I recently sent out an "Appeal" for accounting educators, researchers, and practitioners to actively support what I call The Accounting Review (TAR) Diversity Initiative as initiated by American Accounting Association President Judy Rayburn --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR.htm

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan --- FactCheck.org --- http://www.factcheck.org/

Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) was the pseudonym of Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet, educator, diplomat and feminist --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriela_Mistral

“Objectivity is a good thing to strive for in journalism, but not at the expense of failing to confront the obvious. My own newspaper, for example, has written extensively about Vice President Cheney without once pointing out the self-evident fact that he is — and I offer this as a trained professional observer — Satan.”
Dave Rossie who contends "Truth always makes graduation speeches better" --- Click Here
Jensen Comment
If this was a quote from a student's commencement address we might be more forgiving, but David Rossie is an Editor for the Gannett Newspaper Chain. What odds do you give to the "objectivity" of anything edited by Dave Rossie?

Homer: Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals ... except the weasel.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons Quotes --- http://www.thesimpsonsquotes.com/

Three Montana State University students are suing two professors for libel over a painting by an art professor that portrays the students as “foolish weasels,” the Associated Press reported. The painting was displayed prior the students’ being cleared over allegations of having cheated on an assignment.
Inside Higher Ed, June 22, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/23/qt

A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that "individuality" is the key to success.
Robert Orben as quoted by Mark Shapiro at http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-06-20-06.htm

Homeowners and business owners still reeling from soaring insurance premiums can expect to get socked again. After two busy hurricane seasons, local governments across Palm Beach County are being slammed with similar property insurance increases. And taxpayers will have to pay the price to keep city halls, police and fire stations, and park facilities protected. "In the last five years, it's easily more than doubled, possibly tripled, with no end in sight," said Boynton Beach Risk Manager Chuck Magazine. "My doctor tells me I need to be in a less stressful job."
Erika Slife, "Palm Beach County governments getting socked by high insurance bills," Sun-Sentinel, June 19, 2006 --- http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-pcoverage19jun19,0,635079.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines

According to the senator’s travel-expense forms, unearthed by the Center for Public Integrity, the senator and her aides have taken free rides on a Lockheed-owned private plane at least five times since 2001. The Lockheed jet isn’t exactly Air Force One, but it certainly has saved time and airfare costs during the Armed Services Committee member’s successful efforts to get Lockheed defense contracts, notably a $1.7 billion, 750-job deal to build presidential helicopters up in Owego (population 3,911), near Binghamton. Last year, Lockheed’s pac gave Clinton the maximum $5,000 donation, a first since Clinton became senator, but its generosity didn’t start there. In July 2004, Clinton and her personal aide, Huma Abedin, boarded a Lockheed jet at Dulles and zipped up to Troy for the day with the Italian ambassador to the U.S., Sergio Vento, for the first-ever New York State Little Italy Heritage Tourism Conference. After the full-day affair, Clinton zipped back down to Teterboro, New Jersey, on Lockheed’s jet. The trip, labeled on disclosure forms as a “speaking engagement,” was paid for by Lockheed, even though Senate ethics rules mandate that a primary sponsor of the event pony up. Jennifer Hanley, a Clinton rep, insists no ethical breaches were made, explaining that Clinton and Lockheed share the same goal—bringing jobs upstate—and that Lockheed’s free lift to Troy was made in that spirit.
Geoffrey Gray, "Hillary’s Friendly Skies: Air Lockheed," New York Magazine, June 19, 2006 --- http://www.newyorkmetro.com/news/intelligencer/17339/index.html

The most memorable part of "Forrest Gump" is a scene set in or around 1968, in which Forrest, who by the way served in Vietnam, has encountered his love interest, Jenny, at an antiwar rally in Washington. Jenny gets into an argument with her hippie boyfriend, who slaps her in the face. Forrest decks the hippie, who later tries to smooth things over with Jenny: "Things got a little out of hand," he tells her. "It's just this war and that lying son of a bitch, Johnson! I would never hurt you. You know that." This wonderfully encapsulated the worst aspects of baby-boomer liberalism: the narcissism thinly disguised as idealism, the self-pity and flight from accountability, the tendency to lash out at those to whom one owes loyalty.
Opinion Journal, June 19, 2006

It's a problem for perpetrators. Young men and teens wearing low-slung, baggy pants fairly regularly get tripped up in their getaways, a development that has given amused police officers and law-abiding citizens a welcome edge in the fight against crime.
Serena Ng, "Perpetrator Problem: It's Hard to Run Away In Falling Trousers Cops Say Loose, Baggy Jeans Trip Up Many a Thief; 'Hey, Dude, Buy a Belt'," The Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2006; Page A1 --- Click Here

Warren E. Buffett's gift of about $37.4 billion (out of his $44 billion) to Bill Gates's charity and four others vaults him into the top tier of charitable giving.
Timothy L. O'Brien and Stephanie Saul, The New York Times, June 26, 2006 --- Click Here

The state (Louisiana) predicted that collections would plunge after last year's hurricanes, but instead revenue is setting a record.
Leslie Eaton, The New York Times, June 26, 2006 --- Click Here

Saying friendship is as if to say perfect understanding, immediate trust and lengthy reminiscing, that is to say trustworthiness.
Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) was the pseudonym of Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet, educator, diplomat and feminist --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriela_Mistral

In April 2006 I commenced reading a heavy book entitled Great Minds in Management: The Process of Theory Development, Edited by Ken G. Smith and Michael A. Hitt (Oxford Press, 2006).

The essays are somewhat personalized in terms of how theory development is perceived by each author and how these perceptions changed over time.

In Tidbits I will share some of the key quotations as I proceed through this book. The book is somewhat heavy going, so it will take some time to add selected quotations to the list of quotations at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/GreatMinds.htm

PG. #509 & 510 WINTER
In the spring of 1959, chance events let me to read a 1950 paper by Armen Alchian, entitled "Uncertainty, Evolution and Economic Theory" (Alchian, 1950). At the time, I was trying to do a dissertation featuring an empirical analysis of the determinants of corporate spending on research and development. R&D had become quite a hot topic in applied economics after the mid-1950s. The theoretical framework that I had planned to use in this investigation was a model based on the familiar concept of the profit-maximizing firm, a core theoretical commitment of mainstream economics then and now. But, at the time of the fortuitous encounter with the Alchian paper, I had become concerned that my model of profit-maximizing R&D spending related to a decision situation that did not actually exist, at least not in any form resembling the context-free one that the model addressed.

Reading Alchian, I saw that an evolutionary approach on the theoretical front might offer a promising way to address satisfactorily a set of otherwise bothersome facts: (1) business discourse on R&D intensity seemed to be anchored on some notion of an appropriate R&D-to-sales ratio; (2) firm R&D decisions of any particular year were strongly shaped and constrained by decisions and their consequences from previous years; (3) incremental changes in policy nevertheless occurred, and had in fact accumulated over time into a pattern of significant and persistent inter-industry differences in R&D intensity; and (4) sustained pressures from the economic and technological environment seemed to play a shaping role in the emergence of those inter-industry differences. Such was the starting point of my long odyssey with evolutionary thinking.

