE: Jun 22, 2005
PAGE: C1 LINK:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111939468387765810,00.html
TOPICS: Auditing, Auditing Services, Auditor Changes, Auditor Independence, Personal Taxation, Public Accounting, Regulation, Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Securities and Exchange Commission, Tax Shelters

SUMMARY: As described in the related article, Justice Department officials are debating whether to seek an indictment of KPMG from a criminal case built by Federal prosecutors for the firm's sale of what the prosecutors consider to be abusive tax shelters. The Justice Department is concerned about competitiveness of the audit profession if KPMG collapses as did Arthur Andersen and only three large firms are left. As described in the main article covered in this review, the SEC already is considering relaxing some of the auditor independence rules because of the difficulties in implementing them with only four large firm auditing most publicly-traded companies.

QUESTIONS:
1.) What auditor independence rules have been implemented as a result of Sarbanes-Oxley? Hint: to help answer this question, you may refer to the AICPA's summary of this Act available at http://www.aicpa.org/info/sarbanes_oxley_summary.htm

2.) What steps has the SEC taken to relax some standards for firms switching auditors? When did the SEC institute these allowances? What trade-offs do you think the commissioners considered in making these allowances to relax the standards?

3.) Why is the SEC again concerned about what actions it may have to take to allow for firms to switch auditors?

4.) What is the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board? What role can this entity play in establishing public policy because of the concerns with the shrinking number of large public accounting firms?

5.) Refer to the related article. For what reason might KPMG LLP be indicted? Does this potential indictment have anything to do with the audit services provided by this firm?

6.) How is the potential indictment affecting all aspects of KPMG's practice regardless of the culpability of the firm's audit partners? How do you think this potential indictment affects all firm employees' perception of the need for control procedures over the firms' activities in all practice areas?

Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island

--- RELATED ARTICLE ---
TITLE: KPMG Faces Indictment Risk on Tax Shelters
REPORTER: John. R. Wilke
PAGE: A1
ISSUE: Jun 16, 2005
LINK: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111888827431261200,00.html

Bob Jensen's threads on the two faces of KPMG are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#KPMG

Bob Jensen's threads on the future of auditing are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#FutureOfAuditing

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German proverb: "Whose bread I eat his song I sing."

"Auditors: Too Few to Fail," by Joseph Nocera, The New York Times, June 25, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/business/25nocera.html

Yet the word now seems to be that the Justice Department will probably not indict the firm (KPMG). This is partly because KPMG has belatedly apologized, admitted the tax shelters were "unlawful," and cut adrift its former rising stars (and tried to shift the blame for the shelters to them). And it is working to come up with a deal with prosecutors that, however painful, will fall short of the death penalty.

But it's also because the government is afraid of further shrinking the number of major accounting firms. Remember when people used to say that the major money center banks were "too big to fail"- meaning that if they ever got in real trouble the government would have to somehow ensure their survival? It appears that with only four big accounting firms left, down from eight 16 years ago, there are now "too few to fail." How pathetic is that?

. . .

"What infuriates me about the accounting firms is the enormous power they have," said Howard Shilit, president of the Center for Financial Research and Analysis. "You just can't compel them to do things they ought to do. And the fewer firms there are, the more concentrated their power." To my mind, the biggest problem is the hardest to change - that accounting firms are paid by the same managements they are auditing. Nobody really thinks about changing this practice mainly because it's been that way forever. But, "it's the elephant in the room," said Alice Schroeder, a former staff member at the Financial Accounting Standards Board who later became a Wall Street analyst. In the memorable phrase of Warren E. Buffett's great friend and the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Charles T. Munger - quoting a German proverb: "Whose bread I eat his song I sing."
 

June 26, 2005 reply from Denny Beresford [dberesford@TERRY.UGA.EDU]

Bob,

The author of this article has set up a "Forum" in which readers are encouraged to report their reactions to the issue of so few major accounting firms. It's at www.nytimes.com/business/columns . There are some very interesting comments already recorded - some of the suggestions might actually make sense.

Denny

The forum link is at http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/businesstechnology/accounting/index.html

June 27, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen

Some of the forum's replies are from nut cases.  But there are some good suggestions, particularly the suggestion about pooling of audit fees.  This would not eliminate the risk of a bad audit, but it does take the fee negotiation risk out of the picture.  The mako59 reply from a PwC CPA is well written.

Bob Jensen's threads on the two faces of KPMG are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#KPMG

Bob Jensen's threads on the future of auditing are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#FutureOfAuditing

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From Jim Mahar's Blog on June 27, 2005 --- http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
Jay Ritter finds that shareholder returns are negatively correlated with economic growth.
In his words:
 

"... does economic growth benefit stockholders? This article argues on both theoretical and empirical grounds that the answer is no. Empirically, there is a cross-sectional correlation of –0.37 for the compounded real return on equities and the compounded growth rate of real per capita GDP for 16 countries over the 1900-2002 period."

"I am not arguing that economic growth is bad. There is ample evidence that people who live in countries with higher incomes have longer life spans, lower infant mortality, etc. Real wages are higher. But although consumers and workers may benefit from economic growth, the owners of capital do not necessarily benefit."

Later:
 

"This article argues that limited historical data on stock returns are not a constraint, since these data are irrelevant for estimating future returns, whether in emerging markets or developed countries. This point has been made before, although possibly not as explicitly, in Fama and French (2002) and Siegel (2002), among other places. Of greater originality, this article argues that not only is the past irrelevant, but to a large extent knowledge of the future real growth rate for an economy is also irrelevant."

