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Leaders and the Responsibility of Power

"The Anxiety of Influence," by Josiah Bunting III, The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2006; Page A10 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115188105388196624.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep

More than 40 years ago the historian Henry Steele Commager asked how it was that the British colonies in North America could have produced such a galaxy of leaders: a generation that made a revolution and established a new and enduring nation. In talent, he argued, the leadership rivaled that of the Athens of Pericles and the England of Elizabeth I, a florescence of wisdom, character, virtue and vision that has not since been equaled. The question has never been -- and never will be -- satisfactorily answered; each generation is obliged to engage it in its own way.

Commager adduced several reasons, most of them familiar: "New occasions teach new duties," as James Russell Lowell wrote. Great challenge evokes mighty response. The places of honor, of ambition realized, were almost all to be found in the ranks of those preparing the Revolution or fighting in the continental army or designing, and making, a new government. There were few fortunes to be made, few industries, universities, institutions of culture to lead. And talent seemed much less divisible than in 20th-century America; that is, of necessity a new beau ideal of leadership had come into being: The patriot saw no necessary tension between being a scholar, soldier, writer, legislator, leader.

Like the heroes of the early Roman Republic and ancient Greece (Rome more than Greece) whom they emulated, these Americans discharged their obligations, as they understood them, by answering multiple vocations and duties, all serving a common end. They did not particularly count the cost. They were not concerned to lay up fortunes for themselves. They had small conception of what our own age calls (and is obsessed by) "stress." They were educated in the classics of ancient literature, history particularly, and in the philosophical literature of 17th- and 18th-century Europe -- Locke, Sidney, Montesquieu, Hume. Many did not attend college: There were only nine universities and colleges by the end of 1776.

Yet they wrote with a grace and lucidity we cannot match. Their minds seemed clearer than ours. And they had also what was imputed to a great general of a later generation: the imaginations of engineers. They knew how to transform ideas into action, into policies and institutions.

When they were young, these leaders of the revolutionary generation accustomed themselves, under the supervision of demanding adults, to long periods of solitary study. Their English near-contemporary, William Wordsworth, remembered a statue of Isaac Newton in the courtyard of his Cambridge college: "the marbled index of a mind voyaging forever, through strange seas of thought, alone." As young people, they were not often praised or rewarded. The satisfactions of learning, they were taught, were in the learning, and in how that learning -- like the unconscious predisposition to emulate certain heroes -- might somehow be transmuted into examples and lessons that would influence their own conduct later on. Like Pericles's men of Athens, they would thereafter "be ashamed to fall below a certain standard."

* * *

The English historian Paul Johnson wrote that the generation of American leaders of the 1940s was our ablest since that of the Founding. No one imputes to this second generation the creative genius of the first. Several of its tribunes were professional soldiers and naval officers -- men ideally (according to Clausewitz) of a searching rather than a creative intellect. One has the impression, studying their lives as youngsters, that they were not "brilliant" at school.

They were born between 1875 and 1890: they included FDR, Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, Ernest King, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Omar Bradley, William Halsey, Chester Nimitz. With the exceptions of MacArthur and Roosevelt, they were children of the American heartland, all born into modest, even hardscrabble circumstances. The service academies were literally their way out of Dodge.

For the military men, Marshall and MacArthur in particular, enormous responsibility was given them as lieutenants in their early 20s in the Philippines. Self-reliance is usually the consequence, and so is what David Riesman called, in 1950, "inner-directedness": the predisposition to act on judgment and conscience rather than calculations of external approval. Thus Harry Truman, almost blind without glasses, insisted on leading his artillery battery in the most severe, and final, campaign of the Great War -- the Meuse Argonne offensive (in which American casualties were 126,000, including 26,000 killed, in six weeks). More than 20 years later, Truman, then a U.S. senator, sought service again, but George Marshall turned him down: Truman was then in his mid-50s.

Nimitz, Bradley, Eisenhower -- towers of moral strength, settled wisdom, common sense of an elemental, singularly American kind: and all, like the 16 millions who served in World War II (more than 10% of the country's 1945 population) with the innate modesty which remains above all others the quality which draws Americans of 2006 to this Greatest Generation. Such people embodied the virtues, including the un-self-conscious nobility the founding generation admired in their ancient models.

* * *

In a phrase that recurs so often that it has almost become a cliché, we read that Bradley, or Ike, or Halsey "was a mediocre student at the Academy." Yet, in a confluence of character, conscience and mind that we cannot disentangle, they considered problems of enormous complexity, took counsel of those they admired, attained wise and useful decisions, and inspired and led huge numbers of servicemen -- and women -- to complete their missions. In our time of crisis will another generation bring forward men and women of the same métier as those of the Revolutionary and Second World Wars?

The answer expected is a red-blooded Of Course We Will! To suggest anything less is to invite the imputation of cynicism. But the culture of palliatives -- in which virtually all minor encumbrances of imperfect health, physical and psychological, can be erased by drugs, in which most avenues of advancement rely less on the actions of self-reliance than upon the legions of aids (human and material) that are gathered to smooth their way, and in which the ends to be pursued and the ambitions to be gratified are usually (though not always) those that exclude useful service to the nation -- this is not a culture that cultivates the qualities most needed.

Consider the character of George Marshall, leader of the American Army from 1939 to 1945, whose name, President Truman insisted, be given the Plan for European Recovery in 1947. A small episode, early in Marshall's final retirement, is illustrative. He was offered very large sums of money to write his memoirs. He declined instantly. It would not do to call attention to himself. His country, he said, had already compensated him for his service -- and besides, what he would be obliged to write, writing truthfully and accurately, might cause pain to people who had done their best, and who deserved well of their country.

Gen. Bunting, former superintendent of VMI, is president of the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation.

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 took some time to add selected quotations to the list of quotations at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/GreatMinds.htm 

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The New Yorker told us so four years ago
Year 2002 Articles About Hezbollah:  "The Most Successful Terrorist Organization in Modern History"
This week, a cross-border raid by the radical Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah embroiled Israel and Lebanon in an escalating conflict. In 2002, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a two-part article examining Hezbollah, which he called “the most successful terrorist organization in modern history.” Read part one and part two
Jeffrey Goldberg, "IN THE PARTY OF GOD:  Are terrorists in Lebanon preparing for a larger war? The New Yorker, October 2002 --- http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/021014fa_fact4

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Lebanon Leaders Reaffirm Support for Hezbollah Until Israel is Destroyed
Michel Aoun, a one-time commander in Lebanon's 15-year civil war who now serves in parliament, said . . . "I don't think that Israel has the capability to destroy Hezbollah militarily because Hezbollah is not a group of armed men," Aoun said. "Hezbollah is a major part of the Lebanese social fabric."
"Lebanese leaders call for unity:  Former president:  'The ship is sinking; we should stick together'," CNN International, July 20, 2006 --- http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/07/19/lebanese.politics/

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Year 2006 criticism of Hezbollah and Iran by Leading Arab Governments
With the battle between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah raging, key Arab governments have taken the rare step of blaming Hezbollah, underscoring in part their growing fear of influence by the group’s main sponsor, Iran. Saudi Arabia, with Jordan, Egypt and several Persian Gulf states, chastised Hezbollah for “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” at an emergency Arab League summit meeting in Cairo on Saturday.
Hassan M. Fattah, "Militia Rebuked by Some Arab Countries," The New York Times, July 17, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/17/world/middleeast/17arab.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
 