That personal journey is now half way through its fifth decade. More than three decades have passed since Richard Nelson and I published our first collaborative papers on evolutionary economics, and more than two since we presented a major statement of our theory in An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Nelson and Winter, 1982a). Needless to say, there have been a number of significant twists and turns along the way. In particular, the opportunity to present this chapter in a volume devoted to management theory reflects developments that certainly were not anticipated in the early stages. From its original status as a possible solution to my specific problem with R&D spending, the evolutionary approach quickly became the basis of an attempt at major reform in economic theory. That it remained, though the scope became even broader, as the collaboration with Nelson began. A contribution to management theory was not on the program.

Nevertheless, the logic of the connection to management is clear enough. As my subsequent discussion here explains, one of the key advantages of the evolutionary approach is that it offers liberation from overly stylized theoretical accounts of business behavior. Alternatively, one might say that the evolutionary approach embraces the realities of business decision making rather than shrinking defensively from them (exactly the choice posed in my encounter with the question of R&D spending). It, thereby, makes room for managers in the economic account of business behavior, and at the same time offers a style of economic thinking that is more interesting and potentially helpful to managers. In both directions of that traffic, the words "technology," "organization," and "change" are prominent, along with "management" and "evolution." A considerable portion of this promise has been realized, thanks in great part to the number of other scholars who have shared this vision, or pieces of it, and sought to bring it to realization. Major opportunities still lie before us.

PGS. 511 - 514 WINTER 24.2 "REALISM," MAXIMIZATION, AND THE THEORY OF THE FIRM
The Friedman paper mentioned above soon supplanted the Alchian paper as the main focus of my early thinking about economic evolution, but Alchian's work remained a fundamental guide in one key respect. Alchian had proposed a reconstruction of economic theory on evolutionary principles, and plausibly sketched some key elements of such a program. That idea appealed to me, but it certainly was not what Friedman was up to.¹Friedman's essay, "The Methodology of Positive Economics," appeared as the first chapter of his Essays in Positive Economics (Friedman, 1953). In large part, it was Friedman's response to a lively scholarly controversy about the profit maximization assumption that had emerged in the 1940s. The critics complained that the assumption was not realistic, and some of them cited evidence from close-in observation of business behavior to back their claims.² Friedman argued that the critics suffered from a simplistic understanding of what "realism" meant in science. He also put forward arguments about why profit maximization might be a "fruitful hypothesis" in spite of apparent conflicts with direct observation--scorning the latter with the comment "A fundamental hypothesis of science is that appearances are deceptive" (p. 33). One of his supportive arguments for profit maximization as a scientific hypothesis was an evolutionary "natural selection" argument that concluded with these words:

The process of "natural selection" thus helps to validate the hypothesis--or rather, given natural selection, acceptance of the hypothesis can be based largely on the judgment that it summarizes appropriately the conditions for survival. (1953:22)

The critical assessment of this proposition--which I have come to call "the Friedman conjecture"--became the central theme of my dissertation research, at a rather late stage in the year that I was supposedly devoting to the dissertation. The study of corporate R&D spending was never completed; the theoretical puzzle it presented was recast as an example of a much larger puzzle about the general representation of business behavior in economic theory, and about profit maximization in particular. The topics of R&D and technological change were set aside, but the early concern with these issues was a portent of things to come in the development of evolutionary economics.

As Friedman' essay explained quite well, every science faces the challenge of finding ways to makes its theoretical concepts operational, thus building a bridge from a theory to a set of facts that might be expected to throw light on the merit of the theory. Just how this "light-throwing" works is not obvious. It is actually a deep and sometimes contentious issue, though elementary accounts of the scientific method often posit a simple and reassuring answer. One particular puzzle concerns the appropriateness of leaving a theoretical term without any direct empirical reference of its own, so that it serves only as a convenient place-holder in a longer argument that engages observable reality at some distant point. Friedman's position was that the notion of "profit maximization" in economic theory was a theoretical term of this kind: what the theory says, per Friedman, is that firms behave as if they maximize profits. Hence, mounting an effort to examine firm decision making at close range is simply misguided (as economic science), because economic theory makes no real prediction as to what you should expect to find. Friedman suggested that other processes--such as "natural selection" or tacit skill--might create the observable consequences of profit maximization.³ This could be happening even if the maximization itself--in the sense of clear objectives, explicit calculation and careful comparison of alternatives--were not only unobservable, but absent. He also expressed skepticism about the possibility of discovering how business decisions are made through observation or interviews, suggesting that respondents might dissemble in some way or perhaps were actually not consciously aware of the mental processes involved (the tacit skill point). For example,

the billiard player, if asked how he decides where to hit the ball, may say that he "just figures it out but then also rubs a rabbit's foot just to make sure; and the businessman may well say that he prices at average cost, with of course some minor deviations when the market makes it necessary. The one statement is about as helpful as the other, and neither is a relevant test of the associated (maximization) hypothesis. (Friedman, 1953: 22)

This skepticism about the value of direct observation of firms is by no means peculiar to Friedman, or to those who are explicitly committed to something like his methodological outlook. It remains a broadly held attitude in the economics discipline, though perhaps not so broadly as when Friedman wrote. Anyone who undertakes a direct approach to studying firm behavior is sure to encounter it, sooner rather than later, when discussing the project with economists.⁴ To be clear, there certainly is merit in warning against the possibility that respondents are dissembling, or reporting socially approved motivations and procedures, or exercising tacit skills that they cannot explicate effectively. These points are familiar and accepted in social science research, and for that matter are widely relevant in everyday life. What is distinctive about the response often encountered from economists is its extreme and unqualified nature. Instead of being the beginning of a discussion of how likely it actually is, given the actual context, that the results are tainted in these ways, it tends to be offered as the end of the discussion--both for the present and for the foreseeable future.

The methodological issues surrounding profit maximization have rough parallels in others sciences. The case of the neutrino is a classic of the type. When originally proposed, the new particle appeared to be nothing more than an ex post adjustment to prevailing physical theory to protect it from apparently disconfirming observations. Even the proposer, Wolfgang Pauli, referred to the proposal as a "desperate expedient." As a patch to the theory, the neutrino seemed to have the disturbing property that it was apparently impossible to check its validity, since the assumed properties of zero mass and zero charge posed a major obstacle to observation. Thus, paralleling the case of "as if" profit maximization, the proposed patch was put forward in a context of cogent reasoning as to why it was impossible to check on its validity. Physicists and philosophers debated the legitimacy of the neutrino patch for some decades--after which the question faded, as first indirect and then relatively direct confirming evidence was developed.

¹ An argument that Friedman's evolutionary insights should imply reconstruction was actually made by Tjalling Koopmans, a much-admired mathematical economist who was a professor of mine at Yale (Koopmans, 1957: 140-141). I do not recall reading that passage in Koopmans before I read Alchian--but I might not have reacted, even if I did.

² A good example is Gordon (1948), which cites a lot of the other relevant work.

³ Friedman did not use the terminology of "tacit skill," but it seems fully appropriate in retrospect.

⁴ For a recent example, see Truman Bewley's discussion of these attitudes, which he encountered in connection with his interview-based study of why firms don't cut wages in recession (Bewley, 1999: esp. 8-16). More generally, see also Schwartz (1998).