"I argue that only three pieces of information are needed for estimating future equity returns. The first is the current P/E ratio, although earnings must be smoothed to adjust for business cycle fluctuations. The second is the fraction of corporate profits that will be paid out to shareholders via share repurchases and dividends, rather than accruing to managers or blockholders when corporate governance problems exist. The third is the probability of catastrophic loss, i.e., the chance that “normal” profits are a biased measure of expected profits because of “default” due to hyperinflation, revolution, nuclear war, etc. This third point is the
survivorship bias issue, applied to the future."
 

A few other highlights:
 

"I believe that the large stock price effects associated with recessions are partly due to higher risk aversion at the bottom of a recession, but also due partly to an irrational overreaction."
 

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A nice summary of XBRL --- http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=11168

Talking Points XBRL IS WINNING SUPPORTERS

XBRL is an XML-based standard for analysis, exchange and reporting of financially oriented business information. Its initial use will be to meet mandates for financial reporting and analysis. Any organization that is familiar with XML is already much of the way there. Everything that needs to be done can be done outside the ERP and GL systems in middleware. The SEC is fueling interest in XBRL, although its official position is pointedly neutral. Using XBRL is voluntary, but that may change soon.

Meet the new addition to the XML family, XBRL. eXensible Business Reporting Language represents another derivative of XML and promises to streamline the integration of business reports and automate the corresponding financial and business analysis. Although the initial uses of XBRL focus on financial reports that must be sent to the FDIC and SEC, it can be applied to almost any category of business reporting. XBRL also is being used in Europe to meet financial reporting mandates.

“XBRL represents a significant advance, but don’t expect it to change things overnight,” says Robert Kugel, VP and research director at Ventana Research. To start, XBRL “makes it easier to deal with financial numbers,” he explains. Therefore, the initial uses of XBRL for mandated financial reporting and the accompanying analysis of those reports represent only the beginning of what the technology can do.

Ultimately, “XBRL has the potential to unleash a lot of creativity,” Kugel says. For example, it would enable the business analysis of the parties in a supply chain or the state of particular markets. These types of analysis are not practical today, as data has to be culled manually, normalized and re-input into spreadsheets or other analytical applications.

Adopting XBRL, however, shouldn’t be a burden. Any organization that is familiar with XML is already much of the way there. All that’s needed is to pick up the appropriate industry-specific schema and adopt some simple maintenance tools. Companies don’t even have to change their existing financial applications. “Virtually everything that needs to be done can be done outside the ERP and GL systems in middleware,” says Walter Hamscher, vice chair, XBRL International. And it doesn’t have to be expensive. “How much you spend depends on how much value you want,” Hamscher continues.

It’s not only the data Simply put, XBRL is an XML-based standard for the analysis, exchange and reporting of financially oriented business information. XBRL International ( www.XBRL.org ) freely licenses the XBRL standard and framework as a specification for structuring and representing information in business reports so it may be extracted and processed automatically by XBRL-aware applications.

Specifically, XBRL defines data-formatting conventions and vocabularies for marking up and describing business report data, such as sales or net assets. Like XML, it is tag based. Descriptions in the form of tags or labels are attached to the various pieces of business data. These tags describe the particular piece of data in terms of an agreed-upon vocabulary. That vocabulary is referred to as an XBRL taxonomy, the specific schema tags. The taxonomy performs a function similar to the document type definition used with XML, although it is more detailed than the DTD.

XBRL then employs XML’s XML Linking Language (XLink) capability to further extend the taxonomy definitions. “XBRL is not just data but semantics—about what the data means. XLink is how you specify the semantics,” says Hugh Wallis, an independent consultant for XBRL International.

Once the organization has the appropriate taxonomy, it can enable its reports for XBRL. From there, organizations can more easily use and share data from the reports within the organization and between organizations. XBRL-aware applications can take advantage of the high level of specificity and self-describing nature of the tags to automatically process the information for purposes of reporting and analysis. XBRL is independent of any hardware platform, software operating system, programming language or accounting standard, as noted in a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report titled “XBRL: Improving Business Reporting Through Standardization.”

Bob Jensen's threads on XBRL are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm#TimelineXBRL

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Low long-term interest rates persist even in the face of powerful factors that should drive them up: why?

"The 'Conundrum' Explained," by Roger C. Altman, The Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2005; Page A16 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111931620512664812,00.html?mod=todays_us_opinion

The first part of this article is not quoted here

What is uncommon is for developing regions to run positive international accounts. Historically, they have grown rapidly and consumed foreign capital on a net basis. But today the opposite is true. Remarkably, Latin America, China, Africa and the Middle East are in surplus, as shown in the chart nearby.

By definition, such unprecedented foreign liquidity must be invested, and more of such capital usually flows into fixed income instruments than equities. Believe it or not, comparable rates outside the U.S. are even lower than ours. Economic growth is so anemic in Europe and Japan, for example, that the yield on Japan's 10-year government bond is 1.3%, while the 10-year German Bund is at 3.3%. At the margin, therefore, the highest returns are realized on American bonds. That is why this excess foreign liquidity has nowhere else to go.

This is the one aspect of our overall financial picture which is both new and carries significant impact. On that basis, it is a more likely explanation of the conundrum than either a misguided bond market or an incorrect consensus economic forecast.

The final question is whether this unprecedented phenomenon will continue to suppress U.S. long-term interest rates. The logical answer is yes -- but not indefinitely. At some point, foreign investors' holdings of dollar-based assets will rise beyond any prudent standard of diversification. They will then, at minimum, stop adding to these holdings. If nothing else changes in the interim, that will end our interest-rate honeymoon.