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Hezbollah and Pericles
Are these men and women hostages of live-in terrorists, dumb natives managed by shrewd colonialists, or are they perhaps accountable civil agents who made a very bad choice in one of their first democratic performances? Possible lesson: Reread Pericles. Arab democracy is not hopeless, a fourth clearheaded reflection suggests. The Middle East is divided between those who jeer with any rocket hitting Haifa, and those -- in Lebanon, Palestine and Saudi Arabia -- who secretly hope for both Hamas and Hezbollah to vanish into the limbo of lost lunatics and make way for better and saner Arab regimes. In the aftermath of the current war, Ehud Olmert's Kadima-Labor coalition government would promptly talk with a peace-seeking Palestinian government; this is why a majority of Israelis voted them in to begin with. Possible lesson: Moderates don't easily lose their nerve these days.
Fania Oz-Salzberger, "Hezbollah and Pericles," The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2006; Page A14 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115318772562109435.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep

You can read more about Pericles at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pericles

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Economic Development: What Islam "Most Loathes and Fears"
The real reason India was targeted was because it has transformed itself from a Third World country into a modern economic power, complete with Western-style freedoms. This is precisely what radical Islam most loathes and fears. If the rest of the Third World, especially Muslim countries, learn how to be like India; if they decide to become part of the global order, and learn how to produce wealth on a Western scale and enjoy Western freedoms, including freedom for women, and begin to build pluralist open societies, then the Islamists' dreams of power and domination are dead.
Arthur Herman, "Why India was Hit," The Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2006 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115334394588611561.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep

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Question
Will these engineering graduates take down their diplomas and return them to Ohio University?

Ohio University has sent letters to more than 50 people who earned master’s degrees with material believed to be plagiarized, asking them to return their degrees, rewrite their theses, or demand a hearing, The Athens News reported. In May the university found “rampant and flagrant plagiarism” among some graduate students in its mechanical engineering department.
Inside Higher Ed, July 19, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/19/qt

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

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Differing Standards on Plagiarism
At Southern Illinois University, some passages are being scrutinized by a contingent of young alumni, and current and former faculty members from both the Edwardsville and Carbondale campuses. The informal group, Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption at Southern Illinois, is calling on trustees to respond to their allegations that a number of administrators have plagiarized material that appeared on these campus Web sites — and in university addresses.
Elia Powers, "Differing Standards on Plagiarism," Inside Higher Ed, July 20, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/20/siu

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

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Yes Bohunk: It's Still Possible to Sign Up for Basket Weaving
Athletes Seek Out Professors Who Will Pass Almost Any Athlete
Watkins says it is all too common to see athletes grouped in certain departments or programs under the sheltering wings of faculty members who appear to care more about their success on the courts, rinks and fields than in the classroom. Faculty members are often the most vocal critics of favoritism for athletes (the issues at Auburn were raised by one whistle blowing sociology professor against another), he says, but it is frequently professors who are responsible for the favoritism in the first place.
Rob Capriccioso, "Tackling Favoritism for Athletes," Inside Higher Ed, July 20, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/20/sports

While accusations of widespread abuse like that alleged at Auburn are unusual, “clustering” of athletes — in which large numbers of athletes at an institution major in a particular program or department, out of proportion to other students at the college — is common. A 2002-3 analysis by USA Today found that a large percentage of football players at Auburn and Duke University (a quarter and a third of the teams, respectively) majored in sociology, while tiny fractions of all undergraduates majored in that field. At North Carolina State, the University of Michigan and University of Southern Mississippi, the most popular major among football players tended to be sports management, also far out of proportion with their peer students.

Richard M. Southall, an assistant professor of sport and leisure studies at the University of Memphis, says that his own sports and leisure area is the second most popular major for athletes, just behind those who attend the institution’s University College, an “individualized and interdisciplinary” degree program.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on scandalous academic standards for college athletes are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics

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Imagine a nuclear industry that can power America for decades using its own radioactive garbage

"The Best Nuclear Option:  The U.S. Energy Department's fuel-recycling initiative could be a distraction from a more achievable goal: reviving today's nuclear industry and averting some carbon emissions in the short term," by Matthew L. Weld, MIT's Technology Review, July 20, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17059&ch=biztech

Imagine a nuclear industry that can power America for decades using its own radioactive garbage, burning up the parts of today's reactor wastes that are the hardest to dispose of. Add technology that takes nuclear chaff, uranium that was mined and processed but was mostly unusable, and converts it to still more fuel. Then add a global business model that makes it much less likely that reactor by-products such as plutonium will find their way into nuclear weapons in countries like Iran, even as economical nuclear-power technology becomes available to the whole world.

That is the alluring triple play the Bush administration hopes to turn with the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) it unveiled earlier this year, a proposed long-term research and development program almost as audacious as the Manhattan Project. The basic fuel-reprocessing concepts at its heart have been kicking around for the better part of a half-century. Now they are being touted anew as a way to provide plentiful carbon-free fuel for an energy-hungry world threatened by human-induced climate change.

Under the plan, for which the administration has requested $250 million for the fiscal year beginning October 1, the United States and certain partner countries would process spent nuclear fuel using new techniques that would turn some of it into more fuel and minimize the amount requiring disposal. The United States and its partners would also lease reactor fuel to other countries, which would then return their spent fuel to be reprocessed.

The technology could exploit uranium far more efficiently: Phillip J. Finck, associate director at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, says it could extract up to 100 times as much energy from uranium as is now possible. With the waste now piled up at reactors around the United States, the theory goes, GNEP could produce all the electricity the country will need for decades, maybe even centuries -- assuming enough of the necessary new reactors could be built. That would eliminate about a third of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions (roughly the portion that today comes from fossil-fuel power plants). All this while reducing waste and thwarting the diversion of fuel to nuclear weapons.

In practice, though, in the best scenario GNEP would take decades to develop, and in the worst it might produce nothing; it could turn out to be a nonstarter on technical grounds, or the technology could be economically uncompetitive with other carbon-free sources of electricity. And the program could undermine a more modest and achievable goal: resuscitating a nuclear industry that hasn't launched a successful reactor project since 1974.

Today, a public once wary of nuclear energy has opened up to it as a possible answer to global warming. New reactor designs similar to those used in today's commercial fleet -- but said to be safer and more efficient -- are already approved or under review by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Utilities are in various stages of planning at least 16 such reactors (see "Stirrings of Renewal" chart) and may file applications with the NRC as early as the end of next year.

Continued in article

DOE's Blurred Nuclear Vision
The DOE has changed direction so many times in such a short period that it is in danger of going nowhere. What should it do? Given finite resources, focus on the top priorities. Without a nuclear renaissance -- which means real orders for new plants -- there will be less need for GNEP's novel solution to the waste problem. The department should spend resources to ensure that a renaissance actually occurs. In other words, help with engineering, to lessen the high initial costs. Do not discourage and confuse the utilities; instead, ensure that a repository will be in place to handle nuclear waste, in whatever form it takes. Establish a strategy for deploying the next generation of nuclear plants.
Andrew C. Kadak, "DOE's Blurred Nuclear Vision:  A consistent strategy is the key to a successful nuclear future, MIT's Technology Review, July 20, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17088&ch=biztech

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Student Adopts a Despicable Tactic for Meeting Scantily-Clad Coeds
A student at the University of Central Florida is accused of setting a fire on campus as a way to meet women, according to a Local 6 News report. Police said Matthew Damsky admitted to lighting a couch on fire at the Academic Village Dorms last week. Damsky told officers he hoped he would be able to meet women as the building was being evacuated.
"Police: UCF Student Set Dorm Fire To Meet Women," Local 6, July 20, 2006  --- http://www.local6.com/news/9546222/detail.html

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Important Security Update for Adobe Acrobat
Update to Acrobat fixes a vulnerability in the program that hackers could use to hijack machines running the software just by convincing people to open a hacker-designed PDF document --- http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/

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Question
What are the two basic forms of genius?