PG. #518 WINTER 24.3.2 THE FRIEDMAN CONJECTURE
Theoretical analysis of the Friedman conjecture is one such approach. Essentially, the question is whether money will be left on the table in the long run if it is being pursued by profit-seeking firms with plausible, though typically not optimal, policies. In its basic form, such analysis first posits a situation in which it is logically possible for business firms to get the right answers to their decision problems, for at least there is a right answer. (Without this very substantial assumption, the Friedman conjecture is dead on arrival as a matter of strict logic.) The second constituent of the analysis is some postulated set of possible behavior patters for firms, such that at least some of these patterns are not comprehensively optimal. That is, contrary to the standard assumptions of economics, not all firms are necessarily getting the right answer all the time. (Without this assumption, the conclusion "firms maximize profits" is the trivial result of the familiar postulate, requiring no evolutionary logic or process to establish it.) The final constituent is a characterization of the dynamic process by which firms interact competitively, determining their survival and growth. With the details of a hypothetical context thus specified, the problem of such analysis is to characterize how the dynamic process turns out, and whether this outcome is consistent with Friedman's conjecture of "as if" profit maximization.

PG. #520 & 521 WINTER 24.3.3 BEHAVIORALISM
At the time, I was beginning my dissertation research, the "Carnegie School" was reaching an advanced stage of development in Pittsburgh. Herbert Simon's famous article on satisficing, "A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice," had appeared in 1955 (Simon, 1955), and I had had the good fortune to encounter it in graduate school.¹¹ The classic Organizations volume by Simon and James March appeared in 1958 (March and Simon, 1958). Much of the research that in 1963 appeared as the Richard Cyert and James March book, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Cyert and March, 1963), was under way and was beginning to appear in working paper form. What the Carnegie scholars had to say about firm behavior was partly familiar, being in some ways parallel to what had been said earlier by the economists who criticized the orthodoxy in the theory of the firm. These were the very critics to whom Friedman responded in his essay, and I was well aware of their work. In retrospect, it may appear that even at that early stage there was an evident opportunity to use an evolutionary approach to build on and complement the "micro-foundations" of firm behavior contributed by the Carnegie School.

In fact, that did not happen--at the time. There was some cross-fertilization, and some sense of encouragement (at least in the Carnegie-to-Winter direction), but not much. The "behavioral theory of the firm" was not easy to absorb, especially in its unfinished form. It involved novel theory, novel research techniques (especially computer simulation) and novel-seeming blind spots (especially, an apparent indifference to the role of markets as understood by economists).

When the Cyert and March book appeared in 1963, I was invited to review it for the American Economic Review (Winter, 1964b). In the course of reading the book and preparing the review, I was able to see the Carnegie work as a program for the first time--and to see it as complementary to the evolutionary approach, as suggested above. My review noted that the authors seemed content to regard firm behavior as a significant scientific problem in its own right, and willing therefore to set aside the task of predicting market phenomena--and suggested that this should not be the permanent state of affairs: Also, it is to be hoped that someone will eventually accept the challenge of attempting to provide a better definition of the relationship between the behavioral theory and the traditional theory than is provided by the assertion that the two theories are concerned with different problems...

...the consistency of the behavioral theory with the more persuasive portion of the empirical evidence for the traditional theory has yet to be determined. Investigation of the relationship between the two theories will probably involve closer attention to the circumstances that determine when the profit goal is evoked and when profit aspirations adjust upward, as well as to the ways in which competition may force an approach to profit maximization by firms whose decision processes are governed in the short run by crude rule-of-thumb decision rules. (Winter, 1964b: 147; emphasis in original)

Although it was not fully spelled out in my review, any more than in the book itself, I could see that the Cyert and March book suggested the possibility of a new division of scientific labor. Firm behavior could be regarded as a subject matter in its own right, which on the face of it appeared to involve aspects appropriately studied in psychology, sociology, organizational behavior, engineering, operations research, management, finance, accounting, marketing, and perhaps other disciplines as well, in addition to economics. The primary role of economics was not to strive for imperial control over these other intellectual domains, and certainly not to ignore them, but to point out the systemic and long-run implications of whatever firm-level truths might be brought forward, from whatever source. This role is especially suitable for economists insofar as those implications are largely the result of firms interacting through markets. At the same time, operations research and the business-oriented disciplines might reasonably concern themselves (at least in part) with how existing modes of business behavior might realistically be improved--and that, too, is not the central role of economics. This vision of the appropriate division of labor represents my present view.

¹¹ I doubt that Simon's article ever made an appearance on many reading lists for economics courses, and certainly not by 1957. But it was on the list for Jacob Marschak's seminar on Economics of Information and Organization, which I took at Yale in that year. Even the title of Marschak's seminar now seems quite remarkable, given the date.

PG. #541 & 542 WINTER 24.7 EVOLUTIONARY ECONOMICS AND MANAGEMENT
Economics needs to take large firms very seriously because of their major influence on the system as a whole. Taking large firms seriously means taking managers seriously, because managers make real choices under real uncertainty. In organizational economics, there are valiant efforts to take managers seriously within the familiar frame of rational choice modeling (Gibbons, 2003). Such efforts, while capable of generating useful insight at the micro level, have limited power to address the evolution of the context, capturing the larger scale interactions in the system. For that purpose, the familiar story of profit maximizing firms and (even) competitive markets provides the backdrop for the analysis, as it does elsewhere in the discipline, for want of anything better (or so it is claimed).

In management, the need to take managers seriously does not require an argument, and is not limited to accounting for the influence of large firms. A possibly more serious question is, does management need to take economics seriously? While a lot of useful work under the broad rubric of management probably does not need to take economics seriously, there are areas where economic principles are fundamental to the problems addressed. Strategic management is the obvious case. Like mainstream economics, evolutionary theory illuminates the workings of competition in the marketplace, through which firms influence each others' profitability as well as their prospects for growth and survival. Unlike mainstream economics, its illumination of those "workings" falls directly on the dynamic processes of competition, and not just on equilibrium outcomes or tendencies. Also unlike mainstream economics, its image of a population of firms is an image of heterogeneous firms, differing in their ways of doing things and also in size--with the size differences produced endogenously as a consequence of those idiosyncrasies.

Indeed, thanks to the complementary theoretical work in organizational learning and the partial filling of the major gap concerning industry evolution, it should now be within reach to produce a comprehensive model of the creation and evolution of an industry--a sort of "Big Bang" model for an industrial universe. Such a model would map the entry processes, the learning processes, the market competition processes, the differential growth and survival, and the appearance of concentrated structure--all within a frame that represented and controlled the key exogenous forces and structural determinants, but none of the details. It could even extend to the significant problems relating to the determination of industry and firm boundaries, since evolutionary forces are at work there as well (Langlois, 1991; Jacobides and Winter, 2005). Such a model would rest on a layered structure of theoretical commitments about key processes--commitments that have already been identified and debated, and of course can be debated further. Implemented as a simulation model, it would produce a realistic picture of an industry that responded in systematic ways to differences in the exogenous conditions. It might misrepresent reality, not merely because of the necessarily abstract character of theory, but because it failed to capture significant patterns in the reality. And if it did misrepresent reality in significant ways, that discrepancy would be ascertainable. In short, it would have content.

Most fundamentally from the viewpoint of management theory, evolutionary theory invites detailed attention to individual firms and the problems they face in dealing with competitive environments.²⁴ It does not merely accept, but urges, that inquiry extend to the inner workings of firms. It offers the investigator suggestions about what to look for--especially if the inquiry is one that includes a concern with how that firm fits and fares in the larger system. It also urges, however, that an open mind about the nature of decision processes found in firms will prove more useful than a closed one.

