Tidbits on April 22, 2005
Bob Jensen at Trinity University 

Fraud Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 
Archives of Tidbits: Tidbits Directory --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm

Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter --- Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron" enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and other universities is at http://www.searchedu.com/.

Bob Jensen's home page is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/

Campaign for Trinity University --- http://www.trinity.edu/departments/public_relations/case_statement/index.htm 

Music:  Lookin' Out My Back Door:  Turn speakers up! --- http://www.jessiesweb.com/warning.htm

They can cut all the flowers, but they'll never stop the Spring.
Pablo Neruda

Farewell to Robert Creeley, Poet, 1926-2005
Just days before he died, he gave his final reading - in Charlottesville, Virginia - breathing from what he called "portable wee canisters of oxygen about the size of champagne bottles". In between the poems Creeley said very simple things that rang true: "There has been so much war and pain during the last century. We need to learn how to be kind; kindness is what makes us human." Creeley lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and was a distinguished professor of English at Brown University. The director of Brown's arts program, Peter Gale Nelson, said of him: "Rare enough to be a great poet, even rarer to be a great person, as Robert was. He was a vibrant presence."
"The secret magician of American letters," Sydney Morning Herald, April 16, 2005 --- http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2005/04/15/1113509925201.html

Middlebury College offering graduate degrees --- in California
Middlebury College has always been known for its undergraduate programs in the liberal arts, especially in languages. The college has become increasingly popular with applicants in recent years, but officials have struggled to figure out whether and how to expand its small graduate program. The college may have an unusual solution: taking over a graduate school. The Monterey Institute of International Studies, a California graduate school with a strong academic reputation but struggling finances, approached Middlebury about a possible deal, and the two institutions are in serious discussions about an acquisition. For Middlebury, assuming control of the institute could make it an immediate player in graduate education, expand its visibility on the West coast, and help build its connections to Asia (a strength of Monterey by virtue of its academic priorities and its Pacific location).
Scott Jaschik, "Cross Country Merger," Inside Higher Ed, April 21, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/04/21/mid

Coke cooked the books
Richard Wessel, District Administrator of the Commission's Atlanta District Office, stated, "MD&A requires companies to provide investors with the truth behind the numbers. Coca-Cola misled investors by failing to disclose end of period practices that impacted the company's likely future operating results." Katherine Addleman, Associate Director of Enforcement for the Commission's Atlanta District Office, stated, "In addition, Coca-Cola made misstatements in a January 2000 Form 8-K concerning a subsequent inventory reduction and in doing so continued to conceal the impact of prior end of period practices and further mislead investors." In its order, the Commission found that, at or near the end of each reporting period between 1997 and 1999, Coca-Cola implemented an undisclosed "channel stuffing" practice in Japan known as "gallon pushing" for the purpose of pulling sales forward into a current period. To accomplish gallon pushing's purpose, Japanese bottlers were offered extended credit terms to induce them to purchase quantities of beverage concentrate the bottlers otherwise would not have purchased until a following period. As Coca-Cola typically sells gallons of concentrate to its bottlers corresponding to its bottlers' sales of finished products to retailers, typically bottlers' concentrate inventory levels increase approximately in proportion to their sales of finished products to retailers.
Andrew Priest, "THE COCA-COLA COMPANY SETTLES ANTIFRAUD AND PERIODIC REPORTING CHARGES RELATING TO ITS FAILURE TO DISCLOSE JAPANESE GALLON PUSHING," AccountingEducation.com, April 21, 2005 --- http://accountingeducation.com/news/news6094.html
Bob Jensen's threads on previous channel stuffing revenue recognition frauds are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/eitf01.htm#ChannelStuffing
 