What he has found is that genius – whether in art or architecture or even business – is not the sole province of 17-year-old Picassos and 22-year-old Andreessens. Instead, it comes in two very different forms, embodied by two very different types of people. “Conceptual innovators,” as Galenson calls them, make bold, dramatic leaps in their disciplines. They do their breakthrough work when they are young. Think Edvard Munch, Herman Melville, and Orson Welles. They make the rest of us feel like also-rans. Then there’s a second character type, someone who’s just as significant but trudging by comparison. Galenson calls this group “experimental innovators.” Geniuses like Auguste Rodin, Mark Twain, and Alfred Hitchcock proceed by a lifetime of trial and error and thus do their important work much later in their careers. Galenson maintains that this duality – conceptualists are from Mars, experimentalists are from Venus – is the core of the creative process. And it applies to virtually every field of intellectual endeavor, from painters and poets to economists.
Daniel H. Pink, "What Kind of Genius Are You? A new theory suggests that creativity comes in two distinct types – quick and dramatic, or careful and quiet," Wired Magazine, July 2006 --- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius.html

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Saving the Soul of Public Research Universities
Competition among research universities for national ranking increasingly fuels a conflict between peer prestige and public purpose. Governors and legislators rail about public purpose, while professors and administrators rave about peer prestige. Can public research universities pursue both public purpose and peer prestige? (Can the University of Virginia meet the dual directive of its Board of Visitors to raise its proportion of economically disadvantaged students and its U.S. News & World Report ranking among national universities? ) As currently defined, achieving both goals remain an impossible dream, for public purpose is not a byproduct produced automatically while pursuing peer prestige.
Joseph C. Burke, "Saving the Soul of Public Research Universities," Inside Higher Ed, July 14, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/07/14/burke

Bob Jensen's threads on prestige ranking issues in higher education are at --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings

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Higher Education Cartoons by Matthew Henry Hall --- http://www.matthewhenryhall.com/

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National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science
Although the case method has been used for years to teach law, business, and medicine, it is not common in science. Yet the use of case studies holds great promise as a pedagogical technique for teaching science, particularly to undergraduates, because it humanizes science and well illustrates scientific methodology and values. It develops students’ skills in group learning, speaking, and critical thinking, and since many of the best cases are based on contemporary—and often contentious—science problems that students encounter in the news (such as human cloning), the use of cases in the classroom makes science relevant. At the University at Buffalo, we have been experimenting with case studies in science courses for over 15 years. We have found the method to be amazingly flexible. It has been used as the core of entire courses such as “Scientific Inquiry” or for single experiences in otherwise traditional lecture and lab courses. Cases dealing with cold fusion, AIDS, acid rain, ozone depletion, and toxic waste disposal have been used with undergraduates, graduates, and students in professional schools. A case on cystic fibrosis has been used in small laboratory sections run by teaching assistants and a case on the spotted owl has been employed in a large class of over 400 students. In our experience, students exposed to the case method have been extraordinarily excited and actively involved in their learning.
National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science --- http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/projects/cases/case.html

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Help in Problem Solving Courses

July 14, 2006 message from biology professor Robert Blystone [rblyston@trinity.edu]

Below is a reference that may be useful to advisors with incoming first-year students and parents with children who are facing math classes.

St. Louis University has prepared a helpful commentary for students who are taking problem solving courses, such as mathematics courses.

http://euler.slu.edu/Dept/SuccessinMath.html 

The Web site has a lot of common sense information. It is nicely organized and should be helpful to the student who is facing a math class and is feeling a little uncomfortable about it.

The site was just reviewed by the Internet Scout Project folks and that is how it came to my attention.

I plan to read the information with my 15 year old grandson.

Bob Jensen's threads on math helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics These include the following:

Algebra Tutorials
Purplemath --- http://www.purplemath.com/index.htm

Mathematics Help Central --- http://www.mathematicshelpcentral.com/ 

Wikipedia has a number of good modules on mathematics --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics

Wikipedia also has some modules on problem solving --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_solving

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Mathematics Across the College Curriculum --- http://www.mac3.amatyc.org/index.htm

S.O.S. Mathematics --- http://www.sosmath.com/index.html

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Appearance versus Reality of Trustee/School Kickbacks

One of the most common reality is that trustees who run portfolio investment firms become trustees to steer a portion of the school's endowment to their companies. The connections can be direct or extremely circuitous.

All to often members of the boards of trustees of colleges and school boards of K-12 schools serve for business reasons (typically to steer business their way) rather than for purposes of ethically guiding the institutions. Sometimes these kickbacks are highly illegal. Sometimes they are not illegal but they are unethical and are frowned upon if details are exposed to the public. For example, institutions commonly, albeit secretly, promote insurance, legal, personal finance, computer, or travel business of a trustee. These arrangements sometimes entail questionable and unmentioned kickbacks such as a kickback to the school for every trip booked with a trustee's travel agency or every insurance policy written with an employee, student, or alumnus. One of the more subtle examples is where a school or alumni association promotes a credit card without revealing that the school gets a kickback every time the user makes a payment to the credit card company. Often these kickback arrangements are established without a trustee being involved, but all too often a trustee has guided the school into such arrangements.

Stanford University paid more than $2 million in legal fees to a firm headed by a Stanford trustee, The San Francisco Chronicle reported. While Stanford defended the arrangement and it is not illegal, it is the type of apparent conflict of interest that for-profit companies increasingly try to avoid, the newspaper reported.
Inside Higher Ed, July 3, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/03/qt

Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in higher education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

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

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American Sign Language University --- http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/

Bob Jensen's helpers for physically challenged learners are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped

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Authoring Ethics or Lack Thereof

Question
How do prestigious professors plagiarize in textbook "authoring" without even knowing it?

"Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in Originality," by Diana Jean Schemo, The New York Times, July 14, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/books/13textbook.html

The language is virtually identical to that in the 2005 edition of another textbook, “America: Pathways to the Present,” by different authors. The books use substantially identical language to cover other subjects as well, including the disputed presidential election of 2000, the Persian Gulf war, the war in Afghanistan and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

Just how similar passages showed up in two books is a tale of how the largely obscure $4 billion a year world of elementary and high school textbook publishing often works, for these passages were not written by the named authors but by one or more uncredited writers. And while it is rare that the same language is used in different books, it is common for noted scholars to give their names to elementary and high school texts, lending prestige and marketing power, while lesser known writers have a hand in the books and their frequent revisions.

As editions pass, the names on the spine of a book may have only a distant or dated relation to the words between the covers, diluted with each successive edition, people in the industry, and even authors, say.