²⁴ In this connection, see Gavetti and Levinthal (forthcoming) for an encouraging assessment.

¹ The operationalization of TCE is the result of the concerted effort of many contributors. A selection of some of the more influential articles can be found in Williamson and Masten, Transaction Cost Economics, Vols. 1 and II (1995). Also see Claude Menard (2005).

² For an autobiographical sketch of earlier events and people that were influential to my training and intellectual development, see Williamson (1995). Although good instincts helped me to make the "right choices" at critical forks in the road, I also had the benefit of a number of exceptional advisors and teachers--and fortunately often had the good sense to listen.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Dogs --- http://www.i-love-dogs.com/

Question
What subscription was recently cancelled with fanfare by the University of Incarnate Word?

The library dean at the University of Incarnate Word has canceled the library’s subscription to The New York Times to protest the newspaper’s recent scoops about some secret elements of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism activities, The San Antonio Express-News reported. Many faculty members at the university are outraged, the newspaper said.
Inside Higher Ed, June 30, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/30/qt

Jensen Comment
For a very long time this university has also had a large banner on the edge of campus that reads
"Support the Coalition Troops in Iraq."

Question
What is an "out of sample" test?
Hint: It's related to the concept of "replication" that almost seems to be unheard of in academic accounting research?

From Jim Mahar's Blog on June 29, 2006 --- http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/

I am a big fan of so called "out of sample" tests. When researchers find some anomaly within a data set and then others test for the presence in the same data set, we really do not learn much if they find the same thing. But when a new data set is used for the test, we have a much better understanding of the possible anomaly.

In the current JFQA there is just such an article by Richard Grossman and Stephen Shore. Using a data set that goes from 1870 to 1913 for British stocks, the authors find no small firm effect, and only a limited value effect.

In their own words:

"Unlike modern CRSP data, stocks that do not pay dividends do not outperform stocks that pay small dividends during this period. But like modern CRSP data, there is a weak relationship between dividend yield and performance for stocks that pay dividends. In sum, the size and reversal anomalies present in modern data are not present in our historical data, while there is some evidence for a value anomaly."
Which makes me wonder how many other things we think we "know" we really don't.

The current version of the paper is not listed on SSRN, but a past version of the paper is available (at least right now) here.

Bob Jensen's threads on the replication controversy in academic accounting research are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm#Replication

Colorado Moves to Fire Churchill
It’s possible that Ward Churchill may never again teach a class at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The interim chancellor at Boulder on Monday issued a “notice of intent to dismiss” the controversial professor, citing findings of serious and repeated research misconduct. Churchill still has appeal rights — and has 10 days to take his case to a faculty review committee. After any appeal, a final decision rests with the president of the University of Colorado System and the Board of Regents. And Churchill has vowed to sue the university to block any firing.
Scott Jaschik, "Colorado Moves to Fire Churchill," Inside Higher Ed, June 27, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/27/churchill

HypocrisyChurchill.htm

Ward Churchill should be fired for academic misconduct — that’s the decision made by the interim chancellor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, after receiving a report from a faculty committee concluding that Churchill is guilty of falsification, fabrication and plagiarism. That report shows that, even under difficult political conditions, it’s possible to do a good job dealing with charges of research misconduct. The Colorado report on Churchill provides a striking contrast to the flawed 2002 Emory University report on Michael Bellesiles, the historian of gun culture in America, who was found guilty of “falsification” in one table. The contrast says a lot about the ways universities deal with outside pressure demanding that particular professors be fired.
Jon Wiener, "A Lesson From the Churchill Inquiry," Inside Higher Ed, June 30, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/30/wiener

Also see
"Churchill Fallout: There Are More Like Him," by Anne D. Neal, Inside Higher Ed, May 26, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/05/26/neal

Jensen Comment
Jon Wiener clearly takes the side that plagiarism discoveries in Churchill's writings are relatively minor and that politics played the major role in this decision by the interim chancellor at the University of Colorado. What's more clear is that what Churchill and Bellesiles call academic "research" is unethically called "research" writing rather than "persuasive" writing with cherry picking of facts used in support of opinion. If cherry picking is grounds for firing in academe, an enormous number of professors would be fired around the world, although this bias in academic "research" is one of my pet peeves with the academy. Clearly this bias has not been grounds for firing in most instances in our academy.

Bob Jensen's threads on the Ward Churchill saga are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm

Appearance Versus the Realities of Research Independence and Freedom

"Let the Chips Fall Where They May," Mark Shapiro, The Irascible Professor, June 28, 2006 --- http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-06-28-06.htm

Political interference in academic research seems to be on the rise lately. We have seen this in the recent attempts to harass and intimidate researchers in such diverse fields as climate change and medicine whose results conflict with a particular political philosophy or ideology. The latest attempt to discredit the results of scientific research that uncovers uncomfortable facts is not in the cutting edge areas of global warming or stem cell research, but in the rather mundane area of forest management.

This time it's an Oregon State University graduate student in forestry who has been hauled before a congressional committee to defend research that has proven to be a bit uncomfortable for some in the logging industry. The graduate student, Daniel Donato, discovered that salvage logging following a forest fire can hinder the regrowth of the forest.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the finer points of forest management, salvage logging refers to the process of cutting down the dead trees that remain after a forest fire for commercial use. Salvage logging, which accounts for about one-third of the timber sales from national forests, is based on the assumption that clearing the burned over land of dead trees then replanting it with seedlings is the best way to help the forest recover. Donato and his team examined areas that were burned in the Biscuit Fire that raged through Rogue River - Siskiyou National Forest in southern Oregon two years before the research was carried out. Donato's group found that in burned areas where no salvage logging had taken place there was abundant natural regrowth, while in areas that had been logged the number of seedlings per acre was much less. In addition, Donato's team found that in areas where salvage logging took place there was a substantial amount of fallen timber from the logging operations that remained on the forest floor. This material could fuel future fires.

Much of the area that was burned in the Biscuit Fire is rugged and roadless. Salvage logging there is carried out mostly by helicopter. Logging crews are brought in by helicopter and the cut timber is removed by helicopter. This is difficult and costly work, and there is no incentive to remove slash timber that has little economic value. It also is more efficient and profitable to cut all the dead timber in a burned over area and then replant it than it would be to thin the standing dead wood and let natural regeneration take place.

Ordinarily, the one-page research note that Donato's group published on their work in an online edition of the journal Science would have gathered scant notice. After all, it was a study that was limited both in scope and duration, and the conclusions were hardly earthshaking. However, their publication sparked a firestorm of criticism because it came just as logging industry interests were pressing for the passage of a bill that would ease federal regulations on salvage logging in national forests. Some of those interests were well connected both politically and to the leadership of the College of Forestry at Oregon State University. The Dean of the college, Hal Salwasser, is a former U.S. Forest Service official who publicly supported the salvage logging bill, which was sponsored by Greg Walden (R, OR) and Brian Baird (D, WA). The college, itself receives substantial support from the logging industry, and recently had received a $1 million donation from the wife of the founder of Columbia Helicopters - a company that is heavily involved in salvage logging and had a strong interest in the passage of the bill. Columbia Helicopters and its executives, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, also had donated $22,000 to Representative Walden.