---

Summary of Tidbits from June 15-June 29, 2005
The entire Tidbits Directory is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbitsdirectory.htm

Music: Games People Play --- http://www.jessiesweb.com/house.htm

Train of Life (Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline) ---  
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/singingman7/TOL.htm   

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If you're going to borrow money to buy a home, better to borrow in Florida than North Dakota.
While the media tends to quote national averages on mortgage rates, in fact rates vary widely from state to state -- over time and on any given day. On June 8, the highest rate on a 30-year-fixed mortgage was 6.79% in West Virginia, and the lowest rate was 4.89% in Georgia, according to Bankrate.com.
Steven Sloan, "Want a Good Mortgage Rate? It May Depend on Your State," The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2005; Page D2 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111816047825153017,00.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal

Advice about mortgages from Jane Bryant Quinn, Newsweek, June 6, 2005, Page 41.

For great tips on mortgages, visit Guttentag's (a professor at Wharton) site --- http://www.mtgprofessor.com/

For quick quotes, check eloan.com --- http://www.eloan.com/

Ignore the "cheap loan" promises in your e-mail . . . Spammers merely collect names to sell to lenders --- or worse, pry for personal information.

Bob Jensen's threads on Internet frauds are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on investing are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#Finance

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Help for victims of investment fraud --- http://www.helpforinvestors.org/
Think you're a victim of investment fraud? Want to check out your financial adviser? Need to report identity theft? A new streamlined Web site from the Alliance for Investor Education, www.helpforinvestors.org, provides direct links to the right government agencies, regulators, and trade groups.
Lauren Young, "A Tool for Investors in Distress:  The new Web site from the Alliance for Investor Education offers lots of help, including for those who may have been duped," Business Week, June 15, 2005 --- http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jun2005/nf20050615_4371_db035.htm?chan=tc
Bob Jensen's helpers for victims of various types of fraud are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm

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Sharing Professor of the Week
Trinity University's Geology Professor Glenn Kroeger --- http://www.trinity.edu/gkroeger/

Specialties: Geophysics, Seismology, Remote Sensing, Geographic Information Systems

Courses:

• Exploring Earth
• Environmental Geology
• Oceanography
• Geophysics
• GIS and Remote Sensing
• Earth History
• Geoscience Techniques

Projects:

• Java™ Software
• Jennifer Elaine Kroeger
• "Nature Calls"

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Women Often Discover Their Business Talent After Kids Are Raised
In addition, it often takes women longer to believe in themselves enough to seek jobs in which they wield power. "By their 40s and 50s, after observing a few male bosses, women finally begin to say to themselves, 'These guys aren't any smarter than I am,' " says Ms. Liswood. Yet few big corporations are flexible enough to take advantage of women's life cycles by, for example, giving them flexible schedules when they are raising young children and promotion opportunities when they are older. A lot of middle-age women have found their own solution: launching their own businesses. There are 10.6 million women-owned businesses in the U.S., employing 19.1 million people, and two out of three of the new businesses being launched are women-owned. "A lot of these women have worked for big corporations, but at 40 or so when a lot are still stuck in middle management they start thinking, 'I can have more influence and a bigger piece of the pie doing it on my own,' " says Marsha Firestone, founder of the Women Presidents' Organization. The average age of the group's members is 49.
Carol Hymowitz, "Women Often Discover Their Business Talent After Kids Are Raised," The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2005; Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111870963411258724,00.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace

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Mind on Fire
A new biography of Empson has come out recently (or rather, the first of two volumes of a biography, which might just be overdoing it). So that might be part of what’s stirred up the memory. But there is also the fact that I’m at the early stage of writing a book — and at the other extreme from anything resembling the monotonous lucidity Burke describes. Each fact, each idea, every dim intuition seems to connect to all the others. At times this is exciting. The brain blazes; hours of concentration prove effortless. And sometimes it’s a pain in the ass. The problem being that you cannot write a book out of a pure intuition of possible linkages. (Not unless you are a novelist, or the author of one of those fictions of cohesive personal identity known as a memoir.) For a work of nonfiction prose, you have to gather a lot of information — and then control it. So it’s disconcerting to find that your ideas are swarming without a center They keep running to the bookshelves to prove themselves. And if it turns out — as I’m finding it often does — that no scholar has written anything on some topic absolutely essential to the project, then a kind of panicky weariness kicks in. It feels like being obliged to reinvent the wheel without knowing what a circle looks like.
Scott McLemee, "Mind on Fire," Inside Higher Ed, June 14 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/06/14/mclemee

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Stem Cells Get Brainy
Scientists induce certain mice brain cells, which are also stem cells, to multiply. The discovery could spell good news for fighting diseases like Parkinson's and Huntington's.
"Stem Cells Get Brainy," Wired News, June 13, 2005 --- http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,67843,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_9

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Staying divorced is bad for health
Coining a new term, "marital biography," to denote your entire lifelong experience with marriage, divorce and remarriage, the study's co-authors, University of Chicago's Linda Waite and Duke University's Mary Elizabeth Hughes, will show how that history has a cumulative effect on health. Indeed, your marital biography has an even bigger impact on long-term health than whether you are married or divorced at any particular time. The longer you spend in a divorced or widowed state, the higher the likelihood of heart or lung disease, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke and difficulties with mobility, such as walking or climbing stairs, according to the 2005 study of 8,652 people age 51 to 61. The research, funded by the National Institute on Aging, will be presented a week from today at a Dallas conference of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization.
"Another Argument for Marriage: How Divorce Can Put Your Health at Risk," The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2005, Page D1 ---  http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111888263357661063,00.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal

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Testing a disposable camcorder
Disposable photo cameras have been around for years and have carved out a healthy niche in the overall photography market. But nobody has come up with a disposable video camcorder -- until now. Last week, a one-time-use, digital video camera made by Pure Digital Technologies Inc. of San Francisco went on sale in selected drugstores across the nation. Although it's not yet available in Northern California, pending a regional distribution deal, the company hopes to have it on local store shelves by the end of the summer. Retailing for $30, the pocket-sized digital camcorder stores only 20 minutes' worth of video and won't produce the same quality shots that owners of more expensive digital camcorders have come to expect.
Benny Evangelista, "Testing out disposable camcorder: S.F. firm makes it easy to e-mail clips made on tiny device," San Francisco Chronicle,  June 13, 2005 ---
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/13/BUGO0D5OEG28.DTL&type=tech