In the case of the two history texts, the authors appeared mortified by the similarities and said they had had nothing to do with the changes.

“They were not my words,” said Allan Winkler, a historian at Miami University of Ohio, who wrote the “Pathways” book with Andrew Cayton, Elisabeth I. Perry and Linda Reed. “It’s embarrassing. It’s inexcusable.”

Wendy Spiegel, a spokeswoman for Pearson Prentice Hall, which published both books and is one of the nation’s largest textbook publishers, called the similarities “absolutely an aberration.”

She said that after Sept. 11, 2001, her company, like other publishers, hastily pulled textbooks that had already been revised and were lined up for printing so that the terror attacks could be accounted for. The material on the attacks, as well as on the other subjects, was added by in-house editors or outside writers, she said.

She added that it was “unfortunate” that the books had identical passages, but said that there were only “eight or nine” in volumes that each ran about 1,000 pages.

Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, a nonprofit group that monitors history textbooks, said he was not familiar with this particular incident. But Mr. Sewall said the publishing industry had a tendency to see authors’ names as marketing tools.

“The publishers have a brand name and that name sells textbooks,” he said. “That’s why you have well-established authorities who put their names on the spine, but really have nothing to do with the actual writing process, which is all done in-house or by hired writers.”

The industry is replete with examples of the phenomenon. One of the most frequently used high school history texts is “Holt the American Nation,” first published in 1950 as “Rise of the American Nation” and written by Lewis Paul Todd and Merle Curti. For each edition, the book appeared with new material, long after one author had died and the other was in a nursing home. Eventually, the text was reissued as the work of another historian, Paul S. Boyer.

Professor Boyer, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, acknowledged that the original authors had supplied the structure of the book that carries his name. But he said that as he revises the text, he adds new scholarship, themes and interpretations. He defended the disappearance of the original authors’ names from the book, saying it would be more misleading to carry their names when they had no say in current editions.

“Textbooks are hardly the same as the Iliad or Beowulf,” he added.

Richard Blake, a spokesman for Harcourt Education, a division of Holt, said none of the editors involved in the extended use of the Todd and Curti names were still with the company. But he said that now “all contributors and reviewers on each edition are listed in the front of the book,” and that naming new principal authors depended largely on the extent of their contributions.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
What also happens in authoring of textbooks for basic courses in accounting is that a senior professor at a huge-market college is added largely for purposes of gaining an adoption in his/her university or community college. The actual contribution of that professor to the book is somewhat as questionable as when some prestigious authors lend their names to a basic textbook where a lesser-known "co-author" wrote most of the book.

Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat and how they do it are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoCheat

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Question
A Backhoe weighing 8 tons is on top of a flatbed trailer and heading east on Interstate 70 near Hays, Kansas. The extended shovel arm is made of hardened refined steel and the approaching overpass is made of commercial-grade concrete, reinforced with 1 1/2 inch steel rebar spaced at 6 inch intervals in a crisscross pattern layered at 1 foot vertical spacing.

Solve: When the shovel arm hits the overpass, how fast do you have to be going to slice the bridge in half? (Assume no effect for headwind and no braking by the driver...)
Extra Credit: Solve for the time and distance required for the entire rig to come to a complete stop after hitting the overpass at the speed calculated above.

Answer - Who cares, the trucking company just bought themselves a bridge.
Answer with Photographs
Forwarded by Paula --- http://www.snopes.com/photos/accident/hoecrash.asp

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June 29, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

A REPORT ON THE SUCCESS OF ONLINE EDUCATION

Each year the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) conducts an annual survey on the state of U.S. higher education online learning. This year, the Consortium published its first annual special edition, "Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005 - Southern Edition." Some of the findings reported include:

"Online learning is thriving in the southern states. The patterns of growth and acceptance of online education among the 16 southern states in this report are very similar to that observed for the national sample, with one clear difference: online learning has made greater inroads in the southern states than in the nation as a whole."

"[S]chools are offering a large number of online courses, and there is great diversity in the courses and programs being offered:

-- Sixty-two percent of southern schools offering graduate face-to-face courses also offer graduate courses online.

-- Sixty-eight percent of southern schools offering undergraduate face-to-face courses also offer undergraduate courses online."

"Staffing for online courses does not come at the expense of core faculty. Institutions use about the same mixture of core and adjunct faculty to staff their online courses as they do for their face-to-face courses. Instead of more adjunct faculty teaching online courses, the opposite is found; overall, there is a slightly greater use of core faculty for teaching online than for face-to-face."

You can download the complete report at http://www.sloan-c.org/ 

Sloan-C is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information go to http://www.aln.org/

Bob Jensen's threads on alternatives for online training and education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

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

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

Latest Headlines on July 13, 2006

• First One-Pill-a-Day Drug for AIDS
• Evista: Help for Breast Cancer, Heart?
• Heart Failure Runs in Families
• Man Moves Things With Mind Power
• Overtime Work May Be Worse for Women
• Short Legs Linked to Type 2 Diabetes?
• High Humidity Boosts Heart Attack Risk
• RSS WebMD Health News

Latest Headlines on July 15, 2006

• Chili May Help Tame Insulin Spikes
• 'Thickener' May Prevent HPV Infection
• Quit Smoking, Quickly Improve Asthma
• Exercise Boosts Colon Cancer Survival
• Fat Cells May Trigger Asthma
• Infertility Treatment: OK to Delay?
• Ethnicity Alters Diabetes Risks

Latest Headlines on July 19, 2006

• Senate OKs Stem Cell Research Bill 
  (but sadly President Bush finds this the first bill worthy of his veto pen)
• Psoriasis Phototherapy: UVA Beats UVB
• Phone Counseling May Help Smokers Quit
• Can Nutrition Help Fight Cancer?
• Reformed Couch Potatoes Cut Heart Risk
• Migraine With Aura Ups Heart Risk
• Diet, Exercise May Fend Off Dementia
  (Is there anything good that can be said about sugar, fat, and laziness? Only nursing home investors seem to have anything positive to attribute to these temptations.)
• RSS WebMD Health News

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"Diet can cut cancer, diabetes risk," PhysOrg, July 19, 2006 --- http://physorg.com/news72454172.html

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Medicine Should Focus More on Detection Relative to Treatment
(This sounds a bit like crime prevention versus punishment)

"The Art of Navigating Arteries: Andy Kessler wonders why medicine can't be more like computers," by Andy Kessler, The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2006 --- http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110008669

The problem right now, as Mr. Kessler sees it, is that we fight the "big three"--cancer, stroke and heart attack--with treatment rather than early detection. Cancer cells and blood-vessel plaque can be handled much more easily in the early stages, but we spend most of our money on the later ones. More than 80% of health-care dollars are paid by insurance companies and the government, and neither is especially interested in detecting disease when it first appears. Doctors, regulators, researchers and payers of all kinds are locked into what Mr. Kessler calls--a bit ungenerously--the "cholesterol and cancer conspiracies."

A complicated system of mutual dependency distorts the incentives. "The FDA is like the FCC and Big Pharma is like the regional Bells" is what Mr. Kessler hears from Don Listwin, a former Cisco executive who now heads the Canary Foundation, a Silicon Valley-based effort to promote preventive medicine. In other words, in medicine as in telecom, the big players end up exploiting regulations more than opposing them, if only to preserve their monopolies. The Food and Drug Administration--understandably but narrow-mindedly--wants "cures" for cancer and other diseases. Thus tens of thousands of chemicals are screened, only a handful make it even to Phase I trials, and by the time a new drug is approved a billion dollars has been spent. Even then the new drug may help only 10% of patients.