Dean Salwasser and senior faculty members in the OSU College of Forestry attempted to discredit the Donato group's research, going so far as to attempt to prevent publication of the work in the print edition of Science. The Bureau of Land Management briefly pulled funding from Donato's project, and Representatives Walden and Baird hauled Donato before a congressional field hearing in Oregon to explain his results. Oregon State Senator Charlie Ringo made public several email messages from Salwasser to logging industry representatives that showed he was firmly in their camp.

To his great credit Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief of Science and former president of Stanford University, refused to be intimidated. According to the Los Angeles Times, Kennedy stated that "It certainly was an attempt at censorship..." He decided to run the paper by Donato's group because it presented "sound, peer-reviewed research on a subject of considerable interest."

Donato's critics have responded that they were not attempting to censor the work, but were just responding to what they viewed as shoddy and incomplete research. In particular, they have raised questions about the statistical analysis in the Donato paper. Donato's group countered that six independent statisticians have examined their methods and have supported their conclusions. (Science is planning to publish the critique of Donato's work along with a response from Donato's group.)

The important point that seems to have been lost on the politicians and the industry representatives is that disputes over the validity of scientific results need to be addressed in the setting of a peer-reviewed journal such as Science rather than in congressional hearings.

Academic researchers like Donato and his group who provide objective information on politically charged issues often find themselves under attack from all sides. In this case they ended up in the middle of a dispute between environmentalists who would like to ban all salvage logging, and industry interests whose livelihood depends on logging. Objective research results can help to inform policy debates, and in this case could lead to sound forest management practices. However, academic researchers who provide objective information need to be able to gather and present this information without interference from vested interests on either side. Deans and other university officials have an obligation to support that kind of independence. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to maintain that independence when the powerful interests that are pressing the politicians to pass legislation favorable to them also are funding academic institutions.

"Charities Tied to Doctors Get Drug Industry Gifts," by Reed Abelson, The New York Times, June 28, 2006 ---
Click Here

Although outside researchers raised questions about the study's conclusions, the doctor betrayed little doubt. "We believe these results challenge current medical practice and recommendations," said Dr. Costanzo, who predicted many patients might benefit.

Dr. Costanzo did disclose to the audience that she was a paid consultant with stock in the device's maker, a Minnesota company called CHF Solutions. But she omitted another potentially important detail: CHF Solutions was also one of the largest donors to the nonprofit research foundation that had overseen the study. The company contributed about $180,000 in 2004, according to the foundation's federal filings.

Nor did she note that the nonprofit entity, the Midwest Heart Foundation, was in turn an arm of the thriving for-profit medical group outside of Chicago where Dr. Costanzo and more than 50 of her fellow doctors treat heart patients — in many cases using products and drugs made by CHF Solutions and other big donors to their charity. Although the CHF Solutions device has generally been slow to catch on, physicians at Dr. Costanzo's medical group have treated many patients with the company's filtration system.

The Midwest Heart Foundation, and the way it has become quietly interwoven into its doctors' professional lives, is far from unique. Around the country, doctors in private practice have set up tax-exempt charities into which drug companies and medical device makers are, with little fanfare, pouring donations — money that adds up to millions of dollars a year. And some medical experts see that as a big problem.

The charities are typically set up to engage in medical research or education, and the doctors involved defend those efforts as legitimate charitable activities that benefit the public. But because they operate mainly under the radar, the tax-exempt organizations represent what some other doctors, as well as regulators and industry consultants, say is a growing conduit for industry money. The payments, they say, can bias the treatment decisions of physicians, may lead to suspect research findings and at times may even risk running afoul of anti-kickback laws.

Federal officials are starting to take notice of such tax-exempt charities, which critics say are becoming increasingly popular as other forms of industry support to physicians — like lucrative consulting agreements that involve little actual work — have come under scrutiny from regulators and others worried about the potential conflicts.

The potential for abuse by these charities is clear, critics say. "It obviously sets a fertile ground for conflict of interest and misuse of funds," said Dr. Robert M. Califf, vice chancellor for clinical research at Duke University Medical Center.

The charities at issue are not philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that dispense grants for medical research but remain independent of any one group of doctors or medical practice. Instead, the charities drawing scrutiny are set up by doctors in private practice and are closely linked to those doctors' for-profit medical groups.

The Midwest Heart Foundation, which has received millions of dollars from medical industry donors, including the drug makers Amgen and AstraZeneca, and the Cordis and Scios units of Johnson & Johnson, says it stands behind its charitable work, which currently involves about 30 studies and dozens of doctor-education lectures each year.

Dr. Mark Goodwin, a managing partner for the Midwest Heart for-profit practice, said the foundation was created to help prevent potential conflicts by keeping the industry money separate from the doctors' private practice. Companies contribute to the foundation, he said, because they can rely on its research and the doctors involved can enroll large numbers of patients in studies. "We are able to deliver excellent research to our community in a timely fashion," Dr. Goodwin said, "and we are proud of it."

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on Controversies in Higher Education --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

Question
Why is forcing the resignation of Larry Summers costing Harvard $115 million (what would have been Harvard's largest philanthropic donation in history)?

Lawrence J. Ellison, chief executive of the Oracle Corporation and one of the world's wealthiest people, has decided not to donate $115 million to Harvard as he announced he would last year, the company confirmed yesterday. Harvard had planned to use the donation, which would have been the largest single philanthropic donation the university had ever received, to establish the Ellison Institute for World Health, a research organization devoted to examining the efficiency of global health projects. Mr. Ellison decided to cancel his plans for the donation after the resignation in February of Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, amid a storm of controversy.
Laurie J. Flynn, "Oracle Chief Withdraws a Donation to Harvard," The New York Times, June 18, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/business/28donate.html

But what is also true, some at Harvard noted, is that Ellison may be be developing a pattern for undelivered big gifts. In 2001, he told The Wall Street Journal that he would give $150 million to either Harvard or Stanford Universities for a center to study the interplay of technology, politics and economics. That gift never materialized.
Doug Lederman, "A Withdrawn Gift Rankles at Harvard," Inside Higher Ed, June 29, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/29/ellison

Statistics Assignment
Compute the odds of this, especially the odd of having wives with identical names

Ronald Wayne Blankenship, a candidate in the runoff for the Democratic nomination for Jefferson County sheriff, says it's coincidence that a man with a criminal past shares his name and birthdate. It's strange but true, he says, that both he and a man who faked his own death in 1990 are married to women named Judy Ruth Green Stonecipher Blankenship.
Carol Robinson and Robert K. Gordon, "Candidate says criminal past not his," The Birmingham News, June 13, 2006 ---
Click Here

Statistics Question
Would a proud Baptist Baylor University lie with statistics?

One of the multitude of grievances regarding the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings of institutions of higher education is that there are ways to cheat — something that no individual student would be able to do when applying to, say, law school, without facing some mighty consequences. A researcher with the magazine says that officials with Baylor University School of Law have repeatedly submitted misleading answers to the magazine’s questions involving LSAT scores and grade-point averages of first-year students. Baylor officials, meanwhile, insist they’ve done nothing wrong.“We will be scrutinizing their data much more closely,” said Robert J. Morse, director of data research at U.S. News. “We’ll make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”
Rob Capriccioso, "False Rank," Inside Higher Ed, June 28, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/28/baylor

Believe it or Not: Ants Count the Steps Between Home and a Target

"When Ants Go Marching, They Count Their Steps," by Bjorn Carey, Yahoo News, June 29, 2006 --- Click Here

Ants use an internal pedometer to find their way home without getting sidetracked, a new study reports.