Encarta lets everyone be an editor, but not as instantaneously as Wikipedia
Microsoft Corp.'s Encarta encyclopedia is testing a system that lets everyone be an editor -- in theory at least. Readers can suggest edits or additions to entries, although the changes are vetted by editors before they reach the page. Encarta is not requiring such novice editors to identify themselves, said Gary Alt, Encarta's editorial director. But it is asking them to reveal the source of their information if possible, and the editorial staff will check for both factual errors and evidence of bias. This is in contrast to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which lets anyone instantaneously make changes, even delete entries, regardless of whether that person has any expertise in the subject. Encarta has added research editors and fact checkers to handle the volume of edits it expects to receive when the system goes live, perhaps as early as this week. But Alt said the added cost is balanced by the advantage of having a seemingly endless pool of people who may know more about a subject than hired editors ever would -- and will offer their expert advice for free.
"Encarta lets everyone be an editor," CNN, April 19, 2005 --- http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/04/18/encarta.wiki.ap/index.html
This tidbit was forwarded by Debbie Bowling.

This is my favorite mutual fund
Vanguard Group plans to start charging many of its customers lower fees, in a move likely to further rev up the mutual-fund price wars.
Tom Lauricella, The Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2005; Page D1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111404195425112680,00.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal
Jensen Comment:  Vanguard has always been very fair regarding fees and fund choices to suit your investment goals.  Vanguard stayed clean and honest before and after the recent scandals in so very many other mutual funds that have been rotten to the core --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#MutualFunds

Tones at the top write the music
Many people tend to overlook strong business ethics. Unless management at the top shows a clear path of ethical business practices, the people below cannot be expected to follow. Without ethics, business has no meaning.
Shreinik Lalbhai, in a convocation address to the eighth Nirma Institute of Management Studies in India, on the subject of ethics in business --- http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/enewsline/Vol-4/Issue-4/bschoolquotes.asp

Personally I wouldn't know what to do with the leisure.
Relativist income and status:  Is this the real secret to happiness?
Consider this experiment where students at Harvard were asked to choose between living in two imaginary worlds. In World One, you get $50,000 a year while other people average $25,000. In World Two, you get $100,000 a year, while others average $250,000. The majority of respondents preferred the first world. They were happy to be poorer in absolute terms, provided their RELATIVE position improved. All this suggests that a major motivation for people in working so hard is to gain higher status directly from their position in their organisation or from the amount of money they earn and the homes, cars and other status symbols they are able to buy with that money.
"The real secret to happiness: higher taxes," The Age, April 14, 2005 --- http://snipurl.com/statusApril15

With so many businesspeople, economists and politicians banging away, you would have to be pretty slow not to have got the message: what our economy desperately needs is a lowering of income tax rates, particularly the punishing top rate of 48.5 per cent.

The high tax rates we face are discouraging people from working as hard as they could. We need more incentive to try harder - to earn more, produce more and consume more.

But I've just been reading a new book - by an economics professor, no less - that argues the exact reverse: we need to keep tax rates high to discourage us from working so hard and, in the process, neglecting more important aspects of life, including leisure.

The prof is Richard Layard - Lord Layard, to you - of the London School of Economics. His book is Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, published in Britain by Allen Lane.

Why on earth could so many of us - particularly those on the top tax rate - be working too hard and neglecting our leisure? At base, because our evolutionary make-up makes us highly rivalrous towards other people, to be always comparing ourselves with others and seeking higher status.

Layard quotes other researchers' studies of vervet monkeys. The researchers manipulated the status of a male monkey by moving him from one group of monkeys to another. In each situation they measured the monkey's level of serotonin, a neuro-transmitter connected with feeling good. "The finding was striking," Layard says, "the higher the monkey's position in the hierarchy, the better the monkey feels.

"When a monkey beats off his rivals, he not only gets more mates and more bananas, he also gets a direct reward: being top makes him feel great. This is a powerful motivator."

Social standing has a big effect on physical health. When monkeys are put in different groups so that their rank changes, their coronary arteries clog up more slowly the higher their rank.