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Are you a prosumer?
Prosumers are passionate about the technology they use for their creative pursuits. ''How much time do you have?" replies Dr. Cyril Mazansky, when asked about his equipment. Mazansky is a radiologist who is also a devoted nature photographer. ''I could happily talk to you about this all afternoon." For technology companies, they're tough customers, more sophisticated and demanding than garden-variety consumers, but less experienced and free-spending than professionals. The word ''prosumer" was coined in 1979 by the futurist Alvin Toffler. Initially, it referred to an individual who would be involved in designing the things she purchased (a mash-up of the words ''producer" and ''consumer.") These days, the term more often refers to a segment of users midway between consumers and professionals. This kind of prosumer doesn't necessarily earn money by making music, videos, or photos, but is still willing to invest in more serious hardware and software than the typical dabbler, and spend more time using it.
Scott Kirsner, "Are you a prosumer? Take this hand quiz," Boston Globe, June 13, 2005 --- http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2005/06/13/are_you_a_prosumer_take_this_hand_quiz/ 

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Are you a prosumer?
The Maryland Department of Health says results from a federally funded study underscore the need for targeted HIV prevention programs, especially for gay black men in Baltimore. The research was a risk-behavior study of Baltimore-area men who have sex with men. The study reveals that one-third the participants are infected with the disease. But half of the African American study participants are HIV positive. The study was conducted by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health between June 2004 and April.
"Study Finds High Rates of HIV Among Gay Men," ABC News, June 15, 2005 --- http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0605/236070.html

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Phonic Ear's Front Row Active Learning System
FDA Clears Phonic Ear Active Learning Systems for Classroom Communication Phonic Ear has received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for medical devices that improve speech intelligibility in classrooms for hearing impaired and normal-hearing children and adolescents. This clearance designates Phonic Ear's Front Row Active Learning Systems design, which clarifies and amplifies a teachers' voice, as a safe and effective means for improving speech intelligibility. Phonic Ear is the first and only wireless technology developer to earn this clearance for these systems. In addition to improving children's listening skills, Front Row Active Learning Systems could also be a relief on school budgets: U.S. schools may lose as much as $2.5 billion annually in sick leave for teachers with vocal problems, according to the University of Iowa's National Center for Voice and Speech.
T.H.E. Newsletter on June 15, 2005

For the full story, visit http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050608/85337.html?.v=1 

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Search the deep (password protected) Web
Yahoo said it had begun testing a service that lets users search information on password-protected subscription sites such as LexisNexis, known as the "deep Web." The move comes as Yahoo (YHOO), Google (GOOG) and Ask Jeeves (ASKJ) rush to give web searchers access to ever more information -- from books, blogs and scholarly journals to news, products, images and video. The service, called Yahoo Search Subscriptions, allows users to search multiple online subscription content sources and the web from a single search box. Users can see content from the sites they subscribe to, while nonsubscribers have the option of paying to see it. Content providers, for their part, get access to the vast audience of web search users.
"Surfing the Deep Web," Wired News, June 16, 2005 ---
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,67883,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_7

Also see http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050616/165255.html?.v=1

The Yahoo Search Subscriptions site is at http://search.yahoo.com/subscriptions

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

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Online Classroom Network Set to Launch Major Chinese-English LanguageLearning Portal
ePALS Classroom Exchange will launch a Chinese-English Language and Learning Portal in September, enabling its 103,000 global classrooms to connect with Chinese schools in a teacher-supervised online environment. Initially, the focus will be on matching 60,000 English-speaking K-12 schools in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland with schools in China, allowing Chinese teachers and students to practice English language skills while English-speaking schools learn Chinese history, culture, and, language. The company will integrate basic Chinese and English language learning tools into the portal as well as the company's proprietary school-safe, multi-lingual e-mail and eMentoring tools to power the collaboration between classrooms.
T.H.E. Newsletter on June 15, 2005

For the full story, visit http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050606/nym103.html?.v=10 

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Upgrading teacher education programs
Teacher preparation programs have taken a pounding in recent years, from legislators concerned about the dearth of teachers being produced and policy makers who view the programs as outdated and unwilling to change. In 1998, the last time Congress adopted legislation to extend the Higher Education Act, teachers’ colleges (and, in turn, higher education leaders viewed as defending them) were lambasted by Rep. George Miller (D-Cal.), who accused them of turning out poorly prepared instructors. He won passage of new standards and reporting requirements designed to measure, state by state, the quality of teacher training programs. Seeking to shift from defense to offense, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education played host Wednesday to a briefing on Capitol Hill aimed at “debunking the myths” that teacher training programs are lethargic and ("We’re not grandma’s normal school any more,” as the group’s executive director, Sharon P. Robinson, put it) and at introducing its own draft legislation for the teacher training portion of the Higher Education Act, which Congress is once again preparing to renew.
Doug Lederman, "Playing Offense, Not Defense," Inside Higher Ed, June 16, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/06/16/teachered

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Upgrading 'community' college learning
For many low-income students, the gateway to higher education is through urban community colleges. But many of those students have received poor educations in high school, and have a good chance of getting stuck in remedial courses and never graduating. Some community colleges are experimenting with new approaches to educating these students, but there are few examples of concrete evidence of how successful those approaches are. This week, however, a study is being released that suggests that the use of “learning communities” can have a significant impact on the success of students who need the most help.
Scott Jaschik, "Keeping Students Enrolled," Inside Higher Ed, June 16, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/06/16/cc