Desert ants on foraging expeditions use celestial cues to orient themselves in the homeward direction, but with few landmarks in the barren land, scientists have wondered how the insects always take the most direct route and know exactly how far to march.

The new study reveals that counting their steps is a crucial part of the scheme.

Old ideas

Over the years, scientists have proposed several theories for how ants find their way home.

One is that they do it like honeybees and remember visual cues, but experiments revealed ants can navigate in the dark and even blindfolded. Another disproved hypothesis was that because ants scurry at a steady pace, they could time how long it took them to get to and fro. Other studies have shown that once ants find a good source of food, they teach other ants how to find it.

The ant "pedometer" technique was first proposed in 1904, but it remained untested until now.

Scientists trained desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis, to walk along a straight path from their nest entrance to a feeder 30 feet away. If the nest or feeder was moved, the ants would break from their straight path after reaching the anticipated spot and search for their goal.

Try that on stilts

Next, the researchers performed a little cosmetic surgery.

They glued stilt-like extensions to the legs of some ants to lengthen stride. The researchers shortened other ants' stride length by cutting off the critters' feet and lower legs, reducing their legs to stumps.

By manipulating the ants' stride lengths, the researchers could determine whether the insects were using an odometer-like mechanism to measure the distance, or counting off steps with an internal pedometer.

The ants on stilts took the right number of steps, but because of their increased stride length, marched past their goal. Stump-legged ants, meanwhile, fell short of the goal.

After getting used to their new legs, the ants were able to adjust their pedometer and zero in on home more precisely, suggesting that stride length serves as an ant pedometer.

The study is detailed in the June 30 issue of the journal Science.

Why Ants Rule the World

Ants Ambush Prey from Foxholes

Hope for Eradicating Red Fire Ants

Ant School: The First Formal Classroom Found in Nature

Ants 'Fly' When They Fall

How Ants Navigate

Visit LiveScience.com for more daily news, views and scientific inquiry with an original, provocative point of view. LiveScience reports amazing, real world breakthroughs, made simple and stimulating for people on the go.

Updates from WebMD --- http://www.webmd.com/

Latest Headlines on June 20, 2006

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Mad Cow: Symptoms Emerge Decades Later

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Better to be a dirty rat than a sanitized rat
Gritty rats and mice living in sewers and farms seem to have healthier immune systems than their squeaky clean cousins that frolic in cushy antiseptic labs, two studies indicate. The lesson for humans: Clean living may make us sick. The studies give more weight to a 17-year-old theory that the sanitized Western world may be partly to blame for soaring rates of human allergy and asthma cases and some autoimmune diseases, such as Type I diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. The theory, called the hygiene hypothesis, figures that people's immune systems aren't being challenged by disease and dirt early in life, so the body's natural defenses overreact to small irritants such as pollen.
"You Dirty, Healthy Rat," Wired News, June 17, 2006 ---
http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,71185-0.html?tw=wn_index_8

"International Academy of Life Sciences Applauds Novel Product for Diarrhea," PR Web, June 24, 2006 --- http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/6/prweb403604.htm

Hanover, Germany June 24, 2006 -- A new approach to fighting diarrhea that fortifies the standard product, oral rehydration solution, with two key protective breast milk proteins is a revolutionary development that could save the lives of millions of children around the world, the head of an international group of medical and academic researchers said today.
The proteins were developed by U.S.-based Ventria Bioscience, which through a plant-based system is able to cost-efficiently produce significant quantities of lactoferrin and lysozyme, two proteins found naturally in breast milk.

"Our academic community supports the development of plant-made pharmaceuticals because of their tremendous potential to treat life-threatening illness," said Hilmar Stolte, M.D., president of the International Academy of Life Sciences (IALS). "Now we have a study that provides tangible proof of what is possible with this technology."

Diarrhea is the number-two infectious killer of children under five in the world and its effects are particularly acute in developing countries such as Peru, where more than 20 percent of the 36,000 children who die every year are victims of diarrhea.

A study conducted by investigators in the US and Peru found that by adding Ventria’s proteins to the standard treatment for diarrhea, oral rehydration solution, both the length and the severity of diarrhea decreased.

The study, which was conducted following World Health Organization protocols, found that children consuming oral rehydration solution with lactoferrin and lysozyme were sick for 3.67 days on average, as compared to 5.21 days for children receiving oral rehydration solution without the added proteins. Children receiving the enhanced oral rehydration solution had 30 percent shorter duration of the diarrhea. In addition, the children who received Ventria’s proteins had a higher rate of recovery and reduced incidence of another episode of diarrhea.

Leading researchers in the field have said that the development is a significant breakthrough in a condition that kills more than 2 million children every year.

"We know that babies that drink breast milk do not get diarrhea with anywhere near the same frequency as children who are not breast fed, so if you can take the important components of breast milk and extend them to children who are not breastfeeding and older people this would be a huge advantage," William Greenough III, MD, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University and an international expert in pediatric and geriatric diarrhea, has said. "This is what we call the Holy Grail: We’d like to have something that both hydrated people and could shorten the illness."

According to the World Health Organization there are 4 billion episodes of diarrhea in children each year. Many of these are repeat instances that can create chronic health problems including malnutrition, which in turn can weaken children’s immune systems and expose them to additional health risks such as infection, pneumonia and anemia.

"Diarrhea is a dreadful disease that preys worldwide upon the most innocent and the most vulnerable groups of people: children, the elderly and the poor," Dr. Stolte said. "This innovative science promises to provide new solutions to a long-standing public health problem. We applaud this effort."

Stolte, IALS and its U.S. partner, the Biomedical Exchange Program (BMEP), host http://www.plantpharma.org, an online community dedicated to a science-based, medically oriented discussion on PMPs and their potential to help combat life-threatening illness.
Continued in article

Technologies for regenerating damaged cells could one day help aging iPod addicts -- who are at higher risk of hearing loss
Emily Singer, "A Hope for Hearing Loss," MIT's Technology Review, June 21, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17010&ch=biotech

"Mental Health Youth Website at World Peace Forum," PR Web, June 19, 2006 --- http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/6/prweb400318.htm

Question
What is neoteny?

Serious Study: Immaturity Levels Rising
The adage "like a kid at heart" may be truer than we think, since new research is showing that grown-ups are more immature than ever. Specifically, it seems a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth. As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry. Among scientists, the phenomenon is called psychological neoteny. The theory’s creator is Bruce Charlton, a professor in the School of Biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of Medical Hypotheses, which will feature a paper outlining his theory in an upcoming issue. Charlton explained to Discovery News that humans have an inherent attraction to physical youth, since it can be a sign of fertility, health and vitality. In the mid-20th century, however, another force kicked in, due to increasing need for individuals to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends. A “child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge” is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world, Charlton believes. Formal education now extends well past physical maturity, leaving students with minds that are, he said, “unfinished.”
Jennifer Viegas, "Serious Study: Immaturity Levels Rising," Discovery News, June 25, 2006 --- Click Here

Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body --- http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/visibleproofs/

MedLinePlus: Dental Health --- http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/dentalhealth.html

Campus Health and Safety.org --- http://www.campushealthandsafety.org/

"The Naked Truth About Sex Ed," by Regina Lynn, Wired News, June 16, 2006 --- http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71158-0.html?tw=wn_index_2

A week ago, I got my hands on a book that big media has been afraid to touch. According to its author, a National Public Radio show said it was "too edgy" to review, while Newsweek said it was "inappropriate."
No, it's not Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code. It's a book on honest communication about sex, with an emphasis on sexual pleasure and emotional health. It recognizes that sex is so much more than intercourse and encourages readers to have an extensive pre-sex discussion, or PSD, before becoming sexually involved with a partner. And it advises not committing monogamously to one partner too soon.