Continued in the article

Americans will still spend more on taxes than they spend on food, clothing and medical care combined
As many Americans rush to meet today's deadline to pay their taxes, the Tax Foundation reports that the average taxpayer will have to work two days longer than last year to support the government. Tax Freedom Day -- when the average American has finished earning enough to pay off his or her state and federal obligations -- will fall on April 17. That comes to 70 days each of us will spend working for Uncle Sam this year, and another 37 days working to support state and local government. "Despite all the tax cuts that the federal government has passed recently, Americans will still spend more on taxes than they spend on food, clothing and medical care combined," says the Tax Foundation's Scott Hodge, who notes that as economic growth pushes people into higher tax brackets, tax collections grow faster than incomes.
John Fund, The Opinion Journal, April 15, 2005

Do Fundamentals or Emotions Drive the Stock Market?
"Behavioral-finance theory holds that markets might fail to reflect economic fundamentals under three conditions.." The three conditions are 1. Irrational Behavior 2 Systematic patterns of behavior and 3. Limits to Arbitrage." "Academics are still debating whether irrational investors alone can be blamed for the long-term-reversal and short-term-momentum patterns in returns. Some believe that long-term reversals result merely from incorrect measurements of a stock's risk premium, because investors ignore the risks associated with a company's size and market-to-capital ratio. (Eugene F. Fama and Kenneth R. French, "Multifactor Explanations of Asset Pricing Anomalies," Journal of Finance, 1996, Volume 51, Number 1, pp. 55�84.) These statistics could be a proxy for liquidity and distress risk." There is more and I HIGHLY recommend you take a look! It is EXCELLENT! (BTW this was originally from McKinsey Quarterly.) I wholeheartedly agree with the article and am comforted by how close this corresponds to what we do in class! :)
Quoted from Jim Mahar's blog on April 14, 2005.  He's referring to "Do Fundamentals or Emotions Drive the Stock Market?" by McKinsey & Co. CFO.com --- http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/3839631/c_0?f=financeprofessor.com 
The article itself appeared in The McKinsey Quarterly, April 13, 2005.

Talking yourself out of depression
Robert DeRubeis of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues beg to differ, however. They have conducted the largest clinical trial ever designed to compare talk therapy with chemical antidepressants. The result, just published in Archives of General Psychiatry, is that talking works as well as pills do. Indeed, it works better, if you take into account the lower relapse rate.  The study looked at a relatively modern type of talk therapy, known as cognitive therapy, which tries to teach people how to change harmful thoughts and beliefs. Patients learn to recognise unrealistically negative thoughts when they occur, and are told how to replace them with more positive ones. It may sound too simplistic to work, but other studies have shown it can be used to treat anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and eating disorders. Dr DeRubeis wondered just how effective it really was for depression.
"Talk is cheap," The Economist, April 14, 2005 --- http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3860433

"Then I would have to be sorry for dear God. The theory is correct."  Einstein
It took him until 1915 to complete his general theory of relativity. One of his students in philosophy and physics in Berlin at the time was a young woman, Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, who retained a lifelong friendship with the famous scientist, even after she had fled to Sydney in the 1930s. They often took the same tram to university. "I had ample time to pester him with my questions," she told this reporter in 1983, at the age of 91. Einstein used to tease her, saying philosophical debates were like writing in honey. "It looks wonderful at first sight. But when you look again it is gone. Only the smear is left." One of Rosenthal-Schneider's fondest memories was Einstein handing her a cable during a discussion. It was news that Sir Arthur Eddington's observations of a solar eclipse had confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity. She asked the scientist what he would have done if the results had not matched his ideas. "Then I would have to be sorry for dear God. The theory is correct," he told her. Eddington's team made their observations from Brazil and the island of Principe in 1919. While the results turned Einstein into a household name, not all scientists were convinced by their accuracy. "The data analysis was very dodgy," says Jamieson. A total solar eclipse in Australia in 1922 gave researchers a second opportunity to test whether reality matched theory and whether light that passed near a massive body such as the sun would be bent by the gravitational force, as Einstein had predicted. American astronomers from the Lick Observatory in California were reportedly treated like celebrities on their mission near Broome, which confirmed Einstein was right. The force of gravity is much stronger around pulsars - spinning, city-sized neutron stars weighing more than the sun - than around normal stars. "So they provide a much more stringent test of Einstein's theory," says Manchester. He is part of a team that last year identified a unique pair of pulsars which are orbiting each other. It has proved to be "a magnificent laboratory" to test the theory, and his team also found Einstein got it right. "General relativity is really very accurate."
"My brilliant idea," Sydney Morning Herald, April 16, 2005 --- http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2005/04/15/1113509926579.html