Yet if someone were to invent a device with a wide, preventive usefulness--say, a nanotech implant that would spot the proteins that indicate the first minute presence of cancer--it would have to go through the same process of billion-dollar testing. Since the government and insurance companies are reluctant to add anything to their repertoire of coverage--and since such a device would be targeted at the much broader pool of people who are not sick--research might well stall in its earliest phases for lack of reimbursement-funding.

Yes, it is possible to object that doctors and insurance companies do engage in preventive medicine. Don't they urge annual checkups? Don't insurers even pay for them? But that's not the kind of preventive medicine Mr. Kessler is talking about. He means devices that bypass doctors completely. There are diagnostic tools that work as easily as a home pregnancy test. They're just hard to access.

In one hilarious sequence, Mr. Kessler recounts trying to draw his own blood sample, in the hope of checking his cholesterol. But clinics won't draw blood without a doctor's orders. Drugstores think you want the syringe to shoot heroin. Unless you want to just gouge your own finger, you're in the clutches of organized medicine. Imagine how tightly it grips something a bit more sophisticated.

Yet diagnostic technology is taking off--and that's the crux of Mr. Kessler's book. Tomography--that is, three-dimensional imaging--is slicing and dicing the human body (figuratively speaking) almost down to the cellular level. Exploring the inside of someone's carotid arteries is like playing a video game. In one amazing scene in "The End of Medicine"--it still doesn't quite seem real--Mr. Kessler describes a "face off" between five rival 3-D modeling systems at the seventh annual Multi-Detector Row Computed Tomography Symposium in San Francisco.

"I was transfixed," he writes. "This guy was zooming through someone's brain like it was . . . level 60 in World of Warcraft. . . . The place went crazy. This was repeated on each of the workstations by different doctors to often thunderous applause. I had a mild headache from all the excitement."

Behind it all, of course, is medical know-how of an esoteric sort. "But then there are these integrins--adhesion molecules," one doctor tells Mr. Kessler. "This one specific integrin, alphavbeta3, is specifically expressed on proliferating endothelial cells and tumor cells that are forming new blood vessels. That's how we catch them, we find these integrins." Mr. Kessler follows this talk although he seems, at times, as baffled as the reader. Yet he gets it all down with Jack Kerouac-like authenticity.

Continued in article

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From NPR
Detection Changing for Women's Heart Disease --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5552425

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Research links autism to brain abnormalities
Autistic men have striking abnormalities in a region of the brain that deals with social skills, according to research published today. Detailed maps of autistic men's brains show they have substantially fewer neurons than expected in a region called the amygdala, which plays a major role in understanding others' actions and emotions. The finding adds weight to a theory put forward by some scientists that stunted development in the amygdala gives rise to autism. Further research is needed, however, to confirm whether the lack of neurons is a direct cause of autism, or is merely a consequence of it.
Ian Sample, "Research links autism to brain abnormalities," The Guardian, July 18, 2006 --- http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,1823520,00.html

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"Training Attention: New brain-imaging techniques could teach people to strengthen the parts of the brain that control attention," by Emily Singer, MIT's Technology Review, July 17, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17174&ch=biotech

How do surgeons focus intently on their patients for hours on end? Why do other people have difficulty finishing a book or listening to a lecture? Can they train themselves to improve, as they might train to run a marathon or play the violin?

Scientists hope to find answers to these questions by using a new variation on brain imaging that lets people watch detailed movies of their brains in action. If this new technology can indeed strengthen the brain areas that mediate attention, people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might have a drug-free way to improve their symptoms.

Functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) measures blood flow in precise areas of the brain, giving scientists an indirect measure of the brain's activity patterns. While data collected from fMRI has traditionally taken days or weeks to analyze, newer algorithms and greater computing power have collapsed that time down to milliseconds. That means scientists -- and subjects -- can watch the brain in action.

Known as real-time fMRI, the technique has been used mostly as a scientific tool. But scientists are beginning to use real-time fMRI as a form of neural feedback to teach people to consciously control their brain activity. Preliminary studies by Stanford neuroscientist Sean Mackey and colleagues have shown that the technology can help people control chronic pain (see "Seeing Your Pain," July/August.) Now scientists are setting their sights on attention disorders such as ADHD.

When you're having a conversation with a friend in the middle of a cocktail party, your brain is assaulted with huge volumes of sensory information -- the clink of martini glasses, the nasal whine of a nearby conversation. Ideally, mechanisms in the brain filter out this extraneous information, allowing you to focus attention on your companion's voice. "We know the brain can home in on visual or auditory information," says Seung-Schik Yoo, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "But for some people, it's not that easy to do."

People with ADHD may have difficulty filtering out extraneous sounds, or may find it hard to focus on complex directions or a lengthy speech. Yoo and others want to see if fMRI feedback can help strengthen the attentional machinery in the brain.

"[Researchers] understand what parts of the brain are active when people are paying attention," says Peter Bandettini, director of the Functional MRI Core Facility at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, MD. "If you could focus on those areas, it's kind of like bootstrapping yourself to pay attention."

Continued in article

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Environmental Health Science Education --- http://www.niehs.nih.gov/science-education/

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Study: Land use has had profound effects
U.S. biologists say they've determined 300 years of land-use activities have had profound effects on the Earth's ecosystem. University of New Hampshire scientists George Hurtt, Stephen Frolking and colleagues say land-use changes have affected between 42 percent and 68 percent of the global land surface. They analyzed historical records, satellite data and computer modeling to produce the first global land-use history description designed specifically to allow global carbon and climate models to assess the affects of land-use history, both on the past and current sources and sinks of carbon and climate. Hurtt said the data will allow the next generation of coupled carbon-climate models to include the most advanced representations of land-use practices yet. "Land-use activities are known to have added large amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, altered surface reflectivity and led to habitat alteration and destruction," said Hurtt. "A major challenge for scientists now is to understand the combined effects of these activities on the dynamics of the carbon-climate system. This study provides a key basis for these assessments."
"Study: Land use has had profound effects," PhysOrg, July 13, 2006 --- http://physorg.com/news72023992.html

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Roots of the human family tree are remarkably shallow, possibly only 2,000 years
Whoever it was probably lived a few thousand years ago, somewhere in East Asia -- Taiwan, Malaysia and Siberia all are likely locations. He -- or she -- did nothing more remarkable than be born, live, have children and die. Yet this was the ancestor of every person now living on Earth -- the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the planet today. That means everybody on Earth descends from somebody who was around as recently as the reign of Tutankhamen, maybe even during the Golden Age of ancient Greece. There's even a chance that our last shared ancestor lived at the time of Christ. "It's a mathematical certainty that that person existed," said Steve Olson, whose 2002 book "Mapping Human History" traces the history of the species since its origins in Africa more than 100,000 years ago.
"Roots of the human family tree are remarkably shallow," PhysEd, July 2, 2006 --- http://physorg.com/news71043444.html

Also see http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,71298-0.html?tw=wn_index_6

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From Jim Mahar's Blog on July 14, 2006 --- http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/

What does a professor do all day?