Not so shocking until you realize that the book is written for teens and young adults, although author Dr. Roger Libby hopes parents and teachers will read and discuss it as well. And even though the title perfectly captures what's between the covers -- The Naked Truth About Sex: A Guide to Intelligent Sexual Choices for Teenagers and Twentysomethings -- it is apparently so dangerous in America to acknowledge that teenagers have sexual feelings and behaviors that few media outlets are willing to risk bringing attention to it.

But I've read it, and I'm not afraid. In fact, I think many adults can benefit from Libby's emphasis on communication and honesty and emotional health.

"This is the first book (about sex) written to teenagers other than (books about) abstinence since 1968!" he exclaims during our phone interview.

Libby is a certified sex therapist with a practice in Seattle and an adjunct professor of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. In writing Naked Truth, he deliberately stayed away from the usual diagrams of genitalia and reproductive systems in favor of getting to the real concerns young people have about sex.

The book includes numerous questions sent to him by teens and twenty-somethings during his Pleasure Dome radio show, which ran for three years on indie rock station 99X in Atlanta.

While young people will recognize themselves in the words of their peers, I suspect these Q&A sections will be revelations to parents as well. Judging from the e-mail I receive on a daily basis, young people aren't the only ones with these concerns.

Am I normal?

I have never had an orgasm. Not with a guy, not even when I'm masturbating. It makes my boyfriend feel bad because he thinks he's not pleasing me. What should I do?

I wish your PSD were required before sex. Maybe if sex education included something besides abstinence we'd all be informed enough to be selectively sexual.

All we ever get from teachers is the tired, irrelevant, "Just say no" motto.... How can we influence adults to be more real?

"I wanted to do a think piece, to promote a different view of sex," Libby says. "A broader definition (of safer sex) -- a PSD, not just, 'Do you have a condom?'"

He sums up the pre-sex discussion thusly:

A PSD is an intimate and entertaining conversation that informs prospective lovers about each other's feelings, desires, expectations, fantasies and her/his sexual knowledge and sophistication. It's an introduction to the possibility of a sexual relationship or encounter -- a preview of what sex would be like.

He doesn't talk much about the mechanics of sexual intercourse, focusing instead on making smart choices that lead to happy and safe sexual experiences, now and in the future. He writes about developing a healthy body and emotional self-esteem, fostering relationships based on mutual affection and trust, and the importance of being a good listener.

Continued in article

Potpourri from One of My Favorite Writers
This week’s column will be miscellaneous, not to say meandering. It updates earlier stories on Wikipedia, Upton Sinclair, and the Henry Louis Gates method of barbershop peer-review. It also provides a tip on where to score some bootleg Derrida.
Scott McLemee, "Grab Bag," Inside Higher Ed, June 28, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/28/mclemee

Question
What are the meanings of the terms SMS and Zlango

The newest language for mobile text messaging looks like hieroglyphics and sounds like a caveman. The language is Zlango, and its creators aim to inject whimsy and emotion into text messaging while reducing the number of keystrokes needed to get the point across. "SMS is the driest of all forms of communication," Zlango founder and Chief Executive Officer Yoav Lorch told UPI. "SMS," short for "short messaging service," is how much of the rest of the world refers to text messaging.
"Me little late meeting sorry sorry," PhysOrg, June 28, 2006 --- http://www.physorg.com/news70640782.html

Bob Jensen's Technology Glossary is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm

New spreadsheet innovations from he original developer of spreadsheet software

June 28, 2006 message from Richard Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU]

Dan Bricklin was the developer of Visicalc – and he has a screencast about his new web-based spreadsheet.

http://www.socialtext.com/node/83

Question
What are late-night television comedians doing to cheer UP Rush Limbaugh?

"Late-night comics Rush to Limbaugh story: Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien rise to occasion to lampoon Viagra incident," WorldNetDaily, June 28, 2006 --- http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50832

Rush Limbaugh wasn't the only broadcaster to make light of his airport delay when authorities in Florida found a bottle of Viagra in his luggage prescribed to someone else.

The late-night comics are having a field day with the story.

Both Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno joked about the incident on their respective programs last night and this morning.

"Airport security found a bottle of Viagra in Rush Limbaugh's luggage, so they held him up for three hours," O'Brien said. "Let's all say the punch line together, shall we? So they held him up for three hours, and then the Viagra held him up for another three hours."

Leno uncorked at least five jokes about the saga:

# "Well, it's Tuesday, or as Rush Limbaugh calls it, 'hump day.'"

# "That was my favorite story, Rush 'Limp-baugh' was detained for more than three hours at the Palm Beach airport after officials found a bottle of Viagra in his possession with someone else's name on it. How ironic is that? The one Republican with a plan to get cheap prescription drugs and they try to arrest him. It doesn't seem fair."

# "Airport officials said they first got suspicious when they noticed Rush couldn't keep his tray table down."

# "Here's an interesting fact. Did you know this? Even when Rush Limbaugh is on Viagra, he still 'leans to the right.'"

# "What is it with Republicans and Viagra? First Bob Dole, he was doing the ads for Viagra. Now they got Rush Limbaugh. Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but the man was always there to answer the call, ladies and gentlemen."

"A Stinging First Draft: Report released Monday by the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, June 27, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/27/commission

“History is littered with examples of industries that, at their peril, failed to respond to — or even to notice — changes in the world around them,” the report said, adding: “Our year-long examination of the challenges facing higher education has brought us to the uneasy conclusion that the sector’s past attainments have led it to unseemly complacency about the future.”

The 27-page preliminary report — which is enough a work in progress that it lacks a conclusion — largely delivers the back of its hand to American higher education, which it describes as offering “equal parts meritocracy and mediocrity.”

After a fleeting opening mention of higher education as “one of [the nation’s] greatest success stories,” the report lays out dozens of mostly critical findings, including

Insufficient access to higher education for many Americans, caused by inadequate student preparation, poor alignment between high school and college standards, and informational and financial barriers.

“The seemingly inexorable increase in college costs,” driven by “colleges’ and universities’ failure to seek institutional efficiencies and by their disregard for improving productivity,” and a system of higher education finance that is “increasingly dysfunctional, inefficient, and inadequate.”

“Evidence that the quality of student learning at U.S. colleges and universities is inadequate and, in some cases, declining.”

A “woeful lack” of publicly available and rigorously accurate information about colleges, most of which “make no serious effort to examine their effectiveness on the most important measure of all: how much students learn.”

Those and other findings, the draft report suggests, require a set of “imaginative solutions that are not just incremental but that rethink numerous aspects of today’s higher education system in substantial ways.”

It recommends dozens of changes, including:

Expanding access to college by “sealing the leaks in the educational pipeline,” better aligning K-12 and higher education standards and curriculums, and reforming colleges of education.

Overhauling the “entire financial aid system” in ways that would increase the availability of need-based aid and eliminate the complex federal financial aid form. Although it talks about a “streamlined” system, the draft, as written, stops short of calling for radically reducing the number of federal grant and loan programs, although some commissioners favor that.