The blue tongue scare in Spain
Madrid: Some Spaniards may soon have to prepare for the unthinkable: a summer without bullfighting. Instead of travelling to the ring, many of Spain's mighty bulls are being confined to the ranch under a quarantine aimed at halting the spread of a disease known as bluetongue. The illness rarely harms cattle, but can devastate sheep, the backbone of Spain's €7 billion ($11.6 billion) livestock industry, causing fevers and internal bleeding. The Government suspects ranches that produce fighting bulls are harbouring the infection, and has ordered 60 per cent of them quarantined. "The current measures would create the gravest crisis we have ever known," said Enrique Garza Grau, secretary-general of the National Association of Organisers of Bullfighting Spectacles. "If they are not modified, we wouldn't be able to carry out even 50 per cent of the events that are scheduled." Supporters say bullfighting is the essence of Spanish culture, so a threat is taken seriously.
"Sheep scare takes fight out of bulls," Sydney Morning Herald, April 16, 2005 ---  http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2005/04/15/1113509927404.html 

Ignorance is not bliss:  10 million children in the Arab world are out of school
Half of the women in the Arab world are illiterate and more than 10 million children in the region do not go to school, a report has revealed. The report on the status of children and women, produced by the Arab League and the UN Children's Fund (Unicef), said many Arab countries have made progress on child rights and protection, but that more still needs to be done. "More than 10 million children in the Arab world are out of school, most of them in Egypt, Iraq, Morocco and Sudan," said the report, although it gave no figures for the total number of school-age children in the region.
"Report: Half of Arab women illiterate," Aljazeera, April 12, 2005 ---
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/30E03A5E-9BA1-4BE4-B718-BE08BF8A05D8.htm

In Pursuit of Arab Reform --- http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/967715B8-276C-4708-AC08-7FD102E13BA7.htm

Give me your stuffed shirts yearning to breathe rich:  Total CEO pay was up smartly, to an average $9.6 million
Total CEO pay was up smartly, to an average $9.6 million -- a 15% increase from $8.3 million in 2003. But that average was skewed by the outsize pay package of our most highly compensated CEO, Yahoo! Inc.'s (YHOO ) Terry Semel, who received a package worth $120 million made up almost entirely of options. Take him out of the mix and the average raise was 11.3%, not far off the rise in shareholder gains." An important change in this year's scoreboard is that the options are valued using the Black Scholes formula rather than merely looking at exercise gains. This will make "pay anomalies are now easier to detect, thanks to a new methodology that BusinessWeek began using this year. Instead of counting the windfalls from option exercises as part of the annual pay package, as we have in the past, we're counting the value of annual option grants. The values are calculated using the Black-Scholes formula...."
Quoted from Jim Mahar's blog on April 14, 2005.  He's referring to "2005 Executive Compensation Scoreboard The 2005 Business Week Executive Compensation "scoreboard," Business Week --- http://bwnt.businessweek.com/exec_comp/2005/index.asp

If you have this magazine in the attic, it might be worth $10,000
From the Washingon Post Tech News on April 15
In 1965, a technology trade magazine quoted Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore as saying that computer processing power would double each year, a theory widely embraced as Moore's law and one that still holds true to this day. Trouble is, Intel never saved a copy of the magazine and now is offering $10,000 for a mint condition copy. Which magazine are they looking for?