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PLATO Orion Standards and Curriculum Integrator
Largest Idaho District Selects PLATO Orion for Standards-Based Teaching Initiative PLATO Learning Inc. announced it has been awarded a $454,000 agreement with Idaho's Meridian Joint School District for a districtwide implementation of PLATO Orion Standards and Curriculum Integrator. PLATO Orion is an integrated instructional management system that supports the continuous improvement and data-driven decision-making processes of educational organizations. At the district level, it helps curriculum specialists identify standards and objectives for each grade and allows administrators to identify gaps in standards coverage within existing materials and lesson plans. At the building level, teachers use PLATO Orion to access, create, and use formative assessments to identify students' strengths and weaknesses and then identify and assign aligned resources, including PLATO Instructional Solutions, lessons plans, textbooks, and Web sites for individualized instruction.
T.H.E. Newsletter on June 15, 2005

For the full story, visit http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050609/95097.html?.v=1 

Bob Jensen's threads on the history of computer-based course management systems are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm

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Especially note how to unlock retail codes
I agree with most of the advice below except for advice to buy custom made shoes if you have rather standard-made feet.  Note that in some cases below I quoted only the caption and not the text under that caption.

"Unlocking the Special Codes," The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2005; Page D1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111871443117158844,00.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal

From tuition discounts to estate planning to special codes that unlock retail deals, here are some other techniques for saving time and money.

• Don't pay full price for a Broadway theater ticket.

Web sites to check out include BroadwayBox.com, TheaterMania.com and Playbill.com. • Focus on home renovations that enhance resale value:     • Don't pay full price for college     Ask for a discount. Hungry for the brightest students, many of the country's stronger universities are actively discounting tuition. These rebates, which can be thousands of dollars, aren't coming from endowments or government grants.

• The only way to lose weight is to cut calories:   • Timing is everything when it comes to finding cheaper airfares:   • It also is possible to get deals online by using special retail codes:   Just go to one of the following Web sites: naughtycodes.com, currentcodes.com, dealhunting.com or discountcodes.com. Scroll down the menu to find stores, then enter the store's discount code to complete a purchase. Another approach is simply buying something online and then signing up for special promotions and email alerts. Some of these deals can be found on bargain-hunter sites such as DealHunting.com, ShoppersResource.com and QuickToClick.com.

• Consider a living trust:   Assets in a living trust go directly to heirs designated by the trust and avoid probate, saving you legal expenses. If you own homes in two states and want to avoid probate in one of the states, you can put that home in a living trust. Be sure the cost of setting up trusts, and revising them as situations change, doesn't exceed the legal fees and taxes you are trying to avoid. • Buy custom-made shoes:   For men, a leather rounded-toe Oxford lace-up with hand-sewn welting is the most comfortable shoe there is. That is because welting -- where a strip of material is hand-stitched between the sole and the upper part of the shoe -- is essential for enhancing flexibility. It also makes the shoe easier to repair, since cobblers can easily rip and replace, compared to ready-made shoes with glued and molded soles directly attached to the upper. If you can't afford custom-made shoes, buy ready-made shoes elsewhere and bring them into the store to have welting put in. This costs about a third of the price of a handmade pair. • When ordering cocktails, ask for premium tequila but don't bother with expensive vodka:   The most common way people waste money on booze is by asking for super-high-end vodkas when ordering a mixed drink, as the subtle qualities of ultra-premium vodka get washed out by fruity mixers. Save the good stuff for straight-up with a twist. By contrast, the average consumer acts like a cheapskate when it comes to ordering tequila -- yet spending the extra money can make all the difference in a margarita. What you want: a brand with 100% blue agave.

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Findings that led Duke to drop supplying students with iPods for course use
"Duke Analyzes iPod Project," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, June 16, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/06/16/ipod

Among the findings:

• More than 600 students were in courses using the iPods each semester of the academic year that just concluded.
• Use was greatest among foreign language and music courses, although a range of disciplines used the devices.
• While audio playback was the initial focus of most of those involved, students and faculty reported the greatest interest in digital recording.
• The effort was hurt by a lack of systems for bulk purchases of mp3 audio content for academic use.
• There are many “inherent limitations” in the iPod, such as the lack of instructor tools for combining text and audio.
• Some recordings made with the iPod were not of high enough quality for academic use.
• The project resulted in increased collaboration among faculty members and technology officials at the university, and the publicity about the project led to more collaborations with other institutions

Bob Jensen's threads on education technologies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

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New accounting curriculum at a leading accounting program in the U.S.
Professors at Kansas State University College of Business Administration are spearheading a campaign to emphasize the importance of ethics in business education. The call to support Uniform Accountancy Rules 5-1 and 5-2 as effort to prevent future corporate ethics scandals, has been endorsed by more than 200 ethicists, business professionals, two conference boards and, of course, fellow professors.  “The accounting profession, especially the large firms, see a need and have expressed support for ethics courses as part of the accounting curriculum,” says Dann Fisher, associate professor of accounting and the Deloitte Touche Faculty Fellow at Kansas State University. “The resistance expressed by the academic community is what I find disconcerting. In general, accounting faculty appear to be unwilling to change and, at the same time, bitter that an external body would attempt to force them to change curriculum. Regardless of the reasons, the status quo is unacceptable.”
"Professors Call for New Accounting Curriculum Mandate," AccountingWeb, June 10, 2005 --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=100995

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Bob Jensen's threads on the Enron scandal are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm

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Watergate:  The known and the hushed up conspiracies
Watergate involved two conspiracies. The first, now ancient history, was the botched cover-up of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, in which President Nixon was briefly complicit. But we now know there was a far larger and more successful conspiracy involving the FBI's No. 2, to rifle confidential files, to help The Washington Post bring down a president who had topped its enemies list since Joe McCarthy had gone to his grave.
Patrick J. Buchanan, "Watergate: The Great Myth of American Journalism," Human Events Online, June 10, 2005 --- http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7706

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Music: Whiskey Bar --- http://www.jessiesweb.com/whiskeybar.htm

Train of Life (Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline) ---  
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/singingman7/TOL.htm   

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June 18, 2005 message from Bob Blystone

The web site below produced by the University of British Columbia reminds one of those beautiful flowers.

http://www.ubcbotanicalgarden.org/potd/

Each day they post a flower of the day and provide information for the subject flower. The photos can be quite stunning and I have the urge to print the pictures and put them up on the wall. The photos are archived so one can look back on previous selections.