Improving colleges’ productivity by insisting that they better control costs and prices ("college tuition should not rise faster than family incomes") and encouraging competition from “new competitors to traditional four-year institutions,” notably “community colleges and private for-profit providers,” which can be accomplished by “reducing barriers to the transfer of credit between institutions.”

Encouraging states to require that public institutions measure their students’ learning through a potpourri of tests and surveys, and directing colleges to “make aggregate summary results of all postsecondary learning measures ... publicly available in a consumer-friendly form.”

Developing a “unit record” system ("with appropriate privacy safeguards") to allow for the tracking of student performance across their academic careers.

Creating a “national accreditation framework,” though the draft does not specify whether this should be in addition to or in place of the current system of regional accreditation.

As recently as Friday, Miller, the chairman, and the commission’s staff had not been planning on releasing the draft report to the public, maintaining that federal law allowed the commission to keep its written work private until it completed work on a final report. But over the weekend, after a partial draft that circulated among the panel’s members provoked a significant outcry about its harshly critical tone, Miller said that the commission would release a draft, which was written by a small cadre of professional writers and consultants to the chairman.

Continued in article

"What’s Your Fraud IQ? Think you know enough about corruption to spot it in any of its myriad forms? Then rev up your fraud detection radar and take this (deceptively) simple test." by Joseph T. Wells, Journal of Accountancy, July 2006 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/jul2006/wells.htm

What Accountants Need to Know --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#AccountantsNeedToKnow

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on fraud are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

One of my technology heroes, Stanley Zarowin, answers technology questions in the July 2006 free online edition of the Journal of Accountancy --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/jul2006/tech_qa.htm#PRINT

Question
Will you want to replace Internet Explorer and Firefox with "Flock" as your default Web browser?
And here I was just getting comfortable with Firefox as my default browser.

"Flock: The New Superstar Browser: If you like the Firefox browser, you'll love Flock, which is rife with built-in social software features," by Wade Roush, MIT's Technology Review, June 23, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17034

You know that drawer in your kitchen full of everything from screwdrivers and matches to lint removers, Post-it notes, and picture hangers? That's what the Internet is starting to look like for folks who are hooked on social Web technologies such as blogging, photo sharing, social bookmarking, tagging, news feeds, wikis, and map mashups. That is to say, there are a lot of tools out there for creating, uploading, and sharing content -- and many of them work quite well. But they're a jumble, and you always lose time searching for the right one.

Flock, however, is the world's first browser built with social computing in mind. It does everything a Web browser should do, plus a lot of things that other browsers can't do without plugins or extensions. It won't organize your utility drawer, but it might speed you through your Web tasks so that you finally have time for that long-neglected housework. ;-)

Flock Inc., a year-old, 15-person outfit based in Mountain View, CA, released the "0.7 beta" version of Flock (for Windows only) on June 13. I've been testing it for the last several days. I'm impressed -- so much so that I'm almost ready to abandon Firefox and make Flock my default browser.

You might want to audition Flock for a while before you do the same, since it still has a few quirks and unfamiliar behaviors. But overall, the code-jocks at Flock have done a brilliant job of integrating functions that used to require me to fragment my attention across a dozen different websites and software tools.

Flock is the first browser to take full advantage of two fairly new sets of Web 2.0 resources: first, the open-source Mozilla browser code base, which gives Flock all the same features you're accustomed to in Firefox, such as tabbed browsing; and second, the rapidly multiplying application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow external parties to interact with database-driven services like Flickr. Those APIs are what lets Flock's programmers give you the tools to manage much of your personal information aura -- your bookmarks, images, blog posts, tags, and favorite news sources -- from a single application.

My favorite thing about Flock? The "blog this" option in the right-click menu, which beautifully illustrates how Flock integrates with other online services and simplifies common tasks such as creating a blog entry.

When you first download and install Flock, it asks whether you use a blogging service such as Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, or Live Journal, and invites you to enter your username and password. If you do, the "blog this" button will open a composing window with a pre-formatted link to the page you're looking at. You can type your comment, click "Publish," and wait for the post to show up on your blog. It's as easy as that to share the Web tidbits you discover throughout your day. You may never have to log into your blogging services' private interface again.

A related feature of Flock is almost as delightful: Web Snippets. If you see a sentence or paragraph you might want to reuse somewhere else -- in a blog post or an e-mail, for example -- you can highlight it and choose "Send to Web Snippets" from the right-click menu. As the name suggests, this feature sends the extract to the browser's snippets collection, which shows up as an optional bar at the bottom of the screen. From that bar, snippets can be dragged-and-dropped back into any HTML-based form, such as the "body" area of an online e-mail editor. It's a lot easier than the old procedure for reusing content, which often involved bookmarking the link to the page where you saw an interesting passage, coming back to it later, relocating the passage, and cutting-and-pasting it into an e-mail or a blog post.

Speaking of bookmarking, Flock takes care of that. The same big "Star" button that lets you mark items as local Favorites will publish those items to your online linkstream at social-bookmarking sites Del.icio.us or Shadows. (The drop-down menu for the Star button includes an intriguingly mysterious item called "Super Star," the function of which I have not been able to determine. If you know what it does, please leave a comment at the bottom of this blog post.)

And I haven't even mentioned Flock's built-in news feed, which eliminates the need for a separate RSS news aggregator, or its photo-sharing features, one of which lets you drag-and-drop photographs into HTML forms, such as the comment fields at other people's blogs or MySpace profiles. To accomplish this, Flock cleverly connects with your account at Flickr or Photobucket, uploads the photo to that account, then places an HTML link to the photo into the comment field. That way, anyone who clicks on the link later will be taken directly to your photo.

Another photography-oriented feature is the photobar, a bar at the top of the browser window that shows a parade of thumbnail images from your Flickr photostream or anyone else's. If you set it to connect with your squash buddy's photostream, say, you'll automatically see the latest pictures of his two-year-old when you open Flock. That's a very cool feature -- and up to now, it's only been available using plugins or standalone programs from companies like Bubbleshare.

Flock integration isn't flawless. My first try at blogging directly from Flock worked fine. The second time, when I clicked "Publish," Flock indicated that it couldn’t connect with TypePad's servers. I tried twice more with the same result, then gave up, figuring TypePad was having server trouble. Then I went to look at my blog -- and saw three published copies of the same post. (The moral of that story: no matter which remote blogging tool you use to publish an entry, it pays to proofread the new entry on your actual blog before you wander on to your next task.)

But considering how generally amazing and functional this beta release is, Flock deserves to be cut some slack over the remaining bugs. Because Flock is built on Mozilla, the same code base used by the Mozilla Foundation to build Firefox, the Flock team will be able to expand the program's features indefinitely. Also, most of the scores of extensions people have written for Firefox will also work in Flock -- so people defecting from Firefox to Flock hardly have to give up anything.

When I spoke with Peter Andrews, a developer at Flock, a few days before the beta launch, he told me the company's mission was to build a "next generation Web browser" for t

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Audio Slide Show: The Last Day of Little League On a Father's Day weekend, the Times's Harry Hurt III reports on an executive pursuit: watching his son's Little League game.

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Bob Jensen's threads on Ward Churchill are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm

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The Chevy Impala shows how much progress General Motors has made in improving its vehicles and, at the same time, how far behind it continues to fall.