A. Popular Mechanics
B. Computing Times
C. Electronics Magazine
D. PC World

Johnson's Dictionary
Two hundred fifty years ago, on April 15, 1755, Samuel Johnson published the first edition of his Dictionary of the English Language, compiled and written almost wholly by himself. It appeared in London in two folio volumes. Like most dictionaries, there is a rigorous serenity in the look of its pages. The language has been laid out in alphabetical order. The etymologies and definitions bristle with italics and abbreviations. The quotations that exemplify the meanings of the words present a bottomless fund of good sense and literary beauty.  It's tempting to think of a lexicographer in terms of the dictionary he produces, and Johnson's is certainly one of the great philological accomplishments of any literary era. But it's just as interesting to think of what the dictionary does to the man. Johnson says, quite simply, "I applied myself to the perusal of our writers." But reading "our writers" to find the materials for a dictionary is unlike any other kind of reading I can imagine. It would atomize every text, forsake the general sense of a passage for the particular meaning of individual words. It would be like hiking through quicksand, around the world. Johnson lived in turmoil, and the sense of vigor he so often projected was, if nothing else, a way of keeping order in a world that threatened to disintegrate into disorder every day. And what was the disorder of London to the chaos of the language? "Sounds," he wrote, "are too volatile and subtile (interesting that the NYT would spell subtle wrong in an article about a dictionary) for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride." Johnson published his dictionary not as the conqueror of the language but as the person who knew best how unconquerable it really is.
Verlyn Klinkenborg, "Johnson's Dictionary," The New York Times, April 17, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/opinion/17sun3.html?th&emc=th&oref=login

No sex please, I'm not into it
In the first study of asexuality ever published, Anthony Bogaert of Brock University in Canada last year analysed the responses of 18,000 people in Britain from a 1994 survey on sexual attraction. He found a "surprisingly high" number - 1 per cent - agreed with the statement "I have never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all". His results were published last year in The Journal of Sex Research and reported in New Scientist magazine. While homosexual behaviour has been observed in more than 450 species of animals, sheep have provided the best evidence so far for asexuality in the animal kingdom. Three different American teams in the 1990s found that about 10 per cent of rams showed no interest in ewes. Up to 7 per cent tried to mount or sexually interact with other rams. This left 3 per cent of rams that were sexually inactive.
"No sex please, I'm not into it," Sydney Morning Herald, April 16, 2005 --- http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2005/04/15/1113509924438.html

The article itself describes the "pattern"
Ultimately, being coupled is simply a state of mind, just as being single is. So your reaction, when your status shifts from one state to the other, will depend on whether it was your decision, your partner's or something that happened while you were busy making other plans; and what it all meant to you in the first place. Whatever the circumstances, when it does go pear-shaped, it takes a while to morph back from "we" to "I" but the loss follows this pattern.
Megan Gressor, "Back to square one," Sydney Morning Herald, April 16, 2005 --- http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2005/04/13/1113251685928.html

That speculation is incorrect
The memo went out to University of Texas System presidents last month. The Board of Regents had updated its rules on faculty rights and responsibilities, and wanted to make sure that professors knew about the new code . . . Under a section called “Freedom in the Classroom,” the policy reads: “Faculty members are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing his or her subject, but are expected not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter that has no relation to his or her subject.” As that language spread across the Internet, some professors suggested that there was a new crackdown in the works on what goes on in faculty classrooms, apparently to pre-empt David Horowitz-style “Academic Bill of Rights” legislation to regulate faculty conduct. That speculation is incorrect.
Scott Jaschik, "Layers of Meaning," Inside Higher Ed, April 21, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/04/21/texas