If you are a college professor, you have been asked "what do you do all day" or told "it must be nice only having to teach X courses per semester". Similarly, if you are a student, you no doubt have thought "What an idiot! All he does is teach X courses, why can't he get grades back faster?"

Over at Financial Rounds, the Unknown Professor addresses these questions with two answers. In his first entry, he explains the teaching side of the equation and in the second entry he explains how research works.

From the teaching essay:

"There are two main differences between teaching and research schools: the normal teaching load and the expectations of the amount of research (i.e. publishing) you'll have to do to get tenure. A finance professor at a typical research school teaches a "2/2" load - that is, 2 classes in the fall, and two in the spring. For most schools, this means two or three "preps" a year."

(For comparison, I think I have 4/4 and 5 preps this year, but SBU is known as a teaching school and we have a small department and have someone on sabbatical.)

From the research essay:

"For empiricists like myself, a research project always starts with a question, like "how does the makeup of the board affect a firm's performance?", or "do firms back date their options?" The next step is to gather some data, run a number of statistical tests, write up the results, and then send the paper off to a journal. The whole process can be pretty time consuming, since you often don't know what you'll need to do until you're in the thick of it (new research is, by definition, untrod territory)."

and then later:

"Often the paper is rejected (either up front or after several rounds) at the first journal you send it to. At this point you submit it to another journal, and so on. This process can take quite some time. It's not uncommon for a couple of years to go by between the time a project is started and when it's it a study to take paper to take a well over a year. In fact, a colleague just told me she got a piece published that she started in 1990, and had sent to 6 different journals over the years. Now THAT's determination."

It is definitely worth reading all of each essay!

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"The Dirty Secret:  Better technologies exist for extracting coal, a major source of carbon dioxide emissions. The challenge is getting people to adopt them," by David Talbot, MIT's Technology Review, July 19, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17054&ch=biztech

Coal is the black sheep of the energy family. Uniquely abundant among the fossil fuels, it is also among the worst emitters of greenhouse gases. Mindful of coal's bad reputation, President Bush promised the world three and half years ago that the United States would develop a superclean coal plant in an initiative known as FutureGen. The plant would have zero emissions; even the carbon dioxide it released would be pumped underground.

Today there is a patch of land in Great Bend, OH, where an advanced coal plant may one day be built. The plant could eventually include equipment for siphoning off carbon dioxide. But it's not FutureGen, which today remains a collection of research projects. No FutureGen plant has been constructed, and no site for one has been chosen. The proposed plant at Great Bend could more appropriately be called "PresentGen." The technology involved doesn't demand a White House neologism suggesting that clean coal is something for which we must wait.

Great Bend is owned by American Electric Power (AEP), the largest coal-burning company in the United States. The company proposes to build what's called an integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) plant. IGCC is frequently referred to as a "new technology," but it's really a combination of two well-established technologies -- both of which are also intended for FutureGen. The first is gasification, in which coal is partly combusted under carefully controlled temperatures and pressures and turned into a concentrated "syngas" of mainly carbon monoxide and hydrogen. (From syngas, impurities such as sulfur dioxide can readily be removed.) The second is the "combined cycle" -- the electricity generation technology already ubiquitous in natural-gas power plants, where turbines are driven both by a stream of gas and by steam produced from waste heat. Most importantly, carbon dioxide can be captured from a gas stream far more easily than from the smokestacks of a conventional coal plant.

IGCC plants are vastly more advanced than today's pulverized-coal plants -- which are planned in ever larger numbers around the world -- but they're hardly futuristic. "We've done a pretty thorough due diligence on the technology, and we didn't casually come to the conclusion that IGCC was ready," says Robert Powers, AEP's executive vice president for generation. "Gasifiers have been used since the turn of the last century, in a crude sense, and used in the petrochemical industry and refining industry for years. And certainly, on the generating end of the plant, combined-cycle combustion turbines -- we own combined-cycle combustion plants now. Each of those pieces is a mature and developed technology."

Indeed, coal gasification, developed about a century ago, has long been the technology of last resort for countries unable to gain access to oil. The Nazis used it to fuel the Luftwaffe; South Africa adopted it during apartheid. In North Dakota, a coal gasification plant went online in the early 1980s after the Arab oil embargo, later began capturing and selling its carbon dioxide for use in oil recovery, and is still humming today.

Continued in article

"The Un-Coal:  By investing in energy efficiency, we could vastly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and save money," by David Talbot, MIT's Technology Review, July 19, 2006 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17172&ch=biztech

"The Oil Frontier:  Don't expect the scarcity of fossil fuels to drive us toward alternative energy sources anytime soon: we're getting smarter about finding and extracting oil," by Bryant Urstadt, MIT's Technology Review, July 18, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17060&ch=biztech

Out here, 4,300 feet above the seafloor, floats Discoverer Deep Seas. Leased by Chevron, it's a ship that would have been too expensive to use 10 years ago, a ship that represents 20 years of advances in the art and science of oil extraction. It's not particularly beautiful. With its derrick amidships and its rusty waterline, Deep Seas looks like a ghost tanker trying to make off with the Eiffel Tower. But it is a breathtaking expression of ingenuity, and a glimpse of what we'll increasingly have to do to get energy.

The ship is so big that my incomplete tour will take a day. It's 835 feet long -- on end, it would be the height of an 80-story skyscraper -- and 125 feet wide. Because it is so tightly packed with machinery, a visitor winds through Deep Seas rather than walking its perimeter, as one might on a cruise ship, and never gains a full sense of its size.

My guide is Eddie Coleman, the lead drill-site manager on Deep Seas. A quiet Texan in a denim Chevron shirt and jeans, Coleman has spent the past 32 years offshore, working two weeks on and two weeks off, shuttling between his home of Brookhaven, MS, and platforms and drillships progressively farther offshore and more advanced. Like most of the people I meet in this business, he says he wouldn't want to do anything else.

Coleman is in a decent mood, but he could be happier. Last night, the drilling in a well that Chevron calls PS002 stalled at 20,351 feet. Deep Seas doesn't produce oil; it drills for it, capping the wells and leaving them to be put into "production" by equally expensive and complicated floating platforms. The oil field that Deep Seas is exploring is called Tahiti, and it's about 24,000 feet below a 5-by-1.5-mile section of seafloor leased from the Minerals Management Service of the U.S. government, in an area known as Green Canyon. PS002 is the second well of a scheduled six, and the whole field is slated to go into production in 2008. Chevron hopes to pump 125,000 barrels a day out of Tahiti.

Pumping is a long way off, though, and now the drilling has stopped, too. "We tagged something," explains Coleman, "but we're not sure what. So we're tripping right now." To "trip" means to bring the drill bit back up or send it back down. Coleman and a team back in Houston have decided that the casing, the tube that is dropped down in increasingly narrow segments as drilling progresses, in order to maintain the integrity of the well, has probably gotten out of round or developed a spur of some kind. So once they've tripped the bit back up, they'll send down a mill to bore out the casing. And when they've retracted the mill, the bit will have to be tripped down again.

The trip takes about 12 to 13 hours either way, and it's expensive. Deep Seas is leased from a company called Transocean, and the daily rent is about $250,000. With the cost of labor and equipment, drilling in Green Canyon costs Chevron around $500,000 a day. Casing, for instance, costs around $100 per foot. The drill bits run around $80,000 each, and there are 140 to 175 well-paid people onboard, from cooks to highly trained geologists. Developing the Tahiti field will cost about $3.5 billion.