Reply from Bob Jensen

It's been a cold and wet summer in the White Mountains.  Nevertheless, our lupine fields have been nice.

 

 

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We all get heavier as we get older because, there's a lot more information in our heads. That's my story and I’m sticking to it.
Garfield

Proving that I am right would be admitting that I could be wrong.
Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais

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Check the charges on your MasterCard billings (this may also affect Discover,Visa, and American Express to a lesser extent).  I recommend changing your credit card numbers the same as if you lost each credit card.  You can do so using the phone number on the back of each card.  It may take a week or two to get your new cards, so I suggest that you wait until you get your new MasterCard before ordering new numbers on your other cards.
MasterCard International reported yesterday that more than 40 million credit card accounts of all brands might have been exposed to fraud through a computer security breach at a payment processing company, perhaps the largest case of stolen consumer data to date.
Eric Dash and Tom Zeller, Jr., "MasterCard Says 40 Million Files Are Put at Risk," The New York Times, June 18, 2005 --- http://snipurl.com/nytJune18

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Using Your Cell Phone Anywhere in the World --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/travel/19prac.html

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Compact Cameras Get Faster, Smarter, Thinner ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/10/AR2005061001350.html?referrer=email

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Review of a sociologist's book Damned Lies and Statistics:  How Numbers Confuse Public Issues --- http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/more_damned_lies_and_statistics.htm

Self-evidently a sequel to Best’s previous book, it continues a formula that was successful in providing an accessible account of some more of the numerical misdemeanours of modern society. Coming from a sociologist, this is again a remarkably readable and even grammatical work (he knows, for example that data is a plural word). The formula of avoiding anything but the most superficial calculation has the advantage of appealing to a wide audience, but occasionally it creates problems of circumlocution and fuzziness. On the other hand, in the Best tradition, there are many concise bons mots that neatly encapsulate a truth; such as crime waves are not so much patterns of criminal behaviour as they are patterns in media coverage.

There is apt coverage of the modern urge to attach numbers where they cannot possibly apply, such as the quality of teaching. On the whole sociological jargon is avoided, with occasional lapses, though the avoidance of naming some important concepts tends to lead to their being lost in the verbiage. The post hoc fallacy, for example, gets buried in an anecdote about breast implants, and it is too important for that. Sometimes the simplification is positively misleading. We have, for example, “cherry-picking (sometimes called data-dredging)”. These concepts are not equivalent, though they often exist together.

These are, however, rather pedantic quibbles, and the book is very successful in achieving its aim of warning ordinary intelligent people of the dangers of believing the numbers that they read. It is one of the tragedies of modern Anglo-Saxon society that the majority of such readers are almost uniformly innumerate. The approach here is to classify various numbers in the chapter headings (missing numbers, confusing numbers, scary numbers, authoritative numbers, magical numbers and contentious numbers).  There is a final optimistic chapter called Towards statistical numeracy, which highlights some of the resources to be found in the Number Watch links.

Damned Lies and Statistics: How Numbers Confuse Public Issues, by Joel Best, University of California Press, 2004, ISBN 0 520 23830 3

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How Schools Cheat From underreporting violence to inflating graduation rates to fudging test scores, educators are lying to the American public --- http://www.reason.com/0506/fe.ls.how.shtml

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Listen to the classics:  Download audio books from the NY Public Library
The New York Public Library announced Monday that it is making 700 books _ from classics to current best sellers _ available to members in digital audio form for downloading onto PCs, CD players and portable listening devices.
"N.Y. Public Library Starts Digital Library," The Washington Post, June 13, 2005 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/13/AR2005061301093.html?referrer=email

Bob Jensen's helpers when searching for Searching for Audio Books, Clips, Lectures, Speeches, and Books are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#Audio

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I haven't tried this but Snopes says it won't work --- http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/keyless.asp

Urban Legend:  How to unlock your car using a cell phone

Have you locked the keys in the car? If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are home, call someone at home on your cell phone and ask them to get your car keys.

Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the other person at home press the unlock button on your keys while holding it near the phone on their end.

Your car will unlock. It will save someone from having to drive your keys

to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the remote" for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk this way!) 

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540 or more examples of Nigerian fraud email messages that plague us daily --- http://www.potifos.com/fraud/

 Bob Jensen's threads on these and similar fruads are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm

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Are Business Schools Failing the World
JEFFREY E. GARTEN, 58, who is stepping down after 10 years as dean of the Yale School of Management, says he does not think American business schools are doing a good enough job. Here are excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Garten, who became the dean after a career on Wall Street specializing in debt restructuring abroad and a stint as under secretary of commerce for international trade . . . It's extremely difficult to figure out what to teach in a two-year course, to reflect today's realities, let alone what the world will look like 10 or 20 years from now when the graduates reach their stride in terms of their careers.
William J. Holstein, "Are Business Schools Failing the World?" The New York Times, June 19, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/business/yourmoney/19advi.html

June 19, 2005 reply from Jagdish Gangolly [JGangolly@UAMAIL.ALBANY.EDU]

AECMers also might like to read the article "How Business Schools lost their way" by Warren Bennis and James O'Toole in the may 2005 issue of HBR. Fascinating. It makes many of the same points as the Garten interview.