States yearn to collect online sales taxes
Online purchases from sites like Amazon.com and eBay may seem to arrive tax-free. Strictly speaking, however, purchasers are required to pay their own state's sales tax rate--the concept is called a "use tax"--and then voluntarily report the amount owed at tax time. Few do. That situation worries state tax agencies, which have long complained about individuals not volunteering how much use tax they owe from mail-order sales. The ballooning popularity of online purchases is making a bad situation worse, state officials believe. (All states with sales taxes have use taxes.) California residents, for instance, enjoy a 7.25 percent sales and use tax. State law is strict: If Californians travel to a state with a 5 percent tax and shop there, the law requires them to cough up the 2.25 percent difference when they return. Online purchases are taxed as well. But compliance is spotty at best. California's Board of Equalization estimates the state lost $1.34 billion in 2003 because residents aren't paying use taxes--$208 million of that due to online purchases. "We are looking at ways to help solve the tax gap in California," Anita Gore, a Board of Equalization spokeswoman, said Thursday. "We're doing the background and research necessary to bring in more of this money."
Declan McCullagh, "States yearn to collect online sales taxes," ZDNet, April 15, 2005 ---
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5672198.html

Looking for love in all the wrong places
He says his job as a Moscow gumshoe is right out of the movies. His name is Vladimir, an undercover detective hunting down Russian women who bill themselves online as brides. As CBS News Correspondent Thalia Assuras reports, their prey is American men. "They suck out $3,000 to $5,000, then simply disappear," he says. "It's become almost like an industry," says Russian detective Elena Garrett. Garrett is Vladimir's boss back here in the United States. A Russian bride herself, she now helps clients find out if their online love is real or an Internet phantom. "He gives us her name, age and everything, and we come back in three days and we say, 'There is no such girl,'" says Garret. "Such girl does not exist."
"Beware Russian Web-Order Brides," CBS News, April 16, 2005 --- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/14/eveningnews/main688311.shtml

French farmers may become Europe's "black sheep."
Mr Chirac fired some shots at his opponents, warning his audience about the consequences of voting No and conjuring up some fears of his own. Without a strong Europe, he said, France would be vulnerable to the “ultra-liberal, Anglo-Saxon Atlanticist” currents in the world and the rising powers of China, India and South America. In particular, he cautioned France's farmers, who are opposed to the constitutional treaty, that their lucrative subsidies from Brussels could end if they rejected the treaty and became Europe's “black sheep”.
John Thornhill, "Chirac shoots from hip for Yes vote," Financial Times, April 15, 2005 ---
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/67c799b4-adea-11d9-9c30-00000e2511c8.html

First clone of champion racehorse revealed
The first ever clone of a champion racehorse was unveiled on Thursday at a press conference in Italy. The foal was cloned from a skin cell of Pieraz, a multiple world champion in equine endurance races of up to 50 kilometres. Unlike conventional horseracing, which bans the use of non-natural methods of breeding, including cloning, endurance racing is among the half dozen or so equine sports which would allow cloned competitors. Others include dressage, showjumping, three-day-eventing, polo and carriage horse racing. It is the first time an elite racehorse has been cloned, and comes two years after the appearance of Prometea, the first and only other cloned horse. “Prometea was just a scientific experiment and, scientifically, there’s not much new about the new clone,” says Cesare Galli, who produced both horses at the University of Bologna in Cremona, Italy. “But from an industry viewpoint, the new horse is the real thing.”
Andy Coghlan, "First clone of champion racehorse revealed," New Scientist, April 14, ---  http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7265

His house is now a home
The owner of a brothel in a small town in southern Poland is closing down his business out of respect for Pope John Paul II who died on April 2, the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper reported yesterday. "I'm closing down my business with the girls; I'm doing it for the one at the top, for John Paul II," the paper quoted Jozej Galica as saying. "Money is not everything. Something cracked inside me. I lost my way in life," he said. Mr Galica said he would from now on take communion and confess to his Poronin parish priest, Franiszek Juchas, who confirmed that the businessman had assured him he would shut up shop.
"Brothel owner sees the light," Sydney Morning Herald, April 17, 2005 --- http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2005/04/16/1113509968291.html