Because of the resulting financial pressure, Deep Seas hasn't been back to shore since it was launched five years ago. Every six months or so, a supply ship pulls up alongside and pumps a million gallons of diesel onboard. The fill-up takes about 24 hours. The diesel runs six generators, which send five megawatts of power to each of six electric omnidirectional thrusters, which keep the ship in position. On a calm day like this, the thrusters, fed by GPS data and overseen by a team of dynamic-positioning operators on the bridge, keep the 100,000-metric-ton ship essentially stationary; it drifts only by inches over the well below.

Continued in article

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Scary Times for Dinosaur Media
In the latest round of nastiness, several leading newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, have been denounced for publishing stories about a secret government counter-terrorism program. President Bush called the stories "disgraceful," and one congressman has suggested that perhaps the New York Times should be prosecuted under the federal Espionage Act. In Washington, words we tend to associate with the 1950s — "treason" and "traitor" — are back with a vengeance, and they're being hurled at journalists. The media's image has arguably hit a new low, though one hesitates to say that about a business for which fresh nadirs have become a way of life. The point is, how did we get here? And is there any hope of redemption? . . . Some journalists are worried that the profession is dying, but this is classic newsroom alarmism. As long as there is a popular hunger for truth — a constant of human society, last I checked — there will be work for people who want to dig it up. Witness the best of the bloggers, who have not only proved themselves adept fact-checkers but become tip sheets for the mainstream media. The dinosaur media have even started hiring them.
William Powers, "Breaking news Shrinking circulation! Fact-checking goofs! Partisan reporting! Despite the scare headlines, journalism's sob story may still have a happy ending," Los Angeles Times, July 16, 2006 --- Click Here

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From The Washington Post on July 19, 2006

In a Nielsen//Netratings study of people who download video podcasts, which content-based Web site was the most popular?

A. AOL
B. Live365.com
C. Fark.com
D. StarTrek.com

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From The Washington Post on July 17, 2006

How many Americans play online poker?

A. 5 million
B. 12 million
C. 23 million
D. 60 million

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Fox News Now Number One in Spite of Being Openly Biased
"Fox News now number one in actual news as well as ratings," by Tim Cavanaugh, Reason Magazine, July 15, 2006 --- http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/

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Iran's Possible Carrier Attack Missile
Iran is not idly sitting by, waiting for U.N. deliberations to determine what comes next. At least some segment of the Iranian government is preparing for military conflict with the United States. The latest sign is the announcement that Iran, probably with the aid of Russian technology, has developed a super-fast underwater missile. This bit of sabre-rattling sounds a little fanciful — a top speed of 223 mph is claimed for the weapon — but is not without purpose. U.S. carrier-based air power would be a huge component of any strike on Iran. The Iranians surely noticed how naval air was used during the offensive against even land-locked Afghanistan. Clearly Iran would like to have an effective anti-ship weapon that could even the odds by threatening American carriers, so they are no doubt trying to develop one.
Jeff Taylor, "Hello, Mr. and Mrs. America and All the Ships at Sea," Reason Magazine, April 4, 2006 --- http://www.reason.com/re/040406.shtml

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From Jim Mahar's Blog on July 14, 2006 --- http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/

Dow and SP 500 Differences

Most introductory finance classes cover the makeup of different indicies. For instance the Dow Jones Industrial Average is price weighted and composed of 30 "blue chip" stocks whereas the S&P 500 is weighted based on market capitalization and includes 500 stocks.

The Street.com looks at some of the implications of this difference:
 

"What is the impact of the different weighting schemes?....if one of the Dow stocks has a big move higher or lower, as 3M (MMM - commentary - Cramer's Take) did Friday..., the disparate impact on the indices is noticeable. The $7.29 drop in 3M accounted for 58.4 points of the Dow's loss of 134.63 points, or 43.38% of the index's move. On the same day, 3M accounted for 0.607 points of the S&P 500's 8.60 point loss, or 7.06%."

"The systematic impact of differential weighting over time should lead to a higher actual volatility for the Dow, and it does. Its standard deviation of returns since August 1974 has been 1.021725 times as great as that of the S&P 500....And even though the indices track each other remarkably well over long periods of time, considering their significant differences, they should not be viewed as substitutes for one another on a daily basis. If they were, we should expect both the regression coefficient and the r-squared to be far closer to one than the .855 and .7639 shown."

The article goes on to talk about trading on the differences.

 

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Financial Markets in a New Age of Oil --- http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTMENA/Resources/MainReport.pdf

Bob Jensen's investment helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#Markets

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"They Give It the Old College Try: Funds Let Students Invest Millions," by Diya Gullapalli, The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2006; Page C1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115284073257006548.html?mod=todays_us_money_and_investing

Once an anomaly, student-run investment funds are taking off as a teaching tool everywhere from the University of Texas at Austin to Cornell University. As recently as the early 1990s, there were about 30 such funds but they now number more than 200, according to the Association of Student Managed Investment Programs at Stetson University in Florida, formed to coordinate efforts among funds such as these about five years ago.

The funds take many forms. This year, Villanova University, outside Philadelphia, plans to open two student-run funds. It already has two, including a small fund started two years ago that specializes in what it terms socially responsible investing -- such as avoiding companies that make military weaponry -- as part of the Catholic school's religious values.

Continued in article

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Question
What company is the largest health-care buyer in the U.S. and why is this company in deep trouble?

Answer
GM is the largest buyer and is in deep trouble because of its under-funded commitments for retiree health care and pension benefits.

Mr. Wagoner's written testimony includes a call for a "vigorous and robust competitive prescription drug market" including generic drugs and policies that support comparing treatment options. He also will call for a stronger focus on addressing high-cost cases without outright advocating government-sponsored catastrophic health-care coverage. GM lost $10.6 billion in 2005 and pinned much of its weakness in the U.S. on its so-called legacy burden related to funding benefits and pensions for retirees. According to Mr. Wagoner, GM is the largest private heath-care buyer in the U.S. and spent $5.3 billion on U.S. health care last year.
"GM Chief to Address Senate on Health Care," The Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2006; Page A7 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115275334714505262.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

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"How Far Would You Drive to Avoid a Rental-Car Tax?" by David Cay Johnston, The New York Times, July 17, 2006 --- Click Here

People will stand in line for an expensive cup of coffee, but a study to be released today by the nation’s largest car rental company shows that people will go miles out of their way to avoid a $4-a-day tax on rental cars.

The study, for Enterprise Rent-A-Car, also challenges the widely held perception that taxes on rental cars are imposed on visitors, rather than local residents, and are thus a free lunch for local governments.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the privately held St. Louis company that is the nation’s largest car rental agency with 667,000 vehicles, hired two tax economists, William G. Gale of the Brookings Institution and Kim Rueben of the Urban Institute. Mr. Gale and Mr. Rueben looked at every jurisdiction with local rental-car taxes, but focused on tax avoidance behavior in Kansas City, Mo., because there were many rental offices just outside the city.

The study compared every Enterprise rental in and around Kansas City in 2002 though 2004 with rentals in the first half of 2005, when a $4-a-day tax to subsidize a local sports arena began.

Among people who lived within five miles of an Enterprise location where the tax applied, large numbers rented from an office more than five miles away where the tax did not apply. The number of cars rented by such people in the taxed area fell 41 percent while the number of rental days fell even more, by 69 percent. On average these renters avoided almost $16 each in local car rental tax.