A far more potent article ("Bad management theories are destroying good management practices") is the one by Sumantra Ghoshal of the London Business School, published postumously in the Journal "Academy of Management Learning & Education" a few months ago. If I had my way, this would be a required reading for all B-school faculty.

Paul Williams also has an article "A Social view on accounting ethics" in Research on Accounting Ethics that expresses similar views.

I would draw the following sequence of events (I am caricaturing below, but there is a good dose of truth nevertheless):

Stage 1: It is my understanding that B-schools sprung out of Economics departments because of their emphasis on non-business aspects of economics and the lack of tolerance of non-traditional/innovative interdisciplinary research of great value in business (real world is not stove-piped) -- look for example at the pathbreaking Columbia dissertation of William Cooper (Revisions to the theory of the firm") that was turned down (if my memory is right), but subsequently published in a reputed economics journal.

Stage 2: Separation from the economics departments got the B-schools autonomy, and the so-called "clinical" faculty were very much a part of the community. While this arrangement was ideal, the problem was the desperate need of the B Schools for academic respectability and credibility. The pendulum swung again in stage 3.

Stage 3: To gain academic respectability, B schools went back to their "roots" stove-piped research. In fact much of the research in B schools today, in my opinion, could be done far more efficiently with far greater quality control, in the traditional departments across the campus. Also, clinical faculty are looked upon often as necessary evil to be tolerated because they give us a modicum of credibility in the business world. Looks like the pendulum may be swinging again.

I have lived through all three of the stages above. When I was an undergraduate, we were taught most courses by "clinical" faculty (accounting by practicing chartered accountants, actuarial subjects by practicing actuaries, law courses by practicing barristers/solicitors; I was surprised to discover that even my statistics instructor ran a small-scale production shop). Early in graduate school, I was taught Operations Research by practitioners from ICI and BAT, MIS by an engineer at Honeywell, Production Management by one from Exide Batteries, Personnel management by one from Alcan subsidiary,... However, as I progressed through my graduate education I saw less and less of them until they almost completely disappeared, at least for the graduate students.

To be frank, this has affected accounting far more than some other areas in Bschools (specially in Finance where the interactions between the academia and the industry are strong). In my humble opinion, the main reason for this is that the real world is, of necessity, normative (the only reason in business to understand a mousetrap is to be able to build a better one, in the academia it seems to be to contemplate the navel), whereas in accounting academia we have given normative research a bum rap. Consequently there is little substantive interaction between the academia and the profession except on a social basis.

Respectfully submitted,

Jagdish

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Pay for Internet purchases using the new Google electronic-payment service
Google Inc. this year plans to offer an electronic-payment service that could help the Internet-search company diversify its revenue and may put it in competition with eBay Inc.'s PayPal unit, according to people familiar with the matter.
Kevin J. Delaney and Mylene Mangalindan, "Google Plans Online-Payment Service:  New Business May Diversify Revenue Stream, Compete With eBay's PayPal Arm," The Wall Street Journal,  June 20, 2005; Page B4 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111905141149263168,00.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace

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A lavish looter will have to take some time off from spending his hundreds of millions of booty
L. Dennis Kozlowski, the former chief executive of Tyco International, and his top lieutenant were convicted yesterday on fraud, conspiracy and grand larceny charges, bringing an end to a three-year-long case that came to symbolize an era of corporate greed and scandal.  The four-month-long trial was the second time Mr. Kozlowski and Mr. Swartz were tried on charges of stealing $150 million from Tyco - a conglomerate whose products range from security systems to health care - and reaping $430 million more by covertly selling company shares while '"artificially inflating" the value of the stock
Andrew Ross Sorkin, "Ex-Chief and Aide Guilty of Looting Millions at Tyco," The New York Times, June 18, 2005 --- http://snipurl.com/TycoVerdict 

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Another review of Freakonomics
"A Romp Through Theories More Fanciful Than Freaky," by Roger Lowenstein, The New York Times, June 19, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/business/yourmoney/19shelf.html

The authors show the dangers in the crack trade by pointing out that the fatality rate for street dealers is greater than that of inmates on death row in Texas; they demonstrate the power of information, and the way the Internet has eroded the pricing power of automobile dealers, by recounting how a quite unrelated network (the Ku Klux Klan) was done in by an infiltrator who broadcast the group's secrets.

The book is only barely about economics, freakish or otherwise, and even when the authors venture into a standard tutorial, such as one about how supply and demand influence wages, they do so with delightful and unexpected curveballs. Thus, they observe, "The typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect." This is less surprising than it might appear. Working conditions limit the supply of prostitutes and, as for demand, the authors mischievously observe that "an architect is more likely to hire a prostitute than vice versa."

Their protestation notwithstanding, "Freakonomics" does have a unifying theme, which is the power of incentives to explain, and perhaps to predict, behavior. The authors clearly tilt against the one-dimensional theory, so dear to orthodox economists, that people are always motivated solely by maximizing their wealth. Rather, they side with the up-and-coming behavioralist school, which sees people's motivations as more nuanced and polydimensional.