Terrible time in history that gave Australians Anzac Day
Australia fed 331,781 young men into the World War I mincer of France, Belgium, Gallipoli and the Middle East. Almost 60,000 never came home. Of those who did, 213,000 returned wounded, either in body or mind. Another 85,000 Australians enlisted but did not serve overseas. In a nation of just 4 million, 416,809 of its men - all volunteers - were in uniform at some time during the years 1914-18. Only three are still alive. Two are Victorians. They are both 105. The other is a West Australian. He is 106. Just the three of them. They are all that is left of that terrible time in history that gave us Anzac Day.
"Shameful history of a desecration," Sydney Morning Herald, April 16, 2005 --- http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2005/04/15/1113509924777.html

Investor beware of your broker even after the new laws and regulations
The outrageous rip-off sends a clear signal to investors that while many firms on Wall Street have cleaned up their acts, smaller, neighborhood brokerages can still be a danger. Mitchell was so bold that he made more than 2,400 stock deals in one nine-month stretch and purchased more than $196 million of securities, the papers said. In addition to illegally draining $10 million from his client's account, he ran up a $7 million margin balance, according to the NASD papers. "This is one of the most brazen, egregious frauds I have ever seen," said Jacob H. Zamansky, the lawyer who brought the charges on behalf of his clients, Boris and Igor Minakhi, brothers who are the trustees for their family's fortune.
Richard Wilner, "QUEENS BROKER IN KING-SIZED SCAM ," New York Post, April 17, 2005 --- http://www.nypost.com/business/42773.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on "Rotten to the Core" are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#InvestmentBanking

Congratulations Jim:  Best of luck on your tough new assignment
The University of Washington has named Jim Jiambalvo, a professor of accounting, dean of the university’s business school, pending approval by the school’s regents. Jiambalvo, who has been with the business school since 1977, is expected to start his new job May 1, 2005. In announcing Jiambalvo’s nomination for the top job, university officials said that one of his key goals will be raising money for the creation and construction of a new business school complex.
"Accounting Professor Named Dean of Business School," AccounitngWeb, April 11, 2005 --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=100771

Flap in Georgia
The University of Georgia’s messy, on-again, off-again battle with its own foundation is on again. The Associated Press reports that the Board of Regents told the university to sever ties to the foundation. The two entities have been fighting over athletics programs, control of the university name and management issues.
"Flap in Georgia," Inside Higher Ed, April 21, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/04/21/qt

Are you interested in four of our twelve grandchildren?
Cindy is David's wife and the mother of four of our grandchildren.  Her journal about raising four children near Yuba City, California --- http://journals.aol.com/cb96db/Summeradventures/

Drag the mouse and make the skeleton dance to the music --- http://www.chezmaya.com/applet/valentin.htm
Link forwarded by Auntie Bev

Die hard Packer fans won't think this one is odd.
Toivo, a Finlander from Brantwood, finally gets a ticket to a Packer game. His seat is in the nosebleed section but that's OK - he's at Lambeau Field. So he starts looking around with his binoculars and sees a guy in one of the best seats in the stadium with an empty seat beside him. It looks like an old friend named Ole he knew when he went to school up north. This is driving Toivo nuts, so finally at half time, he goes down, says hello to his old friend, and asks Ole why he has a vacant seat in such a choice location.

Ole says, "My wife, Lena, and I bought dese here seats a long time ago. But sadly, my dear Lena has passed avay."

"Oh, I'm really sorry to hear dat", Toivo says, "but vhy didn't you give da ticket to anudder relative or a friend?"

Ole replies, "I tried to but everyone vanted to go to her funeral instead."

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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