Many renters crossed the Missouri River into Kansas, costing the state of Missouri more than $6,800 a month in sales taxes just among Enterprise customers. In effect, the effort to increase local revenue came at the expense of all Missouri taxpayers outside of Kansas City.

Some people who lived within a mile of a rental office where the tax applied rented from an office more than five miles away to avoid the tax, the analysis found.

The $18 billion car rental industry has been fighting local excise taxes on car rentals. At least 80 local governments in 38 states have car rental add-on levies, and at least 24 more levies are being debated.

The most common use of these excises is to finance sports stadiums and convention centers. At least 35 sports stadiums are or are expected to be financed partly with subsidies from car-rental taxes. Other research has shown that in the 1990’s, subsidies provided 94 percent of sports stadium financing

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From the Issues in Scholarly Communications Blog at the University of Illinois ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

E-Books Still Have Hard Time Catching On

For book lovers, no digital device has yet proven as cool or as user-friendly as the iPod has for more than 42 million music lovers. Most books are still printed on paper -- much like they have been since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1450....

Hand-held devices for digital books have been around since the late-1990s from such companies as Franklin Electronics Inc. of Burlington, N.J., and NuvoMedia Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. But sales were plagued by bad design, high hardware costs and a frustrating lack of content.

Today, many of the original e-reader makers have left that business. Franklin, for example, sold its eBookman business to New York-based Ectaco Inc., which is marketing the device as a language-learning tool.

Meanwhile, sales of e-books, while growing -- rising 44% to US$179.1-million last year in the United States, according to Management Practice Inc. -- still account for less than 1% of total book sales of US$25.1-billion in 2005. Many e-books are read on computers, and reference and educational books are the most popular.

That's not to say e-reader makers have given up. Several new devices will be launched this year. Sony Corp. will lead off with its much-acclaimed Sony Reader. iRex Technologies Inc., a spinoff of Philips Electronics, and Chinese supplier Tianjin Jinke Electronics Co. will also hit the U.S. market with new devices.

More at Canada.com --- Click Here

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It may take years for a graduate to change an evaluation of an instructor
One of Sanford's key points is that it may take years for a student to fully appreciate the quality of his or her education. What might have seemed tedious, dull, or unimportant at the time may, in the long run, turn out to be more valuable to a person's life than that which seemed immediate and exciting in the classroom. Unfortunately, as Sanford notes, that long-term value often is not captured in the immediacy of student evaluations of instruction. Wise department chairs and deans take that into account when reviewing those evaluations. But, here at Krispy Kreme U. not all department chairs and deans are wise.
Mark Shapiro commenting on a piece by Sanford Pinsker, "You Probably Don't Remember Me, But....," The Irascible Professor, July 12, 2006 --- http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-07-12-06.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on teaching evaluations are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#TeachingStyle

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An Interview With Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1946-1976. Dr. Friedman received the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science in 1976, and the National Medal of Science and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1988. He served as an unofficial adviser to presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and Presidents Nixon and Reagan. He is the author of numerous books, including Two Lucky People (with Rose Friedman). The following are quotations from edited transcript of a conversation between Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and Milton Friedman, which took place on May 22, 2006, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco, California, during a two-day Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar celebrating the 25th anniversary of Milton and Rose Friedman's book, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement.

"Free to Choose: A Conversation with Milton Friedman,” Imprimis Archives, Hillsdale College, July 2006 ---http://hillsdale.edu/imprimis/

LA: On the subject of Social Security, let me read to you a passage from Free to Choose: “As we have gone through the literature on Social Security, we have been shocked at the arguments that have been used to defend the program. Individuals who would not lie to their children, their friends, their colleagues, whom all of us would trust implicitly in the most important personal dealings, have propagated a false view of Social Security. Their intelligence and exposure to contrary views make it hard to believe that they have done so unintentionally and innocently. Apparently they have regarded themselves as an elite group within society that knows what is good for other people better than those people do for themselves.” What do you think of these words today?

MF: I stick by every word there. But there has been progress since then. Let me explain: Free to Choose was produced and shown on television for the first time in January 1980. President Reagan was elected in November 1980. To get a clear picture of what has happened since the publication of Free to Choose, we really need to look at what happened before and after the election of Ronald Reagan. Before Reagan, non-defense government spending—on the federal, state and local levels—as a percentage of national income was rising rapidly. Between the early 1950s and 1980, we were in a period of what I would call galloping socialism that showed no signs of slowing. Following the election of Ronald Reagan, there was an abrupt and immediate halt to this expansion of government. But even under Reagan, government spending as a percentage of national income didn't come down: It has held constant from that time to now. Although the early years of the current Bush presidency did see spending increases, national income has risen, too. We have achieved some success at our first task: stopping the growth of government. The second task is to shrink government spending and make government smaller. We haven't done that yet, but we are making some progress. I should also mention as a cautionary tale that, prior to Reagan, the number of pages in the Federal Register was on the rise, but Reagan succeeded in reducing this number substantially. However, once Reagan was out of office, the number of pages in the Register began to rise even more quickly. We have not really succeeded in that area.

There have been real changes in our society since Free to Choose was published. I'm not attributing them to Free to Choose—I'm not saying that's the reason—but in general, there has been a complete change in public opinion. This change is probably due as much to the collapse of the Soviet Union as it is to what Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman or somebody else wrote. Socialism used to mean the ownership and operation of the means of production, but nobody gives it that meaning today. There is no country in the world attempting to be socialist in that sense except North Korea. And perhaps Russia is moving in that direction. Conversely, opinion has not shifted far enough in terms of the dangers of big government and the deleterious effects it can have, and that's where we're facing future problems. This clarifies the task facing institutions such as Hillsdale College: We must make clear that the only reason we have our freedom is because government is so inefficient. If the government were efficient in spending the approximately 40 percent of our income that it currently manages, we would enjoy less freedom than we do today.

LA: In Free to Choose you discuss Abraham Lincoln's “House Divided” speech, which you relate to the great task that the American people face. Like Lincoln, you argue that a house divided against itself cannot stand: America is going to be a government intervention country or it's going to be a free market country, but it cannot continue indefinitely as a mixture of both. Do you still believe that?

MF: Yes, I very much believe that, and I believe that we've been making some headway since Free to Choose appeared. However, even though it is real headway compared to what was happening before, we are mostly holding ground.

LA: What do you think are the major factors behind the economic growth we have experienced since the publication of Free to Choose?

MF: Economic growth since that time has been phenomenal, which has very little to do with most of what we've been talking about in terms of the conflict between government and private enterprise. It has much more to do with the technical problem of establishing sound monetary policy. The economic situation during the past 20 years has been unprecedented in the history of the world. You will find no other 20-year period in which prices have been as stable—relatively speaking—in which there has been as little variability in price levels, in which inflation has been so well-controlled, and in which output has gone up as regularly. You hear all this talk about economic difficulties, when the fact is we are at the absolute peak of prosperity in the history of the world. Never before have so many people had as much as they do today. I believe a large part of that is to be attributed to better monetary policy. The improved policy is a result of the acceptance of the view that inflation is a monetary phenomenon, not a real phenomenon. We have accepted the view that central banks are primarily responsible for maintaining stable prices and nothing else.