Continued in article

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Cognitive Science ePrint Search Engine --- http://cogprints.org/

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

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From Nine to Nine:  Technology is far from labor saving
A new report says advances in technology, particularly in the mobile variety, will result in more Americans working longer hours. This cannot be promising for people who already confuse the words "job" and "life."
Robert MacMillan, "Workin' 9 to 9," The Washington Post, June 16, 2005 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/16/AR2005061600801.html?referrer=email 

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Comics Looking to Spread A Little (free) Laughter on the Web ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/15/AR2005061502251.html?referrer=email

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Evaluating Faculty at the University of Tennessee

Jan R. Williams, "Faculty Evaluation: Lessons Learned," AACSB eNewsline --- http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/enewsline/Vol-4/Issue-6/dc-janwilliams.asp

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No relief for relief efforts:  Import tariffs discourage disaster relief and the spirit of giving
New Delhi: Oxfam has had to pay $US1 million ($1.3 million) in customs duty to the Sri Lankan Government for importing 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles to help victims of the tsunami. The sum was levied by customs in Colombo, which has refused to grant tax exemptions to non-governmental organisations working to repair damage caused by the Boxing Day disaster, which killed at least 31,000 people in the country. The Indian-made Mahindra vehicles, essential to negotiate damaged roads and rough tracks, were stuck in port at Colombo for almost a month as officials of the British charity completed the small mountain of paperwork required to release them. Customs charged $US5000 demurrage for every day they stood idle. Oxfam said it had "no choice" but to pay the 300 per cent import tax or face further delays to its relief operation.
"Sri Lanka charges Oxfam $1.3m to bring in jeeps," Sydney Morning Herald, June 18, 2005 --- http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2005/06/17/1118869095366.html

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College grads enter an encouraging job market
But compared with recent years, America's 1.35 million new college graduates are having an easier time of it. “It's been a good job market for grads,” says John Challenger, CEO of the global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “[It's] up 13 percent over last year. The last three years have been very rough.”
Kevin Tibbles, "College grads enter an encouraging job market:  Things are looking up, if you know where to look," MSNBC, June 17, 2005 --- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8259716/

 

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The future of textbooks?
From Jim Mahar's blog on June 16, 2005 --- http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/

The future of text books?
Megginson and Smart Introdcution to Corporate Finance--Companion Site

Wow.
I think we may have a glimpse into the future of text books with this one. It is the new Introduction to Corporate Finance by William Megginson and Scott Smart.

From videos for most topics, to interviews, to powerpoint, to a student study guide, to excel help...just a total integration of a text and a web site! Well done!

At St. Bonaventure we have adopted the text for the fall semester and the book actually has made me excited to be teaching an introductory course! It is that good!!

BTW Before I get accused of selling out, let me say I get zero for this plug. I have met each author at conferences but do not really know either of them. And like any first edition book there may be some errors, but that said, this is the future of college text books!

Check out some of the online material here. More material is available with book purchase.

June 18 reply from Robert Holmes Glendale College [rcholmes@GLENDALE.CC.CA.US]

I chose not to submit my personal information in return for a look at the material, but just a look at the resources was enough to tell me they are extensive. How much time do we expect our students will spend each week on a course? What do we think they should do with that time? Attending class, reading the text, looking at Powepoint, working Excel problems, reviewing the answers to the problems, looking at resources in the Resource Integration Guide, writing papers, taking notes, "learning"/memorizing the notes. Does looking at a lot of different things produce learning? Is it efficient? I look forward to hearing about how many of these resources are actually used, and if they produce more learning.

June 19, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Robert,

What gets used depends heavily on the quality of the materials. I've found little use for many of the supplements that accompany the most accounting textbooks because the supplements are generally cheap shots and over-hyped crap, including the videos and many of the PowerPoint shows. One major publisher, for example, has PowerPoint with audio that simply reads the PowerPoint captions. The videos sometimes are only company PR blurbs that have little or nothing to add to accounting study.

I'm told by insiders that what gets spent on quality supplements really depends upon market size, and accounting is not really a big market relative to mathematics, basic science, economics, and other courses required that are part of the core for virtually all college students.

I think what Jim was trying to say was that the Megginson and Smart textbook is the first finance text that had real money spent on supplements. I'm still waiting to see the first accounting textbook that has real money spent on Web supplements.

Bob Jensen

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

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Rethinking Mathematics
Rethinking Schools: Spring 2005:   Rethinking Mathematics (with special emphasis on math education of urban African Americans) ---  http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/19_03/19_03.shtml

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Images of farm machine history --- http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/feature/mccormick/
The McCormick-International Harvester Company Collection includes hundreds of thousands of images dating from the 1840s through the 1980s. The images were created by and for Cyrus McCormick and his family, the McCormick companies, and the International Harvester Company. They document agriculture, rural life, industrial labor, advertising, small towns, transportation, and the agricultural machinery, truck and construction equipment industries.

Bob Jensen's threads on history are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#History

June 17, 2005 reply from Paula Ward

The same/related (?) website has a fantastic collection of manuscripts, one of which is the Lyman Copeland Draper Manuscript Collection: The collection as a whole covers primarily the period between the French and Indian War and the War of 1812 (ca. 1755-1815). The geographic concentration is on what Draper and his contemporaries called the "Trans-Allegheny West," which included the western Carolinas and Virginia, some portions of Georgia and Alabama, the entire Ohio River valley, and parts of the Mississippi River valley.

I forget how many volumes and rolls of microfilm make up the Draper Manuscript Collection, but it is huge. A very small portion of it is available on the website. As luck would have it, the portion available on the website includes information about a member of my family (Benjamin Kelley/Kelly) who was captured, along with Daniel Boone, by the Shawnee Indians in 1778 at the Blue Licks in Kentucky:

Document AJ-150: Recollections on Capture by the Shawnee, 1778 - Jackson's Recollections as recorded by Lyman Copeland Draper (14 pages on microfilm):

http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cgi-bin/docviewer.exe?CISOROOT=/aj&CISOPTR=17869&CISOSHOW=17854

 

All this and more at The Wisconsin Historical Society's American Journeys: Eyewitness Accounts of Early American Exploration and Settlement http://www.americanjourne